CyberLaw Blog

Archive for the ‘child pornography’ Category

Media Release: Global investigation cracks child exploitation network – Australian Federal Police: “Media Release: Global investigation cracks child exploitation network

Release Date: August 27, 2010

International law enforcement agencies have combined to dismantle an alleged organised child exploitation network that had been operating via the social networking site Facebook.

A total of eleven people have been arrested as part of a coordinated operation across Australia, the United Kingdom and Canada.

Law enforcement has made six arrests in relation to child abuse image offences in the United Kingdom, including the alleged head of the network. Three arrests have been made in Australia and two in Canada. Investigations are ongoing with the operation currently spanning four continents.

The Australian Federal Police (AFP) began the investigation in March this year and has operated in partnership with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), the Child Exploitation Online Protection Centre (CEOP) in the United Kingdom and the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

The investigation began when a covert AFP Internet Policing Team member established an online identity on Facebook and was approached by one of the network members. Upon further investigation into the network, referrals were made to overseas counterparts leading to the arrests across the globe.

AFP National Manager High Tech Crime Operations Neil Gaughan heralded the successful operation as a clear demonstration of co-operation between international law enforcement agencies.

‘Criminal activity of this type is often described as a borderless crime because there’s no geographical restriction on where offenders may try to target their victims,’ Assistant Commissioner Gaughan said.

‘Policing in this social networking environment is a challenge, but the cooperation during this operation demonstrates that international law enforcement is united in a global fight against online child exploitation material.

‘The investigation should serve as a warning to both social networking providers and users.

‘In this case, Facebook deactivated the online accounts of the initial suspects but there were indications that, within hours, the groups were reforming again under new accounts.

‘It is important that content service providers including Facebook constantly scan for child exploitation material, and then inform law enforcement of their findings.’

CEOP Chief Executive Jim Gamble said, ‘This network was made up of people who share an interest in viewing extremely disturbing images of children suffering horrific abuse.’

‘All the officers working on this investigation – both in the UK and in Australia, America, Canada and elsewhere – shared a steely determination to safeguard children wherever they were and to bring those involved to justice,’ Mr Gamble said.

‘Offenders are not limited by their geography and neither are we. We have worked side by side with the Australian Federal Police, the FBI, the RCMP and colleagues in a number of other countries to ensure that no stone is left unturned and no child is left unprotected.

‘Project Ocean should send a clear message to others who think that online environments offer them anonymity in their offending. Everything you do leaves a digital footprint and, working together, we will stop at nothing to protect children suffering abuse.’

FBI Assistant Director Gordon M. Snow, Cyber Division, said: ‘The sexual exploitation of children is a heinous offense, and the FBI is committed to identifying and thwarting online predators, no matter where they live.’

‘We work side-by-side with our law enforcement partners around the world to identify and pursue those who produce, possess and distribute sexually explicit images and videos of children.’

RCMP Superintendent John Bilinski, Officer in Charge of the Canadian Police Centre for Missing and Exploited Children said: ‘The RCMP’s National Child Exploitation Coordination Centre is committed to working with its international policing partners. Project Ocean is a clear demonstration of how international co-operation can help ensure that child sexual offenders are brought to justice.’

‘One of our most effective strategies against Internet-facilitated child sexual abuse is cooperation. No single agency can deal with this crime in isolation. We continually work together with our partners to ensure the safety and security of children, regardless of where they live.’

Media enquiries
AFP National Media Team +61 (2) 6131 6333
CEOP Media +44 (0) 870 000 3434
RCMP Media +1 613 993-2999
FBI Media +1 202-324-3691

FACTS & STATS

Background:

The operation began in March 2010 when an AFP Internet Policing Team member established a covert online identity in Facebook.

The profile was approached by numerous Facebook users to become ‘friends’ and commenced engagement with these friends.

The engagement identified the network exchanging child exploiting material using Facebook to host the images. Members of the network were identified and referrals were made to the countries they were identified to live in.

Australia

* On 2 June 2010, a 33-year-old Victorian man was charged with two counts of using a carriage service to access child pornography material, contrary to section 474.19(1)(a)(i) of the Criminal Code Act 1995 (Cth); two counts of using a carriage service to make available child pornography material, contrary to section 474.19(1)(a)(iv), of the Criminal Code Act 1995 (Cth); and possessing child pornography, contrary to section 70(1) of the Crimes Act 1958 (Vic). The man will appear in Melbourne Magistrates Court on 6 October 2010.
* On 2 June 2010, a 18-year-old Victorian man was charged with two counts of using a carriage service to access child pornography material, contrary to section 474.19(1)(a)(i) of the Criminal Code Act 1995; two counts of using a carriage service to make available child pornography material, contrary to section 474.19(1)(a)(iv) of the Criminal Code Act 1995 (Cth) and possessing child pornography, contrary to section 70(1) of the Crimes Act 1958 (Vic). The man will appear in Geelong Magistrates Court on 24 September 2010.
* On 15 June 2010, a 27-year-old New South Wales man was charged with using a carriage service to transmit child pornography material, contrary to section 474.19 (1)(a)(iii) of the Criminal Code Act 1995. The man will appear in Wollongong Local Court on 14 October 2010.

United Kingdom

The CEOP have arrested and charged six males in the United Kingdom, one of which is the alleged head of the network.

* The 45-year-old Worthing man has been sentenced to four years in prison and served with a Sexual Offences Prevention Order, after pleading guilty overnight at Chichester Crown Court to making (six counts); possessing (one count); distributing (seven counts) and view to distributing (10 counts) child abuse images. He was also found guilty of breaching his requirements on the Sex Offenders Register. The man was arrested by Sussex Police who initiated a specific investigation to gather evidence of his offences. Further police activity lead detectives to identify five additional suspects in the UK and a further nine suspects overseas, with investigations still underway.
* Two UK children have been safeguarded and five further suspected offenders have been arrested in the UK.

Canada

Law enforcement agencies have arrested two males in Canada. One suspect has been charged with four counts relating to child exploitation in Canada.
Regarding the second man, the investigation is still ongoing.”

(Via .)

Translator fined over child porn cartoons – The Local

Published: 25 Jul 10 11:14 CET
Online: http://www.thelocal.se/27984/20100725/

A Swedish translator of Japanese manga comics has been fined by Uppsala district court for possession of drawings depicting children engaged in sexual acts.

The ruling is the first of its kind in Sweden and has sparked a heated debate over children’s rights and censorship.

The translator at the centre of the case was found guilty of possessing child pornography after downloading the offending manga images from the internet. He told the court that he had retrieved the 51 pictures in order to stay up to date with the latest developments in the Japanese comic genre.

Judge Nils Pålbrant conceded that the decision to fine the translator, though unanimous, had raised a number of thorny issues.

‘There’s a clear conflict between freedom of speech on the one hand and general regulations regarding children’s rights on the other,’ he told local newspaper Upsala Nya Tidning.

‘It was however our view that the protective aspect weighed more heavily when taking into account the intentions of the legislator. The aim of the law, as described in the preliminary work that led to its creation, is not just to protect individual children but children in general.’

But the case has polarized opinion in Sweden. In an editorial published on Thursday, tabloid Expressen gave its backing to the translator.

‘However unpleasant and nasty a work of fiction might be, and whatever one thinks about Japanese porn involving cartoon children, there is actually no victim here. The children in the Uppland man’s manga comics were not molested since they were characters in a comic.’

The translator’s lawyer, Leif Silbersky, expressed surprise at the June 30th ruling and has lodged a formal appeal on behalf of his client.

‘It goes against all common sense. These are just drawings; no children have been harmed,’ he told Upsala Nya Tidning.

Judge Pålbrant said he too would welcome a second opinion from the Court of Appeal due to the precedential nature of the case.

Internet Freedom under pressure in Denmark: “

On 27 May the Danish Supreme Court upheld a lower court decision which obliges internet service providers (ISPs) to block access to websites that may contain – or link to other sites which contain – material which infringes copyrights (the Pirate Bay in this instance).

The decision has rightly been criticized as a setback for internet freedom in Denmark. The decision attaches undue weight to the interests of copyright holders while ignoring obvious dangers of abuse, restrictions on internet freedom and access to information and the lack of any due process. The decision may lead to the blocking of websites that mainly includes content that does not infringe copyright and thus restrict the free flow of information. Moreover, by forcing ISP’s to police the Internet without due process the decision marks a dangerous precedent that is likely to include other ‘illegal’ or ‘offensive’ material in the future.

The Supreme Court’s decision is only the latest instance of a wider trend towards internet regulation in Denmark (ranked as the country with the freest press in the world by Reporters Without Borders).

In 2005 The Danish police set up the so-called Child Pornography Filter in co-operation with the Danish NGO Red Barnet (Save the Child). When Red Barnet and the Police identify web-sites that contain child pornography the police informs ISPs and request them to block access to these sites with no prior warning or hearing. The sites blocked by the filter are kept confidential by the police. In 2008 Wikileaks leaked all the sites blocked by the filter which seemed to show that several sites were either inactive or contained material that had nothing to do with child pornography.

Earlier in 2010 the Danish parliament (Folketinget) passed a law, which will allow the tax authorities to notify ISPs of web sites operated by ‘unauthorized’ providers of online-gambling. ISPs will then be requested to block access to such sites. Should the relevant ISPs refuse or fail to do so they will be subject to criminal liability. No courts or tribunals will review the decisions of the tax-authorities nor will the owners of the relevant websites be heard prior to a decision. It is an open question whether this law violates the Danish constitution’s prohibition against censorship and/or the European Convention on Human Rights’ protection of freedom of expression and access to information.

Several Danish lawmakers have proposed wide ranging restrictions on Internet access. Earlier in 2010 the Socialist Peoples’ Part proposed criminalizing surfing on ‘terror related web sites’ and the Danish Peoples’ Party has twice proposed banning www.psychedlica.dk a website dedicated to sharing information about drugs. According to media reports the Danish governments has also been very active in keeping the ongoing Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) negotiations confidential. According to leaks from the ACTS negotiations the current ACTA draft envisages intrusive measures likely to threaten internet freedom and the right to privacy.

“

(Via Global Voices Advocacy.)

AFP: Japan must crack down on child porn: activists

(AFP) – 14.05.2010

TOKYO — Japan’s government must crack down on rampant child pornography, which proliferates on the Internet causing great mental anguish for its victims, an activist group demanded Friday.

Japan is considered a major global source of child porn — in part because, while production and distribution of child pornography are illegal, its possession is not.

Keiji Goto, head of the lawyers’ Forum Against Child Pornography, said he did not understand why the centre-left government in power since last year has not cracked down on images depicting the sexual exploitation of minors.

On many child porn websites, he said, ‘most of the victimised children have their faces exposed in images that are posted and distributed on the Internet forever, and they suffer from mental and physical trauma forever.’

Goto spoke a day after Tokyo police arrested 20 people, and referred cases of seven others to prosecutors, for allegedly posting child porn on a website opened by a high school student for access via mobile phones.

The National Police Agency this year reported that law enforcers took action in a record 935 child porn cases last year, up 38 percent from 2008.

Goto also called for a ban on child pornography in the form of manga cartoons and computer graphics, which are now legal, saying they ‘are as realistic as the child pornography in the form of video and photography.’

‘One of the worst cases of those animation images depicts a graphic scene of the rape of an infant,’ Goto said at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan. ‘Tolerating this means our society tolerates child pornography.’

A National Police Agency survey showed about 25 percent of child porn images posted on the Internet had not been deleted despite requests made last December for Internet service providers to do so, Kyodo News reported Friday.

The government, which took power last September, has said it plans to draw up new measures against child pornography by June, based on guidelines mapped out by police, education, justice and other senior officials.

A group of Japanese cartoonists in March protested against a Tokyo metropolitan government plan to tighten rules against sexual images of minors in comics, animation and computer game software.

Japan’s capital had proposed to call on publishers to exercise greater restraint on sales of any cartoon works that feature sexual depictions of characters that people would assume to be under age.

The cartoonists said the measures would ‘violate freedom of expression.

Jail for man who broke into woman’s home to frame husband for child porn: A man has been sent to prison after he attempted to force his way into a female colleague’s life by breaking into her house and framing her husband for downloading child pornography.

(Via Tech and Web from Times Online.)

Cartoon Law goes live: “

Time to burn your Japanese comics

If you happen to possess any cartoon images on your hard drive – or on your bookshelf – that just might depict children involved in or present at a sexual act, then you should probably have deleted them already.…

“

(Via The Register – Public Sector.)

US, EU to launch programme against Internet child pornography – The Independent

AFP, Sunday, 11 April 2010

The United States and the European Union announced they plan to launch a joint action programme to fight child pornography on the Internet.

The agreement was announced at the end of an EU-US meeting of justice and interior ministers in Madrid.

‘We decided on something very important for both our citizens, that is to set up a common action in order to take down child pornography from the Internet,’ said EU Commissioner for Home Affairs Viviane Reding.

‘Child pornography should be eliminated whenever we spot it,’ she told a news conference.

‘Many of those sites are all over the planet, many are in Europe, many are in the United States. We should join forces to protect children and to give no chance to pornography.’

The Swedish commissioner said the programme would involve the use of ‘hotlines’ and the European police agency Europol.

‘We are looking forward to this action, that is going to be set up in the coming weeks.’

Spanish Interior Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba, whose country holds the six-month rotating presidency of the European Union, said the two sides also discussed efforts to combat cyber crime in general.

‘We know that if the Internet is global by definition we need to prevent child pornography and other cyber crimes from happening,’ he said.

Spanish police have stepped up their fight against Internet child pornography in recent years, arresting hundreds, aided by Hispalis, a computer programme that identifies those who access paedophile sites.

The US delegation at the meeting was headed by Attorney General Eric Holder and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.

Court Says Parents Can Block ‘Sexting’ Cases – NYTimes.com

By TAMAR LEWIN, Published: March 17, 2010

In the first federal appeals court opinion dealing with ‘sexting’ — the transmission of sexually explicit photographs by cellphone — a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled Wednesday that parents could block the prosecution of their children on child pornography charges for appearing in photographs found on some classmates’ cellphones.

‘It does not resolve all of the constitutional issues implicated in sexting prosecutions, but it’s a terrific start for civil liberties,’ said Witold Walczak, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, who represented the parents.

The case, Miller v. Mitchell, began in 2008 when school officials in Tunkhannock, Pa., discovered seminude and nude photographs of some female students — some as young as 12 or 13 when the photographs were taken — on other students’ cellphones. The officials confiscated the phones and turned them over to the Wyoming County District Attorney’s Office.

The district attorney at the time, George Skumanick Jr., said that students possessing ‘inappropriate images of minors’ could be prosecuted for possession or distribution of child pornography, and sent letters to the parents of the students with the phones — and the parents of students who appeared in the photographs — threatening to prosecute any student who did not participate in an after-school ‘education program.’

The syllabus called for the girls to write a report explaining why they were there, what they had done, and why it was wrong.

‘Participation in the program is voluntary,’ the letter said. ‘Please note, however, charges will be filed against those that do not participate or those that do not successfully complete the program.’

Three families whose daughters were in the photographs refused to participate and instead filed suit to block the charges, which they said would amount to retaliation for that refusal. They said the district attorney’s actions interfered with the girls’ constitutional rights to be photographed and to be free from compelled speech — and with the parents’ rights to direct their children’s upbringing.

In March, the district court temporarily barred the district attorney from initiating any criminal charges against the girls. Wednesday’s opinion came in response to his appeal and upholds the injunction but does not resolve the case.

The unanimous ruling of the judges, Thomas L. Ambro, Michael A. Chagares and Walter K. Stapleton, criticized the district attorney’s reliance on the girls’ presence in the photographs as a basis for the potential charges.

‘Appearing in a photograph provides no evidence as to whether that person possessed or transmitted the photo,’ said the opinion, by Judge Ambro.

EU – EDRi sends open letter to Commissioners to oppose Internet blocking (EDRI-gram)
EDRi has written to Commissioners Cecilia Malmström (Home Affairs), Viviane Reding (Justice and Fundamental Rights) and Neelie Kroes (Digital Agenda) about the re-launch of the Commission proposal for a revised Framework Decision on combating the sexual abuse, sexual exploitation of children
and child pornography. The Commission made a proposal for the mandatory blocking of websites deemed to contain illegal images of child abuse (‘child pornography’). That measure is, as proven by the remarkably poor accompanying ‘impact assessment’, an example of legislation proposed without evidence and without due regard for human rights. As a measure which superficially sounds like a positive move, it is also an attractive option politically, which creates the temptation to legislate based on impulse rather than on evidence, legality and effectiveness.

(Via QuickLinks Update.)

Ed Balls Warns OnJames Bulger Killer Jon Venables Sent Back To Jail On Suspected Child Porn Offences | UK News | Sky News

2:12pm UK, Sunday March 07, 2010

Alison Chung, Sky News Online

The Children’s Secretary has told Sky News the media is getting close to breaking the law over reports about James Bulger’s killer.

The latest claims by the Sunday Mirror are that probation chiefs revoked Jon Venables’ licence because of child pornography allegations.

Justice Secretary Jack Straw will say only that ‘extremely serious allegations’ caused Venables, 27, to be returned to prison last week.

Newspaper speculation about those allegations includes claims of drug use, violence and sex crimes.

The murdered toddler’s family have called for full details of the allegations to be disclosed – but the Government has insisted Venables’ anonymity must be protected.

Ed Balls said some newspapers are getting too close to revealing Venables’ identity which would undermine the integrity of the criminal justice process and could prevent prosecution.

‘If we responded to the desire for people to know the facts in public in a way which ends up prejudicing a legal case, we would look back and think we made very irresponsible decisions,’ he told Sky News.

‘At the same time we will do nothing that would put children or adults at risk, now or in the future.’

Venables was controversially released on life licence in 2001 with a new identity after serving eight years for the toddler’s murder.

James’s mother Denise Fergus believes Venables should lose his anonymity if he is charged with new offences.

Her spokesman Chris Johnson said: ‘If after that, depending on the outcome of the court case, the powers that be decide that he should have some new identity yet again, then we’ll deal with that when we come to it.

‘But she can’t understand why he doesn’t appear in a dock under his own name, if that’s going to be where he ends up.’

Mrs Fergus does not believe Venables should be at liberty and should have served closer to 15 years.

‘In her mind, if there has been an offence committed, it means that that could have been avoided,’ Mr Johnson said.

Mrs Fergus has demanded to know why Venables was put back in jail, and is meeting Mr Straw this week.

She found out about Venables’ recall only on Tuesday, shortly before the news became public.

She told a newspaper that when a probation officer told her she ‘threw question after question at her, but she blocked every one’.

‘My fear was that he’d hurt another child, or any human being,’ she said.

Venables and accomplice Robert Thompson were just 10 when they battered two-year-old James to death in Liverpool 17 years ago.

They were both released on lifelong licence in 2001, requiring them to obey strict conditions such as not contacting each other or returning to the city where James was killed.