Websites fuel ‘alarming’ increase in child porn
WASHINGTON— Often, as the homemade videos begin streaming across the computer screen, unwitting children appear holding homemade placards bearing the pseudonyms of the macabre films’ makers.
The makeshift message boards represent claims of credit for the ghastly images that follow: Children, some pleading for help, being sexually abused in torturous ways by parents, relatives or others. Among the worst: Infants used as toys for the videographers’ and viewers’ sexual gratification.
The cache of images are among the most vile, yet valued, commodities on what is known as the “dark Web.” It is an everexpanding part of the Internet where Drew Oosterbaan, chief of the Justice Department’s unit in- vestigating crimes against children, says purveyors of the material have found social status based on their continued and escalating activities.
Last year, more suspects were arrested for child exploitation crimes — 7,386 — than at any time in the past five years, according to Justice Department records gathered from 61 Internet Crimes Against Children task forces across the nation.
That number, however, is dwarfed by an estimated 50,000 people in the U.S. who are believed to be “consistently trading illegal images” involving children at any time, said Brad Russ, who oversees federally funded training programs for hundreds of investigators assigned to the national task forces. The enormous number of participants, Russ said, is based on the downloads of known prohibited videos and photographs that can be tracked to individual computers.
The number of known images has ballooned since 2002, the year of the creation of the Child Victim Identification Program, which serves as a national repository for information on young victims, said John Shehan, executive director of the Exploited Children Divi- sion at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
More than 100 million images and videos of suspected child abuse have been referred to the program housed within the center to assist in criminal investigations and for the purpose of locating child victims, Shehan said.
“It is alarming,” Russ said of the numbers, adding that suspects increasingly try to shield their activities from law enforcement.
They cloister themselves behind encrypted IP addresses and password-protected sites where they have found “validation, acceptance and encouragement” to find new victims, Oosterbaan said.
When criminal charges were announced against 11 men last November in Indianapolis, the case represented a significant break in a suspected long-running child pornography ring. It also underscored the daunting challenges now facing investigators who police the dark Web.
For at least 12 years, federal prosecutors say, the 11 suspects, operating from bases in Indiana, Florida, California, Alabama, New York, Texas and Virginia, ran online chat rooms where huge collections of child pornography were shared among members, representing Canada, Switzerland and other parts of the globe.
Before their arrests, according to court documents, the suspects found temporary havens protected by “data encryption software” and password-protected sites “available exclusively to members of the conspiracy,” officials said.
“This conspiracy allegedly stretched across the country and around the world, using sophisticated techniques to hide the orchestrated abuse of dozens of child victims,” Indiana U.S. Attorney Joseph Hogsett said when the charges were made public.
In fact, federal authorities said the number of victims numbered “nearly 100 children around the world,” according to court documents.