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Anonymous hackers turn fire on global paedophile menace
After
targeting jihadist websites, the Anonymous hacktivist collective targets
clean-up of dark web, as experts warn child porn explosion is overwhelming
government
6:00AM GMT 23 Jan 2015
They are best known
for hacking government and corporate websites, but in the wake of the Westminster child abuse scandal and allegations
of establishment cover-ups, the Anonymous internet collective has a new target:
exposing international paedophile networks.
Named “Operation Death
Eaters” after the evil acolytes of Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter series,
the group has issued a call for a global effort on social media to build a
grassroots database of paedophile cases that it says will shine light into the
darkest corner of the worldwide web.
The new Anonymous
campaign comes after the group announced it would target jihdadist websites in
the wake of the Charlie Hebdo killings, and is being spreading on Facebook,
Twitter and other social media using the tag ‘OpDeathEaters’
Heather Marsh, an
online activist who is helping to co-ordinate the operation and describes
herself as an “old friend” of Anonymous, said that ‘OpDeathEaters’ was aimed at
exposing the extent of the explosion of child abuse material on the internet.
Tens of millions of
images of child abuse are now believed to be circulating online, many showing
the abuse of infants and toddlers so horrific that mainstream media outlets and
the public at large are turning a blind eye to the problem, experts warned this
week.
Many of the cases,
like that of Michael Centanni, a prominent Republican fund-raiser in Washington
who pleaded guilty this month to child sex offences after being found with 267
child abuse videos, are glossed over by local media as too disturbing to cover
in detail.
Data from the National Center for
Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) in
Washington, which reflects only a fraction of the total, has identified almost
8,000 child victims since 2002 as well as some 3.2m child pornography images,
with approximately 40,000 new images being added every week.
The Anonymous project was also prompted in part by
allegations of cover-up of the alleged 1980s Westminster paedophile ring and
renewed questions over the influence network of Jeffrey Epstein, the
billionaire financier and friend of Prince Andrew who
was convicted of sex offences.
“The premise behind OpDeathEaters is to expose
high level complicity, obstruction of justice and cover-up in the paedo-sadist
industry in order to show the need for independent inquiries,” said Miss Marsh.
OpDeathEaters, like a
previous Anonymous campaign to highlight the cover-up of ritual murders in the
African state of Gabon, is intended to break what it says is a conspiracy of
silence among sympathetic politicians, police and mainstream media to downplay
the full extent of the online child sex industry.
“The database is not
meant to find criminals but to show influence networks and how already known
cases are distributed across those networks,” Miss Marsh added. “No one can
visualize a beach by being presented with periodic, isolated grains of sand.”
The scale of the
problem was acknowledged by David Cameron last year when he announced his “We Protect” initiative, including new offences for
soliciting pictures from children and a new unit at GCHQ to police the
encrypted file-sharing networks abusers use to swap videos and pictures of
child abuse.
At an international
conference in December Mr Cameron warned of “sickening images” being
transferred on the so-called dark web, and warned paedophiles there would be
“nowhere to hide” as the intelligence agencies shone a light “on the web's
darkest corners”
However Miss Marsh
whose book ‘Binding Chaos’ looks at the power of global, grassroots networks to
supplant traditional government, said the grassroots not government must own
the process.
“The high level
cover-ups by the UK government would make one question the good faith of any of
their initiatives to shut down the industry,” she said.
The Anonymous
database, which will be hosted on the GitHub online repository, promises to
collate cases from all around the world,
cross-referencing connections within sub-groups including the police, armed
forces, schoolteachers, politicians, media, academics and religious
organisations.
The database’s
ultimate purpose has yet to be fully determined, but in the first instance the
group says it wants to shut down the child-sex industry by “dismantling the
power structure which held it there” and by “educating to create a cultural
change”.
By its secretive
nature, precise data on the number of child abuse images circulating online is
impossible to produce, however police officers, prosecutors and child-sex
experts said that the avalanche of new material was easily overwhelming
government.
Detective Cecil
Arnold, a member of the Texas Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) task force,
said that US law enforcement had estimated there were some seven million
identified images of child abuse, only about 40 per cent of which were being
specifically tracked.
Even more disturbingly
according to Det. Arnold some 60 per cent of new images recently reviewed by
ICAC were of pre-pubescent children under 10, infants and toddlers –
challenging the often widespread assumption that child pornography involved
mainly pubescent or teenage boys and girls.
Paedophiles share the
images on ‘peer-to-peer’ file sharing networks that enable two people to swap
video files and pictures over an encrypted network that enables sophisticated
users to avoid detection.
Many of those
arrested, says Det Arnold, are “low hanging fruit” who started out consuming
mainstream pornography but found themselves sinking further and further into
hard core, and the child pornography.
“They start looking at
regular pornography, and then that progresses until they're into bondage, then
they're into torture and before they know it they've desensitised the portion
of their brain that filters this stuff as being wrong,” he said.
Lawyers, police
officers and experts who deal with child abuse cases on a regular basis said
that sheer depravity of the material, often involving the rape and sodomy of
very young children, mean that mainstream media were unable or unwilling to
describe the true nature of the problem.
James Marsh, an
internationally recognised lawyer for victims of child pornography who last
year took a compensation came for victims to the US Supreme Court, said that
government, media and society was simply failing to grasp the problem because
no-one wanted to confront the reality.
“It is an unstoppable
cesspool of images and exploitation out there and it’s just something that, from
a public policy standpoint, a social policy standpoint and a public health
standpoint, we haven't even begun to deal with this in a reasonable way,” he
said.
The rise of the
smartphone, the ubiquity of ‘regular’ pornography and the ability of the internet
to network child-abusers together into self-supporting groups has massively
accelerated the child porn problem in recent years, according to experts.
Dr Sharon Cooper, one
of the world’s leading experts in the impacts of child sex abuse, who has been
reviewing child abuse images since 1998 for police investigations, said
contemporary images were now noticeably more sadistic than a decade ago.
“In the late 1990s a
lot of images were poses, children just solo or perhaps masturbating, but not
nearly as horrendous as what we see today, which is child-torture. Sometimes
it’s so bad you cannot be sure they will survive it,” she said.
“Many of these child
abuse images are also mimicking adult porn which has become much more violent,
often contains more than one offender and includes many more homemade images.
That is occurring in child sexual abuse images too.”
The high prevalence of
white, often middle class establishment professional men among offenders has
also contributed to the failure to fully address the problem and the
over-arching networks that sustain the child pornography industry, according to
Mr Marsh.
Data from the US
government’s Sentencing Commission survey confirms that the overwhelming
majority – more than 85 per cent - of those convicted of child pornography
offenses were white males. Their average age was 43.
“Our biggest challenge
is often convincing a court and the world that the white middle class
businessmen, with no prior record, was indeed a paedophile - a child rapist and
a child molester. That's something that we don't want to accept,” he said.
Studies have also
established a clear link between those who possess child pornography and those
who engage in real-world sexual abuse, with the a review of 21 studies by
Canadian scientists finding that half of convicted child-porn offenders
admitted having previously committed a “contact sexual offence”.
Activists pointed to
the muted media coverage given to a recent case in Washington DC in which
Centanni, a senior Republican fundraiser, was charged with child sex offences
after investigators traced transmissions of child pornography to his computers
in his basement.
The case was not
covered by The Washington Post or the New York Times, and was only picked up by
a local NBC affiliate state and The Washington Examiner, a small conservative
paper in the city.
According to the court
filings, Centanni was found in possession of 3,000 images, many apparently
filmed in his own bedroom, including one showing a man raping a five year old
girl who cries “no” and “mommy” while the man says “good baby” and “stop
crying,” according to one filing.
Professor David
Corwin, a child psychiatrist at the University of Utah and a regular expert
witness who has had to watch graphic videos of child abuse, says the collective
desire to turn away among the media and public is understandable, but is
keeping society from confronting the truly corrosive nature of child abuse.
“This material is just
so far beyond our common ability to even conceive, it’s psychological heroin,
you cannot get it out of your head,” he said, “It’s like Medusa: you can’t look
at it without it turning you to stone, so how does society deal with the
problem?”
Link originale: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/11363303/Anonymous-hackers-turn-fire-on-global-paedophile-menace.html
