Alex says: “[Here’s a New York Times] article describing the capture of the previously mentioned [suspected] pedophile whose pictures of sexual abuse with minors featured his face swirled. As detailed on Boing Boing, the decoding is actually a relatively simple photoshop process, but the NYTimes interestingly calls it a “virtuoso act of electronic decoding”!
The suspect, Christopher Paul Neil, 32, was caught after Interpol issued an unusual international appeal based on some 200 Internet pictures that showed the faceless man sexually abusing boys in Vietnam and Cambodia. Interpol said the man had abused a dozen boys in those countries, some as young as 6.
The Thai police said they had employed some high-tech unscrambling of their own, tracing Mr. Neil to a location outside Bangkok through the cellphone calls of a friend who was in contact with him.
Officials said Mr. Neil, who had been teaching English in Thailand, Vietnam and South Korea, would be prosecuted here and then extradited to his home nation, Canada, where a recent law allows prosecution for sex crimes committed abroad.