The Politics of Entrapment Part VI

Under Plain Cover

In the UK, new rules exist that oblige doctors and social workers to give the police any information they have about teenagers’ sex lives. The London Child Protection Committee (LCPC) protocol allows child welfare staff an unjustifiable level of interference in the sex lives of teenagers, which could risk breaching the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and the right to privacy enshrined in article eight of the convention. Senior lawyer Stephen Groz commented on the new protocol believing that: “It is particularly hard to see what justification there can be for routine assessment - if that is what is intended - in the case of those in the 16-18 year age group, where the prevention of crime will normally afford no justification at all.”1

 
Mandatory sentencing where no clear definition of the crime is known is already steaming ahead. According to one expert, 12 and 13-year-old defendants “are being convicted of relatively minor sexual indiscretions in the crown court, and, if the law operates as it is supposed to, being sentenced to custody when it should be a supervision order.” 2
 
With over 2,225 child offenders serving life without parole (LWOP) sentences in U.S prisons for crimes committed before they were age 18,  it seems Europe is being set to emulate the decline of the US. 3 It is no surprise that America’s principles of fascism cloaked under the pretence of liberty are being welcomed by some governments of Europe. In a country with the largest prison population in the world and where corruption in the judiciary and police forces is a way of life, perhaps this is unsurprising.

 
David Blunkett MP (who resigned last year after yet another financial scandal) would call such concerns “airy-fairy” and those seeking a fair and just system as the enemy. Blunkett proceeded to remove the presumption of innocence from the Sexual Offences act of 2003, giving a straight and clear road for court cases to be prosecuted successfully without any evidence. This lay greater emphasis on the prosecution state where, as in the US, you are presumed guilty before being proven innocent. This US infection of the law paved the way for their fabrications in Operation Ore where an allegation alone was enough for a conviction.
That is not to say that all of the reforms have been dangerous. On the contrary, many are to be welcomed, yet those that are suspect tend to create difficulties that eclipse such progress.

Another stalwart defender of Blair’s Britain was the equally disturbing Charles Clarke MP the UK government’s Interior minister who was at pains to tell the European Union that in his view the: “The judges both in my country and in the European Court need to understand that the people of Europe ... will not for a long time accept that action cannot be taken against people who are offering a real threat to our way of life because of human rights considerations,…”4 This kind of para-moralism is reminiscent of the same kind of Neo-Con “they hate us for our freedoms” nonsense so often repeated as a blanket rebuttal for genuine concerns for civil liberties. Once a train is set in motion without an ounce of objectivity to regulate the speed, the train is prone to smash through any barrier of common sense that is erected in its path, especially when financial dividends are involved and actively encouraged. 
 
The National Criminal Intelligence Service said in its annual report in 2003 that “more than half of the child porn sites are hosted in the United States” and that “…the number of sites coming from Russia has doubled in the past year.” Evangelistic crusades are being encouraged, whipping up a great deal of emotion covering up little factual data. Child pornography figures in some quarters have been massively overblown or in some cases plucked out of thin air. According to reports from within the US last year a 300 percent rise in internet paedophilia may indicate both a new phenomena in terms of utilizing a new technology for predation but which also reinforces the mythology and lies designed to keep such dynamics firmly in place. 

 
There is a moral paranoia continuing in the States where truth is continually marginalised in favour of both a misplaced Puritanism sourced from the population at large as well as a more insidious process. Invention is the name of the game and if a new crisis is needed then child porn can be used as a “double-bind.” Reverse psychology becomes the method to distance the real culprits from such activities. As one journalist recently remarked:  “What an irony if the only readily available child porn on the Internet is being maintained by the police and the self-appointed monitors!” 5

 
On the evening of January 17 2005, Sky News in the UK reported on the false evidence used by the UK police in Operation Ore. The evidence of corruption was overwhelming. It remains to be seen if any action will be taken against the police. The sanctity of the police as protector and social confidante is about as far away from reality as it is possible to be. Some men and women in law enforcement know this very well yet few speak out. 

 
It is likely that much of the child pornography within societies today are produced and distributed underground through an informal but loose-knit networks of paedophiles operating in most European countries. Sporadic outbreaks of paedophilia rings and other forms of sexual abuse within neighbourhoods and families do and will occur. However, with the astonishing rise in child trafficking and clear indications of institutionalized paedophilia, child pornography as a multi-billion dollar industry may be, purposely exaggerated. Nevertheless, as a strand in the overall industry of exploitation where billions are indeed accrued, it remains a connected reality, the dividends logically set to increase. 

 
Michael Heimbach, head of the FBI’s Crimes Against Children Unit believes sexual deviants “have a real innate need to communicate with others…and sharing experiences, it’s a psychological support base, It makes them say, ‘I’m not so weird. There are a lot of other people out there that like the same thing I do’’” The current case Heimbach was describing involved “An underground ring of adults who created and trafficked in pornographic videos of naked children being beaten with paddles, hairbrushes and canes.” The “loose-knit” group called the “Spanking Club” were said to have brutally beaten children as young as 4 years old. The club was seen as being influenced and encouraged by the availability of porn and internet chat-rooms where an exchange of fantasies and photos took place. 6

 
The more disturbing link with organised pornography, trafficking and/or child abuse which leads to the front door of the Establishment, remains inscrutable and unsurprisingly - cast iron. We see innocent men and women placed in prison or caused to take their own lives. The unfortunate reality is that high level paedophiles remain above the law. It is also likely that most of the real child porn that does exist is so far underground that it is alongside the impassable domain of the snuff movie where information is almost impossible to come by. 
 
The discovery of crimes that may have been continuing undetected for decades are now frequently being seen via the relative “safety” of a closed system known as Internet Relay Chat - IRC - which requires participants to log in using passwords. And many of the paedophiles in question are no amateurs. They can be extremely competent with encryption usage and various other technical ways to utilize avoiding entrapment.

The vast majority of stings are carried out by the enormous stores of child nudity and erotica that under the laws of the US and increasingly Europe are deemed obscene. This material may also serve as a means to entrap people for private extortion. It is always the case that witch hunts generally begin from a reaction by those in power to protect their own ivory towers as was the case with the Waterhouse and Cullen enquiries. One can all too easily reel in righteous and understandable shock at the notion of predators preying on children with a glut of horrific downloadable photos threatening to submerge the search engines. But is this the reality? Or has the reflex of paedophilia and child pornography come to represent anything but a fight against injustice? And what of the recent ruling from US Pathocrats that effectively all porn is child porn? 7

 
The Child Protection and Obscenity Enforcement Act also known as “2257” now requires adult porn or erotica companies to keep detailed records proving that all the models they use are over the age of 18. These records will also contain the real names of performers, and their addresses too which have to be published somewhere online. It does not take a huge leap of logic to realize that this could leave some persons - such as women operating webcam shows from their homes - open to stalking and harassment. Moreover, all sites coming under the new law are required to have their address clearly accessible to all in order to indicate their “place of business.” To avoid fines and jail terms persons must keep “proper records” under the new version of 2257 where all files that contain every single pornographic or erotic image and film published, must be cross-indexed with age-verification papers for every single performer that features in the stills or movies. This is a huge undertaking meaning massive overhauls for businesses hard drives, the records of which must be kept for seven years. The porn business is up in arms over the law claiming that it curtails significant freedoms. As the same report states: “…they have vast numbers of addresses to punch into their super computer for listing undesirables…. the Patriot Act was used to prosecute people for offences that were not terrorist offences shortly after it became law.”8, 9

 
Of course, we needn’t shed tears over porn brokers rights being breached. But it doesn’t stop there. We can easily forget how sneaky these new acts and waiting executive laws really are and how they primed and ready to dispense with all constitutional rights. As former director of UK civil rights organization and now a much needed voice as Deputy Chair of the new Independent Police Complaints Commission, John Wadham mentioned recently: “I recall an occasion attempting to argue that even alleged sex offenders have human rights, when confronted by the devastated mother of a child murdered by a sex offender.” 10  Not an easy prospect, which is why child porn and public pornography in general could be another vehicle used to initiate a comprehensive lock-down on freedoms.

 
 But the genuine Russian-led examples of their burgeoning networks are a reality as are some of the isolated European instances of exploitation including the recent arrest of five suspects in the Spanish cities of Madrid, Murcia, Lerida and Valencia. One man was charged with abducting, raping and abusing babies as young as 11 months while the others were charged with filming and distributing images of the abuse on the Internet. 11 Or the British man and father jailed for raping a baby with a sentence that was clearly far too lenient. 12 Both cases were proven examples that child molestation is a reality. This is the nature of the perfect double bind. Yet there are further “politically correct” rulings that funnel more chaos into an already charged domain.

 
Take the 2004 ruling in the Italian high court that paedophiles can take pornographic photos of children as long as they are not sold for profit. In other words, child porn you can share and perpetrate acts of child porn as long as you do not charge for viewing the material - it is legal. The report goes on to say “…that the Court of Cassation in Rome upheld the acquittal by a court in Turin of Antonio B., 45, over photographs that he took when he forced a youth of 13 to carry out sexual acts.”13 There are small clues in the above that included “forced” “sexual acts” and “profit.” One wonders what thoughts processes are running through those whose directives one would hope, are first and foremost protect the interests of children. 

 
Similarly, Canada’s BC provincial court also came to the conclusion that possession of child porn represented a clear self-imposed boundary that would not be transgressed by those who chose to view such pornography. A court in Oregon believed a law that prohibited adults from giving minors sexually explicit materials violated the Oregon Constitution’s free speech protections. 

 
There is, as we shall see, a huge difference between an individual who has murdered a child with evidence that is clear and present and an individual who has been surfing for adult porn. This is the reality surrounding much of the prosecutions focused around child pornography. But in such an emotive arena, all manner of forces that are vying for control have very little to do with liberty, least of all for the rights of the child. In effect, child pornography - while certainly encompassing very real predatory beings intent on using the internet to search for prey - is now a term that is used by law enforcement agencies to cover a multitude of sins extending to arts and basic pornography – regardless of its morality.

 
After this brief snapshot of child pornography rings mostly operated via the internet what we are unfortunately seeing here is the lower tier end of a problem and little action taken against those whose who partake in such crimes the reason being they are part of the judiciary, politics, police and even welfare services. Psychopaths, paedophiles and child molesters are drawn into these professions and the higher the person’s status is, the more he is likely to be protected. Let us keep in mind that in 2004 and 2005, three young children were killed by sex offenders. Congress immediately reacted and passed the most unconstitutional Child Abuse laws in the history of the USA. Yet while the figures for the prevalence for sexual abuse remains contentious and unresolved, you can bet that the horrendous figures for physical abuse, drug abuse, gang related crime and drunk-driving deaths of children on the roads barely gets a mention. This isn’t “sexy” or salacious though, is it? This doesn’t get the voyeuristic and self-righteous juices flowing. Meanwhile, the financial, business and political “Elite” can play the “knight in shining armour” while indulging in the very practices they apparently eschew. 

 
Inflating or even taking advantage of a rise in child pornography online could lead to a comprehensive ban on extreme examples of porn and finally pornography itself. For the masses that is. The tool of child pornography will serve as a prelude to more extreme forms of “crimes against the state.” We may look for a gradual fusion between dissidents, al-Qaeda and the “War on Terror” so that internet surveillance can be comprehensively tightened. The dawn raids of Landslide/Ore and other trawling and entrapment operations that ruined so many lives may well be the first stage in quelling any kind of dissidence of the near future. Criticism of the US government and Homeland Security is perceived as Bush’s line: “if you’re not with us you’re with the terrorists.” In many American minds the sex offender and terrorist is more or less one and the same as in this Georgian State legislator’s opinion: “Sex offenders are the most reviled people in society… They're one step above terrorists; there's no political downside to cracking down on these folks.” It is then that we realise the true extent of Neo-fascism and the depth of ponerization that is now occurring. In Britain, the “surveillance society” is well and truly here. 

 
One of the idea’s floated by the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre When children are so bombarded by images and thoughts that are effectively splitting their minds in two, what better way to turn them into “spy kids” for the emerging Pathocracy in Europe and the US? This is the crux of the matter: to make people so dependent and reliant on the police states and their largely phantom fears so that children feel compelled to turn their own parent’s in. “There are 9.5 million school-kids in the UK. Imagine if we could get them all to save the Ceop centre’s website to their favourites box so that whenever they are online they can fill in a form telling us who they are talking to, what (those people) are saying and why they think it is a threat.” 13

 
The UK is the most spied-on country in the world according to a recent official report. We are being scrutinized and data-mined with minute details of our lives recorded without ever being aware of it. A typical Briton will be caught on camera more than 300 times a day. The report highlighted concern over records kept of every internet site we visit and the long-term retention of logs detailing those visits to the growing use of automatic number plate recognition to track people’s journeys. A typical Briton will be caught on camera over  300 times a day. One example sited in the study showed how easily the climate of paedophilia panic was eroding normal life. A schoolgirl’s playground banter:

“…resulted in her father being refused work because he had been classed as a suspected paedophile. ‘The little girl was overheard saying, ‘My dad bonked me last night’. A dinner lady heard this and reported it to the school authorities,’… Social services discovered that the girl was referring to her father tapping her playfully on the head with an inflatable hammer. The file was closed, but five years later the father discovered he was still a suspected sex offender.”14

A suspected sex offender, subversive, dissident, terrorist – there are no limits to the labels ready to be given to the public to protect us from all manner of bogeymen. After all, this is all for our own protection right? The near future will give us the answer.

Notes


1 'Google erases Operation Ore campaign site’ by Lucy Sheriff, The Register, September 21, 2006.
2 Teen sex monitoring 'may breach human rights' David Batty, The Guardian, Wednesday December 14, 2005
3 Dr David Thomas Retired Cambridge University don, sentencing expert and author of leading textbook on sentencing. Quoted in ‘Judges speak out against erosion of independence by government’ The Guardian, Tuesday April 26, 2005.
4 ‘United States: Thousands of Children Sentenced to Life without Parole’ National Study by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch Finds Majority Face Life for First Offense ,New York, October 12, 2005 Human Rights Watch, hrw.org/

5 ‘EU must accept some erosion of civil rights-Britain,’ By Aine Gallagher, Reuters, September 7 2005.
6 Ibid.

7 ‘Child Pornography Case Highlights Use of Internet in Crime’ By Michelle Mittelstadt The Dallas Morning News, March 11, 2002.
8 ‘On File’ By Annalee Newitz,  AlterNet, June 22, 2005.
9  The Patriot Act: HR 3162 RDS 107th Congress, 1st Session H. R. 3162 October 24, 2001, revised and updated to PATRIOT Act II in 2003. “Diminishes personal privacy by removing checks on government power, diminishes public accountability by increasing government secrecy; diminishes corporate accountability under the pretext of fighting terrorism; Undermines fundamental constitutional rights of Americans under overbroad definitions of ‘terrorism’ and ‘terrorist organization’ or under a terrorism pretext; Unfairly targets immigrants under the pretext of fighting terrorism. – b y Timothy H. Edgar, Legislative Counsel February 14, 2003 Section-by-Section Analysis of Justice Department draft ‘Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003,’ also known as "Patriot Act II" American Civil Liberties Union.
10 Ibid.

11 ‘I am ashamed to be leaving Liberty whilst people are interned without trial’ John Wadham LIBERTY editorial 2005 liberty.com.
12 ‘Spanish police break up pedophile ring suspected of abusing babies’ Reuters, May 26 2005
13  Baby rape sentence 'unduly lenient' BBC News, Wednesday, 3 September, 2003.
14 ‘Italy and Oregon Courts Rule for Paedophilia’ June 2 2004 lifesite.net

The Politics of Entrapment Part V

“The first sign of corruption in a society that is still alive is that the end justifies the means.”- Georges Bernanos

“Perverted Justice” and “Porn Bombing”

The internet has already spawned its own version of reflexive and ill-informed initiatives which serve to increase the market for psychopaths’ machinations. The distortion of facts and the suppression of real issues and thus possible solutions are kept out of reach. Confusion and cognitive dissonance must continue to shower all forms of potential progress related to a clear understanding of these problems. 

 
Perverted Justice.com is but one example of those that are willing to seek retributive justice and project their own fears into the emotional maelstrom. This particular website has formed a “gateway” for recruiting “volunteer contributors who pose as underage children in chat rooms. Posing from a variety of ages (standard ages are 10-15), these contributors simply go into chat rooms with fake online screen names and wait for predators to instigate conversation with them.” 

 
Xavier Von Erck, the website owner, claims to target and expose “wannabe pedos” from online chats which have been recorded after the fact and where many have been arrested, convicted and placed on the California sex register. You are also able to send the target an email (assuming he still has an account which is unlikely) and “…If no police agency expresses interest in prosecuting those adults, we post them publicly on our website. […] Regardless of past interaction with police, we make an effort to present each case to police so that there is an opportunity to prosecute before the log is posted on this site.” 

 
Once the wannabe predator has been sufficiently stimulated and worked up into a frenzy of deviancy, phone numbers are taken and addresses given, ready for the police show down. The chat room dialogue is then posted on the website with a photo for all to see. At the bottom of every posting we see:

Slimyness Scale: Your opinions on this post

On a 1-5 scale. 1. Not slimy at all  2. Somewhat Slimy 3. Just Plain Slimy  4. Really Slimy 5. Really slimy  6. Oozing, dripping with slimyness!

Though this kind of puerile behaviour is by no means the worst that can be seen on the site, it gives an indication of the intent of the website owner and the people employed to run it. Some  believe that responses such as these, far from helping to address society’s problem of paedophilia and child rape crime, actually helps to create it. Though the intent may be to inform and defend children, the route taken to convictions are dangerously close to vigilantism dispensing with the “rule of law” however inadequate this may seem. Once “adult citizens” follow the already extremely suspect version of entrapment then the concept of law and justice becomes less than meaningless where a judge and jury are simultaneously those acting as creators and instigators of crimes.

 
Von Erck provides an extensive FAQ section where all seems above order and meticulously thought out. There are a few problems with this set up however. It appears “Xavier Von Erck” or real name: Phillip Eide, a 26 year old computer gamer of Portland, Oregon, the owner and “director of operations” set up Perverted-Justice over 4 years ago with a strict “Rule of No First Contact” which was observed for the first 2 years. An immediate ban from the site would follow if any member contacted the police or news outlet regarding their ensnarement. 

 
Late last year it seems the rule was “relaxed” largely due to pressure from ex-members who formed an alternative site (corrupted-justice.com) to alert the public that all was not rosy in the land of alleged paedophile busting. Since the PJ’s inception they have claimed to have “busted” over 600 men with no police involvement. Corrupted Justice (CJ) asked: “How many of those 600 were actual predators who were [allowed to] walk free because the vigilantes didn’t involve police? How many of those people were actually innocent and mistakenly ruined as a result of being targeted by untrained, anonymous Internet cop-wannabes?” The answers are less than encouraging. Of the 15 plus “group media busts” in which they involve the television media in their stings is minimal at best, the end result being that sexual predators walked away suitably embarrassed and angry and no doubt, still at large. 

 
According to CJ: “Out of 1106 men they have ‘busted’, only 42 convictions have resulted.” What is even more worrisome is that very few of the alleged “busts” have much to do with child solicitation:

The tiny percentage of their "busts" which have resulted in an arrest were virtually all a result of media reports, phone calls to police from neighbors, etc. after the fact. - The result - Mostly plea-bargains to minor charges because of a lack of usable evidence.

 
Since the taping for February 3rd's Dateline program, Perverted-Justice has resumed "busting" people with absolutely no law enforcement involvement, preferring instead to let their anonymous members dish out their own form of "justice". In a number of recent cases since the Dateline taping, they have mistakenly begun anonymously threatening completely innocent, non-involved people by telephone and e-mail…1

This is akin to rattling a hornet’s nest and then running for cover. CJ asked in their editorial last year: “…what ever happened to the One Thousand and Sixty Four potential predators they busted but for which they didn't contact the police? They are living in your community instead of sitting in jail where many of them may belong…” Other substantiated claims against Perverted Justice include:

* The employment of minors in explicit online sex chats.

* Anonymous harassment and terrorization campaigns against those targeted.
* Identity theft against critics of Perverted Justice.
* Serious threats, defamation against journalists, attorneys and other child-protection 

* organizations who have voiced concerns regarding the group's vigilante tactics.
* Classic psychopath tactics of denigrating critics by paramoralisms  and paralogistics 2
* No evidence of any actual recognized or legitimate law enforcement training for  Perverted-Justice members has been made public other than the “extensive training” claimed by present members.

Die-hard Israel supporter and media mogul Rupert Murdoch and his tabloid news corporation MSNBC screens the “Dateline” show “To Catch a Predator” paid Perverted Justice over $100,000 to participate in the program. This is understandable, as the level of voyeurism is matched by the other. However a “reputable” news corporation does not pay for stories, or compensate sources, yet this is exactly what they did while watching the ratings climb and pandering to the same old tired propaganda that enraptured over 8 million viewers. It is tabloid T.V. at its worst it yet remains a sure-fire winner for those seeking short-term profits from long-term misery.

 
In combination with PJ’s activities such exploitative programming merely make predators far more aware of legitimate police stings (a term to be used loosely) and to make the field of child molestation and paedophilia reduced down to nothing more than  pop-corn entertainment. All this feeds into the overall impression that PJ is something other than an altruistic community protection programme, rather, it is part of a further operation to muddy the issues involved in sexual exploitation. Think “War on Terror” and we have the same programme – different channel. 

 
  In August 2004, KenoshaOnline, a news portal for Kenosha and Wisconsin was forced to shut down its anonymous forum due to repeated spamming from a Defence Department source with “links to incest, bestiality, gay sex and other inappropriate media.” 3 KenoshaOnline’s John Norquist contacted the Pentagon regarding the “porn bombs” but the Department of Defence refused to comment. The site’s traffic saw a significant fall once the forum was disconnected. 

 
From this example alone we can see that the pornography business can be used as a means of control for a variety of purposes unbeknownst to the public.  Even Google has had to defend itself since August 2004 from the likes of US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales who has been pressing the search engine giant to release data about people’s searching habits on the internet. 4 The Justice Department was keen to view specific information, including the types of queries submitted by users and the websites in its index. Not one to be accused of worrying too much about the privacy of its users, even Google believes the criteria is too broad and “threatens trade secrets.” It fell to privacy groups to warn that user identities could be indirectly revealed, especially with the government’s new drive to collect data for “fighting crime and terrorism.” Their justification of course, was the enforcement of pornography laws with special attention to the 1998 Child Protection Act, which was blocked by the Supreme Court pertaining to legal challenges regarding how it was enforced. Gonzales has now sought a court order to force the company to part with the records. This is strangely hypocritical as the search engine is already in bed with the CIA.5

 
 The company’s habit of censoring websites has come under particular scrutiny of late. The internet-based Inquisition 21 group seeking to bring a class action law suit against UK police for the Landslide/Operation Ore scandal had their website inquisition21.com delisted by Google. They believe due to the nature of the evidence they are sharing concerning child porn police corruption. After refusing to comment on the action Google issued a general statement yet failed to confirm that the Inquisition21 website had breached any of the guidelines. The censorship came just as the site was about to make potentially damaging disclosures about the handling of the Operation Ore investigations. 6

 
While a reform of sex laws are periodically needed for improvement on a variety of bills and clauses, the introduction of measures, that in effect, hand over responsibility to government bit by bit, decreases our own “response-ability,” often without the relevant information as to why such laws are considered so essential for our children’s protection and safety. In reality, freedom and responsibility are deeply connected and if one is curtailed the other will inevitably follow suit. The end result is Governments accruing more control while its citizens scratch their heads and wonder how on earth it could have happened. 

Notes

1 See www.corruptedjustice.com for further details.

2 Paralogism: n. illogical or fallacious deduction. paralogical, paralogistic, a. paralogize, v.i. be illogical; draw unwarranted conclusions. paralogist, n. conversive thinking: subconscious selection and substitution of data leading to chronic avoidance of the crux of the matter. For example, If you are "anti-pedophile" as Von Erck professes to be, then it is standard procedure for such people to use the "pro-pedophile" reference “in the hopes that those seeking "unfiltered" information about the website activities will be dissuaded from going further. This stigmatization and avoidance of the core issues are the methods by which Counter Intelligence Programs (CoIntelpro) do their work in the areas of 9/11 Truth Movement, The Human Potential or New Age Movement and in the area of law courts and sexual exploitation generally. This is not to say that Von Erck is cointelpro, but it certainly smells like it.

3 See also: ‘Is Pentagon flooding Kenosha site with porn?’ By Rachel Campbell, The Journal Times , Racine WI, August 26 2004.

4 ‘Google defies US over search data’ BBC News, Friday, 20 January 2006.

5 Former CIA agent and computer expert Robert David Steele, who has close connections with top Google directors, suggested that Google co-operated with the CIA. Steele is was the second-ranking civilian (GS-14) in U.S. Marine Corps Intelligence from 1988-1992 and a former clandestine services case officer for the CIA. His latest accusations against Google have raised the possibility that other accusations are now credible and that Google is truly censoring in places far from China and much nearer home. For example, Google has been caught censoring recent programmes and critiques critical of the Iraq war. On the October 2006 Alex Jones radio programme, Steele said, “I think that Google has made a very important strategic mistake in dealing with the secret elements of the U.S. government - that is a huge mistake and I’m hoping they'll work their way out of it and basically cut that relationship off. Google was a little hypocritical when they were refusing to honor a Department of Justice request for information because they were heavily in bed with the Central Intelligence Agency, the office of research and development.”

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