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Archive for the ‘Operation Ore’ Category

High Court awards damages to Operation Ore accused | News | PC Pro

By Nicole Kobie
Posted on 4 Apr 2011 at 14:29

The High Court has awarded damages to a man wrongfully caught up in the Operation Ore child porn investigation.

Operation Ore kicked off in 1999 in the US, with a list of suspects accused of paying for access to a ‘child pornography’ site handed to UK police in 2002, leading to more than 1,400 prosecutions.

However, the evidence used to convict the accused paedophiles was flawed. Writing in PC Pro in 2005, computer expert and investigative journalist Duncan Campbell revealed that many of the accused were nothing more than victims of credit-card fraud.

British police were aware the evidence was flawed within months of starting the investigation, according to a new report published today on The Register.

Jeremy Clifford, now 51 from Watford, was one of thousands of people accused during the investigation, after his credit-card details were fraudulently used on the site in question. He was arrested in 2003.

Illicit images were found in the temporary internet files folder on his machine, but a police computer expert said at the time the thumbnail images could have been placed there without Clifford’s knowledge.

Despite the expert finding no evidence that Clifford ever downloaded child pornography, Hertfordshire Police still proceeded with the charges, which were eventually dropped.

The court awarded Clifford £20,000 in damages, while the police force faces up to hundreds of thousands of pounds in costs.

‘In my opinion it is an absolute disgrace that the police have been allowed to spend huge sums of public money recklessly and without apparent check or merit attacking Mr Clifford, in order to deflect from their own shortcomings,’ Andre Clovis of Tuckers Solicitors, told the The Telegraph.

‘This course of conduct caused costs to escalate. There appears to be no control mechanism over police spending in such circumstances, but this does not mean that the Chief Constable and his legal department should not be called to account for their actions.’

A spokesman for Hertfordshire Constabulary said: ‘Legal advice was taken beforehand and it was advised and expected that we had a reasonable chance of winning our case.’

Of the over 7,000 originally accused in the Operation Ore investigation, 3,744 people were arrested, 1,848 were charged, and 1,451 convicted. As many as 39 people committed suicide after being accused.

Operation Ore was based on flawed evidence from the start: “

Cops raised concerns ahead of national meeting in 2003

Exclusive Britain’s biggest ever computer crime investigation, Operation Ore, was flawed by a catalogue of ‘discrepancies, errors and uncertainties’, disclosed reports of two national police conferences seen by The Register reveal.…

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(Via The Register – Public Sector.)

Judge hits police with massive bill over false Operation Ore charges: “

Cop had ‘no honest belief’ in charges

A man wrongly accused in Britain’s largest ever child pornography investigation has won damages in the High Court after an eight-year legal battle.…

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(Via The Register – Public Sector.)

Judges reject Operation Ore appeal: “

Claims of card fraud in child abuse pics case dismissed

The Court of Appeal has rejected claims that some individuals prosecuted under Operation Ore for incitement to distribute indecent photographs were themselves the victims of credit card fraud.…

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(Via The Register – Public Sector.)

Operation Ore decision a ’serious miscarriage of justice’ – lawyer: “

Judges ignored evidence, lacked expertise

The solicitor who brought the Operation Ore appeal that was finally rejected today has questioned whether the British courts had the expertise to consider deeply technical cases.…

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(Via The Register – Public Sector.)

Case could clear names of hundreds of men accused of child pornography | UK news | The Guardian: “Case could clear names of hundreds of men accused of child pornography

Man arrested as part of Operation Ore in 2002 says his credit card details were stolen and used on paedophile sites

* Afua Hirsch and Louise Shorter
* guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 10 November 2010 19.36 GMT
Hundreds of men who say they were wrongly accused of child pornography offences could have their names cleared after a case to be heard in the court of appeal tomorrow.

One of the 3,700 men arrested as part of Operation Ore in 2002, who says his life was ruined after he was falsely associated with one of the UK’s biggest online child-abuse rings, will argue that his credit card details were stolen and used on paedophile sites.

The case stems from Operation Ore, an unprecedented police investigation that led to the arrest of 3,700 men in 2002 after they were linked to an American US-based website, ‘Landslide.

Police and prosecutors claimed that the men had all clicked on a banner advert on the site, which read: ‘Click here for child porn,’ and that police had obtained the names and addresses of more than 7,000 UK users who had followed the link.

But the lawyer acting for the man mentioned said that many of the suspects were innocent.

‘Criminal webmasters would use stolen credit card details or take them from their own legal adult pornography sites and re-enter them to sign up for subscriptions to their illegal sites for child pornography,’ said Chris Saltrese. ‘There is evidence of bundles of different cards all being entered from one place, one after the other. It was simple fraud.’

The appeal court will also hear that the banner was only ever one of a series of rotating ads that led to a legal adult pornography site.

Operation Ore has attracted controversy in the UK for the number of suspects it targeted. Critics claim that, whereas in the US, details were available of 35,000 users of the site but only 100 were prosecuted, the UK authorities prosecuted 1,800.

Thirty-nine of the men are reported to have killed themselves as a result of being prosecuted during the Ore inquiry, and campaigners say many others pleaded guilty to avoid the publicity of a trial.

The case, which has been strongly contested by officers involved in the original investigation, comes amid continuing controversy over efforts to target child exploitation online in the UK.

In July the government announced that CEOP, the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, which is responsible for prosecuting offenders, would be absorbed into the National Crime Agency, following the coalition’s programmme Policing in the 21st Century, announced in June.

Senior politicians close to CEOP have said that absorbing the organisation into the National Crime Agency will put children at risk.

‘CEOP’s effectiveness will be lost,’ a senior source said. ‘Effective child protection relies on knowledge running throughout an agency. It will be difficult to develop this in a large organisation like the National Crime Agency.’

Last month head of CEOP Jim Gamble resigned, four months earlier than his expected departure, in protest at the plans, four months earlier than his expected departure, and has been placed on gardening leave. A number of other senior managers in the organisation are also thought to have resigned.

Although Operation Ore was conducted by the National Criminal Intelligence Service, a forerunner of CEOP, the investigation has attracted criticism for the organisation, as today’s appeal could pave the way for other men to have their convictions overturned.

‘I have clients who have lost everything: their jobs, their homes, their marriages, their children and their health,’ Saltrese said.

Police chief escapes jail for refusing to hand over seized material | Politics | guardian.co.uk

Chief constable cleared of contempt after he returns hard drives containing evidence of suspected child abuse

* Sandra Laville, crime correspondent
* guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 16 June 2009 17.52 BST

A chief constable was criticised by three judges today for defying a high court order to return computer hard drives containing evidence of suspected child abuse to an expert witness.

Colin Port, the chief constable of Avon and Somerset police, escaped a prison term for contempt of court because he returned the files from 87 computer hard drives to the expert yesterday evening, hours before the officer appeared at the Royal Courts of Justice in London.

Although they dismissed the contempt of court action against him the three senior judges said Port’s actions in defying the order ‘gave grounds for concern’.

The case pitted the chief constable against Jim Bates, a forensic computer analyst, who since the 1990s has been used by police and defence lawyers in paedophile cases.

Bates said the contents of the computer hard drives and hundreds of photographs which were seized were all related to his work as an expert witness.

He claims that Port and other senior police officers involved in child protection are engaged in a campaign to discredit him because he continues to expose serious flaws in Operation Ore, Britain’s biggest online paedophile investigation.

Last year Bates was found guilty of falsifying his qualifications by saying he held a bachelor of science degree when he did not.

‘I have been subjected to intimidation, bullying and even threats of violence by police and some of their misguided supporters,’ Bates said in court documents.

But as he escaped prisontoday Port was defiant. Outside the court he called upon Bates to destroy all the material which had been returned and said the case raised concerns about who was allowed access to highly sensitive material.

‘Each time these images are viewed it is a fresh victimisation of the child,’ he said. ‘Tighter governance is crucial. We need a nationwide accreditation system with clear rules and safeguarding of victims and a fail-safe that allows accreditation to be withdrawn should any aspect of those rules be breached.’

Bates, who has been credited as a world-renowned expert in forensic computer analysis, became the focus of a police inquiry last year when he acted in the case of a Bristol man accused of possessing paedophile images.

He was arrested last September on suspicion of conspiracy to possess indecent images of children. His home was searched and 87 computer hard drives and several hundred photographs of children were seized.

The police claimed Bates had 2,500 photographs of children in his possession. He disputes that, saying there were only about 250 pictures, all relating to historic cases which the police had knowledge of.

Bates challenged the search and seizure at a judicial review and said the material was legally restricted, professionally confidential and required for his work as a defence expert.

In May the high court ruled in his favour saying the search was unlawful and ordered Port to return the material.

But Port refused, saying that the public would not understand a police officer handing back images of suspected child abuse during an investigation.

Bates, who is acting in two forthcoming appeals against conviction in the Ore investigation, has suggested that 85% of the convictions are unsafe because of ‘massive evidence of credit card fraud’.

Operation Ore was launched in 2002 after the credit card details of 7,200 people believed to have paid for paedophile images on the internet were supplied to the British police by US investigators.

More than 2,000 individuals have been convicted as part of the inquiry. Police suspected those on the list of having paid for access to images of children being abused through a website called Landslide, which provided access to 300 adult sites.

But Bates and others say the inquiry was seriously flawed, and said many people on the list were victims of credit card fraud. In the United States only a small proportion of those on the list were convicted.

In his affidavit Bates said: ‘My investigation revealed … massive evidence of credit card fraud within the database (Landslide) and conclusive evidence of breathtaking incompetence in the prosecution’s expert analyses of how this database had been generated and maintained.’

Senior officers involved in Ore are also facing a class action from former suspects who claim their lives have been ruined as a result of a flawed investigation.

In their judgment Lord Justice Stanley Burnton, Mr Justice Wilkie and Mr Justice Calvert Smith criticised Port for attempting to smear Bates in a series of newspaper articles ‘all of which were directed to bring Bates into disrepute as a result of suggestions that there was salacious material which he had on computers otherwise than for purely professional purposes’.

They refused to grant Port’s legal team costs. Bates said he would be pursuing a case for damages against the force and Port.

Has Operation Ore left a scar on British justice? – TelegraphHas Operation Ore left a scar on British justice?

Scores of the men caught by Operation Ore may not be paedophiles, but victims of identity theft, says Alasdair Palmer.

By Alasdair Palmer
Published: 3:49PM BST 20 Jun 2009

There are some unspeakably vile people amongst the thousands of men swept up by Operation Ore, the police’s extensive investigation into paedophilia and child pornography. But it is becoming increasingly clear that a substantial portion of those who were convicted of offences such as “incitement to distribute indecent images of children” had committed no crime at all.

Thirty-five of the accused committed suicide. It’s not easy to think of many things that are worse than being convicted of a paedophile offence when you are innocent of that ghastly crime. Once you are stamped as a paedophile and placed on the Sex Offenders Register, you will probably lose your family, for your wife will divorce you, if only to ensure she can keep custody of the children whom you will now be forbidden to care for. You will lose your friends and you will lose your job.

That’s exactly what happened to dozens of men who either pled guilty or were convicted as a result of Operation Ore. The sole evidence against them was that their credit card details and computer passwords were found on the list of subscribers to websites with such repulsive names as “child rape”.

What could be clearer evidence of guilt than that? As their solicitors told them, it did not matter that their computers had been examined and found to be free of child pornography, or that they could produce alibis to show they could not have been at their keyboards when they were supposed to have signed up for the child porn. Judges and juries found the electronic data irrefutable.

But the electronic data wasn’t irrefutable. One simple possibility appears not to have occurred to the police or any of the lawyers assigned to the accused: that they had been the victims of identity theft. Someone had got hold of their credit card details and identified the perfect way to rack up charges: create a subscription service child-porn web site (it need not actually have any child porn on it, just a suitably disgusting name), then charge a subscription to the stolen card.

Very few people are going to complain to their credit card company, still less to the police, that they have been charged for visiting a site identified as “child rape” – for how do you prove that it wasn’t you? Some of the men had visited legal adult pornography sites on the internet, and given their credit card details so they could watch porn films. They had not been to child pornography sites – but once they had given their credit card details, it was very easy for someone else to do so using their credit card number.

It took a computer expert named Jim Bates to notice that on the full electronic log, the same credit card frequently subscribes to the same child porn site several times on the same day – and yet the “subscriber” never actually visits the site. Moreover, Mr Bates noticed that the same credit card number was being used to subscribe to child porn sites at the same time on three different continents.

Mr Bates’s discovery that the electronic data was riddled with fraud did not find favour with the police. His reward was to be smeared as a paedophile himself: the cops searched his house and accused him of – you’ve guessed it – “conspiracy to obtain indecent images of children”. Employed as an expert witness, he had, in the course of his work, examined computers with paedophile material. The police search was ruled illegal and last week he received back the material that they had confiscated.

Chris Saltrese, a Merseyside solicitor, believes he can demonstrate that scores of the men caught by Operation Ore are not paedophiles, but victims of identity theft. If his arguments convince the Appeal Court – with whom he has just lodged a specimen case – the police may be forced to apologise for their role in causing this country’s most colossal example of injustice. It will be too late for most of the innocent men they convicted. Their lives are in pieces. And they will never be able to put them back together.

Legal challenge to web child abuse inquiry | UK news | The Guardian: “Legal challenge to web child abuse inquiry

Claim that hundreds were convicted through flawed credit card evidence

* Sandra Laville, crime correspondent
* guardian.co.uk, Thursday 2 July 2009 20.30 BST

One of Britain’s biggest online paedophile inquiries is to be challenged in the court of appeal amid allegations from campaigners that hundreds of men have been wrongly convicted in a mass miscarriage of justice.

For more than two years a small group of experts have claimed that Operation Ore, the police inquiry into thousands of British men, was tainted because the database at the centre of the investigation contained evidence of widespread credit card fraud. Their allegations will be tested for the first time in the appeal court within weeks, when a judge examines a test case that could expose a huge miscarriage of justice, lawyers say.

The single judge will decide whether the case should go to a full appeal.

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