Inquisition 21
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Child pornography
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1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11
Child porn is at the heart of our new sexual absolutism. Its laws have criminalized both artistic representation and objective intellectual examination and speculation.
Henry goes to prison
Henry (not his real name), married for twenty-five years with four devoted children in the US, has been charged with the possession of 35 images of child porn, all of which had been erased from his computer when the police seized and inspected it. The authorities did not reveal that they were recovered images, and he and his wife had to hire a computer expert for $12,000 to find this out. His wife has contacted us to tell their story and look for what help might be available. Apart from being his supportive wife, she is a psychologist who says that he is not interested in child pornography and that if he was she would have seen tell tale signs.
Here she is speaking: “Yes the government is definitely overreaching and abusing its power. After September 11th, the government has created an excuse to invade our privacies and monitor everything we do. We will become no different from any other third world country, and eventually lose our freedom. People need to become aware of what is happening to our privacy and the government’s overreaching powers. New laws have been passed that did not take into consideration the Internet’s capabilities and unlimited access to any type of material (legal and illegal). I am not in agreement with anyone that conducts any illegal actions or possesses any type of illegal material on-line or off-line for that matter.
“Possession of ‘child pornography’ just by downloading the material into your computer whether you knew it was there or not, is illegal and you could face up to five years in prison and/or $250,000 fine. When this law was enacted, it was not considered that the Internet is so broad and web surfers have access to any type of illegal material, because it’s out there for the taking. Just by deleting unwanted questionable or illegal material, you are not getting rid of it and the government can come back and recover anything from your hard drive and charge you with possession of the illegal material.
“Isn’t it odd that more and more every day we read or hear in the media that someone has been arrested for possession of ‘child pornography’? Is this really an epidemic of pedophiles that have come out from the cracks and are using the Internet to predate on innocent children and lure adults into becoming pedos by plastering sexual images of children on the Internet? Do we really have so many pedophiles in the world? Or could some of these just be innocent people that may have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, automatically downloading material in their computers and when they realized the contents of the images erasing them? But it’s too late if a warrant is served on their computers and images recovered they are guilty of possession.”
The background to Henry’s case is as follows. A couple of years ago he was chatting online to some people, mainly about society, computers and politics. The matter of pornography came up and some of his associates suggested he look at certain sites. Thinking it was adult porn he looked and found some questionable images of girls who may have been under 18. He deleted these. One of these associates, who was a UK man who had passed himself off as a married woman in her Thirties with two children called ‘Rachel’, was raided by the British police. Ironically, Henry, who was involved in a kind of ‘cyber-relationship’ with Rachel, had also paid ‘her’ £2,000 to help her over some family problems, a sum no doubt seized upon by Scotland Yard and the FBI as paying for a large consignment of child pornography.
When Scotland Yard found Henry’s email address on ‘Rachel’s’ computer, they passed it to the FBI, who obtained a search warrant and seized Henry’s computer. Henry’s wife was working on a project as consulting work for a local university, and because the computer has not been returned after 27 months she has lost the entire project and the associated consulting work.
Henry was indicted in January 2004, almost two years after the raid. According to his wife, the FBI agents lied to the grand jury telling them that he knew about Operation Candyman, and that he had admitted to deleting the images because he knew they were coming to raid the house. It seems that the raid was on March 19 2002 at 6 AM, while Operation Candyman was released to the media that day. Also the last time his eraser program had been used was five weeks before the raid.
He and his wife ‘prayed that the jury would realize that something was wrong with this overreaching law’. So far they have spent approximately $75,000 from their children’s college fund. Upon his indictment, Henry was immediately fired from his job, as the prosecutor went public with the news both in the papers and on the Internet.
His wife sums up: “I don’t know if you can help by publishing our story. It is becoming a very serious issue, as many innocent people are taking pleas because they don’t have the financial resources to fight and go to trial. We have chosen to fight but our resources are running out, not to mention the emotional strain it has placed on our family. Many lives are being affected daily by this overreaching law. Possession of any illegal material is very easy to obtain over the Internet. To prove your innocence is very costly, even if you get lucky and are found innocent it can be too late as a lot of damage has already been done.”
More charges are added
Henry’s wife writes us mid July 2004:
“Thank you for all the latest e-mails, we really appreciate your interest in our case, attention and assistance. I apologize for not responding to you sooner but we were out of town meeting with the attorneys.
“By the way, the prosecutor has added two new charges, due to a new Supreme Court law passed two weeks ago in the U.S. called the Blakely Law. Since she had to re-indict him due to this new law she decided to add the following charges 1) conspiracy to distribute CP and 2) receipt of CP. So far what she has produced in discovery is not substantial to merit the new charges. There have been no new developments and as to the evidence they have - they have had it for over 26 months. Since the prosecutor decided to add new charges and due to this last minute superseding indictment, the trial date has been moved again and now it’s scheduled for August 16th. You may not know this, but in the U.S. the federal government loves to add the conspiracy charge to everything (which if convicted carries a maximum15 year sentence). Can you believe this new development? I can also assure you that this is without cause as all he had was simple possession and not even that as all the images had been erased, because he didn't want this stuff in his computer and is not interested in this type of material.”
Editor: We forwarded the URLs of the sites we have discovered to be legal in case any were on Henry’s warrant or hard drive, although we still believed that his main defence was accidental or unknowing possession.
Dramatic developments
Just before the case went for trial in the US in late 2004, we learned that the FBI had located two European witnesses who had been in a chat room with Henry from which the child porn images had emerged. One was the British man ‘Rachel’, the other a Swedish man. The FBI intended to bring both over to the US as witnesses against Henry, despite the fact that one had conspired against him and defrauded him by posing as a woman. We put out an appeal for information on the two, and can now reveal for the first time that a third person who was in the same chat room, and who had left abruptly and in time, contacted us. We’ll call him Third Person. Third Person revealed that the chat room was that of the Shadowz Brotherhood where rather dangerous games were played, including one of trying to stay one step ahead of the censors and police.
Third Person also revealed the names of the two witnesses, one of who at least had now plea bargained with local police in exchange for informing on others including Henry. One was the ‘married woman in her Thirties with two children’, named Rachel, and who was a man by the name of Mark Roland Seel from West Yorkshire, UK. It was after Seel’s home was raided, that the FBI assisted by a constable from Scotland Yard, raided Henry’s home in the US in 2002, on the assumption that he was an international associate of Seel’s dealing in child pornography. The second witness was a Kenneth Gunnarsson from Sweden, whom Henry ‘barely chatted with’, about whom Third Person knew little.
Seel (Henry’s Rachel) also operated as ‘Santa’ and Gunnarsson as ‘Loverman’.
We named both on this site and asked for further information about them. The result was almost instantaneous. Henry’s US woman prosecutor issued subpoenas to him and his wife demanding all the contents of communications between them and Inquisition21 and our editor. The subpoenas revealed that the FBI had been monitoring the site and the emails. When Henry’s wife switched to encrypted Hushmail, the prosecutor attempted to subpoena the original content. Whatever value our intervention had been, and we will never know that, at least the witnesses were somewhat discredited. Third Person was amongst the first to realize that the Shadowz list had been infiltrated by the police and that stings were underway and got out immediately.
Henry’s attorney asked the prosecutor to provide details of any deals or agreements that the two witnesses may have had connection with their own convictions and sentencing. Seel served only four months, and is now on three years community service. After his trial, the local Bradford paper called it ‘a judgement that betrayed 4,000 innocent children’, and carried reports of the dismay of locals at the leniency shown to him. But the US prosecutor responded that Seel had no deals. Henry’s team was not able to get much information from Sweden either.
We soon learned that Mark Seel had been arrested as part of an international police operation against the Shadowz Brotherhood, which the police claimed was ‘a network of perverts who swap paedophile material featuring babies and children’. This brotherhood could also be a source from which the idea of the grooming of children over the Internet emerged. After Seel was arrested, the police claimed that ‘hundreds of officers swooped on 50 addresses across Europe at the end of a ten-month investigation into the ring’. The UK police claimed that the reason for his early arrest was because they felt he posed ‘too much of a risk’ to wait until the final operation, which can now be seen to place another question mark over his light sentence. Fifteen others were also arrested early in what was called ‘Operation Twins’. The local papers reported that ‘hardened officers described the images as among the worst ever’.
After telling Bradford Crown Court that he himself had been abused, and having already served four months on remand, Seel thanked the judge for his release, saying it would allow him to ‘get to grips' with his problem, and walked from court.
The British police also told the press that Seel’s arrest had led them to another member of the ring in the US, ‘who had uploaded images of a six-year-old girl being abused’. We have now established that a James Francis Bidwell (DOB 6/4/71) from Atlanta, Georgia was arrested on 2 July 2002 for uploading the images of his six year old daughter. He was apparently in communication with Seel.
Also adding more fuel to the idea that Seel engaged in a British form of plea bargaining was the detectives who raided his home telling the press that he lived a ‘hermit-like
existence', that they found 95 per cent of his computer's memory taken up with thousands of sick images, and described his as a `significant fish in his world'. None of which was to be borne out by his lenient sentence.
After the British police and media wailed about ‘the abuse of 4,000 innocent children’ and ‘hardened officers described the images as among the worst ever’, Seel walked off after four months, thanking the judge and doing community service. We can add the following comments by the UK police.
"The kind of material they were distributing was of the most horrific kind and the advice they were providing to members was extremely disturbing. They provided advice on grooming children for abuse, using chat rooms and that is an extremely worrying development. Just when you think you have seen the worst something else comes along and it comes as a real shock to the system."
We can also advise that long before we became aware of Henry, we had been alerted to the new development of perpetuator turned victim/informer, that is whoever is prepared to inform on the others changes his status to victim and is allowed to do so if he informs on the others.
This is how the last subpoena was served
Henry’s wife is speaking.
“An FBI agent showed up at my parent's home this morning (apparently we were followed when my husband and I left our home). About five to ten minutes after we arrived at my parents, the agent knocks on the door. When I open it, he flashes his badge, asks if I remember him and I said yes (I never forgot him, since he was one of the FBI agents who participated in my husband's arrest 7 months ago). I also noticed that he had his gun in plain view tucked toward his back because he had no jacket on to hide it. As he was identifying himself, our 11 year old daughter saw him from the kitchen area where my mother and husband were. She happened to see him when he was flashing his badge and heard him when he was insisting on speaking with me regarding the subpoena and what it was about. I told him I had nothing to speak to him about, that I knew what it was about, and that we have an attorney. My daughter also saw his gun and got very scared. It took us a long time after he left, to calm her down because she was crying thinking that the FBI would once again raid the house and take her father away.
“Not only our youngest child but our three other children have also been traumatized since the raid, which took place over two and a half years ago, when approximately seven FBI agents and four to five local police officers searched my parent's home (which we were living there temporarily). They held us for over three hours at the dining room table while my husband was being interrogated in the master bedroom, and our two youngest children were kept in one of the bedrooms isolated from me while being watched by an FBI agent. As a child psychologist I once again have extensive work ahead of me with my daughter, to try to diffuse this incident which has re-ignited her fears. It is very unfortunate that she had to see an FBI agent again at our door and relive that terrifying day.
“To add insult to injury, we find out later that evening through some of our very supportive neighbors that this FBI agent had been at our house the day before. Since no one was home at the time, he started knocking on at least four of our neighbor's homes, flashing his badge identifying himself as an FBI agent, asking them about us and if they knew our whereabouts. Like if the FBI didn't know: after all, we DO have to come home every night before ten o'clock due to a court ordered curfew imposed on my husband, therefore he knew where to find us.
“What seems very strange is why on earth did the prosecutor have an FBI agent deliver a subpoena when as far as I know in this country a subpoena is usually served by a ‘process server’ who makes a living delivering subpoenas? I am not surprised at anything anymore on what the prosecutor orders due to her overall behavior.
“Why this messenger (an FBI agent) was chosen instead of the regular method of delivering subpoenas is beyond me. Specially when we are under a ‘heightened alert level’ in this country for terrorist activities and possible attacks against its citizens. Although I have been pondering with this question and the possible reasons why the prosecution has done this, I think its best to leave it to the readers of this forum to come to their own conclusions."
On 10 January 2005, Henry received a 47 month sentence. Seel and Gunnarson walked free.
The Shadowz Brotherhood
(While we believe that most of the unfortunate Henry’s involvement with the Shadowz Brotherhood was in his flirting with ‘Rachel’, here is Third Person’s description of what went on there.)
“I especially feel for those who have simply looked at a few pictures out of curiosity and have felt the full force of the law as a result. I couldn’t include myself in that category however as I got pulled into the deep end of the pool pretty quickly. Looking back a few years it is bizarre to see just how quickly I was sucked into this vortex. It was a matter of a few weeks after stumbling into a couple of the popular bulletin boards (out of idle curiosity) that I’d had a swift education in the dark arts of safe surfing and had become a founding member of an internet chat room that later mutated into the ‘infamous’
Shadowz Brotherhood. Here was something highly potent. A heady and exhilarating world different from anything I had ever experienced in my entire life. There were (solo!) sexual kicks to be had, plus a real feeling of danger and risk taking that initially appealed to me as much as any other factor. It was, as one of the LEA who busted Shadowz accurately said, like living your life in another country or even another world - - - .
“So I was now ‘very far from innocent’. What had started off as curiosity had developed into a habit and that habit quickly developed into an addiction that would keep me tied to my PC from the early evening into the early hours of the morning.
”Sometimes I would stay online throughout the night and skip work totally the next day. When I did get a night’s sleep, I’d wake up with a cold sweat at 6.45am, knowing that I was potentially 15 minutes away from a knock on the door that would change my life forever and that when the knock eventually came, then everything that was solid in my life would simply melt away.
”About this time the fairly loose and friendly bunch of guys that made up Shadowz started to become somewhat more organised and structured. Things moved up a notch and began to get serious. Instead of just chatting, sharing links and spending interminable hours discussing the endless nooks and crannies of internet security and tactics for staying one step ahead of the law, the guys started to build private image libraries. I must have just about had a handle on reality because at this point (early to mid 2001) I realised that I was no longer part of a chatroom but part of what the scuzzy media would claim to be a ‘pedo ring’ and sooner or later, despite the undoubted skills of the guys, the LEA would come after us. It was time to quit while I still could and looking back three years later it still boggles my mind to think that the bunch of guys I used to swop jokes with and talk crap to throughout the night would become the targets of massively financed and resourced Interpol operation. Furthermore, I’m pretty sure that the only way the LEA were able to bust Shadowz was by infiltrating it and impressing everybody with the quality of material they were posting. We forget that the biggest collectors of ‘on-topic’ material in the UK are the boys and girls of Scotland Yard.
”So I’d now retired and had weaned myself away from the sort of surfing that would put my liberty in danger. Nevertheless, the damage had been done. Boozed up and hunched over a keyboard I had once or twice broken my own rules and pulled out the plastic - - -never for a hardcore site but for the sort of ‘cute Russian girls in dainty poses’ sites that I’d convinced myself would never attract the full force of the law. How wrong I was!
”Despite having a squeaky clean HD (I’d never kept a collection and had learnt how to keep my HD clean during my Shadowz time) I still couldn’t relax. Even pre-Operation Ore I was reading about the busts and sweeps that would happen every couple of months and thinking about just how close to the wind I’d sailed. I got a massive shock to the system when Shadowz was busted in early 2002 but the clincher was shortly afterwards when I read an article in the Sunday Telegraph mentioning the soon to be infamous list of 7000 credit subscribers that would become the subject of Ore. That was it. They were now coming after the small fry and it didn’t matter whether Ore got me or the next big list or even the one after that - sooner or later I would get the knock.
“It was after several sweaty months that I realised that there really were other choices available to me than to sit and wait like a sitting duck. There was another quite separate way through this. I could take control of my situation away from the state and empower myself.
“The job that would push me near to the top of any list of ‘prioritised targets’ was far from close to my heart and in fact I was tired with it. I wasn’t married and had recently come out of a long relationship. I had no dependents. I owned property that could be sold and would leave me with a reasonably large amount of liquid cash.
“I re-evaluated my life and decided to end the pressure. Not only was I exhausted with worry about the 7am wake up call, I was also tired of living in the UK’s current moral climate. These guys I read about being busted and having their entire lives destroyed for looking at pictures mostly weren’t abusers. I knew that I wasn’t and from having long conversations online with the guys at Shadowz, I knew that most of them weren’t either despite the triumphant media later labelling them ‘a close knit ring of child abusers’. I remember one long chat online with some Shadowz members where a particularly unpleasant series of photos was discussed. It was unanimously agreed that this series was beyond the pale for the reason that the girl in the photos was clearly in pain or discomfort. Never was actual abuse discussed during my time at that board and to the best of my knowledge no-one ever wanted to take their internet life into reality. Really, ‘Shadowz Chat ’ was 30% security related conversation, 20% chasing links and 50% cracking jokes, talking about the weather, the moon and the stars and blah, blah blah.
“In the real word however and that means the Salem type atmosphere of the UK right now, I was up there with the worst of the worst and seen to be deserving of the full force of the law. In the UK circa 2004 an illegal immigrant speeding in a car with no license or insurance can run down and kill a child and then get 4 months in jail. An ‘internet pedo’ can get years in jail for simply looking at pictures and the punishment of losing their liberty comes after the separate punishment of their life having been torn apart, shredded and thrown to the media wolves. In what sort of country is the law such an ass that I could get sent to jail for looking online at the same images that it legal to possess in a book available from Waterstones. It’s true; you can buy a book of Jock Sturges amazing photographs on Charing Cross Road but having exactly those same photos on your hard drive will land you in front of a judge.
“So I quit my job, sold my house, got rid of my PC and moved to a ‘Third World’ country that has no extradition treaty with the UK. Was this an extreme move? Yes indeed, but I’ve never been happier. I have no home internet access here and have not been tempted to return to my surfing habits of old. I have a new career and am wishing that I had made the move years before. Added to that I am able to pursue my sexual interests far more freely than in the UK where I would be labeled a pervert for my taste in mid teen girls. The country I now live in has an age of consent lower than the UK together with an abundance of girls who are available to me legally. I can do what I like without having to look over my shoulder or worry about breaking the law.
“For those unlucky enough to be living in Blair’s Britain, all I can say is ‘go well’ and let’s all look forward to living in a more enlightened time.”
Child pornography
Background reading
Mitsubishi abandons employee
Henry goes to prison
Dangers from your hard drive
Operations Ore and Amethyst are discredited
The Athlone story - State of malice
Irish judge in child porn allegations
Who did it? When child porn appears.
Operation Ore on the verge of collapse
Alabama man’s four year wait in Limbo
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