The Politics of Entrapment Part II

 

0ne of the greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the evils in this world are to be cured by legislation. - Thomas Brackett Reed

Landslide

Armed with a search warrant and an $800,000 grant, the Landslide Inc. a credit clearance intermediary based in Fort Worth, Texas was raided by the FBI, USPIS officers, US customs, Microsoft, Dallas Police, and other contractors. It was closed in April 1999. Operation Avalanche was the result which oversaw investigations and arrests in the US of only 100 individuals whose credit card details were found on the Landslide database. International operations such as Snowball, Amethyst, Auxin followed and the Grand Daddy of them all: Operation Ore in the UK. As a result of the Landslide/Avalanche operations a list of over 7,000 credit card holders and their transactions were culled from the Landslide database and given to the UK police.

The Landslide investigations were initially focused around a website that had graphic thumbnails and banners advertising child pornography. Proprietor Thomas Reedy’s home was raided in September and the office in December of the same year. Assets and bank accounts for frozen while the servers which had been left to run during this time yielded further credit card details from subscribers which then produced a huge database of suspects. Although Reedy and his wife were offered a 20 year sentence in return for cooperation in trapping webmasters he chose to mount a defence, believing he was not responsible for the content on third party websites. This led to his indictment in May of 2000 and a life sentence for his troubles in August 2001. His conviction included 89 counts of conspiracy, possession and distribution of illegal images of minors while his wife Janice Reedy received 14 years due to her relatively minor role in the affair. 

 
The severity of Thomas Reedy’s sentence has since been questioned by many more than his attorney: “the Reedys are victims ... to lose 10 years of a person’s life in prison is a helluva lot for a crime that doesn't involve death...” stemming from the fact that Reedy was not a webmaster nor had they created the sexual images. It was also true that the credit card verification for sites did not involve child pornography further suggesting their sentence was unduly severe. Yet according to Robert Adams, a US Postal Service inspector, who began investigating the couple in May the couple had “helped three foreign webmasters provide ‘hundreds of thousands of images’ as well as movies depicting children in violent sex acts…”1 which extended to children of only four years of age. Adams made no bones about the fact after his investigations this was, in his opinion “a global operation” 2 involving webmasters from Indonesia to Russia, where he saw the Reedy’s business as actively providing the means for webmasters to share files and download photos.

 
The joint US/UK entrapment scheme called “Operation Avalanche” followed with a breathless media fanfare and alleged help from the FBI to streamline the subsequent arrests that were made in August 2001 just as Reedy began his life sentence. From 35,000 US Landslide subscribers email invitations were sent to all with the offer to purchase child pornography by post. “Members of the Internet Crimes against Children (ICAC) Task Forces and US Postal Inspectors have conducted 144 searches in 37 states with 100 arrests to date for trafficking child pornography through the mail and via the Internet…”3

 
The huge scale of Operation Ore was primarily due to a list of 7,200 names supplied to British police forces by the FBI, and ICAC, Task Forces. The inference given to the media was that this was a clear cut case of paedophilia in society where rings were being rounded up and highly professional under cover operations were in action intended to spring the networks of paedophilia in our midst. 

 
According to the respected investigative journalist and researcher of Operation Ore cases Duncan Campbell, the evidence was “exaggerated” and “used unacceptably.” Actually, this is being a little kind. American police testimony was wholly discredited and forensic methods deemed questionable at best. Critical evidence provided by US investigators which initially formed the foundation of Ore itself, were proven to be false. Ministers were not informed of this salient fact and indeed it was buried while convictions continued and while costs sky-rocketed. Interpol received sworn statements submitted to UK courts in 2002 that Dallas detective Steven Nelson and US postal inspector Michael Mead had explained that all those who visited Landslide were always presented with a front page screen button which offered a “click Here (for) Child Porn” and thus all those who accessed Landslide and paid with their credit card were assumed to be paedophiles:

British police and computer investigators had finally examined American files, they found that the “child porn” button was not on the front page of Landslide at all, but was an advertisement for another site appearing elsewhere: thus the crucial “child porn” button was a myth.   Landslide certainly gave access to thousands of adult sex sites. But accessing such material, which is now freely broadcast and sold in high street grocers’, is not a crime. The real front page of Landslide was an innocuous image of a mountain, carrying no links to child porn. There was “no way” a visitor to Landslide could link from there to child porn sites, according to Sam Type, a British forensic computer consultant who was asked by the National Crime Squad (NCS) to rebuild the Landslide website. She dismissed the idea that Landslide had created a service devoted to child porn. She described it as different merely in that it was a “pay-per-view” service. 4

Jim Bates, a computer expert with forensic knowledge served as a witness for the prosecution and the defence in more than 100 child porn cases stated: “I am convinced that a massive fraud has been perpetrated at Landslide and an unknown number of subscriptions are fake...”5 US investigators believed that those who accessed Landslide - by the mere act of paying - were paedophiles. Worse still, from the thousands of pay-to-view access channels provided by Landslide’s two services, US investigators had copied the contents of 12 sites out of a possible 400 accessible through one of the Landslide services called Keyz. Although these sites did contain child pornography and around 25 percent or more, about 180 Keyz sites were either standard pornography or unknown. With the Landslide closure over three years before, evidence of incriminating images in many cases were absent, only address and card details remained:

Here, the American evidence that having paid to get into Landslide meant having paid to access child porn has become crucial. Many of the accused argue that their card details could have been stolen and used without their knowledge, or admit that they used Landslide, but for adult material.

The NCS detective who found the real, innocuous Landslide front page in the American police files acted quickly to make it available to police forces and prosecutors. But nobody seems to have paid attention to the contradiction this created in the Operation Ore evidence. Nor did they apparently notice that there were now two, utterly different “Landslide front pages” presented in Operation Ore prosecutions — one totally incriminating, the other (and accurate) page quite innocuous.6

In Duncan Campbell’s Sunday Times article in June of 2005, it was evident that the sworn statements provided in British courts by two American detectives who initiated Operation Ore were now plainly false. Steve Nelson and US postal inspector Michael Mead, had claimed that everyone who went to Landslide accessed the page through a front-page screen button saying “Click Here: Child Porn”. However, it is now clear that rather than being on the front page of the website it was on an advertisement for a different site several levels into the Landslide website. 

 
There were also many police in the UK who expressed disquiet at the way Operation Ore was conducted. Some became so disillusioned that they resigned from their jobs. One of them was Merseyside police officer Peter Johnston, who described his lack of faith in a letter to The Sunday Times: “I began to doubt the validity of the evidence surrounding the circumstances of the initial investigation in America…I found it difficult to rationalise how offenders had been identified solely on a credit card number.”7 All of which means that it is very likely that many cases will be overturned or sent to the Court of Appeal. However, this comes too late for the 33 men who committed suicide and the lives of individuals and their families shattered. Once again, we must question whether this was through social shame attached the stigma of being on the sex offenders register or, were there “loose ends” needing to be severed?

 
One of many victims who had been under the Ore investigation since December 2004 was that of Commodore David White, 50, commander of British forces in Gibraltar. Despite a lack of evidence against him, he was instructed to give up his position in January of 2005 after news of the investigations began to spread. Twenty-four hours later he was found dead at the bottom of his pool after taking a dose of sleeping tablets washed down with whisky. There was said to be insufficient evidence as to whether the Commodore’s death was accidental or suicide, though the latter appears more than probable. A statement from his brother, showed that his mental state had collapsed after his dismissal and that he was in a “catatonic state of shock.” 8 The inquest into the circumstances surrounding his death have since confirmed that investigations: “…yielded no evidence that he downloaded child pornography, and a letter was written by ministry of defence police to naval command on January 5 this year indicating that there were ‘no substantive criminal offences’ to warrant pressing charges.” 9

 
The Scottish arm of the Operation was completed in August 2003 after investigating 350 people north of the Border, about 200 of who were in Strathclyde and 70 in Lothian and Borders. After millions of pounds of expenditure no arrests were made due to a failure “to gather the necessary evidence” though “grave doubts” about suspects remained.9 Despite the disastrously flawed evidence from the US, it was the UK contingent of police, lawyers and frothing media who transformed the possibility of a genuine investigation of child pornography into a verifiable witch-hunt by using emotive catch lines and the reliance of sensation in favour of facts.

 
 The very nature of paedophile images already predisposes the media and juries to convict based on the instinct to make it disappear. Therefore, most defence solicitors suggested pleading guilty if any images were found on computers regardless of whether they were guilty or not. Reconciling this with the persistent evidence of high level paedophilia and other deviant activities is not easy. What are we to make of this growing trend where sting operations and the preparations leading up to such potential prosecutions inexorably becomes the crime itself? In the US it is an advanced state of criminal “pre-emption”:

“…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.”

  

Notes

1 ‘Couple in child porn trial planned to flee to Mexico, witness testifies Defense counters that pair has No criminal history, passports’ – dallasmorningnews.com/ By Debra Dennis Fort Worth Bureau of The Dallas Morning News,  April 19, 2000.
2 Ibid.
3 ‘Attorney General Ashcroft Announces the Successful Conclusion of Operation Avalanche’ Press Release, US Depart. Of Justice August 8 2001, www.usdoj.gov.
4 ‘A flaw in the child porn witch-hunt’ By Duncan Campbell, The Sunday Times, June 26, 2005
5 ‘Operation Ore Exposed’ by Jim Bates,  computerinvestigations.com  

6 ‘A flaw in the child porn witch-hunt’ By Duncan Campbell, The Sunday Times, June 26, 2005.
7  Child porn suspects set to be cleared in evidence ‘shambles’ by David Leppard The Sunday Times July 03, 2005.
8 ‘'Military chief killed himself over child porn allegations’ by Caroline Gammell, The Scotsman Fri 30 Sep 2005.
9 ‘Dead officer absolved in porn probe’ By David Leppard, Sunday, 2 October, 2005,
10 ‘Dismay as international paedophile probe fails’ by Marcello Mega, August 2003 The Scotsman