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Toronto Globe and Mail

Infiltrating the realm of the online predator
Police have become increasingly adept at tracking the digital footprints of child pornography

[This analysis ran in Canada's leading paper the day after UK police announced a major international bust of a pedophile ring and the rescue of 31 children]

JULIAN SHER
June 19, 2007

LONDON -- The Internet cannot turn someone who has no sexual interest in abusing children into an offender. But there can be little doubt it has brought latent child sex offenders out of their dark corners - giving them anonymity, access and acceptance. Just ask the Alberta pedophile whose arrest two years ago led police down the trail that ended with the sentencing of the British online kingpin yesterday.
When the Alberta man was arrested in the spring of 2005, he offered to help police track down some of his Web buddies.
Are indecent pictures of children on the Web a "safety valve" as some say, I asked when I visited him in prison where he is serving a 14-year sentence. In other words, is it better that men like him look at pictures rather than go out and abuse children themselves?
"That's bullshit," said the man, who cannot be named because it would identify the children he abused. "All it does is make me want me to get more. And the further I go on and the more I see the pictures, the more I'm going to want to do something. It's just the next step before you start abusing."
He remembers the moment he clicked on a website that offered illicit pictures of children. "I just couldn't believe my eyes. ... That's when I started building my fantasies."
Joe Sullivan, the principal forensic behaviour analyst with Britain's Child Exploitation and Online Protection agency, calls this the "spiral of abuse."
"Some people spent all their lives hiding their predilection and never spoke to anyone about the feelings they had," said the psychologist, who has treated and interviewed hundreds of child sex offenders. "Now they were able to share ideas and get new ideas, develop their fantasies to another level."
But the same Internet that has emboldened the predators can also entrap them. Bank robbers don't shoot videos of their crimes and then post them on the Internet. Pedophiles do. They boast and brag, swap and trade.
When Carl Treleaven - of the initial chat room dismantled by police in the early stages of this operation - was arrested early last year, he had 90 people standing by online ready to download from a vast collection of more than 20 gigabytes.
Timothy David Martyn Cox, the British site administrator who was sentenced yesterday, had more than 75,000 indecent images on his computer - and he had shared more than 11,000 with his fellow offenders.
Posting and trading these images leave digital footprints, clues that police are becoming increasingly sophisticated at tracking.
It's not easy. It took months for Toronto police to first monitor and then infiltrate Mr. Treleaven's chat room; then an American investigator helped crack the code that gave police access to the encrypted identities of some of the room organizers. From there, police were able to arrest some of the leaders and seamlessly take over their identities, working patiently to ensnare and eventually arrest dozens.
In effect, they turned the very tools the predators exploit - the secrecy and anonymity of the Web - against them.
Just as online offenders try to fool young people by lurking in chat rooms pretending to be young children, police are infiltrating the darkest lairs of the Internet by posing as perpetrators.
In the British end of the operation revealed yesterday, police presided over the chat room for 10 days after they arrested the leader known as "Son of god."
Now it's not just children and their parents who need be afraid on the Web.
CEOP's Jim Gamble - who helped lead counterterrorism operations in Northern Ireland before becoming Britain's top child abuse cop - makes no excuses for deploying the same tactics police use against organized crime and terrorism.
As Mr. Gamble warned yesterday: "Anybody who thinks they can carry out such horrific activities undetected is in for a rude awakening."
And dozens of rescued children can finally sleep soundly tonight, knowing that, for them at least, the nightmare is over.
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Julian Sher is the author of One Child At a Time: Inside the Global Hunt to Rescue Children from Online Predators