CHILD RAPE & ABUSE
High Tech Helps Child Pornographers and Their Pursuers
February 9, 2003 By JENNIFER 8. LEE

WASHINGTON, Feb. 8 - The combination of digital photography and high-speed home Internet access has set off what the authorities say is an explosion of homemade child pornography in recent years, with growing numbers of victims.

The authorities in this country have responded by compiling a federal catalog of all known child pornography photographs. Germany, Britain, Sweden, the Netherlands and Interpol already maintain similar databases, each with about a million photos and films depicting thousands of children worldwide.
The national database, which began processing photos on Jan. 24, has two main goals: to help trace the children in the photos, and to aid in prosecution by establishing that the photos are of identified victims who were under 18 when the pictures were taken.

The identification is in response to a Supreme Court ruling in April that overturned the Child Pornography Prevention Act. The court ruled that child pornography had to contain photos of actual children, not simply those that "appear to be children."

"The kid is out there and was victimized at one time," said Michael Netherland, the director of the child exploitation unit at the United States Customs Service, who oversaw Operation Hamlet, a yearlong investigation that has spread across four continents and resulted in the arrests of 30 people, most of them fathers who sexually abused their daughters. Eighteen of the arrests were in the United States.
Child pornography can be compared to the narcotics trade, the authorities say, in that the effort to stop it emphasizes clamping down on both the demand and the supply. Most law enforcement efforts have been aimed at those who collect and trade child pornography, such as the 1,300 people swept up in a recent campaign in Britain, but do not produce it. The new American database will help the authorities catch those who are actually abusing the children, the authorities say.

Most national law enforcement databases track criminals and suspects - not victims - so officials say they are taking steps to protect the victims' privacy. The database will not contain the victims' identities. Instead, it will list the law enforcement officers who can testify that the victims are real children.
The federal database is managed by the Customs Cybersmuggling Center and is a cooperative effort of government agencies and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
Most children depicted in child pornography are prepubescent, with most of them appearing to be from 6 to 11 years old. Yet many of the victims are toddlers or infants. The photos include nude shots as well as depictions of rape, sodomy and sadistic abuse.

The government is using image-comparison software to find matches of photographs, enabling the authorities to find new victims as well as identify them as real children.

A movement is afoot among European law enforcement officials to call the photos "child abuse images" instead of "child pornography." The shift is supposed to put more attention on the victims in the photos and to eliminate the commercial connotation of the word "pornography."

"A lot of people say, `I was just trading pictures,' " said Lars Underbjerg, a child pornography investigator with the Danish National Police. "We say, `No you weren't. They were child abuse images.' "
The photos are often organized into series of several hundred, many labeled with names, real or fictitious, like Helen or Amy or Kevin. Some, contain several children, with general names like the KG series, which labels photos of what appear to be kindergartners from an unidentified region in northern Europe. Some series of photos are known descriptively, like "pink ball," a series that depicts a girl with a ball in her mouth. Some series have file names assigned by the digital camera.

Typically, people will download pictures posted on Internet bulletin boards for pedophiles. People regularly post requests on these bulletin boards seeking to complete a particular series of photographs, with names like amy173 or kevin049.
But in the world of child pornography, as in any culture of collecting, the material most difficult to obtain is the most highly prized. Most of this so-called fresh material is circulated only in children pornography rings that are difficult to crack, the authorities say.
"What we are trying to do is stop the actual abuse," said Lars Underbjerg, a child pornography investigator with the Danish National Police. "If there isn't abuse, there aren't any child abuse images."

Mr. Underbjerg sparked Operation Hamlet by tracing a Danish couple that was abusing their child through a partial shirt logo of a company in Denmark.

A year ago, material found on the computer of the Danish couple led to the arrest of Lloyd A. Emmerson, a 45-year-old chiropractor in Clovis, Calif. Mr. Emmerson was a hub in several child pornography trading networks, prosecutors say. He has pleaded not guilty to charges of manufacturing and trafficking in child pornography, as well as a conspiracy charge. His case is pending in Federal District Court.

Over the past year, four officers from the 90-member Clovis Police Department sifted through half a million photos and films found on Mr. Emmerson's computer hard drive and 400 computer CD's.
Two Clovis officers, Mike Casida, and James Gentry, spent late nights tracking down abusers in the case, often aided by the fact that they appeared in the photos with the children.
Since the photos often show the children at home with their abusers, the sleuthing begins with tiny clues: partial street signs in the background, blurred license plates, the shape of electric outlets and chimneys, the type of vegetation in the yard and company directories in the backgrounds.
With the help of ordinary Internet tools like Google, Mapquest and Internet phone directories, the Clovis team was able to track down the abusers of 70 children.
A decade ago, child pornography was harder to create and circulate because people either had to develop their own photos, know someone who could develop their home photos, or use Polaroid cameras, law enforcement officials said.
Aggressive campaigns by the Customs Service and the Postal Service had largely slowed child pornography in the United States after a 1982 Supreme Court ruling that child pornography, like obscenity, should not receive First Amendment protection. By the late 1980's, child pornography had become mostly confined to scattered Polaroids and the recycling of old magazine photos, the authorities said. "Human interest hasn't changed," Mr. Gentry said. "Technology has."

Now the prevalence of affordable digital cameras and digital camcorders allows abusers to take hundreds of photos in the privacy of their homes, officials say. All the people indicted in Operation Hamlet had digital cameras.

The increasing use of high-speed Internet connections around the world has spawned vast international trading networks, the authorities say. Anecdotally, investigators say they see the abusers spurring each other on. For example, according to the indictment of Mr. Emmerson, he asked a Danish couple to spank their daughter so he could hear recordings of her screaming. Psychologists also say that they suspect exposure to publicly available child pornography may tap into some adults' latent pedophile tendencies.

"There are communities that allow you to express your interest in a safe and unchallenged way," said Max Taylor, director of the Copine child pornography project at University College Cork in Ireland. "It normalizes it."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/09/technology/09PORN.html?ex=1045797073&ei=1& en=ea92af3909252b66

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