Unfortunately at one point or another, whilst staring absent-mindedly at the TV, you will have come across that CSI show.

Who knows what city they’re heading to next – New York, Las Vegas and Miami are already ticked off – but one thing you can count on is the use of technology that is nowhere near becoming a reality for investigative units around the world.

Not that law enforcement isn’t breaking ground, and the latest tech available at the Homeland Security Investigations Cyber Crimes Center [sic] is pretty darn impressive.

The team spoke to CNN about their efforts to catch a child predator:

In a bathroom, the predator has placed a child on the counter to photograph his evil acts.

In the background of the photo, which was posted online, are products including prescription medication.

But zooming in on that pill bottle makes the details unreadable.

“Utilizing [sic] some technology that hadn’t even been released to the public yet we were able to take a look at the bottle and reverse out some of the motion blur,” Cole said.

They can now see the offender’s first name “Stephen,” the first two letters of the last name and the first three digits on the prescription order.

With that he applies to the pharmacy for the customer details of every person who fits that criteria. It narrows the list down to a man named “Stephen Keating.”

But that’s not all. The offender’s fingers are also in the picture and incredibly this crack team manages to pull the fingerprints from the image.

“That was the first time we were able to do that,” Cole said.

The evidence was strong enough to put Stephen Keating behind bars for 110 years. Investigators rescued his 14 victims.

The technology is called ‘Photo DNA’, and the use of computers has drastically reduced the amount of time expended to undertake such a photo analysis.

The rest of the article is definitely worth a read, focusing on how these new techniques are catching child sex offenders and rescuing their victims, so head over HERE for that.

[source:cnn]