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Archive for the ‘Paedophilia’ Category

BBC News: ‘World’s largest paedophile ring’ uncovered

16 March 2011 Last updated at 15:27 GMT

‘World’s largest paedophile ring’ uncovered
By Dominic Casciani BBC News home affairs correspondent

The boylover.net website The international network operated out of the Netherlands

International police led by a UK team say they shut down the largest internet paedophile ring yet discovered.

The global forum had 70,000 followers at its height, leading to 4,000 intelligence reports being sent to police across 30 countries.

The operation has so far identified 670 suspects and 230 abused children.

Detectives say 184 people have been arrested – 121 of them were in the UK. Some 60 children have been protected in the UK.

The three-year investigation, Operation Rescue, was led by investigators from the UK’s Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop).

Speaking at a news conference at The Hague in the Netherlands, investigators said the network hid behind a legal online forum which operated out of the country – but its members came from around the world.

Europol Director Rob Wainright on ’spectacular international police success’

Along with the Netherlands and the UK, suspects have been identified in Australia, Italy, Canada, New Zealand and Thailand.

The members of the network went into a private channel, boylover.net, and then used its secret systems to share films and images of abused children, said Rob Wainwright, director of European police agency Europol.

However, child abuse investigators, including a team from Ceop, had already infiltrated the network and were posing as paedophiles to gather intelligence.

In the UK, the 240 suspects include police officers, teachers and a karate teacher. One of the suspects in the UK is a woman.

The latest arrest was in Northamptonshire.

To date, 33 have been convicted, including John McMurdo, a scout leader from Plymouth. Another forum user was Stephen Palmer, 54, of Birkenhead, who shared abuse images with contacts in the US. A third man, 46-year-old Colin Hoey Brown of Bromsgrove, was jailed for making and distributing almost 1,000 images.

‘New ground broken’

Peter Davies, head of Ceop, said: ‘The scale and success of Operation Rescue has broken new ground.

Analysis
image of Danny Shaw Danny Shaw Home affairs correspondent, BBC News

The internet has proved to be fertile territory for people with a sexual interest in children.

Those wishing to explore their feelings or satisfy their urges can spend hours doing so without having to leave their room. Taking advantage of the anonymity modern computer technology provides, paedophiles download and exchange vile images of abuse unaware of the reality of the suffering.

For some years, however, child protection agencies have been on their case. By pretending to be online sex offenders and by using sophisticated computer techniques, they’ve managed to identify offenders and locate suspect websites. So it was with Operation Rescue.

What marks it out is its global scale. But in UK terms, it still lags behind Operation Ore – an investigation into 7,000 people from Britain whose credit cards were used to access child abuse images on a US website.

‘Not only is it one of the largest operations of its kind to date – and the biggest operation we have led – it also demonstrates the impact of international law enforcement agencies working together with one single objective, to safeguard children and bring offenders to justice.

‘While these offenders felt anonymous in some way because they were using the internet to communicate, the technology was actually being used against them.

‘Everything they did online, everyone they talked to or anything they shared could and was tracked by following the digital footprint.’

Operation Rescue began when Ceop and colleagues in the Australian Federal Police separately identified the site as a key online meeting place for abusers.

The two forces deployed officers to infiltrate the site and to identify the members who were posing the most risk to children.

One of the early breakthroughs in the investigation was the arrest of four suspects in Thailand in 2008. Two of the men were British.

In March of the same year, Ceop identified the owner of the site and the location of its server in the Netherlands. The owner of the server is now co-operating with Dutch police.

CEOP Chief Peter Davies: ‘The case was very demanding’

Rob Wainwright of Europol said the man running the server had used ‘advanced security techniques’ which took months to break down.

‘If you think you can use the internet to abuse children you are wrong,’ he said.

‘We will not allow these offenders to carry on committing these awful crimes against young children. We will not rest until we have identified every offender that has been active in this network and others that might be operating on the internet.’

Australia bans small breasts – Somebody Think Of The Children

January 27, 2010 – 11:41 pm

The Australian Sex Party (ASP) said Wednesday that the Australian Classification Board (ACB) is now banning depictions of small-breasted women in adult publications and films. It comes just a week after it was found that material with depictions of females ejaculating during orgasm are now Refused Classification and Australian Customs directed to confiscate it.

I love the title of this article

Government to protect children from zombie paedophiles: “

The dead may walk – but they can’t work in teaching

The Vetting database will protect children not only from living predators – but from dead ones too.…

“

(Via The Register – Public Sector.)

Davenport Lyons Threatens to Sue Wikileaks Over Publication of Extortion Letter – Wikileaks

From Wikileaks, February 20, 2009

By Drew Wilson (Zeropaid)[1]

Claims that the extortion letter is protected by copyright and cannot be posted online.

Late last year, Wikileaks obtained a copy of one of the extortion letters sent by the infamous law firm Davenport Lyons. The law firm, at the time, had been sending tens of thousands of these letters which threatened to take the recipients to court if they don’t pay just over 500 pounds. The original goal was to deter alleged copyright infringers, but in a strange twist of fate, the law firm is now actively trying to censor the letter itself claiming that the letter is protected under British copyright law.

The legal threat letters themselves contain a hash value, and IP address and a time stamp that is being used as evidence – flimsy evidence according to many people who have observed the legal side of file-sharing. The reason it is seen as flimsy is that a filename can be called anything and still have the same hash value. Second of all, there is no evidence provided that verified that the file name matched what the actual work was. For all we know, it could have been a 5 minute porn clip rather than a music video. Thirdly, there’s no evidence to suggest that an IP address is linked to an individual. The computer could be used by someone other than the owner of the connection. There could be a wifi connection that other users, including unauthorized ones, could be using that IP address. Finally, a time stamp doesn’t contribute much into proving that a copyrighted work has been uploaded. The alleged incident in question happened over BitTorrent, but no website was given, so who really knows where the evidence was gathered in the first place?

The turn of events seems to resemble the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) deciding that they don’t want the trial broadcasted over the internet. The copyright industry said that the whole purpose of file-sharing lawsuits is to educate the public, yet objected to idea that the case should be broadcasted over the internet. The same sort of contradiction can be seen in the Davenport case. The whole idea is to educate the public, but now they don’t want their own letters being published, claiming it’s copyright infringement.

One might argue that the reason that Davenport Lyons don’t want the letters published in the first place is because they don’t want their letters subject to public or any real legal scrutiny. It’s much easier to attack a single individual singled out rather than attacking a single individual with the public sphere watching. It’s little wonder why the copyright industry has been seen as a bully throughout the years really. If they truly feel they are in the right, why the need to hide their activities in the first place?

Thanks to Drew Wilson and Zeropaid for covering this document. Reprint rights remain with the aforementioned.

Armed anti-paedophile cops swoop on video site uploader: “

Baby swing vid prompts ‘child abuse material’ charge

A video sharing website user who posted a clip of a man apparently swinging a baby around has had his house raided by an armed Australian police anti-paedophile squad.…

“

(Via The Register – Public Sector.)

Another article from the Times….

Dangerous and depraved: paedophiles unite with terrorists online – Times Online

October 17, 2008

Dangerous and depraved: paedophiles unite with terrorists online
Richard Kerbaj, Dominic Kennedy, Richard Owen and Graham Keeley

For some, the internet is merely a hiding place — a web of secret corridors where all manner of shameful deeds unfold. But the police never expected that it might become a strategic platform where two groups of society’s outcasts, terrorists and child sex abusers, could meet to exchange operational secrets.

The realisation that there might be something in common between violent Muslim fanatics known for their supposed piety and sexual deviants who prey on children has only slowly dawned on officers. Cracking the mystery of how these worlds overlap is expected to improve understanding of the mindsets of both types of criminals and has been hailed as a potentially vital intelligence tool to undermine future terrorist plots. ‘A way of finding who the extremists and terrorists are’, an anti-terror source said, ‘is to go through the child-porn sites.’

The link might have remained unknown but for the case of a Muslim preacher from the East End of London who in 2006 was being investigated by police over his suspected links to a jihadi terrorist gunrunner.

To Scotland Yard’s surprise, the 26-year-old Abdul Makim Khalisadar, a former primary school assistant, was discovered to be downloading considerable quantities of child pornography. A DNA test showed he was the wanted ‘Whitechapel Rapist’ who had violently attacked a woman in the street a year earlier. He was jailed for ten years for rape and perverting justice. Khalisadar, who has never been convicted of terrorist offences, and some friends concocted a false alibi that he was preaching at the East London Mosque when the attack happened. He was accused of possessing photographs of child sex abuse but these 11 charges were allowed to lie on file. “

(Via .)

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Sounds all unbelievable to me but interesting article from The Times. Why wouldn’t they hide their messages into normal boring photos considering the fact that websites carrying child pornography would be more likely to be under investigation?

Link between child porn and Muslim terrorists discovered in police raids – Times Online

October 17, 2008
Link between child porn and Muslim terrorists discovered in police raids
Paedophile websites are being used to pass information between terrorists
Richard Kerbaj and Dominic Kennedy

A link between terrorism plots and hardcore child pornography is becoming clear after a string of police raids in Britain and across the Continent, an investigation by The Times has discovered. Images of child abuse have been found during Scotland Yard antiterrorism swoops and in big inquiries in Italy and Spain.

Secret coded messages are being embedded into child pornographic images, and paedophile websites are being exploited as a secure way of passing information between terrorists.

British security services are also aware of the trend and believe that it requires further investigation to improve understanding of terrorists’ methods and mindsets. Concerns within the Metropolitan Police led to a plan to run a pilot research project exploring the nature of the link. One source familiar with the proposal said that this could eventually lead to the training of child welfare experts to identify signs of terrorist involvement as they monitor pornographic sites.

Concerns have already been expressed at Cabinet minister level about the risk of vulnerable Muslim youths being exploited by older men. “

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Latest online offender ‘grooming’ tactics revealed – 2008 – Press releases – Media centre – CEOP: “Friday 11 September 2008
Latest online offender ‘grooming’ tactics revealed
UK centre for tackling the sexual abuse of children advises parents to increase vigilance as latest intelligence report is published

Online child sex offenders are using more intimidating tactics to engage with, exploit and abuse children in an increasingly converged technological environment according to the UK’s police agency dedicated to tackling child sex abuse – the Child Exploitation and Online Protection (CEOP) Centre.

In its latest strategic intelligence dossier, the organisation reports an increase in online offenders using threats such as hacking online profiles and email accounts and using blackmail techniques as a response to an increasingly empowered internet generation who are recognising and reporting online ‘grooming’ behaviour to the police agency.

To date 2.2 million children and young people have seen the Centre’s Thinkuknow education programme and together with public awareness around international law enforcement activity in tracing and arresting internet offenders, this is resulting in offenders changing their tactics to approach and groom children.
(more…)

Internet paedophile ‘librarian’ jailed: “A paedophile who acted as a ‘librarian’ for a global internet child abuse ring was handed an indefinite jail term today after one of the biggest undercover police investigations into online child abuse”

(Via Latest news, sport, business, comment and reviews from the Guardian | guardian.co.uk.)

Canadian paedophile jailed for three years: “Man caught after police unscrambled ’swirly face’ on web pictures pleads guilty to molesting teenager”

The Register, Thai court jails ’swirly-face’ paedophile: A Canadian schoolteacher who was arrested after police appealed for the identity of a man depicted abusing boys on images circulating on the net has been jailed for three years and three months in Thailand.…”