Inquisition 21
 |
 |
|
|
| Log In
|
|
|
|
|
| Search Articles
|
|
|
|
|
| Comments
|
|
|
You don't have to,
but if you log in,
you can add comments.
|
| Page Referral
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
No one using the Internet is safe
|
|
|
|
This article is one small outcome of a current investigation into police corruption in the USA and UK that is being carried out by a private team of volunteers.
No one using the Internet is safe
This article is one small outcome of a current investigation into police corruption in the USA and UK that is being carried out by a private team of volunteers.
Brian Rothery
The main initial and continuing focus of the team is the crimes committed by police in their carrying out of Operations Landslide, Ore and other related spin-offs such as Avalanche, Amethyst and Snowball. These are so fully covered elsewhere on this web site that they will not be re-visited in any depth here. The reason that members of the team are not identified in this article is to protect them, although the police appear to know at least some of them. What is revealed here is that an even greater threat to the Internet, to our liberty and to our systems of justice than those in the Landslide and its spin-off operations has been identified.
I ask readers to appreciate that this information has been obtained with extreme difficulty and that closed doors and official bureaucracy, not to mention vested interests, have also made the obtaining of relevant information very difficult. I am also constrained in revealing key sources.
Two million names of credit card holders that used their cards to purchase adult pornography have been sent to the UK police by the credit card companies. We do not have the equivalent numbers for the US, but we can assume that they are even greater. Why have they been sent to the police? For a number of reasons it seems, one of which may originally have been to flag individuals for future busts if and when new legislation, already underway, gets implemented, such as that to ban ‘extreme pornography’, which includes mainly play type spanking and fantasy bondage. A separate US excuse is to legislate adult porn to control the access of children to it.
The huge police interest in adult pornography can be understood by reference to two new UK organizations – SOCA (Serious Organized Crime Agency) and CEOP (Child Exploitation Online Protection), both semi commercial businesses, largely managed by police and ex police, which have had huge set up costs and will operate under a large budget, but are expected to become self financing. CEOP cost £45 million and will have to pay wages to 200 staff. They need organized crime and online child exploitation to justify their existence and budgets, to survive and to prosper. One of the biggest areas of potential revenue, already realized in the US, is through the ARA, asset recovery agency, where either suspected drugs or pornography distribution justifies raids and asset seizure. ARA is a misleading label, to the public meaning the recovery of the 'proceeds of crime', but already it is being used to seize 'all material wealth'.
As has also been learned by the British police from the US, asset seizure together with planting of evidence can make defence virtually impossible and plea bargaining all the easier. If your money is seized you cannot hire a defence lawyer, even if you could find a good one to defend a pornography accusation and its accompanying shame, and the planting of material makes a plea bargain all the more likely. So great was the stigma attached to child porn that most of the individuals raided in Operation Ore plea bargained, even those who found themselves on the Landslide database through credit card fraud. The fact that Landslide and Ore are falling apart now gives the UK police a more urgent reason to find something to replace them with. The two million names in the UK alone could go a long way towards maintaining good revenue, and the busts from Operation Ore have both shown the way and given the police some confidence. But stop, the shrewd reader may say, what has child porn got to do with adult porn apart from the material employed? I and others wondered about that also.
An answer, perhaps only partial, came when many of those reported by their credit card companies to the police for paying for adult porn began to receive unsolicited email invitations to visit child porn web sites. The team mentioned above had already established beyond reasonable doubt that after child porn was swept off the Net by the draconian new legislation, only the police in the US and UK (that we know of) had it in any quantity and were using it in sting operations, the LA police for example openly boasting that they were doing this and that they had what they described as perhaps one of the world’s largest collections of child porn.
So politically correct and cowed had commentators become through the child porn moral panic that many accepted that stings had to be used to ‘catch would be perpetuators’, so that they were a necessary evil. Two developments have forced some at least to moderate that kind view, one the development of innocent adult porn purchasers being lured into child porn, and, two, the increasing tendency of the police to plant the child porn images on certain individuals. While some of the email invitations carried text only, others had actual images, which were criminal to possess and were planted right onto one’s PC, appearing fully on screen once an email message was clicked on. It went further and I have to add that I personally know an individual to whom this happened. One of the most ardent fighters against the corruption he perceived in Operation Ore and an extreme critic and thorn in the side of the UK police has been the subject of emailed child porn, which he and the team have traced back to the FBI, whom we can reasonably assume sent it at the request of the UK police he was doggedly trying to expose. As a writer and journalist, I will go so far as saying that this and other information awaits full revelation when and if a government or an MP with courage succeeds in mounting an official investigation. Margaret Moran MP was asked to intervene and did the very opposite by ignoring a citizen who wants to show her the images he received from the police while continuing herself to broadcast baseless and inflammatory statements about child pornography. Incidentally, the police he tried to give the images back to also refused to accept them.
Let us look closer at the credit card situation. The two main credit card companies on the UK side of the Atlantic, Visa and MasterCard, have made slightly different responses. Visa appears to have dropped all transactions involving pornography, in other words they will no longer handle your transaction to buy it, while MasterCard may be going in that direction, but both report such transactions and attempts to transact to the police for their growing database of pornography buyers.
All of this is against a background of existing massive Internet credit card fraud. With few exceptions, no one who buys adult porn over the Internet is safe from credit card fraud, as the very people one tries to buy from may cheat by continuing to deduct monthly for what was supposed to be a once off payment, by inflating the charge or by selling on the credit card details. The more extreme the web site, say bondage or spanking, the less likely is the cheated buyer to complain to the credit card company in the event of limited fraud. There are a few apparently bona fide brokers and I understand that one of these is AEBN, with whom one’s credit card details will be safe, but now Visa will refuse to complete that transaction and MasterCard may also do that soon, and in both cases while you will not be cheated at the point of purchase the police will receive notice of your interests. For awhile E Gold offered a virtual credit card which protected one from direct fraud, but then they also began to disclose transactions for pornography to the police. Thus, the commercial porn industry is being hit hard with the small operators being squeezed out.
At this stage the perceptive reader may also say, hold on, this does not make sense. Why should the police on either side of the Atlantic kill the goose that lays their golden eggs? As I also asked while researching this. Several reasons apparently. Even if only once-off, or if people flee from buying pornography or the credit card companies refuse to handle such transactions, the credit card list is already so big that it serves the immediate strategic needs for material for future busts, but another possible reason is intriguing. The existing cartel which controls the mainly soft pornography over late night adult channels and an increasing amount of hard material fears the freedom and competition offered by the Internet where even enterprising women for example can set up a business from home with a web cam, and it wants to see it reined in, even by criminalizing it on the Internet, through the use of the ‘protection of children’ reason for example. Moves in the BBC in this direction are most interesting, as it could mean that the very state that is criminalizing pornography is in fact taking it over to get a monopoly on it, or share its management through a cartel.
Apart from entrapment and planting, the police, particularly the FBI, are also ‘distorting’ adult porn to child porn by swapping heads for example, that is placing a child’s head and face on images of skinny young (eighteen say) adult girls, to entrap individuals.
Let’s look at the excuses for gathering information and criminalizing pornography used by some of the vested interest groups. For government and the law, the excuse is age verification for the purposes of child protection. For the police it is traceability for ease of arrest and prosecution. For the often duped public it is the need for protection from fraud. We are moving in an interesting manner towards a situation similar to that of standards and certification. The cartel, which is also a major funder of the online child protection agencies, will require and probably obtain CEOP certification for its adult pornography broadcasts, so that we see the state taking over the business of pornography, or at least an approved version of it. SOCA may indeed be in the business that its name declares it to be - serious organized crime, and CEOP in that of child exploitation online.
If the trends of the police using pornography for bust material and the cartels taking it over continue, the Internet may split into public and covert domains, with pornography going back to where it used to be - into a red light district. Is there any hope that this can be avoided? It appears not for as long as Microsoft continues to be a provider of the very system that allows both credit card fraud and police surveillance and at the same time acts as a major funder of bodies such as the new CEOP. It may be no coincidence that Mike Marshall, ex-Microsoft, was in both the Dallas Landslide raid and acted as technical expert for the prosecution. One other ground for hope is that never before have the police and judiciary antagonized a large minority group of such high intellect as those being stitched up with charges of viewing, possessing, making, inciting to send or distributing illegal images. This group is now becoming a formidable foe of the police and prosecution service and of a legal system that maintains not justice but the ideology being used for the maintenance of power by a cartel. This is now extremely dangerous for the state.
Let me return to where I began, however. No one is now safe using the Internet, no man because he is a man and no woman who has a husband or sons, that is until encryption and other means allow the system to evolve again. When I started down the long road of looking at the problem I did so with the naive view that the state would not want to repeat the mistakes of previous prohibition eras, where each prohibition fanned crime, including the organised crime of police and legal and judicial corruption. It took years for me to learn that such obvious anomalies suited the vested interests of members of a powerful cartel, and when that cartel has powers equal to the hellfire and damnation powers of past cartels it is powerful indeed.
Postscript. It may seem unfair to leave readers at such an unsatisfactory point, but moves are underway to bring the spotlight to bear onto some of the more outrageous activities of the police and onto the disingenuousness organizations that also profit from them. As strategy and safety allow new evidence will also be published.
Brian Rothery
Ireland
 |
|
|
