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.
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.