Child Exploitation Tracking System

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article does not cite any references or sources. (April 2008) Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed.

The introduction to this article provides insufficient context for those unfamiliar with the subject. Please help improve the article with a good introductory style.

The Child Exploitation Linkage Tracking System(CELTS) is a software system developed by Microsoft Canada that enables law enforcement to better tackle the growing problem of online child exploitation. CETS is housed at the Royal Canadian Mounted Police's National Child Exploitation Coordination Centre (NCECC) in Ottawa, Canada and is available to Canadian police forces across the country. CETS allows police services to share crucial information that previously could not be shared, making critical links between pieces of information that have been overlooked or lost in the sheer volume of Internet traffic and it has overcome the technical boundaries that prevented effective coordination among police services in the past.

The Child Exploitation Linkage Tracking System initiative began in 2003 when Paul Gillespie, a police officer with the Toronto Police Child Exploitation Sex Crimes Unit, emailed Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates asking for help in creating a technology solution for tracking online predators.

CELTS will permit investigators to easily organize, analyze, share and search information from the point of detection right through the investigative phase, arrest and offender management. Multiple law enforcement agencies will securely access a centralized database where child exploitation investigators will be able to match up other investigations that reference the same people or online identities (such as email addresses or nicknames). This database gives law enforcement the tools needed to conduct more efficient and thorough investigations.