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UNPLUGGING ONLINE CREEPS

April 15, 2007

Review by Patricia Pearson
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One Child at a Time:

The Global Fight
to Rescue Children
from Online Predators
by Julian Sher
Random House Canada,
327 pages, $34.95
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The Internet has been likened to the Wild West for its freewheeling lawlessness, and nowhere has that analogy been more apt than with camera-slinging pedophiles. Thousands of friendly, neighbourhood pediatricians, chiropractors, priests, teachers and soccer coaches have been roaming this unpoliced frontier with reckless and lustful abandon for the past 15 years.
If, in the early 1990s, a mere handful were furtively emailing one another snapshots of children, by 2006, hundreds and thousands of men were using webcams to stream live video of themselves raping their daughters for an audience of like-minded "rock spiders," as the Australians call child molesters.
Group approval and encouragement indisputably increased the number of victims, as fathers and uncles and teachers got egged on in chat rooms from voyeurism to direct assault. "You show me your rape, and I'll show you mine." The Web had generated a bona fide crime wave.
Julian Sher's fine and gripping book, One Child At A Time, tells the story of the investigators who set out to rescue the victims - on the fly and with a passionate ingenuity - by teaching themselves how to navigate this uncharted virtual terrain where the criminals roamed.
One such investigator was Det. Sgt. Paul Gillespie of Toronto's Sex Crimes Unit, who explained to Sher exactly what he and his colleagues were up against in the early days. In brief: They were cops, not geeks.
They were used to working the phones and prowling the streets. They barely knew what Google was, and had clunky desktop computers that couldn't begin to analyze or sort or isolate the hundreds of thousands of child porn images being traded before their eyes. Traumatized by the brutality of the pictures and overwhelmed by their volume, Gillespie vented his anger at the world's richest computer baron. In 2003, he fired off an angry email to Bill Gates, saying, in effect, you created this mess, you help us clean it up.
To his surprise, as Sher tells it, Gates read the message and immediately ordered Microsoft Canada executives to meet with the Toronto police. In the ensuing months, the cops and the real geeks worked together to come up with some software that could monitor and match imagery from a vast database of pictures.
The end result was a program called CETS - the Child Exploitation Tracking System - which is now being used in several countries.
When the first little girl was located and rescued with help from CETS, the news "went through the (Microsoft) building in about two minutes - faster than email," Sher quotes executive Frank Clegg as saying. "The passion was just electric."
Indeed, what is fascinating about Sher's book is the degree to which the spread of child pornography has inspired a truly ardent collaborative response, not only in police agencies in dozens of countries, who usually clash with one other over jurisdiction, but also with the private sector. Sher profiles several individuals who work for such companies as AOL, Visa and Microsoft, and who have grown as obsessed about stopping the wave as have investigators.
There is, certainly, a shared sense that while the Internet is a place to make friends, money and reputations, it is also a great gathering in of demonic forces. Pedophiles find one another and so do terrorists. Girls suffering from anorexia seek tips, and starve to applause. Sex tourism gets peddled, drugs are traded, mass murderers openly declare their fantasies in advance. And all of this is entirely facilitated by Google, AOL, American Express, Microsoft and the world's banks. After all, to purchase an ad, as one German man did a few years ago in seeking out a willing victim to kill and eat, you need an email account and a credit card.
On the web, nothing is what it seems.
One of the most remarkable examples of how far investigators have come in the last five years is Operation Wickerman. In the winter of 2006, police in Edmonton, Toronto and Chicago co-ordinated a raid on an Edmonton bungalow, which they timed precisely to the moment when a "kiddievids" site administrator in the deep Web - where no IP addresses can be traced - was online, but in his kitchen getting coffee. They swept in, cuffed him, and assumed his online identity in less than five minutes. None of the other visitors to kiddievids suspected the switch, and after several months "administering" the site and collecting identities, police in a dozen countries arrested dozens and dozens of men.
One doesn't come away from this book with a strong enough sense of why so many men are capable of this most vile behaviour.
Sher has chosen to focus on the good guys.
But it is an important book that ultimately calls on all of us to do what we can - even if it is merely educating our kids, and acting as neighbourhood watch patrollers on the web.