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NEWS
British Child-Pornography Investigation Is Broadening

January 14, 2003
By SARAH LYALL

LONDON, Jan. 14 - The list includes police officers and dentists, judges and politicians, lawyers, teachers and social workers and, as of Monday, the guitarist Pete Townshend of the Who. In all, more than 1,300 people have been arrested in Britain in the last 10 months as part of Operation Ore, a nationwide hunt for users of child Internet pornography.
Mr. Townshend was taken into custody on Monday, questioned and then released without being charged. The police in London seized computers and other material from his house and office and said they planned to re-interview him. Mr. Townshend, who says he suspects he was abused as a child, said he had viewed child pornography on the Internet while conducting research for an autobiography and as part of his longtime campaign against child sexual abuse. .

Mr. Townshend, 57, is the highest-profile Briton caught up so far in the operation. Today, the authorities in London arrested Yusuf Azad, a civil servant who works for the London Assembly as an independent watchdog overseeing the office of the mayor of London. In Oxfordshire, Terry McClaren, the deputy governor of the Bullingdon jail, which houses convicted sex offenders, was also detained, Channel 4 News reported.

Like Mr. Townshend, Mr. Azad was released without being charged, pending further investigation, and had computers and other material seized from his home. Officials at the Bullingdon jail refused to discuss Mr. McClaren's status.

In September, two police officers who investigated the abduction and murder of the schoolgirls Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells in Cambridgeshire last summer were arrested and charged with possessing and distributing child pornography. One of the officers, Detective Constable Brian Stevens, who had served as a family liaison officer for the Chapman family throughout the investigation and who had read a poem at a memorial service, was also charged with sexually assaulting two teenage girls.
Rumors swirled today that more arrests were imminent, including those of at least two current or former members of Parliament.
In Britain, possession of child pornography is illegal, and suspects in the Operation Ore investigation are accused of viewing and downloading sexually explicit photographs of children, some as young as 5, from a variety of pay-per-view Web sites between 1997 and 1999.
Subscribers paid $29.95 a month per site, entering credit card details that allowed them to view files with names like "Child Rape," "I am Fourteen," and "Russian Underage." The sites contained hard-core pornographic images and would have been impossible to stumble upon by chance, said Jackie Bennett, a spokeswoman for the National Crime Squad, which investigates serious crime in the United Kingdom. "You would have to make a decision to subscribe to the Web site and purchase the images," she said.

The suspects' names were passed to the British authorities by the United States Postal Inspection Service, whose investigation of a Texas-based Internet pornography empire that is now defunct led to the arrest in December 1999 of its proprietors, Janice and Thomas Reedy. According to law enforcement officials, the couple took in millions of dollars from subscription fees, allowing customers access to thousands of pedophile Web sites, many of them foreign-based.

Mr. and Mrs. Reedy were convicted of a variety of offenses, including sexual exploitation of minors, distribution of child pornography and conspiracy. Their pornography ring served as a treasure trove of information for investigators, who found data concerning 310,000 subscribers in dozens of countries and passed it on to the relevant authorities abroad.

After the names were passed to the authorities here, they were divided by regions and given to the 43 police departments in England and Wales. The investigation has been slow and painstaking, in part because the British authorities have not given high priority to crimes involving Internet pornography. Suspects' computers and hard drives must be thoroughly searched for evidence that they have downloaded illegal images, a long and arduous process.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/14/international/14CND_PORN.html?ex=104369292 1&ei=1&en=3ab40720a192ee46