Child abuse unit paying for data

[ken]

> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7840924.stm

Is he talking about investigation of crimes that have already 
been committed, or about trying to find out if crimes have been 
committed, or about finding children who are making themselves 
vulnerable, or about  data mining to look for patterns of 
behaviour thought to be associated with abusers?   The BBC 
webpage does not make it clear.  (The CEOP website is even less 
clear - its text reads as if it has been autogenerated by an 
Eliza fed with PR and bumf and managementspeak.)

I mean, is the data that is being charged for the equivalent of 
a shopping mall handing its CCTV recordings to the police after 
a crime has been reported?

Or is it the equivalent of the police asking for the whole 
stream and looking for people who look as if they might commit a 
crime, or be victims of one, in the future?  Is this like asking 
the mall to send in photos of all teenagers spotted hanging 
around on corners?

If I were an ISP I would be annoyed if I was forced to pay for 
parastatal fishing expeditions.

Comments like these imply data-mining (or perhaps 
data-prospecting) as well as focused investigation:

- "It works both online gathering intelligence, and on the 
ground protecting young people from abuse and tracing offenders."
- "'If you're a child on a social networking site, you will 
expose certain information about yourself'" Mr Gamble said."
- "CEOP works closely with the industry to track potential victims"
- "But he feels it is unacceptable when working to prevent harm 
to children in an online area created by the ISPs themselves."

Preventing harm and protecting people are wonderful things to 
do, but they are not the same as investigating crimes.  Tracking 
potential victims sounds good as well, like an old-fashioned 
park-keeper keeping an eye out for little kids climbing too high 
in the playground.  (Though it also sounds like a licence to 
control everybody everywhere just in case some of them are doing 
risky things) Presumably if Parliament had wanted ISPs to donate 
all their records whatsoever to the government so that they 
could be searched for patterns of online behaviour that might 
show children doing things that make themselves unsafe in 
future, then Parliament could have passed a law requiring them 
to do that.  But I don't think they did.

Also if Mr Gamble really said: "Their core business is the 
online environment, bringing customers to that environment..." 
then I'm worried about his lack of knowledge about how the all 
this stuff works.   "What we're saying is if you create a public 
place, you have responsibilities and you need to live up to 
those responsibilities in that public place frequented by 
children." is true, but by and large it is not ISPs who create 
these "public places" or who are best placed to police them.

Its as if he is blaming the motorway maintenance people for 
burglary,  because the criminals drove to the scene of the crime.