In early July, U.K. police contacted the DHS Homeland Security Investigations unit about a sexually explicit video involving a man and an infant that the British investigators believed was made in America. In an effort to identify both the adult and the child, HSI ran the pair’s faces through an undisclosed facial recognition tool that scanned a mass database of images scraped from the web and social media.
“No single effort like this has resulted in that amount of identifications in such a short period of time,” Cole told. “The tech used can assimilate the data and put that puzzle together. Before, we didn’t have the pieces.”Cole declined to name the tools that were used, but sources with knowledge of the operation told