Child-porn bust a drop in bucket

In this happy era of dropping crime rates, there’s one category of offences that is the gift that keeps on giving — child pornography.

Despite the Ontario Provincial Police Thursday announcing the fruits of its latest major investigation — 249 charges against 60 people from the province’s big cities and prosperous suburbs, small towns and mere dots on the map — the police are just scratching the surface, and no one knows it better than they do.

The 60 were those prioritized from among 7,000 individual Internet Protocol (IP) addresses in the province that were deemed as likely download candidates for suspected child pornography — that’s 7,000 just in the last 180 days.

As OPP Det. Staff-Sgt. Frank Goldschmidt, the provincial co-ordinator for Ontario’s strategy against online child exploitation, put it, “6,940 to go.”

Most unbearably, 14 Ontario children were, in the language of the police, “identified”; it means 14 real kids were removed from their abusers, in most cases family members or trusted family friends.

Add them to the other 534 Ontario children who have been rescued since the unit’s inception in 2006.

The other category of child victim is the youngster who is befriended by someone online, develops what to a child feels like a long-standing relationship, and then is asked to “lift their shirt or show themselves” somehow to their trusted friend, and before the child realizes what’s happened, she’s down the rabbit hole of blackmail and much worse.

The list of those arrested demonstrates another truth about this kind of crime.

Though many sorts of offences are routinely described as cutting across all demographic strata, the truth is often rather more unsettling — for instance, most old-school sex offenders are white men, most homicide victims in Toronto are young black men and most were killed by other young black men, and across Canada, aboriginal girls and women are disproportionately represented among the missing and murdered.

But child porn really is an equal-opportunity offence in that those who upload or download it are young and old, rich and poor, ordinary and privileged.

The youngest arrested in this operation are so young they can’t be identified, their names protected by the Youth Criminal Justice Act. The oldest is a 63-year-old from Chatham, Ont. The 20- and 30-somethings are nicely represented, as are those in their 40s and 50s.

Their only common denominator is gender — the vast majority are men.

Only two females are facing charges, one, who is unidentified to protect that particular ongoing investigation, with eight counts, including sexual interference with a person under 16, invitation to sexual touching and sexual assault.

“Technology, the Internet, has provided the perfect tool for these like-minded predators to find each other and also to find children,” Det. Staff-Sgt. Goldschmidt said in an email interview. “Then they have the opportunity to help each other polish their predatory skills.

“There are just so many of these guys out there. … I can’t see the problem getting any better any time soon,” he said.

Det. Staff-Sgt. Goldschmidt says there’s another troubling trend within this growth crime — police are saving more child victims who are also being abused in the oldschool way by “typical handson offenders.”

Not mentioned at the OPP press conference are two other recent developments that will only serve to make the job of stopping online predators more difficult for the police.

The first is a June 13 Supreme Court of Canada decision in a child-porn case called R v. Spencer, which basically creates a new sort of privacy right — online anonymity — and deems protected the sort of tombstone information police once were able to get by merely requesting Internet Service Providers to hand over subscriber names and addresses.

Now, Canadian police must get a search warrant to obtain phone data approved by a judge; later the same month, the U.S. Supreme Court made a similar ruling.

But those decisions were effectively rendered moot by developments announced last week by Apple and Google.

Largely lost in the hullabaloo about the release of Apple’s new operating system — iOS8 — was the company’s boast on its website that with the new system, Apple can’t bypass a user’s passcode and therefore “it’s not technically feasible for us to respond to government warrants for the extraction of this data…”

With its older systems, Apple could unlock some content on devices for police bearing warrants, but not anymore.

The next day, Google made a similar announcement about its new Android operating system, due for release next month.

As Washington Post writer Craig Timberg put it, the development amounts “to an engineering solution to a legal quandary.”

Rather than comply with the now-necessary warrants, in other words, and risk criticism that they’re too eager to play handmaiden to the state and police, the companies will be able to say, in effect, “Golly, we’d so like to help, but we can’t get at the data ourselves.”

It all has staggering implications, not just for wannabe child pornographers: I can barely remember a criminal trial in the past decade that didn’t count among its most significant evidence reams of text messages, emails, photographs or online postings, much of it retrieved from smartphones.