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The Murder of Innocents
Plunging the Dark Depths of Child Porn Web Sites

Commentary By Michael S. Malone
Special to ABCNEWS.com

Jan. 28  As usual, it took a celebrity bust to
finally interest the public in a scandal.

This time, the celebrity is Pete Townshend of the Who,
and the scandal is child pornography. Townshend is
accused of downloading and sharing kiddie porn files,
purchasing them with his credit card.

Townshend, for his part, claims he was researching a
book on his own suspected abuse as a child  the
genesis of Tommy's Uncle Ernie, among other indicators
in his body of work  and some of his Web writings
from more than a year ago suggests there may be some
truth in this.

On the other hand, there are procedures for this sort
of research, none of which Townshend appears to have
followed. Moreover, "research" has become a tired
alibi for pederasts and other visitors to the
underworld over the last decade. Every sleazeball with
a disk full of pictures of naked children turns out to
be working on an expose book.

Though I suspect that Townshend may be telling the
truth, I have no firm opinion either way.

What I do have a strong opinion on is that the media
continues to utterly fail in its reporting of this
topic, and the consequence of this failure is horrible
beyond imagining. And one day it will touch us all.

How do I know this? Because I've visited those depths
and returned a shaken man. 

The Shocking Truth

Three years ago, as editor of Forbes ASAP magazine, I
was approached by Robert Grove, my multimedia editor
and producer of my TV shows. The story he told me was
shocking. Like most people, I knew that child porn,
that most despicable of crimes, was available
somewhere out there on the Web. But I assumed it was
furtive, tiny and all but inaccessible; the province
of a handful of perverts passing photos back and
forth.

What Bob told me was stunning. What he had learned
from his sources was that child porn wasn't a tiny
boutique industry, but a global empire. That it wasn't
hidden, but easy to find. But most of all, he said,
this wasn't just some crude, back-alley operation, but
a sophisticated business octopus, using some of the
most sophisticated computer software and encryption,
conveyed by some of the biggest and most legitimate
corporations, and with revenues of billions of
dollars. Worst of all, Bob said, this creepy shadow
organization ultimately had the potential to morph
into dangerous new forms and threaten our national
security. 

I gave Bob the assignment to chase the story as far as
it would go. Little did he or I now how far that would
be. 

But first, we did one thing Pete Townshend apparently
never did: We went to the feds. In our case, it was
the FBI office in Oakland, Calif. There, the agents
did exactly what they should have done: They warned us
that if we were lying or downloading any of the sites,
they would throw us in jail. In turn, we, as editors
for Forbes ASAP, agreed to turn over any leads we had.

And then we began a three-month tour of hell.

You may think you know what the child pornography
industry is, but, no matter how cynical you are, you
do not. Yes, it is naked children exposing themselves.
But it is worse than that. It is adults have sex with
children, even babies. But it is worse than that. It
is the rape and torture of little children.

But, hard as it may be to accept, it is even worse
than that.

A couple of years ago, the Italian press ran a story
that received little pickup in the U.S. media. It was
about the arrest of an Italian-Russian pederast ring
that was taking orders from customers to kidnap
Russian orphans according to pre-specified
characteristics like hair color  then torture and
kill them on camera for posting on the Web.

This is the very heart of darkness. These are images
that are more than shocking and repulsive. They kill
your soul, in part because you know that every poor
child you see on these sites is dead, if not now at
the hands of a sadist, then decades from now from
drugs, alcoholism or suicide. The pictures first make
you sick, then angry, and finally homicidal. If you
could get a hold of the people perpetrating this, you
would kill them with your bare hands. But you can't;
the best thing you can do is expose them. So you go
on.

Very quickly, I made it a point not to look at the
pictures anymore. That was my prerogative as editor.
But it was already too late: There were already
certain unspeakable images so burned into my brain
that, even now, I wish I could take a scalpel and cut
them out. 

But Bob had no choice. He had to look. Only his fury
and hatred of these people and his desire to destroy
them kept him going  and when that wasn't enough he'd
go out at night and get drunk to try to destroy the
memories.

In the end, at considerable cost to his psyche, Bob
got it all: from the poor families in the Eastern Bloc
and Africa selling their kids to porn merchants to the
sophisticated software and encryption designed to bury
these sites in plain sight, to the giant Internet and
financial services companies that make only a cursory
effort to defend themselves from being used as
conveyors of this evil smut to its degenerate
customers.

By the time Bob finished his story, Forbes ASAP was
dying. There was no place to run the story. So we took
it to the mother ship, Forbes, which wanted nothing to
do with it. In the end, it was Red Herring, and its
heroic managing editor, Blaise Zerega, who finally
brought the story to print. You can read it at:
http://www.redherring.com/mag/issue109/1249.html.

And that was it. Bob won a well-deserved award for his
work, the feds made a few busts seemingly based on our
leads, and the child porn scandal disappeared from the
public consciousness. 

The Missed Stories

Now, with the Pete Townshend bust, the story is back.
And yet, by focusing only on a single personality, the
media has once again missed the bigger stories. 

What are those missed stories? For one thing,
Townshend was busted because he used his credit card.
Why wasn't the credit card company  Visa or
MasterCard  charged as well? Why is it even possible
to buy child pornography with plastic? Don't say it's
because it would be like finding a needle in a
haystack of millions of transactions; that's why we
have search programs and spider applets. Where are the
Visa or Mastercard task forces on child porn? 

Spokespeople for the credit card companies say while
they are opposed to child pornography, they have no
direct line knowledge of how their cards are being
used.

"It's our member banks' job to know what their
customers are doing and how our card is being used,"
says Joshua Peirez, vice president and counsel for
MasterCard.

In a statement, Visa said that it did not want to be
associated with any inappropriate activity that
involves degrading and harmful conduct. "We will make
every effort to deny merchant acceptance privileges
for such inappropriate activity," says the company.

By the same token, why is it even possible to find
this stuff on the World Wide Web? Why aren't the
hosting sites, from regional ISPs to AOL, being
investigated, too? They'll argue that they can't
monitor all those thousands of Web sites and .alt chat
rooms under their control, especially the gypsy ones
that use software to hijack a URL for a few days
before jumping on to another. But that's a lie, too.
They know that they merely have to monitor traffic and
look for sudden and unprecedented spikes in usage.
There's even search software to find these images.

But they won't do it, because no one makes them do it.
Besides, it's not their problem  or ours. Just let
the cops bust the users.

If you believe that, you deserve what's coming next.
Let me tell you now the worst thing Bob discovered in
the course of his research: Kiddie porn is just the
beginning. It is, in fact, a Trojan horse. The
apparatus that currently exploits children in the
underdeveloped world and distributes the results to
hungry perverts in the developed one only grows more
sophisticated, faster, more robust and more secure, by
the day. 

Very soon now, it will be carrying shipping delivery
dates for drugs, electronic currency being laundered,
messages to secret cells, and atomic bomb diagrams. Do
you think it is a coincidence that al Qaeda hid its
e-mails behind porn pictures?

Now, do you still want to pretend it's somebody else's
problem?


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