FBI's sting snares 7,000 paedophiles across Britain

The Sunday Telegraph (U.K.) ^ | 08/04/2002 | David Bamber

[Pokey78]

More than 7,000 British paedophiles have been snared in a sting operation by US authorities investigating two worldwide internet child pornography rings.

Detectives in Britain have been given the names and addresses of 7,272 Britons who used their credit cards to access pictures of under-age children, some as young as a few months old, engaged in sex acts.

Unbeknown to the paedophiles, the two sites which they were using had been seized last year by agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. British police now plan a series of raids on the suspects in what will be the country's largest paedophile investigation.

The Telegraph has learned that the National Criminal Intelligence Service, which co-ordinates use of intelligence against criminals in Britain, has already used the FBI information to organise the arrest of 36 paedophiles in May. Detectives now intend to swoop on many more offenders, all believed to be men, over the next few months.

Anyone who subscribed to the sites and viewed images faces a jail term of up to five years.

All of the paedophiles registered on the pay-per-view websites between May 1999 and September last year. Every customer had to provide an e-mail address and his credit card details: by return they were sent a username and password to enable them to log on to a paedophile site. In October, detectives in the US arrested the websites' owners and seized the database.

The FBI has raided hundreds of homes of subscribers in the US but has found difficulty in mounting prosecutions because the American definition of possessing indecent internet pornography is much laxer than that in British law.

Det Supt Peter Spindler of the National Crime Squad, who organised May's raid, confirmed that it would be the first of many in this country.

He said: "This is the first time we have targeted people who use the internet to buy images of children being sexually abused. We will continue these operations to protect children and show paedophiles that law enforcement agencies will find them, regardless of which area of the internet they use."

News of the investigation will heighten concerns about the levels of paedophile activity in Britain, highlighted by the murder in 1999 of eight-year-old Sarah Payne and the campaign for a "Sarah's Law", which would reveal the whereabouts of child abusers.

Carole Howlett, the Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, who has led the campaign against child abuse on the internet, said that the investigation proved the extent of the problem.

"A lot more work needs to be done," she said. "There is no greater priority than the protection of children: it should become a ministerial priority and it should be a priority of every policing plan in the country. We have a fair way to go."

[Yeti]

My problem is that the FBI is generating, storing, and SELLING this crap which makes them just as complicit and guilty as your average pervert with a modem.

AGREED!

When you understand how so much of this stuff is mind poison, you have to wonder how many kids have been molested solely because the FBI planted the ideas into the perp's head.

Not to seem too gung-ho on the censorship thing, because I know that when you look at the numbers, the vast majority of people who have seen child porn do not molest anyone -- just as the vast majority of people who watch horror movies don't do anything like the recent vampyre killing in England. It's the few who do that were pushed to it by the FBI.

Anyway, causality of that sort is a moral issue, not a legal one, and although morals worry me more than laws, I have to wonder about the legality of what was done -- not just in the sense of the validity of convictions, but the potential criminal charges against FBI personnel who did this.

What would be said if the FBI sold heroin to tens of thousands of people, then arrested them all for simple possession? Surely some of the resulting addicts would never have become addicts were it not for the FBI???!!!

If someone could show that they developed a sexual problem as a direct result of the porn, or if could be shown that someone was molested in the immediate aftermath of government porn being viewed, there could be a huge lawsuit coming.

LE is getting away with too much, IMO, especially lately! I don't think the moral or legal line is at all vague in this example, it is difficult to believe that so many people (however many FBI personnel were involved in the operation) could cross it so clearly and not understand that they were wrong.

More likely some people thought they found a way to look at it without getting in trouble.

[Aquinasfan]

Great news.

[4Freedom]

"...defend the right to look at kiddie porn."

That's pretty sick. Isn't it?

Read my earlier post about how this Robles Perez was making kiddie porn in Puerto Rico.

He paid grandmothers, mothers and other relatives to bring their children to him to be raped and photographed.

The FBI now think that local school officials or teachers were involved in his porn ring.

But hey, the FBI should go to jail, too. Yeah, right.

[Yeti]

If the FBI acquires a kiddy porn site its next responsibility is to close it down...

Thank-you!

Like, "Last one to the plug is a rotten egg!"

Not the next day, week, year or minute!

The primary justification for abrogating our FIRST AMENDMENT(not 5th or 14th, but the very first) right regarding this kind of thing is that viewing it incites child-rape! I believe that is TRUE in a certain percentage of people. What was the FBI collectively thinking?

Hey, look at this :

---------->>>>> BABY RAPE <<<<<<--------

Now, you're under arrest!

Nyah, Nyah! Made ya look! (psyyyyyyyyych)

[Howie]

The Washington Post reports on the use of wiretapping resources in a New Orleans prostitution case. It appears the FBI was granted a warrant in order to investigate organised crime, but after months of transcribing calls they have evidence of nothing but prostitution. Note that some analysts are predicting that new FBI surveillance rules will lead to resources being increasingly diverted towards investigations of minor crimes.


But FBI agents were listening. Hour after hour, month after month, 10 agents recorded the men's demands, the brothel keepers' deals and the prostitutes' complaints. The agents were listening on Sept. 11, in the days before and in the days after. With 90 calls a day to monitor, the listening post was busy.
[...]

With great care, the agents documented the secret life of a high-end brothel. Through more than 5,000 phone calls, they kept listening to the madams, the hookers and the johns, even though the conversations never turned up mentions of mob bosses or hard-core drug dealing -- both cited in the FBI's initial wiretap application 13 months ago.

[...]

"The whole thing is an incredible waste of federal resources," said Arthur A. "Buddy" Lemann III, one of the most experienced of the city's criminal defense lawyers. "To make a federal offense out of it is like using an elephant gun to kill a fly."

Jonathan Turley, an expert on constitutional criminal procedure at George Washington University, said: "It's extremely unusual for federal prosecutors to pursue a prostitution case. It's particularly curious in an administration that is built on respecting traditional areas of state authority."

(see www.washingtonpost.com)

[palmer]

You shouldn't equate defense of kiddie porn viewers with criticism of this law enforcement effort. The LEO's caught 1 CP distributor, 0 CP creators, and possibly 5000 users although we have yet to find out how many of the 5000 are other LEO's.

This is another example of going after the easy marks. LEO's inevitably go after the easiest and least threatening targets irregardless of the impact of the crime.

[Yeti]

What kind of "bait" do you suggest using to nail these pervs

Bait.

Did they ask the parents of the molested children if they mind using pictures of them during their degradation as "bait?"

If my child had been molested, I would probably want to kill the perp. I would feel the same way about anyone who distributed pictures of that "special moment" over the internet.

If you want to donate pictures of your kids being molested to the internet for any reason, I would wonder...

Hey we could bust child slavery rings by kidnapping kids and selling them to rapists! We need some

"BAIT"

Who do you have in mind?

If you don't have any kids, I think you should name your firstborn Bait.

[Sandy]

The FBI has raided hundreds of homes of subscribers in the US but has found difficulty in mounting prosecutions because the American definition of possessing indecent internet pornography is much laxer than that in British law.

Hmmmm. I'll bet this means the feds are only using virtual kiddie porn, otherwise prosecuting wouldn't be a problem.

[Jorge]

.... 7,272 Britons who used their credit cards to access pictures of under-age children, some as young as a few months old, engaged in sex acts.

A "few months old, engaged in sex acts"?
UN-believable. What next? Fetus sex pictures?

[4Freedom]

"...you have to wonder how many children have been mollested solely because the FBI planted the ideas in the perp's head."

Yeah, that's the first thing a sane person is going to wonder when they read this article. Sure.

Someone's got a great chance for winning a lawsuit against the FBI for planting the idea to go out and rape a child in their head.

I hope they roast these perverts.

[Freedom2specul8]

To just a portion of my ping list:

I thought you might want to check this out...

Is this a war between nappers and authorities or what? (pedophiles don't take revenge on our kids for authorities actions do they?

[4Freedom]

I doubt they used real kiddie porn. They were probably computer generated.

I also don't believe they actually have to deliver a child into a slaver's possession. They just need to have the money exchange hands on tape and then roast the perverts.

[muawiyah]

There are no "easy marks" who should be ignored when it comes to "kiddie porn". Just round them all up - the producers, the audience ("viewers"), enablers, etc.

[4Freedom]

"...least threatening targets..."

You're kidding, right?

Avilla wasn't threatening?

Robles Perez wasn't threatening?

Ortega Rivera wasn't threatening?

[SandfleaCSC]

Look, maybe you're not that savy on digital protocols so let me explain it to you as best as possible. These guys in the FBI sting were caught using their own credit cards on the World Wide Web for viewing illegal content. What the FBI nabbed for all its work, money, and skirting of the law is stupid, small-time, amateur perverts. Nobodys as far as the crime is concerned. There are at least TWENTY other ways to view any binary file over a connection and all of them are more difficult, if not totally impossible to trace when compared to WWW TCP\IP protocols. Efnet, Dalnet, IRC, P2P,proxy servers, usenet....the list goes on. Throw in 512 bit encryption, and you could transmit secret death ray plans complete with your home address straight to the FBI and they'd never be able to read it.

Take a look at the newsreader portion of your browser one day and grab some headers off the usenet. Apart from a few helpful discussion and tech groups, it will read something like "alt.binaries.(insert weird or illegal fetish here)." It's almost like the drug war, catch one and six others will pop up in their place, not to mention the international aspect of the crime or the absence of any "real" physical evidence. My job is network security with a huge company....it's a big free-for-all jungle out there, believe me.

The point to all this long winded post is that the sin that the FBI committed, probably in America, on American equipment, and staffed by Americans, far outweighed any good that they did in Britain.

[palmer]

The Perez arrest sounds like good local police work. Don't know about the rest, but that's still a very poor ratio. It's pretty clear that catching the creators is much harder work and our agents seem to be good at avoiding that work.

[4Freedom]

Do you think Avila was a computer genius? This guy they caught in Puerto Rico with 40 videos that he had made of rapes of, at least, 12 girls ages 4 to 12 took some still pictures to K-mart to be developed.

Puerto Rico: Man may also face federal pornography charges

Child molesters are stupid, moronic lowlife.

The FBI did the whole world a favor by identifying these perverts.

[4Freedom]

Guess how you catch the creators? You go shake down the buyers of this filth, search their homes and see if you turn up any more Robles Perez type material.

Then you follow it back to the source.
These perverts will give up their connections or go to jail.

The FBI will get them.

[yendu bwam]

Yet another Socialist in denial.

I'm no socialist. But people who force little kids into sex acts for their perverted pleasures, and those who buy their wares, should be hunted down all over the Earth, and locked away for good.

[4Freedom]

Execute them.