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Operation Ore

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Operation Ore was a British police operation that commenced in 1999, following information from USA law enforcement, and it intended to prosecute thousands of users of websites reportedly featuring child pornography. In the United Kingdom, it has led to 7,250 suspects identified, 4,283 homes searched, 3,744 arrests, 1,848 charged, 1,451 convictions, 493 cautioned, 879 investigations underway, 140 children removed from suspected dangerous situations (although the definition of what constitutes such, has varied and remains vague)[1] and an estimated 39 suicides.[2][3] While Ore did catch a number of sex offenders, it turned out the underlying identifying data were faulty, resulting in a number of false investigations which ruined lives and appear to have caused a number of suicides.[4] In addition, some children were removed from homes that had been guilty of nothing, but had been victims of credit card fraud thus exposing the children to trauma.

Operation Ore succeeded the similar crackdown in the United States, called Operation Avalanche, though in the U.S. only 100 people were charged from the 35,000 US access records available.[5]

Origins

In April 1999, United States Postal Inspection Service of Texas had received an internal complaint via postal inspector Robert Adams. Adams had received a tip from an acquaintance in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Ronnie Miller, who provided information in relation to a website advertising child pornography. The image in question was being sourced from a webmaster in Indonesia, which presented the question as to whether the USPIS could successfully prosecute it.

As a part of a nationwide initiative funded by the Office of Justice Program’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), The United States Department of Justice announced a grant from the Internet Crimes Against Children Taskforce Program to the Dallas Police Department on 10 January 1998. The purpose of the ICAS was to investigate and prosecute Internet crimes against children. In early 1999, The United States Postal Inspection Service engaged the Dallas Police Department to further investigate whether the image from Indonesia could be prosecuted. [6]

As later revealed in the court transcriptions from the case against Landslide Productions, the Dallas Police Department had formed a relationship with The Microsoft Corporation through a series local police investigations where the software maker had encouraged its technical employees to volunteer their time to better the community in which they lived. After having confirmed that the image in question was indeed being sourced from Indonesia, making prosecution difficult, The Dallas Police Department reached out to its local Microsoft volunteers for one last opinion. Using Web Buddy, a computer program which displayed Internet traffic on geographic maps, the volunteers helped the Dallas Police Department to identify that Internet traffic related to Ronnie Miller's complaint was passing through routers of Ft. Worth, Texas-based Landslide Productions.

On 8 September 1999, federal agents raided the Fort Worth, Texas, home and offices of Thomas and Janice Reedy. The Reedys operated an internet business called Landslide Productions, Inc., which the FBI believed had sold subscriptions to websites offering child pornography. Landslide was, in fact, an adult pornography empire stretching across three continents, some 250,000 subscribers in 60 countries. [7] Furthermore, a separate raid of Reedy's nearby Ft. Worth residence confiscated a home computer where computer expert Dane Heiskel uncovered business emails confirming his knowledge of customers using his payment system to access child pornography. Sexually explicit images of underaged children were also found on this computer. [8]

Later independent investigations questioned Thomas Reedy's intention to provide child pornography[9] , but on 6 August 2001, Reedy was convicted of trafficking in child pornography and sentenced to 1,335 years in prison (later reduced to 180 years on appeal). His accomplice, Janice Reedy, was sentenced to 14 years. This marked the beginning of Operation Avalanche.

Landslide Productions

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 principal systems were AVS for Adult Verification System and Keyz because it operated via the keyz.com domain name owned by Landslide. An adult classified section of the Landslide 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, and obtained a search warrant to raid the home and offices of Thomas Reedy his wife, owners and operators of the business. During the raid, they seized evidence to use in prosecution for child pornography and both owners were convicted, even though the the child pornography in their offerings was provided by third parties, and they had reported illegal sites to the FBI.

The FBI then passed identities from the Landslide database to the police organizations of other countries, including 7,272 names to the UK. Police conducting Operation Ore in the UK targeted all names for investigation due to the difference in laws in between the US and the UK, which allowed for arrest on a charge of incitement to distribute child pornography based solely on the presence of a name in the database.

In all, 3,744 people were investigated and arrested, including several prominent individuals, ranging from police officers and judges to Massive Attack's Robert Del Naja and The Who's guitarist Pete Townshend, who was cautioned by the police after acknowledging a credit card access to the Landslide website. However, Duncan Campbell later stated in PC Pro magazine that their credit card charges and IP addresses were traced through the Landslide site, and both were found to have accessed sites which had nothing to do with child pornography.[10] The actor and writer Chris Langham was among those convicted. [11]

After Campbell's article appeared, the independent computer expert Jim Bates who analyzed the hard drives was charged and convicted of four counts of making false statements and one count of perjury regarding his qualifications [12]and barred from appearing as an expert witness. Bates was later arrested for possession of indecent images during his Operation Ore investigations.[13]

Controversies

After 2003 Operation Ore came under closer scrutiny, with police forces in the UK being criticised for their handling of the operation. The most common criticism was that they failed to determine whether or not the owners of credit cards in Landslide's database actually accessed any sites containing child porn, unlike in the U.S. where it was determined in advance whether or not credit card subscribers had purchased child porn. Investigative journalist Duncan Campbell exposed these flaws in a series of articles in 2005 and 2007.[14][15][16]

This was a serious error, because many of the people making charges at child porn sites were using stolen credit card information (and the police arrested the real owners of the credit cards, not the actual viewers). Plus, thousands of credit card charges were made where there was no access to a site, or access to only a dummy site. When the police finally checked, they found 54,348 occurrences of stolen credit card information in the Landslide database. The British police failed to provide this information to the defendants, and some implied that they had checked and found no evidence of credit card fraud when no such check had been done. Because of the nature of the charges, children were removed from homes immediately. In the two years it took the police to determine that thousands had been falsely accused, over one hundred children had been removed from their homes and denied any unsupervised time with their fathers.

One man was charged when the sole "suspicious" image in his possession was of adult actress Melissa-Ashley.

Independent investigators later obtained both the database records and video of the Landslide raid and with this information showed that Michael Mead of the United States Postal Service lied under oath regarding several details relating to the investigation. As a result of these errors, a number of people arrested in Operation Ore filed a group action law suit in 2006 against the detectives behind Operation Ore, alleging false arrest.[17]

CEOP and its Chief Executive were accused of using vague terms which do not have a recognised meaning within either child protection or law enforcement when they defended the operation.[18]

References

  1. ^ When will we know whether Operation Ore was a success? | Technology | The Guardian
  2. ^ http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/jul/02/web-child-abuse-inquiry-challenge
  3. ^ "CHILD PORN SUSPECTS SET TO BE CLEARED IN EVIDENCE SHAMBLES", Sunday Times 3 July 2005, URL accessed on 23 January 2007.
  4. ^ http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/74690/operation-ore-exposed/page2.html
  5. ^ "Operation Ore exposed", PC Pro magazine, URL accessed on 19 June 2006.
  6. ^ "Press Release from Richard B. Roper" United States Department of Justice Northern District
  7. ^ "OPERATION ORE: Tracking child porn", BBC News, 11 November, 2002.
  8. ^ Alex Tresniowski "Caught in the Web", People, 27 August 2001 Vol. 56 No. 9
  9. ^ http://ore-exposed.obu-investigators.com/PC_PRO_Operation_Ore_Exposed_2.html Campbell, Duncan. "Sex, Lies and the Missing Videotape", PCPro, April 2007. Retrieved on 2007-04-23.
  10. ^ http://ore-exposed.obu-investigators.com/PC%20Pro%20article%20June%202007%20.pdf Campbell, Duncan. "Sex, Lies and the Missing Videotape" PC Pro Magazine, June 2007. Retrieved 27 December 2009.
  11. ^ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/08/02/nlangham202.xml Sapsted, David. "Langham: Caught in Operation Ore's net", Daily Telegraph, 2 August 2007. Retrieved on 2007-08-02
  12. ^ http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/7340997.stm Expert sentenced for court claims. Retrieved 30 December 2009.
  13. ^ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/17/ore_bates_arrest/ Paedo case expert Jim Bates arrested on child porn charge. Retrieved 30 December 2009.
  14. ^ Duncan Campbell (2007-04-19). "Operation Ore flawed by fraud". The Guardian. Retrieved 2007-04-23.
  15. ^ Campbell, Duncan (2005-07-01). "Operation Ore exposed". PCPro. Retrieved 2007-04-23.
  16. ^ Campbell, Duncan (April 2007). "Sex, Lies and the Missing Videotape". PCPro. Retrieved 2007-04-23.
  17. ^ Howie, Michael (2006-09-15). "Accused in child porn inquiry to sue police". The Scotsman. Retrieved 2007-04-23.
  18. ^ When will we know whether Operation Ore was a success? | Technology | The Guardian

See also

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