[no subject]

Crime and Privacy, Caught in the Landslide
Thursday 23rd January 2003

The facts are as follows: Thomas and Janice Reedy ran
a web site in Fort Worth, Texas called Landslide. It
was a paedophile's portal acting as a gateway to 5700
websites many of which contained child pornography.

It was profitable - to the tune of about $1million per
month - until the US Postal Inspection Service paid a
visit to the Reedys in September 1999, arresting them
and closing the site down. (The US Postal Inspection
Service has responsibility in the US for monitoring
the Internet).

Anyway, the upshot for the Reedys is that they are
banged to rights with Thomas Reedy serving a 1335 year
prison sentence and his wife a 14 year prison
sentence. The upshot for the customers is that their
interest in child porn is revealed - because the US
authorities got their hands on the complete list of
commercial transactions and hence the credit card
details of all customers. So if the customer thought
"secure encrypted credit card transaction" meant
"no-one will ever know", they were sadly deluded.

The US passed the full list to Interpol which divied
it up and sent lists to individual countries. The UK
list was 7500 long and included the names of aging
rock star, Pete Townsend and also 50 UK policeman. The
whole affair has raised the noise level about privacy
and the Internet, with some commentators maintaining
that the Internet is now rotten with surveillance,
privacy is no longer possible and big brother is
logging you.

The civil liberties champions long maintained that
child pornography was the stalking horse for bringing
the Internet under government control and now some of
them are expressing deep concern.

The rhetoric has little to do with the underlying
events. The information on who bought from Landslide
wasn't gathered from ISPs but from the Landslide
database and could probably have been gathered from
the records of Visa and Mastercard.

As all good criminals know, if you don't want to be
traced you deal in cash and you cannot do that on the
Internet. Consequently, the black economy never had
much of a presence on the Internet even though crimes
of other types flourished there.

Also, if you want to surf the Internet anonymously, it
has always been possible and still is. You simply go
into a cyber cafi and pay cash. In fact, cyber cafis
are a constant source of nefarious Internet activity
for that reason.

To this you can add the fact that the data protection
act is quite a good guarantee against data
exploitation and its impact is growing - and will
continue to grow. It looks to us as though the
Landslide affair is just a matter of criminal activity
being reined in, and rightly so. International
co-operation is working effectively against
international crime and the Internet is clearly
subject to the rule of law.

Robin Bloor


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-Brian in Atlanta
The Who This Month!
http://www.thewhothismonth.com
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