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 Pro
