Hard-drive-sniffing dog, Thoreau, is cops’ latest weapon on child porn
The Rhode Island state police are showing off their latest tool to combat child pornography: Thoreau, a golden Labrador.
The K-9 has been trained to ferret out gadgets, such as thumb drives and hard drives, that might contain kiddie porn. Thoreau is trained to identify scents such as metals and other components found in these gadgets. The dog can then help the authorities find concealed digital storage materials at residences of those suspected of possessing child pornography.
"If it has a memory card, he’ll sniff it out," Detective Adam Houston, Thoreau’s handler, told the Providence Journal. Dogs can be trained to find a variety of odors, including the smell of optical discs. The Motion Picture Association of America, for example, has deployed dogs that can smell polycarbonates used in DVDs to help bust locations where huge caches of copyrighted content are being stored or produced.
