What would you think if I told you the police had accused 5,000 British citizens of a really unpleasant, despicable crime, the sort of thing where just being questioned is the kind of news that could destroy your family, career, and psyche, that some 39 of them had committed suicide as a result, but quite possibly every man-jack of them was innocent?
It would be like the Guildford Four case on steroids, right? All over the papers, public inquiries, years of litigation, every blowhard from Vanessa Redgrave to Tim Worstall joining the Free the 5,000 support group.
Well, they did it, and it's not. In June, 2006, this blog mentioned an article in the Times by Duncan Campbell - that's the Duncan Campbell of no-ricin not-plot fame, whose articles on this topic were retconned out of the Grauniad archive - which detailed the incredibly flaky evidence used by police in the Operation Ore child-porn case.
Amongst other things, the testimony of a US Postal Service inspector and a cop, both of whom swore that visitors to the website in question had to click a button marked "Click Here for Child Porn", was exploded as nonsense ('twas actually a banner ad).
Now Campbell is back, with even worse news. Recap: the Texas-based website Landslide.com provided hosting and payments services to a large number of porno sites, under a revenue-sharing agreement. In 1999, police seized the box on which the SSL-encrypted credit card numbers were handled. Operation ORE consisted in going through the list of cards.
Unfortunately, the original file includes some 54,348 credit cards known to have been stolen or otherwise compromised.
The site's operators had a curious relationship with credit card fraudsters. In its heyday, it was one of the easiest ways to get credit card merchant facilities, and hence an obvious opportunity if you had a list of other people's cards. As 65 per cent of revenue from its customers went to the owners, they had a strong incentive to look the other way. At least, until the suckers began to spot unusual transactions - then, they raised chargebacks through the Visa dispute procedure. As Landslide was the merchant under VisaNet definitions, it had to pay up, and it was this that eventually bankrupted the site. Naturally, this was an advantage to the crook, as the cost of chargebacks fell on someone else.
The killer fact? Many of the credit cards presented for payment don't correspond to the server log - to put it more brutally, a mysteriously large number of people were paying up in advance but not taking delivery of their smut. In fact, quite a lot of the websites that used Landslide contained no porn, nor anything else, existing purely for fraudulent purposes. The M.O. was to get hold of a list of cards - a black market exists - set up an account, and then run a script that would charge small amounts (say £25) to each, hoping that the payments would go unnoticed.
It should be quite clear from this that the police investigation in both the US and UK was spectacularly incompetent, overkeen to prove that they could keep up with Teh Interweb Menace, and probably conducted with one eye on future data-retention legislation. All prosecutions must stop, and there must be a full-dress public inquiry. The sheer scale of the case demands it.
This is, of course, an instance of everything we fear about the National Identity Register. Justice-by-database has the potential to generate injustice faster and more efficiently than any previous system. It's time to stop the machine - anyone whose credit card was compromised before August, 1999 is a potential target.
Don't miss the longer version of Campbell's report from PC Pro (pdf link). I'd actually forgotten the little ha-gotcha that if they didn't find anything on your computer, they'd charge you with "incitement".
Did I mention the Home Office must be abolished?
6 comments:
are the victims of this scam reported by the BBC this morning to be investigated for terrorist funding?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6578595.stm
principle would be the same.
But if I remember correctly Operation Ore did give us the spectacle Pete Townsend and his "research". Is a massive scandal of willful incompetence worth it for another celebrity nonce? Tough call.
Unfortunately for us, brave Anti-Tyranny freedom fighter Tim Worstall has prioritized his efforts on the pressing matter of compost (to the extent that he may be able to bitch about Teh Greens Movement).
I'm not joking.
Anon - if you read the piece, you'll note that there was no evidence against Pete Townsend either - rather, he agreed to accept a caution because the police told him they'd get him sent to jail otherwise.
Not a clever move in restrospect, since it convinced idiots like you of his guilt - but I'd recommend not judging until you've been presented with a choice of confession or jail-as-a-paedo by a grinning policeman convinced he's solved the crime of the century...
John B
My name is Fima and I live in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
I came to US as political refugee on human rights violations in former USSR
I am russian jew, and I got a lot of discrimination in USSR
My parents are Holocaust survivors.
But I got the worst thing in USA, never possible in communist country.
I was set up with my computer, convicted as a s..x offender for computer p..rn.
Now I do not have job and can hardly survive under police database
supervision, named s..x offender registration. Nobody want to hire me,
I think because of police database.
And I have family. Who cares? Dirty polititians are playing their
dirty games for more power.
I would like to send you some links to publications about my criminal
case. I was forced to confess to the
possession of internet digital pictures of p..rn in deleted clusters
of my computer hard drive. My browser was hijacked while I was
browsing the web. I was redirected to illegal sites against my will.
Some illegal pictures were found on my hard drive, recovering in
unallocated clusters, without dates of file creation/download.
I do not know how courts can widely press these charges on people to
convict them, while the whole Internet is a mess.
You can find all links to publications about my case here
http://estrinyefim.newsvine.com/_news/2007/06/23/798199-internet-porn-hysteria
Here's something they've done recently. A friend of mine has recently been convicted for having 9 (that's right, just 9), images of child porn. Now here's the kicker - they weren't even real. Under UK law he was prosecuted because they were CG images that were deemed to be "Pseudo Photographs". However, they jury was never shown any high end CG images as a comparison so they thought the images they were seeing were top quality.
He was convicted of 6 of the images, but this is where it all gets interesting. Of the 9 images, three had little to no sexual content, and 3 were virtually identical, barring some alterations of the characters head position. Of the former, he was found not guilty for one of them and guilty for the other two, and of the latter, he was found not guilty for two of them and guilty for one. WTF!?!?!?
Oh, and he get's his computer back (barring one of his hard drives). The standard practice is for it all to be destroyed. The police also interviewed him about this FIVE TO SIX MONTHS AFTER HE'D BEEN ARRESTED.
Couple that with the fact that the jury was mainly comprised of old women, none of the research or evidence he'd given his barrister was used in the trial, and add in one very important fact that was never mentioned, and it sounds like a someone's been stitched up doesn't it?
And the important fact I mentioned? He was arrested 3 months previously for having an opinion. He's a muslim, he was on his way back from work, and was having a normal socio-political conversation on the bus home with some students. One of those students claims he threatened to blow up Durham Cathedral (he'd make a great terrorist, telling random people his future plans and all). He was arrested THE VERY NEXT DAY, and lost his job because they arrested him at work (apparently it was a coin flip as to whether they were going to send armed police for him). They took his computer, but didn't take his laptop, DVDs, spare hard drives, or anything else. They did no investigation other than a background check, and because they had no evidence to convict him of that, he's now been convicted of so called child porn.
Oh, and to top it all off, the porn he's convicted of is FREELY AVAILABLE ON THE NET!!! Anyone can download the images, which form a comic strip style story (complete with speech bubbles). You don't need to search that hard for em. All you have to do is type in 3D porn or 3D Hentai into google, and it's right there. I've tried it myself.
If these things are supposed to be illegal, then why are they readily available? Why does the police convince us through the media that they are able to monitor everything on the net? The average joe on the street assumes that what he sees on the net, providing it's readily available, must be safe and legal. The police computer expert has 13 years experience, so he should easily be able to tell the difference right?
There's an article in the local paper about it, and you can find it here:
http://www.gazettelive.co.uk/news/teesside-news/2008/09/26/child-porn-in-cartoon-style-man-convicted-84229-21906841/
Now, does anyone remember the two lads who were shot in Forest Gate by the police? They were suspected of terrorism, but when the police found they had no evidence, they tried to pin a child porn charge on them.
Does it sound to you all that my friend is being stitched up by the authorities? If so, then please get in touch with me at screaminglemming@googlemail.com, and please add this to your blogs and make the world aware that the police and Crown Prosecution Service are commiting the most underhanded acts in order to gain a spurious conviction.
Oh, and my friend will be appealing the decision, and has declared that the police and CPS are going to be taken to the cleaners.
There are already groups of local people backing him. Please join the fight.
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