Operation Ore

Operation Ore was a large-scale international police operation, commencing in 1999, intended to indict thousands of users of child pornography websites.

Origins

The operation followed the liquidation of Landslide Inc., a credit clearance intermediary based in Fort Worth, Texas. In April 1999, USPIS (United States Postal Inspection Service) in Texas had received an internal complaint after Robert Adams, a postal inspector, received a tip from an acquaintance in St Paul, Minnesota. The man, who has never been named, stumbled on a website advertising child pornography via graphic thumbnails and blatant banners. Adams contacted nearby Dallas police department and Steve Nelson, a Dallas police officer accessed various child pornography sites using his credit card. An adult classified section of the website allegedly included postings offering to trade Keyz passwords. USPIS and Dallas Police brought their investigation to the attention of Terri Moore, an assistant district attorney with a tough reputation.

Landslide provided payment systems for adult webmasters. These systems were automated, webmasters could sign up to the system online and people accessing the websites would go through the payment or login system before being granted access. The principle systems were AVS for Adult Verification System and Keyz because it operated via the keyz.com domain name owned by Landslide.

Out of some 5,700 sites that used Landslide's services over time, US LEA's determined a small number of these contained material which was underage according to the laws in the United States. Most of what was of questionable age was old imagery scooped up from the huge volumes of material sweeping through the Internet newsgroups, a minority of which could be described as constituting child abuse. The suggestion that every image was a crime scene was part of the marketing hype for Operation Ore, but it wasn't actually true.

The operation led to the seizure of user information of thousands of persons who were alleged to have accessed a child pornography website with their credit cards. It also resulted in the arrests of several prominent individuals, ranging from police officers and judges to The Who's guitarist Pete Townshend (who admitted accessing child porn images purely for research purposes, and consequently accepted a police caution). Currently, 35 people are known to have committed suicide after being arrested in connection with Operation Ore.

Controversies and Injustices

Operation Ore has also been called a modern day witch-hunt (labelled as such by Pete Townshend himself), a 21st century inquisition and the 'largest miscarriage of justice in UK history'. Detractors of the course of justice taken in regard to Operation Ore cite incidents of faulty intelligence, identity theft, accidental click-through caches, and unsolicited spam as major factors that lead to some people being falsely accused.

On June 21 2005 an article appeared in PC Pro which revealed that many of the alleged offenders were innocent.

“The most critical computer evidence produced in Operation Ore, I have found, was flawed,” says Duncan Campbell, an expert witness in the defence of Operation Ore suspects. “The mistakes meant huge quantities of police, technical and social work resources were misdirected to some futile and ill-founded investigations. But the worse result was damage to innocent lives, and the welfare of families and children.”

The article also claimed that prosecutions have centred on what's been claimed in court to be the front page of an adult website, which prosecutors said was dominated by a direct link to child pornography. New evidence revealed in the PC Pro article shows that many subscribers could not have accessed the alleged child porn page, while US officials had only seen a link to a child porn site on one occasion.

On 31/08/2005, two complaints containing serious criminal allegations against the conduct of senior operatives of the National Crime Squad in relation to Operation Ore were upheld on appeal at the Independant Police Complaints Commission.

---

Child Porn Banner

Operation Ore was launched with considerable fanfare in UK media and BBC broadcasts showed police computers showing a 'click here child porn' banner, and a video capture of this part of the page was used in Operation Ore trials in court.

The inference was clearly, that visitors to the Landslide website, knew that child pornography was being offered. This issue is a point of contention. A public archive in San Francisco captures websites around the Internet and therefore provides an evidential resource. The screen shot used in UK courts was a blow up of what matched the bottom of the Landslide AVS page.

• "archived version"

The archived version shows that the banner location is is way down the bottom of the AVS page, and the banner does not appear as this was part of a third party rotating banner system controlled via another domain.

---

AVS vs KEYZ

The assertion was that avs was adult, but those who had used the Landslide keyz payment system were suspected of downloading child pornography. This provides further contentions, as unlike AVS where a range of websites can be accessed for a single payment, keyz was a per site payment system, there was no menu of websites, and there was evidence the 'click here' banner wasn't present on keyz.

Again this is an issue that can be explored on the public archives via the wayback machine in San Francisco. Users could go to a keyz menu, however, this did not provide site access. The menu allowed subscribers to check their account status, however, the menu would have been principally used for webmasters to set up keyz accounts.

---

Keyz subscriptions

Any keyz or avs signups, recorded the referring site in the client data. It was therefore possible to discern which web sites the Landslide data had charged credit cards against. As again, the archives and other caches on the Internet confirm, the majority of web sites were entirely lawful. This is another point of contention.

Jim Gamble, now deputy director general of the National Crime Squad said to a government enquiry in 1999 towards 7,000 people in the UK sat at their computers and accessed child abuse websites

• "APIG source"

As only a minority of the websites contained underage imagery, and the bulk of it did not involve child abuse, this point is in contention.

Trevor Pearce, now director general of the National Crime Squad, said to the government This operation started when, in 2001, the details of 7,272 British suspects who had accessed child abuse images on a US website with their credit cards were passed to UK authorities. Operation ORE subsequently became the largest ever single investigation into online activity of this nature.

• "NCS to parliament"

7,272 was the total number of credit card identities, which became 6,500 traceable identities. However, to suggest the entire list of subscriptions, to what was mainly an adult payment gateway used by legitimate sites, represented suspects, is a point of contention.

External links

• "PC Pro - A flaw in the child porn witch hunt"
• "Sunday Times 26/06/2005 A flaw in the child porn witch-hunt"
• "Sunday Times 03/07/2005 Child porn suspects set to e cleared in evidence shambles"
• "The Real Story"
• OBU, An investigation into Operation Ore
• Inquisition 21, a web-site operated by several world wide contributors that criticize Operation Ore