ICCAM: What It Is and Why It’s Important

Once a hotline receives a public report, the hotline analyst assesses the reported material, and if it is believed that there is illegal material on that page, the URL is inserted into ICCAM. The system then crawls all information found on that URL and the analyst can classify each picture and/or video separately as baseline (internationally illegal according to INTERPOL’s criteria), nationally illegal or not illegal. All images and videos marked as baseline and nationally illegal are made available to INTERPOL through an ICCAM portal specifically designed for them. Consequently, INTERPOL downloads this material and transfers it for insertion into their International Child Sexual Exploitation Image Database (ICSE Database).

1. Be accessible to all INHOPE member hotlines and other authorised bodies.
2. Provide a technical tool for secure exchange of CSAM among different jurisdictions around the world.
3. Enhance hotlines’ capacity and efficiently assist in identifying and analysing CSAM and collation of corresponding intelligence.
4. Facilitate image/video hashing/fingerprinting and crawling technologies.
5. Streamline hotlines’ workflow and content assessment: by reducing content analysts’ exposure to known child sexual abuse material - by supporting the development of robust, comprehensive statistics both at the country/hotline and global levels.
6. Escalate “new” CSAM to law enforcement for victim/offender identification purposes.
7. Reduce the number of duplicate investigations.

The INHOPE ICCAM platform was developed by Ziuz Forensics with funding from the European Commission under the Safer Internet and Connecting Europe Facility programmes (Digital Service Infrastructure for Making a Better and Safer Internet for kids). ICCAM enables multi-stakeholder collaboration between hotlines, Law Enforcement Agencies (particularly INTERPOL) and the industry.