The effects of pornography are far-reaching, but a local company is hoping to limit the exposure of law enforcement officers who deal with the crime every day.

SurfRecon Inc, an Orem company, has been developing a software program over the last 15 months that will help law enforcement officials identify pornographic images, while limiting the time they spend viewing them.

Andrew Brandt, vice president of sales for the company, said the idea for the program was developed while working with the CP80 group. CP80, founded by Ralph Yarro, is a nonprofit group dedicated to fighting pornography.

“As we were working on that project, we realized that the people who were suffering the most were law enforcement,” Brandt said.

Brandt said the software searches computers for images and compares them to a database of known pornographic images. For legal reasons, the software does not store pornographic pictures. Only the images’ identifying markings, called a hash, are stored. The hash is a series of 32 letters and numbers unique to each picture, just like a fingerprint.

When images are found and matched to a known pornographic hash, they are brought up in a thumbnail size and blurred, so officers do not have to view the images.

“Lots of time you can tell it’s pornography without it being completely clear, so you can blur out the images,” he said.

When new pornographic images are found, police officers across the country can add them to the software’s database and help other agencies identify images, much like a fingerprint database, Brandt said. The software also uses Web crawlers to scan known pornography Web sites for new images.

The database contains information on more than seven million images now, with about 600,000 added daily. The software has been put to use in several countries, including the United Kingdom, France and Australia. Brandt said several Utah law enforcement agencies are using the program, as well as the FBI, NSA, the Department of Homeland Security and other national agencies.

Mark Dell’Ergo, investigation supervisor for the Utah County Attorney’s Office Bureau of Investigations, said his department has used the program for six to seven months. The department has mainly been testing the software to help streamline the tool to be more effective for law enforcement, but it will likely be used in investigations in a month or so.

“It’s still in the beta testing phase, but I’ve used it on my home computers and work computers, and it’s pretty useful,” Dell’Ergo said.

One of the most beneficial uses for the program is shielding officers from viewing adult pornography while searching for child images for an investigation. One friend told him he would pay any price to not view explicit sexual images again, Dell’Ergo said.

“It’s kind of a soul-saving tool, if you will,” he said.

Most people aren’t comfortable viewing pornographic images, so any way to prevent that would be welcome, Dell’Ergo said. Sex crimes officers are especially susceptible to post traumatic stress disorder, and the department would like to have the computer scanning software available to investigators soon.

Brandt said the program will also help officers who are assigned to check up on sex offenders. The offenders’ computers must be checked periodically, but often officers do not know where to start. The software will scan the entire computer for images and bring them to one location, so Brandt said the pictures can be checked even if they are not immediately matched to a known hash.

The program is also available for free download from www.surfrecon.com, and the company will be releasing a home version in the next few months for individuals to rate images they have found. Brandt said the company would like to allow individual users to contribute to the database just as officers do, but the program will need to be altered to avoid tampering by pornographers.

With the home version, users can mark images as safe, sexual or pornographic, but different users may have different opinions. Algorithms will need to be devised to make it harder to label “safe” images so that pornographers cannot incorrectly label images.

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