SaferNet Brazil has an interesting data: According to their 2020’s Transparency Report, 64% of reported CSAM pages they got were in English, 13% in Russian, 10.3% in Portuguese (Brazil’s official language), 2,1 % in French, 1,8% in Spanish, 0,2% in German and 8,9% in others. With 525 images, a .ru is SaferNet Brazil’s 2020 top 8 removed CSAM URL.

Remember that SaferNet Brazil receives only public reports, meaning that those do not represent any Artificial Intelligence powered data, but reports from people really finding it.

How many Brazilians speak fluent Russian? I would say less than 1%, and usually when they are somehow related to the Slavic population living in the country. It is irrational to believe that our Slavic population is the ones responsible for those reports. It is not proportional, and there is no reason to believe that Slavic people are doing this dirty work.

The same, with a higher variance, is valid for English. Even though English is a more common language in the country, it is for sure less spoken than Portuguese. Not to mention the “others”.

Are English pages easier to found, so as the images, and that is why people are reporting it more, as there is, from this point on, no need to analyse what the content there is? Maybe. Ask SaferNet Brazil.

But what about the Russians? Even in Open Web, finding anything written in Cyrillic is not so easy if you do not have a special keyboard for that purpose. This is valid for anything written in an alphabet other than the Latin one.

For law enforcement authority, this data should trigger an immediate alert. Unfortunately, it is now always so.

Is it not a valid, possible hypothesis that the reason why pages of CSAM written in Russian is being report to Brazilian hotline, and not to Russian authorities is that whoever is reporting it know that the Brazilian victims are there? What if I tell you that, for more than a subsequent year, one of the pages most removed for CSAM in Brazil was a .ru one (today a hopping domain), and others .ru keep being displayed at the SaferNet 2020’s Annual Report?

 One of Black Dolphin’s (CSAM Operation by the Brazilian Civilian Police in November 2020) victim was expected to be sold for a Russian. In another recent Operation by the Brazilian Civilian Police, a Brazilian victim was found in a page (whose tip come from internal investigations and not for hotline reports) that was, ironic or not, written also in Russian. Another one, conducted by the Brazilian Federal Police in 2013 (Operation Glasnost) also found Russian sites as being an encounter point for sharing CSAM produced with Brazilian victims.

If you are a law enforcement reading that, please think carefully about it.