Fed up with the slow pace of leglisation and law enforcement, hackers have been attacking online kiddie porn traders for years. The defiant paedophiles insist they’re just standing up for their rights to freedom of speech and sexual expression.
The UK is in a situation where the Metropolitan Police Vice Squad claims it can’t even afford to have one person in front of the computer all day tracking down offensive sites, and after my story in .net outlining this staff-shortage, I received several e-mails from volunteers who said they’d like to join the campaign against paedophiles. One reader (name withheld) emailed: “The comment about the Met astounded me. I’ve got plenty of time while I await my bypass operation and I’m certain there are many more folk like me. I’ll go hunting up these people for you – just bloody well do something about it when I find them!! I’m *not* a hacker – I only manage to re-install Windows 95 a couple of times a year because of my self inflicted disasters. But, every little bit helps.”
You can join the CyberAngels (http://www.cyberangels.org/), a group which has spent the last two years deterring child pornographers, predators and paedophiles on the Net. The CyberAngels is an all-volunteer Net organisation with more than 1,000 members in 32 countries. It’s currently running three CHIP (Child Protection) Teams. Team 1 is working on Usenet, one of the worst places for child pornography. For legal reasons, all CHIP 1 members are at least 18 years old. Graphic files are evidence of a crime, and information is passed on to ISPs and federal authorities. Membership is open to anyone who wants to stop the abuse of Net technology by paedophiles.
Team 2 is working on Internet Relay Chat (IRC) to gather evidence against child predators. Membership of CHIP 2 is by invitation only. Team 3 helps the WWW Sewer Sites Campaign (http://mavrick-bbs.com/cyranch/sewer.htm) to close down paedophile sites. CyberAngels CHIP Teams recently contributed a list of over 3,000 URLs to this campaign.
CyberAngels director Colin Gabriel Hatcher said: “There are plenty of on-line users who have been dealing with child pornographers by attacking their sites and bombing their accounts,” Hatcher said. “I would imagine it would be impossible to assess the level of activity, as anyone involved will probably keep it covert. A group that acts as judge and jury and executioner is not a group I would personally join, although I can understand their anger and feeling that nothing is being done. The police should be given the resources they need to do the job.”
Hatcher says it is not possible to get child porn off the Net. “But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be trying to remove it. The main problem is the long time it takes law enforcement to act upon the many reports. There are paedophile sites that I personally reported to the FBI and service providers months ago, yet the sites are still up. It’s small wonder that people feel like bombing them. Paedophilia is a big industry and those who run it are rich and organised. I’m sure they will replace anything that gets destroyed, but this isn’t a reason for letting them abuse the Net and give it a low reputation.
“Both I and the CyberAngels have been working 100 hours a week for the past two years to stop the trade in child pornography on-line,” Hatcher points out. “We gather hundreds of pieces of evidence each week, and have seen a number of arrests and convictions as a result of the work of our members. Our group, however, has a strict code of conduct that does not permit members to use unethical or illegal methods. Since we have about 70 law enforcement officers in our organisation, you can see why we would not be using such methods.”
He says skilled users can trace Usenet posts. “We have an expert TRAK Team and there is little they cannot trace. On-line paedophiles are used to being attacked electronically, and many are well organised and skilled in Net technology.”
Hatcher is concerned that innocent people could be wrongly targeted. “Many users have been impersonated on Usenet and their e-mail or personal addresses given out as advertising child pornography. Then they’ve been viciously attacked.” Lastly, he reminds us: “Don’t forget that most users are NOT paedophiles and the Net is a wonderful place to work, play and study.”
I contacted New Scotland Yard’s Paedophilia Unit, which said it was “keen to have help”, but referred me to the Home Office for the official line. “We can’t condone vigilante activities,” a Home Office spokesperson explained. “It’s an offence to look at or download pornographic pictures of children under the age of 16.”
But how can the public send offending material to the Internet Watch Foundation (http://www.internet-watch.org) or police if we can’t attach the pics? “We can accept information, but we can’t sanction people searching for it. If we had a list of volunteers, how could we be sure they weren’t paedophiles? This would be a great excuse for paedophiles to search for porn. Also, the police could arrest someone for having porn on their computer and the defendant could claim they were about to send these to the police.”
The spokesperson said that if you sent hardcore evidence to the police, it would be up to their discretion whether to prosecute you! However, the Home Office conceded that contacting the police first and saying that you’re looking for kiddie porn was better than not mentioning it up front at all. Also, information about offensive sites is okay, so send URLs.
For those who prefer a more conventional approach, you can join the Coalition of Internet Advocates (http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/3825/ciaindex.html) in lobbying ISPs to remove offensive sites. “DigiWeb [a US ISP] defends boylovers’ right to use the Net,” the site says. “We finally asked DigiWeb’s corporate customers to join in our efforts, but some chose not to get involved. Now, we are preparing to boycott their products.”
Also, there’s a very professional-looking site, Pedowatch (http://www.pedowatch.org/), which welcomes all volunteers. “Your identity will be kept confidential, but we may require a solid reference and your consent to a background check, depending on the nature of your assistance. Currently we need German and Japanese translators”. Several of our volunteers were accepted into this group and are happy with the organisation’s leadership.
Who’s watching the children?
While vigilantes plan their strategies, paedophiles are revelling in their newfound forum where they can chat on-line with other like-minded people who share their sexual passion for kids. The Net has provided an unprecedented global anonymous forum which is a major source of comfort and camaraderie. Now they can globally put forward ideas which would not have been expressed to the mainstream public ever before. For example, at one of the many Paedophile Liberation Front sites, they’re lobbying for the right to have sexual relationships with kids and enjoy pornographic material. Can you imagine that being openly discussed in person on a TV current affairs program? They claim that only 50 per cent of children in porn movies or photos “seem to suffer”, so this means “at least half of the children who participate in child pornography look perfectly OK.” This sort of argument is ridiculous and wouldn’t normally even be expressed in public. Paedophile activists would have their posters torn down or demonstrators would be attacked. But now they have a new, safe outlet. The UK Government released statistics in August 1997 which said there are 110,000 convicted paedophiles in Britain. The jails can only hold a total of 60,000 prisoners. Sixteen per cent of released paedophiles offend again within two years.
When they’re released from prison, they can turn to the Net, and when you find the right spots, you hit an endless trail of sites. Nobody knows how many there are, but I spent a week looking and never got through all the links. After pasting a 20,000-word selection of comments from various sites, I’ve edited a small portion of these and summarised my findings.
I’ve taken out graphic references and while many people may feel queasy about this sort of material, it is important to see what is out there. This problem won’t go away by turning a blind eye, and it is mainly by familiarising yourself with paed’s strategies and thoughts that you can help identify them and take appropriate action. I didn’t look at hardcore material (an illegal activity), but searched through the numerous home page and chat areas and sites featuring ‘swimming pool’ pics or dressed kids. These pics are legal and the pages are usually headlined with comments such as, “Pictures to remind you of your childhood”. While I haven’t included site addresses, many are listed at the anti-paedophile sites, so you can lobby ISPs to remove the pages.
Some facts I gleaned:
* ‘ChildLovers (CL)’, ‘BoyLovers (BL)’ and ‘GirlLovers (GL)’ are some of the terms used by paedophiles who say they truly love kids and wouldn’t do anything to harm them. They believe it’s important for the child to reciprocate affection and advocate the concept of ‘consensual sex’. They want the right to date your kids, and are vocal about this campaign on the Net. CLs claim physical relationships are sought after by young kids and are healthy to their sexual growth. The renowned NAMBLA (The North American Man/Boy Love Association) group, which included gay poet Allen Ginsberg among its membership, has an official site.
* They “demand freedom of speech” (Boylove Manifesto by jay_h) to disseminate their views. “We demand to be held to the same standards as every other participant in the Net: if there is nothing illegal being published on a ‘boylove site’ then this site may not be shut down, or censored at will,” writes jay_h. “We demand a forum for open communication between boylovers, that is entirely free from repression.”
* The term ‘paedophile’ is used by ChildLovers to define people with pathological traits, such as rapists, murderers, malicious people who use false nicknames and e-mails to discuss children in wet undies, trade porn, use chat areas to talk to kids and try to arrange ‘meetings’.
* Paeds point out that their type of love has always existed, and say we’d all better learn how to deal with it. Many of them blame society’s repression for ‘turning’ some of them into rapists.
* Paeds don’t *want* to be changed. “I’m crazy about kids and I’ve never wished I didn’t like them,” is a typical comment.
* Their sites are not access-protected or illegal, and children can easily look at them.
* Rich paedophiles hoping to avoid prosecution visit places such as Amsterdam, the Philippines, Vietnam and Cambodia to indulge. They use the Net to swap details about the best places to visit.
* Paedophiles freely make information available on the Net about how to adopt kids and avoid being identified by the authorities as a “Boylover”. If they’d sent this sort of advice through the mail system, it could be intercepted and they would be prosecuted, but now it’s an online free for all.
The following are a couple of brief quotes from paedophile chat forums which typify the type of threats and sympathy they are making via the Net. Of course, there is no other mainstream venue for these opinions to be aired, but the Net community’s anti-censorship stance has given paeds the opportunity to challenge mainstream views. It is not advisable to visit these sites yourself unless you are an anti-paed volunteer, because topics discussed may contain illegal material.
“I am attracted to boys aged eight to 12. We’re so hated and persecuted just for having the thought, that we meet on the Net anonymously. We are everywhere. We have feelings, we are human beings. Cultural judgements cause many of us pain. One might say, ‘It’s fine if you feel sexual towards boys, but just stay away from them sicko.’ What if someone said that to you, about what you are attracted to? You are being told that you cannot even be near what your skin longs to touch.”
“If you are really committed to ending the raping of children, then I encourage you to find a way to include Boylovers in the culture. Because we are going to be here either way, and there aren’t enough jail cells in the world to put us all in.”
Since the paeds are using the Net to champion their views, I decided to ask a US regular on Boylover Chat several questions. This man claims he has never committed a sexual act with children, and his posts I’d read on the Net were about his struggle to remain celibate. But he cannot find anyone in the real world who will support his battle. Instead of condemnation, maybe we’ll eventually be able to find a way to help potential sex offenders divert their energy into more acceptable activities.
What age groups do you like?
BL: “ I am emotionally and sexually attracted to boys from about 8 to 13 – pre-pubescent or early pubescent. I have been this way all of my life. I think sex is not as important to most children, but when they experience sex – and they do – it is not necessarily bad. Children interpret the experience differently than adults.
When you were a kid, did you want to have a sexual relationship with an adult?
BL: “I did have sexual relations with a man when I was 9. To me, sex was fun, but I mostly enjoyed him wanting me. And I remember the crushing feelings when he suddenly did not want me. Every therapist I’ve ever had has focussed on this experience and said: `Ahhhh…’, like they’ve discovered the `cause’ of my paedophilia. They are so unwise. Then I have to explain that I had sexual urges for boys and was masturbating before this experience.”
Have you ever been convicted of a child sex crime?
BL: “I’ve never had sex with a child. I have not been convicted of any crimes. My situation is unusual in that I ‘came out’ as a boylover to my therapist first, and then to a few others. I did this voluntarily. Plenty of boys have been told *I* was disgusting. But no boys have done anything with me that I think they would consider disgusting. My worst experience was with a woman who decided she loved me and wanted to marry. When I refused, she used her knowledge as a weapon for revenge. This included phone calls to the Children’s Protective agency, the police department and my neighbors. There was a lot of damage done. My life has been threatened only twice. I am mostly afraid of the government. The government falls into the category of those who do not know the situation, but think they do, and stick their nose in.”
Are there any support groups for paeds who are trying to avoid engaging in sexual activity with kids?
BL: “There are very few people who can help me sort out what is and is not my responsibility. I’m alone here. They say we’re sick. We say they don’t understand. They say we don’t understand. We say they’re sick. It would be best if we simply examined ourselves and take responsibility for our own shit. ”
Have you ever contemplated suicide over this dilemma?
BL: “There was a time, when I was separating myself from boys, that I did. I was very sad. Therapists seem to think that boylovers are uncontrollably compulsive, and should be reigned within unbelievably stringent boundaries. For me, this is not true. I do think it is true for some boylovers. This is caused mostly by a lifetime of internal shame, which is bred by those who are afraid of us and it’s perpetuated by moral fanatics who cannot deal with their own fears and shame about sex.”
Many religious believers, who lobby for paed sites on the Net to be removed, think you are an abomination in the sight of God, yet you mentioned in BL Chat that you have faith. Are you angry with God for giving you a perilous sexual preference?
BL: “No, I’m not angry. God created me and my sexual orientation and it is my choice as to whether I use it as a gift or as a curse. I think he sits on my shoulder and supports me and hopes that I make the right choices. I’ve made some really BIG mistakes in my life, and he has always remained with me. I am on a mission to please him. I also see loving boys as a gift that He gave me. It is my duty to discover my gifts and to exploit them for the good of others. Including boys. I believe God loves me and I am a good man. My path is just not very clear, but I know I will survive.”
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It’s unlikely that you’ll ever accidentally “stumble” across paedophile material on the Net. But if you go looking for it, as many curious people do, it’s incredibly easy to find. After 18 months of using the Net and never seeing any kiddie porn, I started searching for the purposes of this story, and the first page I found – which had no hard core material – linked to hundreds of others. And don’t think that just because your kids don’t have credit cards that they can’t look at the hard-core adult porn. Parents often feel complacent about kids viewing hard-core adult sex on the Net, because most of the sex sites demand payment before you can look at the explicit pictures or movies. However, I easily found newsgroups with stolen secret passwords to a Farmyard Lover’s page featuring a woman sucking a dog’s dick and two women who were trying to have sex with a Shetland pony. That was enough, but I tried several other passwords that were valid. The adult online sex industry claims that only one-seventh of porn site users are paying customers and the rest are using stolen passwords.
At a “Combating pornography and violence: A European approach for policing the Internet” two-day conference held in London in 1997, Detective Chief Superintendent Karlheinz Moewes, of the Munich police, Germany, showed us gross paedophilia pictures downloaded or gained via the Net. Genitalia were pinked out and we saw a man pictured with a young girl on top of him, his hands gripping her small body as he penetrated her (captioned “father with six-year-old daughter”), young kids with their legs spread wide, a young Asian face (no older than three or four) with mouth open and a huge penis pinked out, a six-year-old girl helplessly hanging with her arms chained, a mother performing fellatio on a baby boy with him sitting on her face and her legs spread wide. He also showed Hans, 10, being penetrated from behind, and other shots of smiling kids, mostly under the age of 10, posing nude and clutching teddy bears. The first couple of pics were so vile that most of us instinctively looked away. Moewes stopped the gruesome slide show at the request of the conference’s chairperson, but he looked rather annoyed. “Everyone should have the same knowledge as ourselves,” he said grimly. He was supported by the next speaker, Jim Reynolds of New Scotland Yard’s paedophilia unit, who piped up: “We’re talking about a serious subject, but nobody wants to actually see it.”
I keyed the word “sex” into two of the most popular search engines, Alta Vista and Lycos, and came up with over 720,000 references for and against sex. Within two minutes I’d found material equivalent to what you’d find on the top shelf of newsagencies, and an extra minute threw up hard core porn.
The next week, my findings were quoted in an article in the Daily Mail, saying: “Children can find illegal hard core pornography within two minutes of logging on to the Internet, a report reveals.” They’d misspelt the name of our magazine and didn’t mention my name, but it was amusing to see my brief search inflated to the status of “a report”.
Here’s the porn – what are you going to do about it?
It’s frustrating that no matter how much hard-core porn and kiddie-sex stories you find on the Net, there’s often nothing much the police can do about it. I spent a morning searching, with the help of a hard-core porn magazine journalist, for three examples of what we thought were explicit Net porn.
Case 1
A site that asked for credit card details so you could see pics of women in “wide open poses”.
Internet Watch response: “This site had restricted access, and therefore we have not seen the actual images you refer to, as it is not our policy at present to go beyond adult check (usually asking for a credit card) or credit card requirements. However, we shall continue to monitor the site on a regular basis and will take further action if appropriate.”
Metropolitan Police Vice Unit Inspector Ken Bell: “What’s obscenity? I can’t tell you. Only a jury can decide and two juries will come to different verdicts. We’ve had a lot of knockbacks. Even top-shelf magazines can be considered obscene, however, if they’re sold next to kids’ comics.”
Case 2
URL for site with a UK e-mail address for feedback. Had a close-up shot of penetrative sex and many other porn images.
Internet Watch: “Our research places www.richards-realm.com in Florida, but we will continue to investigate this further, as there is a UK e-mail address on the warning page.”
Metropolitan Police Vice Unit Inspector Ken Bell: “A lot of Net users are in the US and Japan and they have completely different obscenity laws. The US has the First Amendment. Everyone globally would have to agree to using ratings systems and then rating everything they send to newsgroups and Web sites.”
Case 3
alt.sex.pre-teens
Graphic and abhorrent text descriptions of sex with 11-year-olds.
Internet Watch: “We have checked with the police concerning the status of text articles, and the advice we have been given is that written material is very unlikely indeed to lead to a successful prosecution under UK obscenity law. This is therefore an issue which we are unfortunately not able to pursue.”
Metropolitan Police Vice Unit Inspector Ken Bell: “Text is only considered obscene if it’s likely to `corrupt and deprave’. The last test case was Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1960 – and the case failed miserably. We’d pass all paedophile text to the National Criminal Intelligence Service and they would forward it to the local police force concerned.”
Inspector Bell says Internet Watch’s plan of self-regulation for the Net industry is our best hope. “I haven’t got the resources to allow an officer to sit in front of a computer all day.” He says it’s “very difficult” to obtain evidence, particularly with anonymous re-mailers and encryption devices. “You can’t expect every complaint to be acted upon. If Internet Watch alerts ISPs and they block links to offensive Web sites, that’s much more effective than trying to prosecute every offender.”
Internet Watch spokesperson Ruth Dixon, who has sent about 200 reports covering 600 items to police during the past four months, points out the long-term aim is to establish a ratings-system. “Parents could use this to block offensive material,” Ms Dixon explains. “About two-thirds of the material we’re received has been child pornography. As for adult porn, the police are more likely to gain a conviction if it features very hard core material, such as bestiality or urination.”
Lawyer Robb Klein, of SJ Berwin, suggested that global laws should guide the Net. “There are international laws for the sea and air-space – why not cyberspace? Probably because the definitions of obscenity are so different in each country.”
He cited cases in Singapore, China and Germany where ISPs had already been warned or prosecuted for transmitting offensive material. But he conceded: “It would be impossible for any authority to check every gigabyte of information on the Net. Software packages should be used to monitor which groups children are looking at. Censorship could mean we end up with the ridiculous situation where no one can look up facts about breast cancer because the word `breast’ is banned,” he said, indirectly referring to when AOL did exactly this, but has since rectified the situation. Klein said the best way to prevent children from gorging themselves on pornography was to “teach them proper values, and stop blaming mass communications for having too much influence”.
[These stories were both run past lawyers and editors and about a quarter of the material was cut out because it was so gruesome. After these stories were published, several paedophiles emailed offensve material to me, but I deleted them as soon as I received them. Usually I could only read an offensive text description, as our work connections were 28kbps modems and could rarely cope with opening email attachments.
[A US site that deals with worldwide child abuse investigations: www.projectsafechildhood.gov]
