ICAC Child On-line Protection System (ICACCOPS) Improvements

This Category 2 program provides enhancing and refining existing investigative tools, methods, and technologies that address child pornography, exploitation, and sex trafficking. Examples include, but are not limited to, effective interviewing tactics (to include polygraphs) to ascertain whether an offender has previously engaged in hands-on abuse; case deconfliction tools; high-priority suspect identification; covert operation tools; national reporting and information-sharing capabilities among federal, state, local, and tribal law enforcement (particularly ICAC task forces); evaluation of existing technical resources and tools; and peer-to-peer investigative tools. This program is authorized pursuant to the Department of Justice Appropriations Act, 2018 (P.L. 115–141, 132 Stat. 348, 423).

The ICAC Child On-line Protection System (ICACCOPS) is supported by the National Criminal Justice Training (NCJTC) of Fox Valley Technical College (FVTC) and is at the center of most peer-to-peer investigations being worked by the Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) task forces. In addition, ICACCOPS supports investigations of Internet chat rooms, online solicitations, enticements and dark web activity. ICACCOPS provides critical investigative resources to the ICAC Task Force through the numerous investigative tools it hosts and data it provides to ICAC Task Force investigators. The applicant proposes to strengthen and enhance ICACCOPS by significantly upgrading hardware and software of the production server and other critical infrastructure components. This upgrade will increase investigative capacity and enhance data analysis, and security. The applicant will upgrade the following systems: Production Server, Web Server, Collection Server, Replication Server, API Server, Development Server, Torrent Processing Server, and ICACCOPS Firewall. CA/NCF