Homeland Security agents tackle growing trend of child sex tourism by webcam

1-3-2014 Global:

From his house in Washington, Pa., convicted sex offender Jeffrey Herschell preyed on a 12-year-old girl a continent away.

He was watching -- and directing -- the girl in a live-sex show in the Philippines with the help of a pimp there who ran a child sex ring from an Internet cafe and charged his customers a fee to control the action in real time.

This is the latest threat in the ever-shifting battle against child predators: webcam child sex tourism.

It used to be that pedophiles had to travel to molest a child, often to countries such as Thailand, Cambodia and the Philippines. It was difficult, dangerous and available only to those with means.

Now, with the proliferation of high-speed Internet service even in remote areas, they can do it online from home.

Herschell is in prison for a dozen years after U.S. Homeland Security agents from Pittsburgh traveled to the Philippines in 2011 and identified his young victim.

But the pimp in the Philippines, Archie Abala, had many other customers like Herschell in the U.S. and elsewhere.

"These cases are considered 'virtual traveler' cases," said one of the agents, James Kilpatrick, a computer forensics expert. "Instead of getting on a plane and flying to the Philippines, he can do this on the computer."

Agents Kilpatrick and Derek Bassler won an award in November from the local Law Enforcement Agency Directors for their efforts in finding the girl and putting Herschell away.

It was necessary to identify her so prosecutors could charge Herschell with production of child pornography instead of mere possession.

The honor was gratifying, but there wasn't much time to reflect on it. The agents and their partners in the U.S. Attorney's Crimes Against Children Task Force know they are up against a flood of child exploitation fomented by constantly evolving technology.

This kind of predation seems to be growing in countries where poverty is rampant. Anyone with a webcam and available children desperate for money can set up a business.

Some of Mr. Abala's victims in the Philippines were as young as 8 and were forced to have sex with adults and even animals for a few dollars a session. The 12-year-old used her $7 to buy food for her family.

"One victim [in the Philippines] told us she was doing this almost every night," Agent Bassler said.

There's no shortage of customers around the globe.

"We do get a lot of reports on this issue," said John Shehan, executive director in the exploited children division at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. "As more people are online with high-speed Internet service, it will continue to grow."

The point was driven home recently with a worldwide sting set up by a Dutch children's rights organization, Terre des Hommes.

The group created a virtual 10-year-old Filipino girl named "Sweetie" and posed as her in chat rooms to entice webcam tourists who wanted her to perform sex acts.

For two months last spring, the "girl" was approached online by 20,000 predators in 71 countries, including hundreds in the U.S. More than 1,000 of the men offered money.

"The moment we got online, we were swamped, like an avalanche," the group's special projects director, Hans Guyt, said in a webcast at the time.

Terre des Hommes turned the customer list over to Interpol.

The organization is worried that webcam sex shows will soon become as common as more typical child pornography. As Internet service grows more efficient in all parts of the world, it seems inevitable that the child sex trade will capitalize on it.

"People use good technology for bad reasons," Mr. Shehan said.

The Philippines seems to be a particular hotbed for child sex; the government there estimates 100,000 children are forced into the trade. But it's increasingly common in other poor countries, too, where the laws may not have kept pace with the Internet age.

Regardless of the motives on the production end, the business wouldn't work without people like Herschell on the receiving end, willing to shell out $30 for a pay-per-view show.

His case began with a 2010 raid of Mr. Abala's "cybersex den" in Cebu City, where he enticed girls from 8 to 17 to perform sex acts in real time for patrons who told him what to make the children do on camera. He communicated directly with his customers by email and instant messenger, and they paid him through Xoom or other services.

Filipino authorities, who were able to identify several victims after the raid, interviewed Mr. Abala, who said he had 10 to 15 customers in the U.S.

One of them was Herschell, 55, a convicted child molester who was working as a security guard and living on Ewing Street in Washington.

Herschell made attempts to hide his identity, using a fake name, email address and postal address. Agents also learned that, at his prior address on Pike Street in the Meadow Lands, he had used the wireless Internet service of his neighbor in making his contacts in the Philippines.

A check of his record indicated he had been convicted in 2000 of indecent assault and corruption of minors in connection with the molestation of a child in 1998. The mother of that child, who had been Mr. Herschell's girlfriend, also had told the FBI that she had found child porn on his computer.

Agents raided the Ewing Street house in March 2011. On his computer, agents found that Herschell had recorded some 20 sessions he had viewed. But among the images in the videos was a 12-year-old girl who was not among the known victims of Mr. Abala and his cohorts in the Philippines.

The U.S. attorney's office could have prosecuted Herschell for possession and moved on. But the agents knew that if they could identify that 12-year-old, prosecutors also could get him for production of child porn and lock him up for at least a decade. Since he had already had a conviction for assaulting a child, they considered him a worthy target for the extra effort.

Agents Bassler and Kilpatrick flew to the Philippines in September 2011 and interviewed the victims in Manila. The girls knew the 12-year-old in the Herschell videos. Mr. Abala, who has cooperated with authorities, also recognized her and described where she was living.

It took two weeks, but with the help of a Philippine national police officer, the agents tracked the girl down.

She identified herself as the girl in the videos and the U.S. attorney's office was able to add a charge of production. The charge was later dropped as part of a plea negotiations, but Herschell pleaded to coercion of a minor and possession of child porn and went to federal prison for 12 years. He will be on federal probation for the rest of his life.

CNN was on hand for the sentencing and highlighted the investigation as part its ongoing Freedom Project focused on sexual exploitation in the Philippines.

"It was a big case for us," Agent Kilpatrick said. "I've been doing this for 10 to 12 years, and this is in the top 10."

Federal agents in other U.S. jurisdictions are pursuing Mr. Abala's other American patrons, but the Justice Department refused to discuss the status of those cases.

Agents Bassler and Kilpatrick, along with Assistant U.S. Attorney Jessica Smolar, were honored for their work Nov. 14 at the 16th annual LEAD awards ceremony at the University of Pittsburgh.

The Herschell case had unique elements, but in another sense he was just another child predator among so many. By one FBI estimate, 750,000 predators are online worldwide at any one time, searching for child victims.

Agents Kilpatrick and Bassler say authorities are doing everything they can to catch them.

"It's never-ending," Agent Bassler said. ..Source.. by Torsten Ove

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Cops Enlist Data-Tracking Software in the Fight against CHILD PREDATORS

While I have no problem with developing software to stop child pornography, this article contains some disturbing supporting information and implications. The implication here is that, Child Predators (i.e., sex offenders) need to be stopped, so one would believe any evidence presented would result from some sex offense, however that is not the case here.

Note this comment "Evidence of child abuse, including child pornography, .." they are co-mingling sex abuse evidence with sex offense evidence, and they are two different worlds, with sex abuse having far more (maybe ten-fold +) numbers of cases than is found in sex offenses. In fact, this comment " The federal government estimates that more than five children die every day as a result of child abuse." comes from Child Maltreatment Reports which includes child neglect cases that have nothing to do with sex offenders. see Child Maltreatment Report 2009 (Fatalities [1,676/365=4.6 day).

This article about "Child Pornography" may be revealing a disturbing trend by the US Dep't of Justice, to co-mingle unrelated evidence, to get harsher laws passed against sex offenders by implying they are the cause of abuse cases in general. It is time to begin questioning all statistical articles about child pornography, to see if thats what they are doing.

11-7-2011 National:

A new tool to track child abuse images shared via BitTorrent may soon be ready for the streets

Evidence of child abuse, including child pornography, is often readily available via the Web thanks to peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing sites. BitTorrent software poses a particular problem for stopping the trade of these illicit images because it breaks the files into pieces and sends them from one computer to the next via different paths without passing through any centralized servers. This has for the most part rendered cops and security experts powerless to trace the origins of the files and catch the predators.

Recently, however, engineers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee have developed promising new software to automate the tracking of BitTorrent content and hopefully help law-enforcement officials solve this puzzle. The key is locating the images quickly by focusing on new files coming out of RSS feeds and entering P2P networks, before they can be widely distributed.

The more times a file has been downloaded via a P2P network the more widely distributed the contents of that file are, making it much more difficult to track, says Robert Patton, an applied software engineering researcher at Oak Ridge who is developing the software with Thomas Potok, head of the lab's Applied Software Engineering Research Group.

Child predators can share images, videos or other content by first creating a small descriptor file, or "torrent," that can be distributed via the Web or e-mail. The torrent file will tell anyone interested in downloading this content how to contact a "tracker" computer that coordinates the matching of consumers with suppliers. Because of the way BitTorrent works, the consumer ends up getting different pieces of content from multiple computers with different IP (Internet Protocol) addresses.

Oak Ridge's software grabs the torrent file and immediately investigates the IP addresses of the different computers from which pieces of the file are stored. Based on data-traffic patterns, the software then prioritizes IP addresses to be investigated, creating a short list of suspects for cops to investigate.

The federal government estimates that more than five children die every day as a result of child abuse. As it is, law enforcement has the resources to work on less then 1 percent of the caseload, says Grier Weeks, executive director of the National Association to Protect Children, a nonprofit based in Knoxville, Tenn. Oak Ridge's automated winnowing of suspects is expected to be a valuable time-saver for law enforcement hunting down those computers and their owners. Currently cops have too many IP addresses, most of them dead ends, to investigate.

Oak Ridge's work on the BitTorrent tool began in early 2010 when the association asked researchers at Oak Ridge and law enforcement officials from Tennessee and Virginia to educate them on the pervasiveness of child abuse and exploitation, much of it shared on the Internet. The idea was for the association to connect Oak Ridge's scientists with law enforcement overwhelmed by the magnitude of the problem and hindered by technical challenges. The Knoxville Police Department, home of the Tennessee Internet Crimes against Children Task Force, expressed interest in Oak Ridge's work soon after meeting the researchers.

Oak Ridge's software means that sophisticated methods of data analysis may soon be in the hands of law enforcement officials. Two police departments are now testing it, although Weeks declined to identify them. "This is a Geiger counter for locating predatory pedophiles," he says. "Instead of radiation, it finds the presence of child abuse images."

The biggest concern about the software at this point is whether its use will hold up in court or allow potential offenders to get off on some technicality. If the software does prove successful, however, "there will be one less excuse for inaction, which is what we have now," says Weeks, who adds that he has brought the software to the attention of top law enforcement agencies, including the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. "This is an entirely new field really, what we would call child-rescue technology, and it uses the same sorts of tools and methods as are used in counterterrorism." ..Source.. by Larry Greenemeier

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Inside the mind of the sex offender

7-3-2011 National:

Many factors to account for, experts say, and each case is different

Some people who create or view child pornography know it's wrong and feel shame after they commit the crime.

Others are considered psychopathic and either don't understand child pornography is wrong or don't care.

Some perpetrators were physically or emotionally abused as children. Others weren't.

Sometimes there are physiological factors, and people's baser brain functions override their logical prefrontal cortex functions, making them more likely to want to view child pornography.

With a former Jackman kindergarten teacher pleading guilty recently to federal charges of producing child pornography, and other recent arrests across the state -- sometimes of people in respected positions -- the question becomes: Why?

There is not one answer to why some people make or view child pornography, or why they are aroused by lewd images of children, according to psychologists and research. What is known, however, is that the number of perpetrators is increasing, particularly because the Internet creates easy availability.

A greater number of suspects in child pornography cases are being prosecuted. More are being convicted. And prison sentences are increasing, according to data compiled between 1994 and 2006 by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, which is a component of the Office of Justice Programs within the U.S. Department of Justice.

A large number of convicted offenders are white, educated, middle-aged men.

Eighty-nine percent of people arrested on child pornography charges in 2006 were white; 99 percent were male; and 58 percent had attended some college, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The median age at arraignment was 42.

The former Jackman kindergarten teacher, Rob Mocarsky, 42, pleaded guilty June 15 in U.S. District Court in Bangor.

Maine State Police found digital photos of his students that Mocarsky took in his classroom of five- and six-year-old girls in costumes, with their genitals exposed, according to court filings. The images were not shared with others, and the children were not assaulted or made to perform sexual acts, according to the documents.

Mocarsky's attorney declined to allow Mocarsky to be interviewed because he awaits sentencing.

Each case is different

Ask a psychologist why some people desire to view or make child pornography and you'll probably get an answer like this: Each case is different and complex.

"There's a whole range of phenomena, from the very innocent to extremely egregious, so we're really talking about a number of different syndromes," said Ronald Feintech, a licensed psychologist and sex therapist at the Couples Center in Portland.

There are patterns, though. Childhood abuse can lead to what Feintech refers to as the "victim triangle" in adulthood.

Depending on the severity and circumstances of the childhood abuse -- whether it was sexual, physical or emotional -- people may try to subconsciously work through their issues in adulthood by being a victim, rescuer or perpetrator.

When people become "professional victims," they put themselves in similar, abusive situations throughout their lives, Feintech said. Those who become rescuers may counsel people with issues they themselves have faced.

People who become perpetrators do to others what was done to them, not necessarily for reasons of revenge, Feintech said, "but mostly a defense mechanism called 'identification with the aggressor.'"

Feintech said, "If you often look in their history, that was done to them, and they're trying to resolve it psychologically, work it through, by developing this exploitative pattern."

Not all sex offenders were abused, and many know that viewing child pornography is wrong, but they are "overcome by the compulsion to do it," Feintech said. "When caught, they're flooded with shame ... Very often prior to getting caught there are elaborate rationalizations."

With others, "They may know it's illegal or that it's wrong in some sense, but they don't care," he said. "There's a blunting of the sense of conscience."

Often there's a biological component as well, Feintech said, where lower parts of the brain hijack the higher, more rational parts. Childhood trauma can alter a person's brain chemistry.

A significant number of offenders suffer from pedophilia, which the American Psychiatric Association defines as a disorder in which an adult's primary sexual attraction is to prepubescent children -- generally younger than 13. Some pedophiles are attracted to children of the same sex, but most are heterosexual.

Climate of hysteria

There are authentic, horrendous examples of child exploitation, but Feintech cautioned people against over-reacting to more innocent actions, such as parents taking pictures of their children in the bathtub.

"I think we live in a climate of almost hysteria about child pornography, and I think as a society we sometimes do more damage than what it is we're trying to protect against," he said.

It's also important to match appropriate therapies to different offenders, he said.

Some respond to counseling, while others require a more structured system involving tracking or surveillance systems, regular polygraph tests, psychotherapy or random home visits from probation officers.

Sgt. Glenn Lang with the Maine State Police Computer Crimes Unit said he's often surprised by who is caught with child pornography.

"I think it's a crime where people know it's wrong. It's not an educational thing. These people are just wired differently than the rest of us," he said.

There are more child pornography cases in Maine than law enforcement can realistically handle, he said. Though he didn't know a precise yearly number, he estimated the caseload to be "hundreds and hundreds."

The computer crimes unit has four full-time officers who deal with all types of computer crimes. Lang said he could keep 10 detectives busy year-round just with child pornography cases.

There is a misconception, he said, that mainly misguided teenagers view child pornography and that it's a victimless crime because there's no interaction.

It's not true.

"It's a symptom of a much greater problem. If you're interested in seeing a six-month-old child being raped, you're a danger to children. It's as simple as that," he said.

Seeing such graphic images desensitizes people, he said. And the impact on child victims can be profound.

Children who were exploited to produce pornography can show a number of symptoms, such as physical illnesses, withdrawal, anti-social behavior, depression, fear, anxiety and moodiness, according to a theme paper prepared for the World Congress against Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children.

One challenge for law enforcement, Lang said, is showing that children in the images are real human beings and not digitally altered.

"A lot of the child pornography that we encounter -- they're of children that have not been identified yet," he said, so some defense attorneys argue that the images were electronically manufactured.

"The truth is these people are thirsty for the real thing. They're not after morphed images," Lang said. He said he's been with the agency 10 years, and arresting people with fake images has not been an issue.

It's difficult to pinpoint how many sex offenders released from jail are likely to commit a new sex offense, as different studies focus on different sex offenses over varying time periods and don't include unreported offenses.

Victim advocacy groups report higher recidivism rates.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics states about 5.3 percent of sex offenders released from prison in 1994 were re-arrested for an additional sex offense over the following three years, and 24 percent were re-convicted for a new offense involving all types of crimes.

Those numbers include violent sex offenders such as those who committed molestation or rape.

Sex offenses involving children account for a relatively small number of the total crime load in the U.S. Just 2.5 percent of the more-than 83,000 suspects prosecuted in federal courts in 2006 had committed child sex offenses, according to the federal statistics bureau.

Sex offenses are, however, among the fastest-growing crimes handled by the federal justice system. Just 431 suspects were arrested by the U.S. Marshals Service in 1994 for a sex offense. In 2006, the number was 2,191.

About 60 percent of child sex crime suspects were prosecuted in 2006, up from about 40 percent in 1994. About 90 percent of defendants were convicted and sentenced to prison, up from 80 percent in 1994. The median prison sentence also increased, from 36 months to 63 months, according to the bureau.

Ninety-five percent of child pornography defendants were sentenced for materials depicting a minor younger than 12, and 97 percent were sentenced for the use of a computer in the offense. ..Source.. by Erin Rhoda

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I-Team: Child predators, part 1

This story has a major HOLE in it, it starts out by saying "Hundreds online either looking at or distributing CP." Then a bit later they say, they need "Administrative Subpoena Powers" to go after these suspected folks. It seems to me that, it is impossible to identify them, then call them suspected. If they are identified, go get them you do not need ASP powers. (Part-2 is below the video)(At very least, take down the KNOWN DATA BASES of CP)

Now in another article about the same story they speak about the embarrassment law enforcement felt -3 years ago- when Rhode Island was ID'ed as the worst in the nation for this crime. Also in the article are some stats which are shocking: RI received Grants "$647,438: Federal funding over three years" and the net arrest record is: 10 in 2008, 22 in 2009, and 50 in 2010. In other words, out of the hundreds they see online daily, they were only able to get 82 of them over three years (at a cost of $7,895 per case). Yup, embarrassing!

I wonder why they need administrative subpoena powers, could be because they are no rules to follow under ASP. Clearly RI needs new folks in this area, something is very wrong, or who do we believe?

5-4-2011 Rhode Island:

An NBC 10 I-Team investigation shows that hundreds of Rhode Island men are online, nearly every minute of every day, either looking at or distributing child pornography. And law enforcement authorities say dozens of these men, are sexual predators.

The I-Team was granted unprecedented access to the Rhode Island State Police's secret Cyber Crimes Unit. Using highly sophisticated computer software, 17 highly trained police officers and civilian employees track the child pornography trade in Rhode Island.

" There are known databases out there of images that have been viewed by law enforcement," said Lt. Nicholas Tella, who heads up the Cyber Crimes Unit, "so we know what we're looking at."

And what detectives are looking at is shocking.

Some pictures show adult men sexually abusing young girls. Some of the girls are infants, as young as 6 months old.

"Any given time, at any given day, there are hundreds of men looking at child pornography," said Coventry Police detective, Kevin Harris, who is part of a federal and state task force working at the Cyber Crimes Unit.

Just two weeks ago, Edgar Braley, 31, of West Warwick, was convicted for trying to entice two 13 year old girls to have sex with him.

He posed online, on the girl's MySpace sites, as an 18 year old.

Peg Langhammer, the executive director of Day One, an organization that helps sexual assault victims, told the I-Team that parents must be aware of what their young children and teenagers are looking at on their computers.

"They should start talking about what's out there with their children right away," Langammer said.

Child pornography distribution is a serious problem throughout the country, but more so, in Rhode Island.

"Rhode Island was identified as being the worst state in the country for child pornography traders," Tella said.

Tella and other law enforcement officials who try to track and arrest child pornographers, are frustrated. They say some legislators, and the Rhode Island branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, are blocking legislation what would help them arrest sexual predators and child pornographers, as soon as they are identified.

State police want the authority to use something called an administrative subpoena. It would allow the Superintendent of State Police, or the Attorney General, to issue a subpoena, based on evidence developed at the Cyber Crimes Unit, that would allow police to identify the account holder of IP addresses of suspected child pornographers or sexual predators.

"The IP address consists solely of numbers. There is no other information other than a number...it shows the user's general location and is not evidence of criminal behavior," Tella said.

Tella testified at a recent hearing on proposed legislation what would grant the use of an administrative subpoena.

Tella said once a suspected sexual predator's IP address is identified, it is extremely important to arrest that person as soon as possible, before the predator can gain access to other potential victims.

But the ACLU, and some key state senators, said there must be judicial review of any subpoena that is issued.

"It's fine to trust the police. But our criminal justice system is not based on trust. One of the key aspects of our system is judicial oversight," testified Steve Brown, executive director of the ACLU.

Brown is concerned that some police might abuse the administrative subpoena, and search IP addresses for other possible crimes, that don't have anything to do with child porn.

In the meantime, the Cyber Crimes Unit continues its work, tracking and in some cases arresting child pornographers and sexual predators, at an alarming rate. ..Source.. by Jim Taricani



I-Team: Child predators, part 2

Two years ago, 31-year-old Edgar Braley attempted to have sex with two teenage girls.

He contacted them on their MySpace pages.

Breanna Lataille, 13, at the time this incident happened, is one of the girls he tried to assault.

Braley first contacted Lataille on her then MySpace page. He lived only four blocks away from her.

"At age 13, I had a MySpace, and what normal teenagers would do, to talk to their friends. Then one day I got these messages," the girl said.

Lataille said after a few messages from Braley, the comments turned sexual.

"Saying like he was going to chop me up, screw me with a chain saw, sexual conversations and then, started getting random messages," she said.

Lataille said she felt like she was being stalked.

"Beyond scared and nervous, I didn't want to leave the house at all. It's terrifying," she said.

Breanna's mother, Shely Mathias, said her daughter did what she was told to do when finding strange remarks on an Internet site.

"I was scared for her, like some psycho was coming after her," Mathias said.

The Rhode Island State Police Cyber Crimes Unit tracks and arrests child pornographers, and sexual predators.

Braley was convicted two weeks ago of attempting to entice minors to have sex with him.

Peg Langhammer is the executive director of Day One, an organization that counsels sexual assault victims. She said parents need to make their children, even young children, aware of sexual predators on the Internet.

""It's so critical that parents become informed," she said. "They should start talking about what's out there with their children right away. Once they're teenagers and they have all the laptops and they are just using them in their bedrooms."

For Breanna Lataille, she knows she came very close to being Braley's victim.

Rhode Island has been identified by law enforcement officials as a state with one of the highest numbers of sexual predators and child pornographers in the country.

Experts say that parents need to constantly monitor their children's computer use to save them from being victims.

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Eye of the beholder: Cute, naked photos of tots pose dilemma for parents

11-2-2010 National:

In a digital world, parents worry photos may be misused — or that they may be suspect

When Nicole Saupe’s son was about 18 months old, the Cincinnati-based photographer snapped a picture of him sitting in a big, rattan chair shaped like a wok. He was too cute to resist in his jammies, his spread legs revealing his diaper, his belly poking out from under his shirt. And so Saupe uploaded the image onto a new online gallery she had created.

“Before I knew it, it had been downloaded three times. That had me very unsettled,” Saupe recalled. “It did freak me out so much that somebody downloaded these pictures.” She doesn’t know why somebody downloaded the images – maybe he or she just thought it was a cute picture. But Saupe kept envisioning a pedophile and “it made me so ill.”

Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, it’s not hard to find pictures of children, some in varying degrees of undress, some naked, being shown off by proud parents. But others on mommy sites and blogs question the practice, warning that child sexual predators can see, too. Some warn it may be dangerous for another reason: that parents themselves can be viewed as suspect — and even arrested — for taking what they see as cute pictures of their kids but others may misinterpret as compromising.

As a result, the question of how, where and whether to show what formerly seemed the most innocent of pictures, like tots playing in a bathtub, has parents in knots.

“What [parents] might think are normal pictures could be seen the wrong way,” says Amy Adler, the Emily Kempin professor of law at New York University. “As a legal matter parents should be extremely cautious. I hate that. I think it is a shame.”

The days when parents breezily photographed toddlers at the beach or young kids running naked through the back yard sprinkler on a hot summer day may be over, she says.

“People could be arrested for [what we used to regard as] normal pictures,” says Adler.

Indeed they could. This spring, Alma Vasquez, a 22-year-old Utah mom, was charged with two counts of sexual exploitation of a minor after, police said, she took photos of the child’s father, 34-year-old Sergio Diaz-Palomino, sexually abusing their infant son.

But charges were later dropped because police determined Diaz-Palomino did not assault the baby. Instead, the couple was giving the boy a bath and after the bath, while the baby was still wet and laughing and the father happily kissed the infant’s body, Vasquez documented the scene as family memorabilia. She took the film to Walgreens for processing into prints, and a technician alerted the police. Arrests, jail, indictments, the child’s removal from Vasquez’s home by the state, followed. Diaz-Palomino, who was in the country illegally, was deported.

There have been a handful of such cases over the past few years and though most of the charges were eventually dropped, a lot of damage has been done.

We now live in a culture in which any nude photo — and some non-nude images, too — of a child is seen as potentially pornographic. Thanks to new laws, legal decisions that redefined what can constitute child pornography, and near-constant pop culture coverage of potential and real sex crimes against children, even innocent pictures of our own kids are often viewed with what Adler calls “the pedophilic gaze.”

As Betsy Schneider, a photographer and Arizona State University arts professor who sometimes uses her own naked children as photo subjects, told me, “once you suggest that it is pornographic, once they are painted in a certain light, it is hard to get that out of your head. Then we are all trapped.”

Back when those of us over the age of 35 were little, parents wouldn’t dream they could be arrested for taking such photos. But we weren’t as afraid then. Now fear drives everything from our politics to our diets to how we raise our children. And it is fear, Judith Levine, author of the book “Harmful to Minors,” believes, that turned innocent pictures of children into crimes.

Starting in the late 1980s, she said, as the government cracked down on child porn, which was then relatively rare, and child sexual abuse, arrests for child porn rose. As arrests rose, “the public said ‘Gosh we have a problem and so we have to get even tougher,'” Levine said. “That’s how panics start.”

In response to the outcry, federal and state laws were toughened and judicial decisions narrowed — but sometimes the definitions of those laws only raised new questions because they called for interpretations of terms like "lascivious." But in the context of a picture of a child, what is lascivious? To whose eyes? A parent? A pedophile? Could it include the cover the Nevermind, the 1991 Nirvana album that depicted a naked baby boy in a pool?

Schneider, the arts professor, said she has been forced to self-censor due to the way an adult could view her children’s photos. “I have a picture of my son. He is about 4 and he his totally naked and he’s holding this gun made of Legos and wearing a police hat and nothing else. He has a campy pose.”

Even though she loves the image, even though her son, now 8, is so proud of it he has hung it on his wall, she doesn't show it publicly.

Just as we aim to protect the photos of our children from being misappropriated, we find ourselves looking at images with new eyes.

No rational person questions the repulsiveness of true child sexual exploitation. But the other day a friend of mine told me about a vacation photo she found of her little boy. He was standing in her pair of cowboy boots, which came up past his knees. He was naked and laughing and when she saw this photo again, after having forgotten taking it, she laughed, too. Then she started to worry. What if somebody found this?

She hit the delete button, turning a precious memory into digital dust. ..source.. by Brian Alexander

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John Walsh "America's Most Wanted" host touts captures of child pornographers using new software

9-3-2010 National:

John Walsh, touring the nation, and a few State Attorney Generals are touting captures of online child pornographers using some new software by an unknown vendor.

See: NY- America's Most Wanted' host makes child-porn-targeting software available to Onondaga County sheriff (9-2-2010)

FL- Bay County Juvenile Among 77 Statewide Cybercrime Arrests (6-9-2010)

Florida dubbed the sting "Operation Orange Tree" and Florida is considered fourth in the nation for child pornography. See In statewide child porn sweep, most arrests in Polk

"Twenty-three agencies took part in the effort – including the Polk County Sheriff's Office, which made 45 of the arrests. Crist and McCollum lauded Polk Sheriff Grady Judd in particular for marshaling the resources to make the crack down on child pornography a high priority.

The high-profile press event took an overtly political turn when Walsh took the opportunity to endorse Gov. Charlie Crist in the race for U.S. Senate. He likewise endorsed McCollum for governor, "to pick up the mantle and take up where Charlie has left off."

Florida ranks 4th in the nation in volume of child pornography, according to the Federal Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force. Crist established the state's Child Predator/CyberCrime Unit in 2005 when he was Attorney General; the unit now has 30 members and five offices statewide, including in Tampa."

I am not sure that being the Governor of a state -fourth in the nation in child pornographers- and "Operation Orange Tree" showing that 95% of those captured were NEW sex offenders, and Florida's legislature spent its time on legislation targeting FORMER registered sex offenders, is a feather in one's cap towards being chosen as a state Senator, but who am I to say? Shouldn't legislators being looking to stop new crime rather than micro-manage former offenders, many of which were living under a bridge and likely lacked Internet access?

And, worse yet, Walsh hopes the new Governor keeps up the good work? What am I hearing? Oh its job security. Have to pay for the new software somehow.

Let's turn to the new software, the one with no catchy name and no vendor. Boy when something like this is being hidden doesn't that scare you? Maybe the ACLU needs to get involved here. Right now we have no idea if the software breaks any laws in catching these offenders, two of which were teenagers, one curious kid searching for "jailbait" pictures.

We do know this because John Walsh said:

Software designed to catch the exchange of child pornography between peer-to-peer computer users will be tried in Onondaga County in what the television host said will be a trial project for the state of New York.

Now, there is a scary thought, peer-to-peer networks, which means those computer hard drives were available to other Internet users, while searching was going on. Yes, I'm aware that peer-to-peer programs generally only allow access to certain folders, but I am also aware that today's hackers (clandestine as they are) break into computers and can do all sorts of things. And here we have a clandestine law enforcement operation, don't you just love that!

I wonder, yes I'm speculating, if law enforcement was watching the search terms being used, could they have setup files containing child porn so searchers would find and download them? And, if so, is that a form of entrapment? Time for lawyers to chime in here. ACLU -Internet and Forensic experts- where are you?

We know its true that courts have simply ignored when law enforcement actually lied to capture folks, and here they have technology as a method, all sorts of possibilities exist. Since these methods are new, they may not have been tested in court, but how will they ever be if the program has no name and no vendor? ACLU are you listening?

NOW THE GOOD STUFF: During "Operation Orange Tree" 77 offender were caught -over a eight-week operation in 2009- and 4 (four) of them were registered sex offenders.

Why is that good? The statistics, 4 / 77 = 5.4% of that group of offenders were recidivists. And that is a number that keeps coming up as the recidivism rate of former sex offenders. But, we do not know how long those offenders were in the community after their earlier conviction.

Important because the Department of Justice study everyone quotes "Recidivism of Sex Offenders Released from Prison in 1994" (the largest study of sex offender recidivism ever done) showed that 5.3% of the released sex offenders were re-arrested within 3 years of release.

Finally, I am left with my nose twitching again, this time about, the software being used and the fact there are no court cases testing it. ACLU where are you?

For now, have a great day and a better tomorrow.
eAdvocate

PS: Mark Foley was also an upstanding person in Congress who authored the SORNA portion of the Adam Walsh Act, and while he was doing that was also conversing online -sexually explicitly- with 16 year old Congressional Pages. Ultimately he stepped down and never was convicted of anything with respect to those minors according to the Adam Walsh Act. Foley was chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, which introduced legislation targeting sexual predators and created stricter guidelines for tracking them.

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