> "So we narrowed it down to [this] one address… and started the process of confirming who was living there through state records, driver's licence… information on schools," says Squire.
> The team realised that in the household with Lucy was her mother's boyfriend - a convicted sex offender.
There’s a lot of focus on Facebook in the comments here, but unless I’m missing something the strangest part about this story was that the child’s mother was dating a convicted sex offender and they had to go through all of this process to arrive at this? It’s impressive detective work with the brick expert identifying bricks and the sofa sellers gathering their customer list, but how did this connection not register earlier?
EDIT: As others have pointed out, the wording is confusing. They made these connections to the identity only after identifying the house
The registers are also massively bloated, some people get put on them for nothing more than public urination.
The only sex offenders who actually get regular checks that might identify this type of thing, are those on parole, or similar court ordered programs.
Happened to me. Went out with somebody who turned out to be a serial shop lifter who operated with a small gang of other shop lifters. Everything looked fine up front until they disappeared when we had plans without contact for days. Thought I was ghosted. Turns out they were arrested.
A friend went out with someone who destroyed his car after he broke up because she was violent twords him. He had to get a restraining order. A friend of his dug up a link to a FL police site. Turns out she did a little time down there for assaulting another woman, beating her with a coat rack during a fight. He never thought to look her up either and she seemed nice at first. Shit happens. Don't blame the victim for not being paranoid that everyone they're dating might be a criminal. Especially when there are damn good liars out there.
We moved out rather quickly after that. If we were in a situation where we had to rent again, and went with an individual renting their own house rather than a company, checking out the registry is on the checklist of things to do.
I challenge you and anyone else reading this to find an example of someone who is on the sex offender registry due to public urination.
So he was naked in his own home?
#Land of the free
With 40,000 couch sales, there would be roughly 120 sex offenders would have bought that couch. You can see what I mean about the registries being bloated.
Doesn't really narrow things down until you add the brick factory, but then they already had it down to 40 houses.
But it's a mistake to even assume the couch was bought by the same house as the offender. The offender could just be visiting, or the couch could have been moved to a different house since purchase (sold second hand, or the owner moved). And you are assuming the offender had been caught before, or was even on the sex offender registry for abusing children.
That’s insane.
It’s really rather sick and deranged though that this kind of dynamic of women with children associating with sex offenders is not exactly rare. Frankly, I hope the mother was also charged.
Would you want her charged if she didn't even know?
There is nothing in the article suggesting that the mother conspired with her boyfriend, or that she even knew he was a sex offender. I can imagine a scenario where the mother blames herself for not knowing and is utterly destroyed by misplaced guilt. Who knows what actually happened? The article wasn't about that.
Yes. She is responsible for making sure her children is safe and well taken care of. I say this morally, not as a legal fact. She should know what they are up to, and she should notice if any of them are regularly abused over an interval of years.
Yes? There are laws against child endangerment for a reason, and giving someone unrestricted accsss to your child without performing a basic background check very much falls into that territory.
When minor offences can get people put on the register, this dilutes the meaning of being on the register.
Every actual sex offender will claim they're on there not because of the serious crimes they committed, but because they went nude on the wrong beach, or something similarly minor.
The ones I've seen have had details about the offense(s).
Having details would make it harder to play down the offenses. But only if someone bothers to check.
If anyone tells you that's why they're on the sex offender registry, it's extremely likely they're lying about it and you should really look them up.
Neighbors were annoyed at loud college parties at the school I went to, so local police waited in bushes to catch people peeing in them, arrested them, and one of the charges was indecent exposure.
Happened to one person I knew personally so it must have happened to several others at just this school.
My friend plead out to some lower charge or probably got a continuance, but it massively increased the leverage they had over him and the fees and fines they could collect, and it massively lowered the chance of him doing any pushback that could have lead to a jury trial, which at least as far as he understood at the time would have put him on the registry, and which is why they abused the law and charged people this way.
That isn’t the case here in Australia.
You can go to trial, but it will be a judge-only trial, and is typically conducted by the magistrate who saw you for your first appearance on the matter, in the magistrates court, which is the lowest court here.
I believe most of the colonies are approximately the same.
I’d imagine it would be cost prohibitive to take a peeing in the bushes charge to jury trial though?
Sounds like the sort of thing one would only do if they were aiming to set a precedent for some reason?
Don't make it sound like it's the womens fault.
It doesn't have to indicate that. I think it's more likely that those traits that those women find attractive are the same traits that toxic abusers have.
> Don't make it sound like it's the womens fault.
I don't think he was doing that - people can't help what traits they find attractive.
There must be some evolutionary justification, but we have to live with that unfortunate reality..
Toxic abusers and high school garbage are good at signalling strength despite their poor character and choices.
But then again remember the incredible amounts of fan mail serial killers and serial rapists get while in prison. (this is taking it to the extreme of course)
It is the same like guys finding toxic sociopaths attractive, against our better judgement.
The OnlyFans example can be twisted in a similar manner.
Apparently it’s much worse than what we see around us. Women literally fall in love with monsters.
That’s not true. Abusers are very capable at identifying and targeting vulnerable people. Abusers are drawn to vulnerable people.
You could similarly observe that social groups have a tendency to select toxic people for leadership roles. The explanations as to why are various but the end result is plain to see.
That's not evidence for any wrongdoing obviously, but it left me quite disturbed.
Whichever it was, they could spot a vulnerable person just from their manner while they walk.
I wouldn't say they were drawn to vulnerable people, though. Like anyone else, they assess opportunity and effort, and these people are easier than others for getting what they want.
Edit: I found one of the studies -
> Key takeaways
> Higher Factor 1 psychopathy scores correlate with improved accuracy in assessing victim vulnerability based on gait.
> Inmates with elevated psychopathy scores consciously utilize gait cues to judge vulnerability more frequently.
> Psychopathy's Factor 1 traits, like manipulativeness, drive effective victim selection among violent offenders.
> Victims often display distinct gait characteristics that predict perceived vulnerability to assault.
> Understanding body language cues may inform victimization prevention strategies for at-risk individuals.
https://www.academia.edu/22213822/Psychopathy_and_Victim_Sel...
Edit: They asked people how many times they had been victimized, which they defined as "worse than bullying".
> Twelve video clips of unsuspecting targets walking from Wheeler et al. (2009) were used in the present study. The targets were undergraduate stu- dents, of whom 8 were women and 4 were men. As described in Wheeler et al., targets were unknowingly videotaped from behind as they walked from room A to B, to capture natural gaits. The targets indicated whether they had ever been victimized and how many times they had been victim- ized in the past (after the age of 18). The wording of the question was very broad, given the numerous types of victimization that can occur, and the effects of any victimization are relative. If participants asked for clarifica- tion, they were asked to think of victimization as being equal to or greater than bullying. Each target’s gait was coded by two independent judges according to the Grayson and Stein’s criteria (1981). As discussed in the original Wheeler et al. study, interjudge reliabilities were high for all gait characteristics (kappa = .77 to 1.00). Essential to the idea that body lan- guage cues indicate vulnerability, targets coded as displaying vulnerable body language in the Wheeler et al. were more likely to have self-identified as a victim, rho (11) = .68, p < .05.
---
Edit 2: The study references a very similar study from 32 years earlier.
> The original 1981 study by Grayson and Stein was incredibly simple. It involved setting up a video camera on a street in New York City, filming people (60 persons) as they walked by (between 10:00 AM and 12:00 pm over a three day period), and then showing the footage to convicted offenders (12 of them), whose crimes involved violence, and asking them to select those individuals who they would target/victimize (on a scale from 1 to 10), in order to discover if there were any identifiable non-verbal cues that were commonly picked up on/identified.
https://www.bostonkravmaga.com/blog/criminology/that-grayson...
So the 1st study focused purely on target selection and gait analysis, while the 2nd one interviewed the potential targets to see how that lined up with their actual history of being abused.
Now the billion dollar question of correlation vs causation: seems to go both ways, as usual. Neurodivergent people walk differently (and have differences in motor areas of the brain), but also trauma changes your posture and movement...
Remember that if you tip them of in any way the abuser might go escape and hide with the girl or even worse decide to get rid of the witness by murdering the girl. So you can’t just do the easy thing and ask the mom nicely.
A Cuban fitness model engaged to a lowlife drug traffic currently in prison in Finland. She specifically traveled all the way to meet him after sexting with him on social media.
> It was impossible to work out who, or where, Lucy was.
Lucy is a pseudonym. They were trying to get Facebook to tell them who the girl was through facial recognition. There’s no reason to expect a priori that the offender would be in any registry.
70.6% of beaten children are beaten at the mother’s custody. Most often it turns out the choice of companion of the mother is inappropriate. While many see that as blaming the mother and it is a huge taboo in our society, it is such a huge humanitarian problem that it’s worth educating women better over that specific problem, and taking sanctions if necessary.
70.8% in the case of death. Source: CDC 2001-2006 if I remember. Incoming: Many ad-hominem about the source, it’s a problem that never gets addressed.
Yes, that's how I see it.
> it is such a huge humanitarian problem that it’s worth educating women better over that specific problem, and taking sanctions if necessary.
"Sanctions"? This is an article about successful digital sleuthing, but your takeaway is that we need to punish the mother?
They should be focusing on everyone connected to the family if known. It would be negligent not to.
The confusion came from the way the article was written. They didn’t know the identity until afterward.
We can react to the fact that mothers can do more to protect their children from abuse in many ways. We can give them better access to information and support in getting away from abusers. We can create better links between police and communities they serve. We can create more pathways for children to be exposed to healthy adult behavior and connections with healthy adults, even when the family is dysfunctional.
But when we find evidence that existing supports have failed, deeply investigating why is critical.
> She said at the point Homeland Security ended her abuse she had been "praying actively for it to end".
You can provide your plausible suggestions as to what the family relationship looked like that the girl could neither ask her own mother for help nor was her father there for her.
It’s disheartening how underfunded these agencies are compared to, what feels like at least, the severity of the crimes they’re up against.
These folks are heroes. This is one place AI has a lot of potential (but very little commercial value).
In the UK once website blocking powers were established, their scope was extended repeatedly by courts for IP protection purposes.
The fact that we still need to traumatize workers to confirm the automated decisions is sad. The only other ways I can see to resolve this would be either to just blindly trust the AI result without any human oversight, or to require all facebook users to link their government ID to accounts and only allow posting by users in countries where the authorities arrest the people posting these things.
https://www.ice.gov/careers/hero
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justice_for_Victims_of_Traffic...
Because the latter basically entails helping create a surveillance state. Which in theory could be an acceptable trade-off, but it seems disingenuous to say "AI companies have no financial incentives here" when the big issue is that AI companies would actually be helping to establish powerful dragnet surveillance capabilities. There would need to be a strong democratic process around this.
That is an epic sentence!
Information inside images is useful for this kind of struggle to identify victims of crime.
However, this is exactly how I’d have hoped Facebook would have responded without some sort of court order for data, they shouldn’t be mining everything at the mere request for help by a law enforcement agency. I get this topic is one where you’d wish there was an exception but exceptions are slippery slopes.
Move slow, build things.
Zillow and tax assessors will list the age\year built of any property.
Old thread for context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19469681
On the other hand, this is clearly propaganda from the BBC to push police state functionality on the UK population by pre-justifying it. "See what happens? Never mind the part about it taking six years. Let us see everything in your fucking lives, you twats."
Willing to bet my life savings that they are able to do exactly this when the goal is to create shadow profiles or maximize some metric.
> The BBC asked Facebook why it couldn't use its facial recognition technology to assist the hunt for Lucy. It responded: "To protect user privacy, it's important that we follow the appropriate legal process, but we work to support law enforcement as much as we can."It’s really sad now to see people getting angry at Facebook not having facial recognition technology.
If someone asks me to do them a favor, I have basically three options for a reply:
• I can and I will;
• I can but I won't; or
• I am not able to.
FB's answer was not option 3.
I think a more plausible explanation is that FB did not want to set a precedent of being the facial recog avenue of choice for the Fed.
I feel like Facebook really dropped the ball here. It is obvious that Squire and colleagues are working for the Law Enforcement. If FB was concerned about privacy, they could have asked them to get a judicial warrant to perform a broad search.
But they didn't. And Lucy continued to be abused for months after that.
I hope when Zuck is lying on his death bed, he gets to think about these choices that he has made.
This story was from more than a decade ago.
Facebook had facial recognition after that, but they deleted it all in response to public outcry. It’s sad to see HN now getting angry at Facebook for not doing facial recognition.
> I hope when Zuck is lying on his death bed, he gets to think about these choices that he has made.
Are we supposed to be angry at Zuckerberg now for making the privacy conscious decision to drop facial recognition? Or is everyone just determined to be angry regardless of what they do?
People decide who they think are the good guys and who they think are the bad guys first, then view subsequent events through that lens.
Even if only law enforcement can use it, having that feature is highly regulated.
[edit] I see this is from years ago. I should read the articles first. :)
With billions of accounts, the false positive rate of facial recognition when matching against every account would likely make the result difficult to use. Even limiting to a single country like UK the number could be extremely large.
Let say there is a 0.5% false positive rate and some amount of false negatives. With 40 million users, that would be 200 000 false positives.
This case began being investigated on January 2014 [0], which means abuse began (shudder) in 2012-13 if not earlier.
Facebook/Meta only began rolling out DeepFace [1] in June 2015 [2]
Heck, VGG-Face wasn't released until 2015 [3] and Image-Based Crowd Counting only began becoming solvable in 2015-16.
> Facial recognition is very powerful these days.
Yes. But it is 2026, not 2014.
> I hope when Zuck is lying on his death bed, he gets to think about these choices that he has made
I'm sure there are plenty of amoral choices he can think about, but not solving facial detection until 2015 is probably not one of them.
---
While it feels like mass digital surveillance, social media, and mass penetration of smartphones has been around forever it only really began in earnest just 12 years ago. The past approximately 20 years (iPhone was first released on June 2007 and Facebook only took off in early 2009 after smartphones and mobile internet became normalized) have been one of the biggest leaps in technology in the past century. The only other comparable decades were probably 1917-1937 and 1945-1965.
---
[0] - https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/2026/bbc-eye-documentary-t...
[1] - https://research.facebook.com/publications/deepface-closing-...
[2] - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-can-recognize-you-just...
I'm willing to bet said ball was kicked into the jungle five seconds after registering the domain.
No, I don’t like Facebook using facial recognition technology, and no I don’t like that someone else can upload photos of me without my consent (which ironically could leverage facial recognition technology to blanket prevent), but these are other technical and social issues that are unrelated to the root issue. I also wish there were clear political and legal boundaries around surveillance usage for truly abhorrent behaviour versus your non-Caucasian neighbour maybe j -walking triggering a visit from ICE.
Yes, it’s an abuse of power for these organisations to collect data these ways, but I’m not against their use to prevent literal ongoing child abuse, it’s one of the least worst uses of it.
It sounds like Facebook was a huge boost to the investigation despite that.
What Facebook actually did was host images .. so that after the team narrowed a list down to under 100 people they could look through profiles by hand.
It may as well have been searching Flickr, Instagram, Etsy, etc. profiles by hand.
All Facebook likely did here that was any different than any other social media platform would have done, was gather Sandberg, Zuck and a cadre of snotty, sniveling engineers in a conference room and debate whether this was good engagement for the platform.
- Pushes for facial recognition
- Pushes for more state run surveillance
- Pushes for AI based surveillance
- Pushes for greater data collection, access & mining
- Legitimises it all under the classic “save the kids” meme and pushes emotionally hard for more.
The main issues i’ve seen discussed on HN the last couple of months have been critical of the never ending and increasing government surveillance. Both sides of the pond. This is their answer.
Simultaneously we’re hearing about how almost anybody and everybody beyond a level of power was well aware of industial level sex trafficking and abuse, and either totally turned a blind eye or joined in.
The article might carry some weight if it wasn’t from an authoritarian state backed organisation that’s very well known for covering up for, and protecting multiple famous high level sexual criminals within it’s own organisation, spanning multiple decades, that has never faced any real audit, investigation or justice for its own crimes.
It is very hard to imagine what the life of someone on the frontline is like, the ones that are really battling online scum. So take that 'think of the children' thing and realize that there are people who really do think of the children and it is one of the hardest jobs on the planet.
Quote from TFA:
"The BBC asked Facebook why it couldn't use its facial recognition technology to assist the hunt for Lucy. It responded: "To protect user privacy, it's important that we follow the appropriate legal process, but we work to support law enforcement as much as we can."
So, privacy matters to FB when it is to protect the abusers of children. How low can you go...
Now, I'm sure that everything present in this article is true. But I'm worried that the reason we get this article now (apparently the things the article describes happened 10-15 years ago) is because it's part of someone's job to build support for warrantless driftnet surveillance, mandatory real-ID systems etc.
So I think it's fair to ask: why was it so hard to give Facebook the warrant they asked for?
> https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1r6wluq/departmen...
Let's see them stand tall then, now that the department of HS is going to make the request, no doubt through the appropriately bought and paid for channels.
99% of requests are wild goose chases based on nothing. Like literally dumb requests that are not only irrelevant, the request wouldn't even get past that cops boss, much less a judge. But a cop can just ask whatever they want regardless of merit or relevance and it's up to you to say yes or no.
In those years we received two requests with warrants that made more sense but when I see "company denied to help" I understand why. Most cases it's a random cop fishing for private info that has nothing to do with anything. And when it's true, just get a warrant then.
Otherwise you're more likely to be jeopardizing innocent people's data than actually helping anyone.
They cherry-picked a story that they knew would win public sympathy since no one wants a child molester to run free. Lets show a time when an agent solved a case for an excellent outcome.
Pick a DHS/ICE story from this year and see what kind of dystopic shitshow you report on.
This is propaganda. Gullible people fall for this shit every day. Put some thought into the context before you swallow the turd.
I haven't watched the video (linked from the article) and I certainly hope the current events caused them to reflect on whether pushing for DHS to have more power is wise, but the last line in the article doesn't give me much optimism.
It is perfectly possible to investigate and prevent child abuse without this particular configuration.
A cynic is simply a realist who has seen too much shit. I am a firm realist. I see the world as it is and hope that others will come along to help make it better but I don't naively hold my breath.
DHS needs a win in the public's eyes. BBC has the air of a trusted platform. It is no big stretch to make the connection that dredging up an old story about tracking down and capturing a pedo using an elite DHS unit would be a useful tool to win back some public support. You notice that there are no dates given in the article so the reader has no way to know that this went down years ago. It looks new and fresh.
Propaganda. I don't have to be gullible so I choose not to be.
Not so.
> Last summer Greg met Lucy, now in her 20s, for the first time. > Lucy (left), now an adult...
Edit: seven years in the making, so entirely coincidental
Doesn't sound like paid DHS/ICE psyopper.
Any reason to think it is?
EDIT: Got the "you're posting too fast", so in reply to OP below:
> Submitter's nationality has nothing to do with it nor does his post history. WTF
Well, yes it does, its exculpatory evidence for a stranger you publicly accused of dredging up the news to try and win sympathy for DHS/ICE. (twice now)
Original post, by you: "It is old news dredged up to try to win sympathy for DHS/ICE." This post, by you: "why do they need to dredge it up today?"
>Within hours, local Homeland Security agents had arrested the offender, who had been raping Lucy for six years.
We can't relax the claim to "well, it says DHS found a pedo, so it's propaganda ipso facto, because DHS did something good": they specifically argue the submission was the propaganda, specifically because it'd be absurd to claim it was published as DHS propaganda. (it's an article by the BBC)
Did Britain's public broadcaster decide, half a decade ago, to begin making this documentary so that they could secretly and nefariously support a US government agency long before it was embroiled in its current controversies?
It turns out that, even if all you can see is the assailant's hands, that may be enough to identify them.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/lifestyle/meta-researcher-warned...
Who needs the dark web when Meta exists and is protected by the US government?
Edit: downvotes? Lol
> sexually inappropriate messages were sent to "~500k victims per DAY in English markets only."
This sounds like a total count of unsolicited sexual messages sent to all users every day.
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/tech/2025/11/22/meta-strike-po...
- there are 2.4B under 18 globally
- which means 500k is 0.02% of all children
- or around 1 in 5000 children globally, per day
- if evenly distributed (which is unlikely), then roughly 7-8% of all kids would feature in Meta exploitation yearly
That suggests very high reoccurrence; but even reoccurrence suggests the total rate remains quite high. A reoccurrence rate of 100x would suggest that roughly 1 in 1000 kids is exploited on Meta, yearly.
Anyway, disturbing.
And now I'm thinking who *wouldn't* want to volunteer to go all in on this kind of stuff once their main work winds down? (Facebook apparently).
... starts looking for dark web vigilante groups
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/dark-agent-spotted-bedro...
There's dozens or hundreds of abusers easily identifiable in there and so this hero story is just propaganda at this time.
>They worked out the woman's address
And yet they didn't bother to knock on the door.
Doing eye for an eye here, say putting a broom somewhere cough for 6 years, only to find out he's innocent would be pretty bad.
> Squire works for US Department of Homeland Security Investigations in an elite unit which attempts to identify children appearing in sexual abuse material.
"The team realised that in the household with Lucy was her mother’s boyfriend - a convicted sex offender."
I feel like the police should’ve started there: cross-referencing people in her close circle against a list of known sex offenders.
How are people struggling so much with basic logic on this one? This is quite strange. Are some of you just unable to imagine having limited knowledge and not being able to just look everything up?
The GP's account was created in 2019, so being born yesterday is not an excuse available to them.