John Carr - Internet Advisor
created 13/04/2006

One Letter

letter to Hilary Ben from NCH website 13/11/2002 pdf

A letter, bearing an imaged signature of John Carr under the banner of CHIS to Mr Hilary Benn MP (Parliamentary Undersecretary at The Home Office), was dated 13th of November 2002 and is at the time of this report, available at the NCH website as above.

As the signature is an image scan, we cannot verify that John Carr authored the document and the title of the document is Professor Martin Wasik, the first Chairman of the Sentencing Advisory Panel. It is however a letter John Carr takes responsibility for and this report is an examination of that letter.

The contributions of John Carr are in green.

Mr Hilary Benn MP
Parliamentary Under Secretary
The Home Office
50, Queen Anne’s Gate
London SW1H 9AT

13^th November, 2002

Operation Ore and its consequences

As you know, the US authorities have handed over to the British National Criminal Intelligence Service a list containing the names of over 7,200 people, seemingly with UK addresses, who had bought child pornography from a web site owned by Landslide Inc., a company that was based in Texas. The British police then organized Operation Ore to structure and implement their response.

- The original list of credit card details was passed from USPIS (United States Postal Inspection Service) to NCIS (National Criminal Intelligence Service - now part of SOCA) via Interpol.

- The list of credit card identities did not represent people who had purchased child pornography, indeed the transaction data verified this was not the case and in the the corresponding operation in the US (Avalanche), they did not attempt to arrest people that were not interested in illegal material. John Carr has not corrected his position despite considerable public exposure, challenge on air, and even direct challenges to his employers at NCH. Rather he has continued to present a whole battery of false and misleading statements, especially to the media, propaganda which at times is highly prejudicial.

- Operation Ore related to a number of websites owned and Operated by Landslide Inc (formerly Landslide Productions Inc), not one as John Carr stated and also related to a large number of third party websites, mainly legal adult.

- The British police had made extensive covert preparations prior to receipt of the list John Carr refers to, indeed John Carr himself only became a public name in this context after Landslide was raided but long before Operation Ore rolled out in May 2002. Tony Blair, Jack Straw, David Blunkett, the UK police, child advocates, the IWF and  John Carr all made significant changes in advance, preparatory to Operation Ore.

We have been greatly dismayed by the slow pace of Operation Ore, and also we are concerned about apparent inconsistencies in the approach of different Constabularies when they do act on the list.

- The slow pace of Operation Ore was by design of the police, though Carole Howlett, promoted from the MET to Chief Constable of Norfolk let slip early on that it would all be over in a few months, a position she made a U turn on almost immediately. It is of considerable relevance, that it is highly unusual to announce arrests well in advance, when the evidence was in possession of those pending arrest, perhaps years ahead. It should be noted further of significance, it would be the exception for someone on the Operation Ore list to be expecting a police visit, Landslide was being used as a clearing house for credit card fraud, and quite regardless, the vast majority of people on the list were entirely innocent, the vast majority of websites entirely lawful, though this is conspicuously not reflected in the prosecution figures.

- Constabularies are meant to be independent of political control, and local policies and priorities would not be an unhealthy position, local accountability being a key priority of the public.

The priority, or lack of it, that different police forces are giving to how they handle the list is undoubtedly, in part, to do with resources, but we are not sure that is the entire explanation. What happened in Cambridgeshire with Detective Constable Brian Stevens will, we hope, not be repeated elsewhere, but unless and until the list has been gone through from top to bottom, it is not only the police who will continue to have anxieties about the avoidable risks to which some children may be exposed. How many people on the list are currently working in one of the professions where they have daily or ready access to children?

- John Carr is inferring that Brian Stevens was someone who posed a risk to children, that he was one of thousands, and that the police needed additional funding and resources in the interest of protecting children. A position at odds with Her Majesty's Inspector of Constabulary who subsequently reported on Operation Ore, its lack of relevance to child protection issues and the fact that real child protection issues were being neglected.

- The case against Brian Stevens, as with most Operation Ore cases, related to imagery that was not connected with Landslide (often charges were brought in the absence of ANY questionable imagery by an unusual application of the incitement law), and where evidence on the computer was misused in an attempt to secure a conviction. This case exploded in the media, resulting in the CPS commissioning an independent report into a forensic partner of what is now SOCA, the conclusions of which provided such a damming verdict on the competence and honesty of Brian Underhill that one of his colleagues took over providing court evidence only for that expert to have been similarly exposed on the stand in court. Brian Underhill prepared the key evidence for use in ALL Operation Ore arrests, evidence that was subsequently proven to have been altered.

- John Carr stresses the risk to children when Landslide was primarily an Internet credit clearance facility for adult webmasters. To assert that there was a substantial risk in this context in relation to the small minority of the list who had actually viewed illegal sites, is an assertion at odds with academic research and at odds with empirical data. In this specific context, an absurd suggestion. It should be noted that Operation Ore in Scotland completed without finding a single case of abuse out of the Landslide subscribers. Enquiries were sent to every force in the UK under the Freedom of Information Act, and one case of child abuse has been reported. Children were taken away during Operation Ore, sometimes with horrific consequences for the child and family alike.

independent forensic report extract pdf
Vogon Report pdf
Jim Bates report pdf

We know there is a significant correlation between those who possess child pornography and those who abuse children. Evidence from the US suggests it may be as high as 1 in 3. Anecdotal evidence from the UK suggests it may be 1 in 5, still a worryingly high proportion. Put either set of numbers against a list containing 7,200 names and it hardly bears thinking about. It underlines, once again, the urgency of resolving this matter. The thought that investigations may be being impeded or delayed because the Home Office and the police cannot agree who should be paying for them is too awful for words.

- In the press frenzy in the United States,  numerous false quotes were made to the media by USPIS operatives and other law enforcement officials, the highest resulting in the 1 in 3 figure that has now become folklore. One US journalist tracked down the real figure which bore no relation to any of the figures that appeared in any of the high profile news reports. It is perhaps appropriate to quote what the Chief Postal Inspector said at the press launch following the conclusion of Operation Avalanche, the US counterpart to Operation Ore, where, according to the Attorney General John Ashcroft, 100 people were arrested nationwide. Two extracts are provided from the media briefing on 08/08/2001 given by Attorney General John Ashcroft and Chief Postal Inspector Kenneth Weaver. The media broadcast is available for purchase in its entirety online.

Q Can you talk at all about what efforts are being made to locate and help some of the children that were obviously used, abused on these child porn sites and the people who are responsible for using them?

Mr Weaver: That's very important. And the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children devotes a great deal of their time in helping children and looking after the abused children. We also pay particular attention to this. Since 1997, we've tracked that of 100,000 investigations or arrests that we've conducted, we've saved over -- and we like to use that term, "saved" or "rescued" -- over 400 children from abuse.

Q The site itself had something like 250,000 subscribers -- (off mike). Does that mean that it's possible to go after the -- you don't have the resources to track down all of them?

Mr Weaver: Well, that may be part of it, but you've got to understand that a good part of these were also foreign-originating. So a lot of the subscribers or the subscriptions were from other countries. And many of them -- it wasn't clear whether they were interested in child pornography or adult pornography, and many of those were just interested in adult.

- the 1 in 5 figure has been misquoted, Jim Gamble of SOCA, CEOP and VGT went far further than most, linking this directly with contact child offences, but this was a report tainted by commercial interests, NCEMEC sponsoring a report from a professor who was regularly used, the findings being published by the US department of justice. The report related to exposure of 10 to 17 year olds to adult material via the Internet. It is clear from the framing of the report, and the format of the output, that this was a report for propaganda use, not of academic merit, and the raw results are not a reason for alarm, though spam and misdirects are typically a nuisance for all users of the Internet.

- Such was the stress on regional police forces, that criminality such as child abuse, rape and even murder had to take a back seat during Operation Ore. The real child care system, always the Cinderella service, was in part abandoned in the dash for cash in Operation Ore and similar operations.

Other relevant links

Guardian -Brian Stevens pdf ('paedophile cases in doubt after collapse of detective's trial')
Spiked 1 in 4 archive pdf ('are you the one in four')
LSE report in conjunction with Lancashire Police archive ('no link between child porn and sexual abuse')
Times pdf ('Child porn suspects set to be cleared in evidence 'shambles')
Official DOJ 1 in 5 report pdf summary pdf
Baroness Scotland of Asthal  pdf

We understand the possible constitutional concerns in relation to Ministers involving themselves in decisions which, on a conventional reading, seem to be largely operational matters. The police should, of course, be able to cope with, as it were, a “standard volume” of these, or any other sorts of crimes, out of their standard resource allocations. But the amounts of intelligence involved in Operation Ore are anything but standard. We believe they are entirely unprecedented. Moreover, such reasoning presupposes that what was already in place was adequate, and I think we are all sadly coming to the conclusion that it was not. The recently formed National HiTech Crime Unit is creaking at the seams and the police have just not been able to roll out the development of locally-based expertise anything like fast enough. The need for joint working and sharing knowledge between police personnel engaged in HiTech crime and police-based child protection work, and between all sections of the police and the wider child protection community, is also paramount.

- John Carr correctly notes the constitutional conflicts were a political party to interfere with police operations, that would of course be the conduct found in a police state as it is a fundamental principle that the police are not politicised.

- If Operation Ore had been a legitimate and professional operation, it would not have required any extension of resources or placed the stress on regional forces as it did.

- The reports that labour officials were on the Landslide subscriber list was denied by Bill Hughes, now the director of SOCA, but the names of two particular individuals were nearly exposed during these enquiries.

Thus we are writing to you now to urge you to consider, in the first place, making a substantial increase in police resourcing in order to enhance law enforcement’s capacity to deal much more rapidly with the list of 7,200, and for you also to consider maybe new ways of ensuring that, at local level, the issue is given a higher priority and that it is dealt with more consistently across the forces.

- John Carr requests money for the police and Industry partners. Beneficiaries include but are not limited to; NSPCC, NCH, SOCA, IWF and of course; John Carr.

- Mr Carr's positions have included: board member of IWF, CHIS spokesman, SOCA spokesman (formerly NCS), NCH Internet Advisor, Home Office Internet Task Force, European Task Force, Sentencing Advisory Panel advisor, member or DfES Schools Internet Safety, member of ACPO strategic group CCAI and a regular media commentator. John Carr's wife is in the House of Lords (Baroness Thornton).

Yours,

John Carr
Internet Adviser

as from:

NCH
85 Highbury Park
London N5 1UD

The questions that went unanswered

Gregg Vines
Head of Public Relations
NCH

I sent an email to John Carr however no reply has been forthcoming. I forward the email to you below as was, that the questions may be resolved.

...

I noticed a number of press releases bearing your name.
nch
communitycare
manchestereveningnews

You say that "PAEDOPHILES should not be able to escape prosecution by simply wiping child porn images from their computer hard drives".

In Rv Ross Warwick Porter (2006) EWCA Crim 560, the Court of Appeal said that a person who had deleted an image had "put it beyond his reach just as does a person who destroys or otherwise gets rid of a hard copy photograph. For this reason, it is not appropriate to say that a person who cannot retrieve an image from the hard disk drive is in possession of the image because he is in possession of the hard disk drive and the computer."

The Court went on to say that "Thus, images which have been emptied from the recycle bin may be considered to be within the control of a defendant who is skilled in the use of computers and in fact owns the software necessary to retrieve such images; whereas such images may be considered not to be within the control of a defendant who does not possess these skills and does not own such software."

A person who receives an indecent photograph of a child must delete it as soon as possible in order to avail himself of the statutory defences. Thus the decision in the Porter case necessarily implies that a person who knows how a computer operates MUST use software like Evidence Eliminator to be covered by the defences. You seem to be suggesting that a person complying with the requirements of the law is a criminal...

where it can be shown that a person suspected of possessing indecent images has used a programme like "Evidence Eliminator" to wipe everything from their hard drive, yet the police are in possession of information which shows, to the satisfaction of a judge, what he had been doing with his computer prior to that, the normal rules of evidence can be relaxed in some way?

What about a person who has been looking for indecent images, but never downloaded them? They are innocent of possession, innocent of making, innocent even of inciting distribution, yet the "relaxation" of the rules of evidence you suggest would have him locked up.

For criminal responsibility there must normally be a combination of "mens rea" and "actus reus": you propose making it possible to punish people (with penalties that are over harsh given the measurable effects of the crime) for no bad act, simply for a guilty mind. When will you implement the thought police?

Saying "child sex abuse image conveys exactly what the image is about, with no room for ambiguity.

Here we are again. Now indecent photographs are not even "child porn" but "child sex abuse images"... and this is to ensure that there is no ambiguity.

Many indecent photographs of children ARE nothing even closely resembling porn (for a perfect exemplar I suggest R v Mould (2000)) yet you wish them to be "unambiguously" linked to child abuse.

Ignoring for now the (in)validity the argument that says that those in possession of images of abuse are abusers by proxy, you here tarnish people who have no involvement whatsoever with child abuse with responsibility for "child sex abuse".

Do you agree that people possessing images that could be found in medical textbooks are child sex abusers? If no, why do you not make your position unambiguous?

Currently, the images themselves must be seized by police for a prosecution to take place.

This is because the indecency of a photograph is a matter of fact, and as such it is to be determined by a jury.

The only way to avoid this requirement for jury evaluation is to draw up a list of images that have been assessed (by a jury) to be indecent, and check each image against this list.
In order to be fair, there should also be a list of images found NOT to be indecent, which the image should also be checked against.

I do not know whether the self-same image has led to a conviction in one trial but an acquittal in another, but it is almost certainly the case; this is one of the known problems with "indecency" laws - what one community considers indecent, another will be perfectly happy with (one thinks of Muslims and nudists).

What, Mr Carr, would you propose happens when an image is found to be on both such lists?

sincerely

John Carr

Putting the dirt back into politics 31/05/2001 pdf
John Carr sentencing advice 08/04/2002 pdf
letter to Hilary Ben from NCH website 13/11/2002 pdf
John Carr Children First 28/09/2003 pdf
John Carr Paris 20/11/2003 pdf
John Carr - Child abuse, child pornography and the internet 01/04/2004
CHIS
new statesman award 22/05/2006
Internet censorship 27/05/2006
60 seconds with John Carr 13/07/2006
no public safety 06/08/2006

CHIS letters
(NCH, Barnardos, Childline, The Children's Society, National Children's Bureau, NCVCCO, NSPCC)

28/03/2000 Letter to DTI Minister
20/12/2000 Xmas campaign
10/01/2001 Evidence to the IWF on Newsgroups
31/01/2001 Evidence on the formation of OFCOM
16/02/2001 Internet Industry asked to clean up act
21/02/2001 Children's Charities welcome Demon change of police
20/03/2001 Letter to the Home Secretary
20/03/2001 CHIS Agenda for Action
22/09/2001 Family Friendly Rating Service - a proposal
08/04/2002 Evidence on Sentencing in Child Pornography Cases
13/05/2002 Invitation to attend a seminar
10/06/2002 Formation of OFCOM - Final Response
13/11/2002 Open letter to Hilary Benn about Operation Ore and its consequences
26/02/2003 Letter to Stephen Balkam, CEO, Internet Content Rating Association (ICRA)
27/02/2003 Letter to Chris Mullins MP, Chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee about Internet-related issues in the Sex Offences Bill
10/09/2003 Letter to Hamish MacLeod, consultant to mobile network operators about self-regulation of new content on mobiles.
16/01/2004 Press release - Children's charities welcome new mobile phone code to protect children from pornography and paedophiles.
15/02/2004 Letter to OFCOM - Ofcom's strategy and priority for the promotion of media literacy
07/07/2004 Letter to Lord Falconer
10/07/2004 Letter to David Blunkett - Identity cards: the next steps
10/07/2004 Letter to Nominet UK - Consultation on Terms and Conditions
06/12/2005 Open letter - Extreme pornography
03/04/2006 Open letter - Children's charities identify problems with mobile phone location service
11/04/2006 Open letter to ISPs regarding censorship technology
23/05/2006 Letter to Gordon Brown
08/07/2006 Letter to Graeme McGowan

Professor Wasik

Professor Martin Wasik at Keele pdf
Professor Martin Wasik SOP original pdf
Books by Professor Martin Wasik

Martin Wasik SAP

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