There is in fact a hard solution to all this. It is the ending of anomimity. You will be wlecome to use handles as we all do, but it must be always possible to right click in order to review the individuals profile which needs to be independently authenticated.
That rule also needs to apply to securities tading and many other commercial transactions.
What this does is that it does not stop viewing porn per se but it stops material whosesource cannot be tracked.
The internet has made simple criminalzation an exercise in futility. Yet it can all be reduced to the crime of criminal impersonation in most cases if the system is made such that this becomes the only way to move forward.
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Special Ops Veteran Now Fights Scourge of Child Exploitation
The Internet Effect
A Growing Threat
Education
Grooming
International Cooperation
Disturbing Images
What Parents and Children Need to Know
Apps and the internet make children more vulnerable to online predators
Special
ops veteran Kevin Tillman retrained as a computer forensic expert and
now fights child exploitation for ICE Homeland Security Investigations
in New York. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)
NEW YORK—Kevin Tillman doesn’t
consider himself a hero. But to many young girls and boys, he is their
champion, an unsung hero in a dark world. His work takes pedophiles and
child pornographers off the streets. And he helps save kids from
nightmare scenarios.
Tillman is a computer forensics
expert working for ICE (Immigrations and Custom Enforcement) Homeland
Security Investigations (HSI) in New York. He is a 29-year military
veteran who retrained as a Human Exploitation and Rescue Operative
(HERO) after retiring in 2015. The HERO program gives veterans, especially those who are wounded, a chance to retrain and fight crime in a different way.
Tillman is the first HERO in the New York HSI office, and he brings his special operations experience to his new role.
“It was very humbling to get involved
in this and see that there’s this hidden society of people that’s so
massive. I was unaware that pedophilia was such a large society,”
Tillman said on April 28.
“I mean, who can question [cracking
down on] child pornography or human trafficking—those are things most
people want to see diminished, or at least depleted.”
A recent successful case involved an
individual who visited a website that was being monitored. During a
subsequent search at his home, child pornography was found on one of his
computer systems. Tillman’s job was to meticulously sort through all of
the evidence on the hard drive.
He discovered compromising photos between a young girl and her grandfather, who lived at the home with the father.
“The granddaughter was removed from
the home,” Tillman said. “And it appears that the father didn’t know
that the grandfather was involved with the child.”
Military
veteran Kevin Tillman at his desk at ICE Homeland Security
Investigations in New York on April 26, 2017. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch
Times)
The internet and social media have thrown open the door to exploitation on a whole new level. The days of plonking a child in front of the television to passively watch are gone.
“Now you’re talking about a computer
and the internet, you sit them down in front of that, and that’s
interactive,” Tillman said.
“If it’s not closely supervised, it’s
an insurgency of evil,” he said. And it’s taking the time that people
used to spend watching “Three’s Company” or “Howdy Doody,” he said.
Perverts operate in the shadows of
the so-called darknet—often using the Tor network, which is an open
network on the internet where users can communicate anonymously through
“hidden service” websites, according to the FBI.
“Most of these guys don’t have any
criminal history, and no one has any idea of what they were doing until
we catch them,” said Special Agent Eric Campbell, who investigates
violent crimes against children in the FBI’s Phoenix Division, in a
statement.
Perpetrators are most often white,
middle-aged men, and it’s very common that the victim is known to the
perpetrator, said Tillman.
A quick scan through the FBI’s list of most wanted for crimes against children elicits average-sounding names like Gregory Whitehead, Bruce Sawhill, and Roger Parham.
As with rapes and sexual assaults—of
which only about 30 percent are reported to police—child exploitation
and child pornography are vastly underreported.
New York college student Robert
Garneau, 22, was arrested last May, the day before his graduation, in an
alleged “sextortion” scheme. He had allegedly chatted to three boys
aged between 12 and 16, through the apps Instagram and Kik. According to
court records, Garneau pretended to be a young girl and enticed the
victims to send him a sexually explicit photo of themselves.
Once Garneau received the
compromising photos, he allegedly threatened the victims that if they
didn’t send a video of a more explicit sexual activity, he would go to
the police with the photos or blast them out to the victims’ Instagram
followers.
According to an HSI forensic search
of the text messages, one of the victims alluded to suicide if Garneau
sent the video out, writing, “Why I’m killing myself” and “Goodbye I’m
blaming you.”
An FBI analysis in 2015 of 43 sextortion cases involving child
victims revealed at least two victims committed suicide and at least 10
more attempted suicide.
Garneau was charged with three counts
of sexual exploitation of a minor, each carrying a minimum sentence of
15 years in prison and a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison.
“Robert Garneau’s alleged crimes are
the nightmare of every modern parent,” said Preet Bharara, then-U.S.
Attorney for the Southern District of New York. “Using everyday social
media websites, Garneau allegedly exploited minors for his own sexual
gratification.”
Timothy
McCullouch Jr., 28, a juvenile probation officer, is arrested by HSI
and FBI special agents on federal sex trafficking charges, in El Paso,
Texas, on Jan. 17, 2014. (ICE)
Sextortion is “by far the most
significantly growing threat to children,” a 2016 DOJ report stated, and
sextortion cases tend to have more victims per offender than all other
child sexual exploitation offenses.
“Offenders create and share ‘how-to’ guides that discuss how to groom children to be sexually exploited,” the report stated.
Sextortion offenders typically
threaten minors aged 10 to 17, the report said, but increasingly the
threat is extending to even younger and more vulnerable victims, as the
offender manipulates the victim to abuse younger siblings or friends.
Tillman said parents should not
underestimate their child’s knowledge of technology. The first line of
defense is for parents to have better control over what their kids are
doing online and who they are talking to.
Tillman recommends that parents and children learn how to combat child sexual exploitation through the information on ICE’s iGuardian website.
He also educates groups of children about the pitfalls of the internet
and messaging apps, and the danger of lurking predators.
“I start off the iGuardian brief by saying, ‘My name is Jessica and I’m 12 years old and have blonde hair,'” said Tillman.
Then he asks the kids, “Do I look 12 and do I have blonde hair?”
“And all the kids go, ‘Nooo!’ and I say, ‘But you don’t know that.'”
Tillman said his fun introduction is
to get children to understand that the person on the other side isn’t
always who they say they are.
“I tell the students: ‘Never
communicate with anybody you haven’t met in person; never give your
phone number out to anybody; never enter into a chat or communicate with
anybody that you haven’t already met in person.'”
Pedophiles can be crafty and methodical, and Tillman described an example.
“So you have a 12-year-old daughter who plays on a soccer team, and she’s got a Kayak chat Facebook
account and she gets a message from another 12-year-old girl, who says,
‘Hey, I play for the opposite team, but I’m new in town and I don’t
have any friends. Can we just chat online?'”
They develop a friendship.
Eventually, up to a year after
they’ve been chatting, the other “girl” says, “Hey, I was up in the
stands and I saw you at your game—you weren’t playing my team, but I
came to watch you play. You were wearing number 7, you were wearing a
blue shirt, you looked great.”
This person’s watching her. A year
later, they want to meet in real life and want to meet at the pizza
place. The other “girl” says “her” father is going to be there, and so
the daughter’s parent says, “Well, as long as there’s going to be an
adult there, I’ll drop you off.”
“That’s how meticulous pedophiles are in grooming,” Tillman said.
Tillman said the cooperation between
local law enforcement, HSI, and the FBI is very effective and the
agencies share information through the National Center for Missing &
Exploited Children (NCMEC).
The cooperation extends internationally, especially as so much
exploitation happens on the internet, which is essentially cross-border.
If HSI in New York finds a child
pornography site and a credit card used on the site traces back to
London, the agency calls the HSI attache agent in London, who can then
pass the information to Scotland Yard to make an arrest.
A
hard drive duplication system at the ICE cyber crimes center in
Fairfax, Virginia. The center supports Homeland Security Investigations
cases. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Steven Chase, 58, of Florida, was
just sentenced for creating a website called “Playpen” in August 2014 on
the Tor network, the FBI said in a statement on May 5.
Members used the website to upload
and view tens of thousands of postings of young victims, “indexed by
age, sex, and the type of sexual activity involved,” the FBI said.
The takedown of Playpen resulted in
the arrest of almost 900 suspected pedophiles globally, and almost 300
children were identified or rescued from their abusers, the FBI said.
FBI Special Agent Dan Alfin said the investigation is ongoing.
“It’s the same with any criminal
violation: As they get smarter, we adapt, we find them,” he said, in the
statement. “It’s a cat-and-mouse game, except it’s not a game. Kids are
being abused, and it’s our job to stop that.”
Most child pornography and pedophile
cases don’t go to court due to overwhelming evidence, but in the ones
that do, Tillman’s work is critical.
The images and videos that Tillman
has to ferret out of suspects’ computers are disturbing, and it takes a
special person to be able to handle it. Part of special ops training is
learning how to compartmentalize, and Tillman said it helps him.
“You can get to the end of the day
seeing horrific things that can’t be unseen,” he said. “I may not try to
put it out of my head, I just try to focus on what’s next or what’s
present.”
Tillman plays the saxophone, does some catering on the side, and leans hard on his faith to help keep balance in his life.
“Every time a new case comes through, it’s [even] more horrifying. I can’t believe it.”
—–
73 percent of teenagers aged 13 to 17 have access to a smartphone, according to a 2015 Pew Research Center study.
46 percent of 10- to 17-year-olds admit to having given out their
personal information to someone they did not know, according to a NCMEC
survey.
Social networking websites often ask users to post a profile with
their age, gender, hobbies, and interests. While these profiles help
kids connect and share common interests, individuals who want to
victimize kids can use profiles to search for potential victims.
Sextortion and livestreaming of child sexual abuse are evolving
threats, according to the Justice Department’s 2016 national strategy on
child exploitation. Apps can be used to target, recruit, groom, or
coerce children to engage in sexual activity.
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