About This Workshop
This 2-day workshop provides a practical, legally grounded training track for law-enforcement officers and DFRWS USA attendees who investigate technology-facilitated child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSEA). Led by a leading international charity focused on equipping and training crimes against children investigators, in collaboration with several other commercial partners and a major US Government law enforcement agency, the workshop combines foundational digital forensics with state-of-the-art online-investigation tradecraft anchored in the USA’s legal and ethical frameworks.
Across two days (four 4-hour blocks), participants will learn to plan and document imaging, triage, and on-scene analysis in a manner suitable for court; apply hash-based intelligence (e.g., Project VIC and CRC data) to reduce exposure to CSAEM while accelerating triage; and normalize evidence into open standards such as the DFRWS sponsored CASE/UCO ontologies, the Crimes Against Children Ontology, and SOLVE-IT to support cross-tool semantic analysis, provenance, and inter-agency collaboration. Attendees gain hands-on experience using commercial open-source products used to investigate crimes against children. Hands-on labs use synthetic, legally permissible datasets and prebuilt virtual environments to practice full workflows: acquisition and verification, intelligence-driven artifact review, structured online collection and evidentiary capture, and end-to-end case development from initial lead to victim-centric prioritization and prosecution support. No child exploitation material is used in this workshop.
Throughout, the workshop emphasizes necessity, proportionality, data minimization, auditability, and investigator wellness, with clear deference to each attendee’s national laws and agency SOPs.