FBI Infiltrates World of Child Pornography

The Innocent Images Initiative focuses on saving as many kids as it can.

By Martin W.G. King, NCPC Staff

The messages would make you ill, but there they are, on the Internet, enticing “clients” to purchase the sexual services of little children. True, the messages were deeply encrypted, catering only to those with honed appetites, but that just made the crimes more heinous.

But the FBI’s Innocent Images Initiative recently exposed the sordid child exploitation ring responsible for the messages. By working with four foreign countries—Australia, Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom—on three continents and 11 U.S. states, 22 men have been arrested, including eight abroad, and 20 victims have been freed. The Innocent Images Initiative didn’t have an easy time of it; the ring’s powerful encryption tools and multi-layered vetting of new members at first kept them at bay. They had a level of operational security that the FBI had not seen before. But the Initiative has been remarkably successful over the years. In the ten years between 1996 and 2007, it opened 20,134 cases; of these, 9,469 resulted in arrests, locations, or summons.

According to the FBI, the Innocent Images Initiative, a component of the FBI’s Cyber Crimes Program, is an intelligence-driven, multi-agency operation that combats the proliferation of child pornography and child sexual exploitation facilitated by an online computer. Today, computer telecommunications have become one of the most common techniques used to transmit pornography and to facilitate abuse.

With the advance of technology, child pornography rings have increasingly been internationally based, making operations like the Innocent Images Initiative all the more important.

A major international child pornography ring was recently broken up in Austria by authorities there. More than 2,360 suspects from 77 countries were involved. Of these, the FBI identified 100 as coming from the United States. Later, police in the United States and 12 European countries searched more than 150 houses and made several arrests, according to news reports.

Earlier, U.S. Immigration and Customs and Enforcement agents infiltrated, then busted a major international child pornography ring based in the United States that involved 27 people in the United States, Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom. They were involved in a chat room used to trade child pornography and view real-time child molestation. Alberto Gonzales, U.S. attorney general at the time, announced the arrests personally, calling the crimes “the worst imaginable forms of child pornography.”

Other crackdowns on international pornography rings include the breakup of an infamous U.S.-European pedophile ring that included parents who sexually abused their children (as young as two years old) for an Internet audience. U.S. Customs Service Commissioner Robert Bonner said that “These crimes are beyond the pale.” The Customs Service cooperated with Danish police in pursuing the ring.

While it has taken part in numerous international operations, the Innocent Images Initiative operates more commonly on a domestic basis. It has recently engaged in another partnership—with U.S. television host John Walsh of “America’s Most Wanted.” Marking the first use of the “child exploitation enterprise” provisions of the Adam Walsh Act of 2006, the show is now picturing suspects wanted on child pornography or molestation charges. So far, it has had almost instant results with several arrests.

Resources

A Parent’s Guide to Internet Safety, http://www.fbi.gov/publications/pguide/pguideee.htm

American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, Child Sexual Abuse, http://www.aacap.org/cs/root/facts_for­_families/child­_sexual­_abuse

“America’s Most Wanted,” http://www.amw.com/