Ministers preparing for next month’s G8 summit have
announced plans to create a central database of internet
paedophiles. Such a database would necessarily include the
names of those convicted as part of Operation Ore, the huge
police investigation launched three years ago on the basis of
a list of 7,200 names supplied to British police forces by
American colleagues.
The men on the list are accused of having paid for child
porn through Landslide, a website that operated in Texas from
1996-9. So far, about 1,200 cases have resulted in
convictions. The public has been led to believe that a huge
number of unsavoury — and possibly dangerous — men have been
brought to book.
There is no dispute that abusing children is a hideous
crime. But it is also appalling to be accused unjustly of such
a crime. My investigations and work as an expert witness in a
number of Operation Ore cases have led me to believe that the
evidence has been exaggerated and used unacceptably.
The costs — in every sense — have been huge. Thousands of
cases have been investigated, with scores of officers spending
hundreds of weeks sifting through computers and disks.
Thousands more may face investigation. Meanwhile, the
accusations have led to 33 suicides, most recently that of
Royal Navy Commodore David White, the commander of British
forces in Gibraltar. On January 8, he was found dead in his
pool.
Ministers appear not to have been informed that critical
evidence from US investigators forming the backbone of
Operation Ore has been found to be untrue. In information
given to Interpol and in sworn statements submitted to British
courts in 2002, Dallas detective Steven Nelson and US postal
inspector Michael Mead claimed that everyone who went to
Landslide always saw only a front page screen button offering
“Click Here (for) Child Porn”.
According to them, this was the way in to nearly 400
pay-per-view websites, almost all of which specialised in
child pornography; ergo, anyone who accessed Landslide and
paid it money must be a paedophile.
When Operation Ore was launched in Britain in May 2002,
pictures of the web page and its “click here” button were
given prominent and sustained publicity. But what passed
almost unnoticed eight months later was that after British
police and computer investigators had finally examined
American files, they found that the “child porn” button was
not on the front page of Landslide at all, but was an
advertisement for another site appearing elsewhere: thus the
crucial “child porn” button was a myth.
Landslide certainly gave access to thousands of adult sex
sites. But accessing such material, which is now freely
broadcast and sold in high street grocers’, is not a crime.
The real front page of Landslide was an innocuous image of
a mountain, carrying no links to child porn. There was “no
way” a visitor to Landslide could link from there to child
porn sites, according to Sam Type, a British forensic computer
consultant who was asked by the National Crime Squad (NCS) to
rebuild the Landslide website. She dismissed the idea that
Landslide had created a service devoted to child porn. She
described it as different merely in that it was a “
pay-per-view” service.
Landslide operated two services, one of which gave access
to thousands of sites for a small monthly fee. The other,
called Keyz, was more expensive and required a separate
payment for each site. The American investigators, it
transpired, had copied the contents of 12 sites out of nearly
400 accessible through Keyz. Those sites definitely did
contain child porn. It was also suspected that about a quarter
of the other sites contained child porn. But investigations
carried out more than a year after Operation Ore was launched
found that about 180 Keyz sites were likely to have been adult
sites only or were completely unknown. “We are unable to say
what material these sites ever contained,” a police report
stated.
This was not a problem in early cases, which relied on
actual possession of indecent images. But the length of time
since the alleged offences occurred — Landslide shut in 1999 —
meant that in many cases, there were no indecent images, just
the record of name and credit card details.
Here, the American evidence that having paid to get into
Landslide meant having paid to access child porn has become
crucial. Many of the accused argue that their card details
could have been stolen and used without their knowledge, or
admit that they used Landslide, but for adult material.
The NCS detective who found the real, innocuous Landslide
front page in the American police files acted quickly to make
it available to police forces and prosecutors. But nobody
seems to have paid attention to the contradiction this created
in the Operation Ore evidence. Nor did they apparently notice
that there were now two, utterly different “Landslide front
pages” presented in Operation Ore prosecutions — one totally
incriminating, the other (and accurate) page quite innocuous.
The Texan investigators’ claims collapsed further in
February this year, when Mead was cross-examined during an
Operation Ore case held in Derby. Mead gave evidence by
satellite video link. On oath, he admitted he and Nelson had
only ever seen the “Click Here Child Porn” button appear once,
at the very start of their investigation.
Mead also agreed they had provided British police with a
photograph that did not show most of the page they had been
looking at. Had they provided a full image, it would have been
obvious that it was not, as they told the NCS, the “Landslide
front page”. In evidence, Mead accepted the photograph had
shown only part of the page. “The child porn link was at the
bottom,” he agreed. He was asked: “In June 1999, it is likely
that the ‘click here for child porn’ was not on the
Landslide’s home page?” “Correct,” he replied.
The 2005 testimony contradicted what was said in sworn
statements given to British police in October 2002. But
despite these flaws being uncovered in the early part of 2003,
Operation Ore accelerated. When police investigators found no
evidence on seized computers, they did not assume the user
might be innocent or had sought only legal, adult material.
They were charged instead with “incitement”. These charges
alleged that, simply by making a credit card payment through
the internet, the child porn webmasters were encouraged to
continue trafficking.
One of the targets was Robert Del Naja, frontman of the
group Massive Attack, who was arrested in February 2003. All
his computer equipment was seized. The case was dropped barely
a month later. After being falsely arrested on child porn
charges, Del Naja later described 2003 as the worst year of
his life. “When the story was leaked to newspapers the human
cost was horrible for me, my friends and family,” he said.
Many arrested Operation Ore suspects who were cleared
because there was no evidence also found their names and
details leaked to the press. Information about Del Naja was
leaked to The Sun before investigations concluded. The same
thing happened to Who guitarist Pete Townshend, who later
admitted visiting child porn sites as part of a research
project. The Sunday Times saw a complete copy of the Landslide
British database of 7,200 names in January 2003.
In Britain, none of the 33 dead has been formally cleared,
although the record of Operation Ore prosecutions, both
successes and failures, suggests some would have been found
guilty at trial and some must have been innocent.
And the pattern of investigations, media leaks and
publicity preceding investigations that then failed has been
repeated in other countries to which Landslide information was
sent. In April 2003, at the start of a Canadian investigation,
Operation Snowball, Toronto police chief Julian Fantino held a
high-profile press conference to announce arrests for child
pornography. He publicly listed the names and ages of six men:
one was never charged and three others later had all charges
withdrawn.
One of those was James LeCraw, the director of a non-profit
agency in Toronto providing computers to schools. He was
suspended and later lost his job. But five months after the
press conference, LeCraw was formally cleared. It was too
late. Stigmatised, he killed himself on July 19, 2004.
Even for those never charged, or acquitted before trial,
the experiences are so scarring that very few want to talk. An
exception is David Stanley, who runs his own
computer-programming company in Wales. Like many men, from
time to time he signed up for adult images on the net. In the
summer of 1999 he saw his credit card details had been used
five times in less than three weeks on the Landslide website.
He complained quickly and got a refund. He thought no more of
it until the police knocked on his door three years later.
Being an Operation Ore suspect was, he said, “a trial of
the mind”. “I lost mine at the time. If people are guilty,
they can say to themselves, yes, been there, done that. But if
you haven’t, then it’s impossible to make sense of what’s
happening to your life.” When Stanley proved to police that
details he’d given for adult access had been stolen and reused
at Landslide to send money to child porn merchants, his
innocence was accepted.
The laudable objective of Operation Ore was the protection
of vulnerable children from adult abuse and harm. But many
fear that mistakes have caused huge quantities of police,
technical and social work resources to be misdirected to some
futile and ill-founded investigations. Many families as well
as accused men have been damaged, sometimes irretrievably, by
the nature of the investigations. The claims made by the
authorities may need to be weighed against the harm done to
innocent lives.
Duncan Campbell has worked as a computer expert in a
number of Operation Ore cases. A longer version of this
article appears in the current issue of PC
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