Fox Valley Technical College’s ICAC Custom Extension for Hubstream

This Category 1 project develops innovative and new investigative tools for law enforcement, prosecutors, and other professionals. These tools will help the law enforcement community and prosecutorial agencies overcome current technology-related investigative challenges such as efficiently and effectively parsing through digital evidence, expediting evidence collection and transferring of digital files, facilitating decryption, addressing mobile chat encryptions, automating data intelligence, and supporting ICAC case management. This program is authorized pursuant to the Department of Justice Appropriations Act, 2018 (P.L. 115–141, 132 Stat. 348, 423).

The National Criminal Justice Training Center (NCJTC) of Fox Valley Technical College (FVTC) will develop and deploy an ICAC Custom Extension (ICE) to the Hubstream cloud-based software platform for image categorization, which will facilitate the download of the Project VIC hash set and the upload of case information to the Project VIC cloud service. ICE will allow investigators more complete access to the Project VIC hash set, allowing them to more effectively parse through digital evidence, expedite evidence collection and transfer digital files, automate data intelligence, and support ICAC case management resulting in increased investigative capacity and effectiveness. It will be a more secure and manageable environment allowing for the collection of more records; enhanced alerts, upgraded deconfliction and ability to initiate investigations using historical data; additional and better investigative leads; enhanced reliability and security for the system and its data; and improved functionality and speed. With increased capacity, expedited evidence collection, reduced backlogs, automated data intelligence, investigators will be able to conduct more proactive versus reactive investigations, more quickly locate and apprehend offenders, and identify and rescue the child victims. NCJTC will also provide training on this enhanced features to ICAC Task force members. CA/NCF