A 50-year-old temple priest has been arrested in Udumalpet of Tamil Nadu for uploading child sexual abuse material on social media back in 2020. The Udumalpet All Women Police arrested Vaidhyanathan alias Bhalaji, who had been working at a local temple in Madathukulam, based on an alert from National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), a USA-based non-profit.
NCMEC had lodged a complaint against a particular IP address and phone number for uploading child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on a social media platform. Based on the complaint, the Tamil Nadu police had narrowed down the person using the particular mobile number in Udumalpet town in Tiruppur district. The accused was later identified as a priest working in a local temple named Vaidhyanathan alias Balaji. He was arrested and booked under various sections of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act and the Information Technology (IT) Act.
NCMEC is a non-profit working on preventing child sexual exploitation. The agency coordinates with social media platforms like Facebook which pick up objectionable material, including child sexual abuse material, and share the details with NCMEC. NCMEC then alerts the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and through the Interpol, they reach out to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which is the nodal agency for the Interpol in India. From there, the respective state police receive the report and action is taken.
“In this case, the IP address was shared and it was linked to a user in Udumalpet. There is no child who we think was personally victimised by him to record the video. He seems to have downloaded some videos and uploaded them on Facebook,” the Udumalpet police said. According to The Hindu, Balaji was booked under Section 13 (using of child in any form of media for the purposes of sexual gratification) read with 14(2) (punishment for using child for pornographic purposes) of the POCSO Act, and section 67(B)(b) (whoever creates text or digital images, collects, seeks, browses, downloads, advertises, promotes, exchanges or distributes material in any electronic form depicting children in obscene or indecent or sexually explicit manner) of the Information Technology Act, and remanded to judicial custody.
The NCMEC uses PhotoDNA, an image-identification technology used for detecting child sexual abuse material and other illegal content. PhotoDNA has a database of previously reported child exploitation imagery. It creates a unique digital signature of an image which it uses to match with previously identified illegal images.