Posted on 07/02/2002 3:48:55 AM PDT by Prodigal Son
Dozens of suspected paedophiles have been held in synchronised raids across the world in an operation led by UK police.
Officers from the UK's National Hi-Tech Crime Unit worked for a year to smash an Internet-based child abuse ring which called itself the "Shadowz Brotherhood".
Hundreds of officers swooped on suspects' homes this morning in seven countries, seizing dozens of computers.
Even hardened detectives described the images and videos involved as the most horrific they had ever seen - many involved babies.
The police investigation - code-named Operation Twins - was supported by Europol in The Hague.
A Europol spokesman said around 50 suspects were involved and their homes were searched this morning.
"In all cases the occupants were implicated in crimes relating to child abuse and pornography," said the spokesman.
"A substantial quantity of equipment was seized including computers and laptops containing images of child abuse, videos and CD's."
The group stretched from the UK to the US, Canada, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Romania, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.
Before today 16 people had already been arrested across the world - one suspect in the US, an air force officer, has committed suicide.
Of the 50 suspects held in the latest raids, 31 were arrested in Germany.
Some members of the brotherhood were themselves involved in sexually abusing children and then posting the images online for others to download.
Their activities centred around a website which also provided advice on how to groom children for abuse in Internet chatrooms and how to evade detection.
When uploading and downloading images to and from the site they used sophisticated encryption techniques, sometimes hiding material in seemingly innocent picture files.
The website was run by a special tier of hardcore paedophiles called "Administrators" who operated a "star" rating system.
After initial vetting by an administrator new members received a "one star" rating allowing them to enter certain chat rooms newsgroups and bulletin boards.
To gain further stars they had to post images of child sex abuse for viewing and downloading by other members.
As they climbed the star ladder they gained deeper access to restricted sites and password protected rooms containing the most sickening material.
An administrator would be on duty 24-hours a day assessing new images.
Detectives compared the structure of the site to a castle with access to the inner sanctums heavily guarded and dependent on star rating.
The brotherhood also operated a cellular structure similar to terrorist and international drug smuggling operations in which only small groups of people within the network were known to each other.
Paedophiles could access the website in languages including English, German, French, Spanish and Dutch.
UN-believable.
The pedophiles are sickos and the U.N. is just as sick for their outright support of them.
There was a story some time back of the U.N. having actually produced an "educational" book endorsing just that kind of open ended sexuality. However there never seemed to be any smoking gun; nobody could actually turn up the book. At least not that I saw. I dare to hope that the U.N. isn't that far gone -- yet.
I don't know the article didn't really specify beyond it being child porn and dealing with babies in some cases. There was another one in the BBC but it had fewer details.
Stands to reason though. This is happening this morning over here, so I'm sure there'll be more details soon.
Yep. Under "The rights of the child" clause. I wouldn't be suprised if UN officials were part of the brotherhood, but conviently overlooked.
Planned Parenthood, GLADD, NAMBLA, and other U.S. liberals will be collecting for their defence - it's just another "lifestyle choice," and the pedophiles are being discriminated against.
I think they're too radioactive even for that.
From the article:
Before today 16 people had already been arrested across the world - one suspect in the US, an air force officer, has committed suicide.
This is an ugly one and a far reaching one as well. I imagine they'll shake some more nuts off the tree eventually. Kofi? That would just be too much to ask for wouldn't it?
On a side note. You'd think that if these perverts were clever enough to create this layered defense and cellular structure they'd be clever enough too to have some sort of self destruct mechanism on their hard drives. I imagine the police have evidence independent of the perps computers but it would seem an obvious self defense mechanism to deny the prosecution as much evidence as possible. Not only sick twisted scum- but dumb to boot.
If the libs had their way, the only thing that would happen to these perverts when caught is a hug and kudos on a job well done.
I'm always vaguely amused/dismayed by this: Whenever a story breaks about the bust of a child porn ring, somehow every law enforcement officer even slightly involved seems to have found the time to watch the tapes and view all the images for themselves. I know a few people HAVE to view them for prosecutorial purposes, but it's obvious a lot of these guys are just looking at this stuff for kicks because they know they can't get arrested for it.
I'd bet a lot of them probably did, and it just doesn't matter. Once the cops get the server logs proving that child porn picture A was delivered from such-and-such a site, that's pretty much proof.
By the way, the technology does exist to extract information even off completely reformatted hard drives. We're talking CIA and NSA level stuff (maybe they've bothered to give some of this tech to the FBI by now), but if they really REALLY want to know what used to be on your drive, they stand a pretty decent chance of being able to reconstruct what was on your disk at least three entire wipes earlier.
Which probably explains why the Pentagon's destruction orders for hard drives that once held top secret info goes something like this: Remove drive. Open drive, remove actual magnetic disk. Shred. Reshred. Reshred. Pulp. Dissolve in acid. Take remaining goo to army base and bury it, where it's protected 24/7 from now unitl the end of time.
There are just certain crimes where the "cruel and unusual punishment" clause should be waived. Not even prison rape would be an adequate consequence for this sort of heinous offense.
Yeah, I'm aware of that. I meant something along the acid or small destructive (phyiscally) device on the hard drive. Self destruct button kind of stuff.
As far as this wiping thing goes. I got Norton Works a long time ago because I was having trouble. Installed the whole thing and used it for a while but have since uninstalled everything except the anti virus program. Norton's wiping utility offered "standard" or "government" as options. The gov't wipe if I recall inserted 0s and then 1s into all the blank space of your computer three seperate times and then did a random insert the final time before wiping the hard drive clean (if I'm not mistaken- I never used it). They can still get data after all that? How do they do it? If it's too long an explanation don't bother- but I am interested.
How I have no idea. But they claim they can, at least part of the time. Something to do with residual atoms from the original "imprinting" on the disk or something like that, kind of like how even if you take a cassette and tape over it, you can still just barely hear the original recording underneath, especially after going through some heavy-duty digital audio processing. (They're trying to resurrect the infamous 18-Minute Gap from the Nixon Tapes this way, without success thus far.)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.