The Politics of Entrapment Part III

Eros and Entrapment

We may by willing to assign the possibility that much of the child porn on the net may well be controlled by the police in order to act as entrapment operations preceeded by invasive trawling .  So, if you are one of those inclined to view pornography – whatever the moral arguments – and find yourself face to face with an advertisement for child porn, the odds are higher that it may be a police entrapment set up. This dynamic of pre-emption and even pre-crime describes a yet again a mindset that is seeping through all corridors of corporate, government and military forms of power at great expense to the public.  

 
The labelling of child porn and the moral panic it has produced, will serve as one of many templates to deception that is so common amongst those who appear to be “protecting” us. The definitions of child pornography set down by America and the UK are so broad and vague that it has caused enormous confusion as to what exactly constitutes an obscene image. It is true to say now that the fear and moral panic induced has reached the sad proportions that mothers and fathers, cannot take photos of their naked child without the fear of reprisals. Art, like innocence, has been debased by those who claim to champion its protection. By lumping sexual abuse and child porn into a category that includes artistic renditions of naked children through photography is to demean the very nature of the natural and sacred; it is to grossly tip the balance in favour of prurience and body-hatred bias; to make sharp distinctions between a free society as oppose to an absolutist one. As photographer Eolake Stobblehouse on this subject mentioned: “If images of beautiful nude children are as much pornographic as those of children being raped, then while the beautiful are criminalized the pornographic are made less criminal.” Is this the real protocol at work here? If all those seeking an earnest appraisal of the subject of child porn and to clearly distinguish between what constitutes a crime and what may be erotic art, or nude photography and are being persecuted for applying such objectivity then we need to be seriously concerned. When civil rights groups and law enforcement agencies become the sole mediators as to what they categorize and label as child porn, then it is a dark day indeed for freedom. 

 
There is a huge difference between child pornography that depicts the rape and abuse of a child and the celebration of childhood which may or may not include children (gasp) without clothes. There will also always be those who position themselves in the grey area that encourages extreme laws such as pre-teen sites 1 that are ostensibly a pictorial diary that neither includes nudity or anything remotely close to child porn. However, it could be said that these sites  pander to paedophiles and those with paedophilic tendencies. Yet knowing that this is unsavoury, it is not illegal or criminal. In a world that is teetering on totalitarianism in all domains, it is an important distinction. 

 
What we have now is yet another form of self-righteous dogma against imagery that does not conform to evangelical, absolutist principles. The criminalization of artistic/dramatic representation and objective intellectual examination and speculation – even thoughts, if they are written down or recorded – are now seen as grounds for prosecution with the sex offender register beckoning. This is dangerously close to the concept of George Orwell’s “thought-crime” from his novel: 1984 concerning life under an overtly totalitarian government. Orwell's descriptions was not merely about the spectre of state communism but the perceptions of the elite with which he worked. 

 
Once again, that is not to say that child pornography may not be on the rise. This was true enough during the raids from the UK Operation Cathedral where torture and degradation was visited on many children and infants. The devil is always in the details not least who benefits from such moral panics. 

 
Irish author and journalist Brian Rothery casts further doubt on the figures bandied about by some police and child advocates. A graph was created from a range of internet research sources which were then used to display the relationships between sites known to contain child porn and all sites on the Internet. The result were highly revealing:

“…5 million total sites, 3.5 million public sites and 8,700 CP sites. The 1.5 million difference between public and total is made up of private sites, mainly corporate where one requires a password (not CP sites requiring passwords). The difference in number between the CP and other sites is so great that on a normal graph page, the CP does not register. It is one fifth of one percent - 0.02 percent.

But now let us examine that figure more closely. First the 8,700 contains many duplications, as images are copied. Let us assume that 20 percent of them share images in differing mixes. This reduces the number of CP sites to 7,000. Many of the CP sites move. xyz.com hosted in Brazil one day can appear as abc.kg hosted in, say, Russia the next, and be counted as two within the analysis period. Say 10percent move, reducing the number to 6,300.

There are more sites with child nudity and child erotica, which may be judged by the analysts as CP, than there are real CP sites. A good guess would be most of them. Let's say 4,000, leaving 2,300. Now for simulated and artificially created images, such as Japanese Hentai, where no real children are photographed, and which many defenders of free expression say should not be criminalized, but, that argument aside, do not involve porn with real children. A conservative guess would be around 6,000, maybe more. This leaves between one or two and 300 CP sites. Let's take the upper figure. We do not know what jurisdiction in the world would not arrest the hosters and makers of these 300 sites but what we do know is that some of our brave censors have worked hard to find the few that have existed. If there are 300, they make up 0.0007 percent of the total number of web sites on the Internet.2 [bold mine]

What could be the other motives for capitalising on the promotion of fake child porn websites? Could there be blackmailing possibilities involved? 

 
Returning to the UK/US Landslide case under Operation Ore which spawned many other child pornography “crackdowns” the subscriber database and all of the other main Landslide FBI/prosecution files show an interesting precedent never revealed to the defence. Researchers at inquisition21.com have discovered that “..credit cards, however obtained, whether from attempts to access adult sites over Landslide, generated by a program or simply stolen, were ‘jumped’ to so-called ‘child porn’ sites.” The rogue webmasters in question “…used the transaction to charge (defraud) the owner and, because of the extreme names of the sites charged to, embarrass the owner into not complaining about the $30 or so robbed in each transaction.” They compromised the credit card owners by:

‘…incriminating their computers with illegal images. Whilst people believed they were signing up to legitimate adult sites, in reality they were signing up to illegal sites. Forensically, the user’s computer would appear totally incriminating - the signup and the images. This was almost a perfect crime, and this has happened in at least one high profile case.’ […] This meant that people entering the payment system at Landslide were switched from adult to child pornography sites. Sadly, sometimes people were arrested simply because of the site names, no matter that the site did not actually exist.3 [bold mine]

The researchers known as the Inquisiton 21 Group saw the programming codes on the rogue sites that allowed the victims to be jumped to illegal sites. They mention that “Both the UK and Irish police should have seen this.” They are consequently involved in pursuing a class action court case in order to have the police explains themselves as to why they chose to ignore such obvious evidence that would have prevented many innocent persons going to jail. 
 
What is more disturbing is the data base of credit card subscribers which was handed over to overseas police by US authorities, notably the FBI, they removed the names of prominent members of government and institutional officials leaving only minor local level politicians and media and celebrity names. These were never raided in the US. The authorities have stated no fraud was in existence which therefore leaves the possibility of those protected was done so for the purposes of compromise or blackmail. The very rogue webmaster scams mentioned fit a little too closely to the practice of entrapment. Could it be that it is merely US law enforcement agencies doing what they historically do best and creating crime for the purposes of blackmail and political leverage? According to the researchers at inquisition21 this is not in the realm of conspiracy, simply a of historical fact. As they mention: “It should not be [a surprise] when we already know that virtually all of the child pornography on the Internet today is published by the US police for entrapment purposes.”4

 
America is leading the way in cases of Child porn. The legitimacy of certain sting operations remain in question. Is child porn another label for which the “Old Boys Network” can justify more jobs while actually creating predators and encouraging them to commit certain crimes? This would serve to bury the real child pornography which does exist, though possibly in less quantities than we were led to believe:

In 1990 at a Southern California police seminar, the LAPD’s Toby Tyler proudly announced that law enforcement agencies were now the sole reproducers and distributors of child pornography. And author James Kincaid said in 2000: ‘Several speakers at an L.A. police seminar I attended a few years back laughingly admitted that the largest collection of child porn in the country is in the hands of cops, who edit and publish it in sting operations. There is at most, they say, a small cottage industry among civilians in which pictures (most of them vintage) are traded.’ And even the UK’s self-styled ‘Internet Abuse’ Guru, John Carr, said ‘I have only seen child pornography twice in my life and then it was at conferences and I was shown it by the police.’” […] There may well be a consensus on the principle of child porn, but there is little consensus on what constitutes child porn.

The Child exploitation industry has now fused with the police directed “NGOs.” On Monday 24 July 2006, the new UK Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, (CEOP) was launched. Director Jim Gamble believes the way forward is to create fake paedophile websites over which ‘undercover’ officers will pose as children on Internet chat rooms. This reflects more of the FBI’s already active in chat-room entrapment operations in both the Americas and Asia.  Creating paedophiles where there are none is as effective as searching for and blackmailing those that are, especially when they reside in the lower rungs of the Establishment. It is also a close cousin to the present Neo-Conservative penchant for pre-emptive attack. But this time the crimes are being created and encouraged. 
 
It is hard not to come to the conclusion that from the blanket restrictions on child porn will simply lead to a further encroachment of the police state where the US/UK Establishment creates a virtual CoIntelpro operation using the child exploitation industry as yet another tool for control.

Notes 

1 ‘Dead officer absolved in porn probe’ By David Leppard, Sunday, 2 October, 2005, 2 ‘Dismay as international paedophile probe fails’ by Marcello Mega, August 2003 The Scotsman
3 ‘Legal child porn’ under fire MSNBC By Mike Brunker March 28 2002—   “The photos of 12-year-old “Amber” cavorting in a swimsuit and various skimpy outfits wouldn’t have raised so much as an eyebrow if they had been posted on a family home page. But on lilamber.com — one of a growing number of “preteen model” sites operating in the legal gray area between innocent imagery and child pornography — they have drawn the attention of the Justice Department and prompted a congressman to declare war on the “reckless endangerment” of such kids by their parents and Web site operators.”

4 ‘The crime exceptum’ inquisition21.com.