Burned by the state


Shaky evidence from a Postal Service investigation is enough to falsely label some as sex offenders
I don't know about the UK, but I know that in the US, regardless of if someone is prosecuted or not, once someone has been accused of being a sex offender, it's almost impossible to prove that they are not.

That is why this article should concern us.

Operation Ore has become embedded in public consciousness as the landmark police operation that tracked down people - almost always men - who allegedly paid to access child pornography via computer. In all, 7,272 British residents were on its target lists, more than 2,000 of whom have never been investigated; and 39 men have killed themselves under the pressure of the investigations. Ore has dragged big names into the spotlight - such as the musicians Pete Townshend, the Who guitarist, and Robert del Naja of Massive Attack, both falsely accused of accessing child pornography.

New evidence I have gathered for my work as an expert witness in defence cases shows that thousands of cases under Operation Ore have been built on the shakiest of foundations - the use of credit card details to sign up for pornography websites. In many cases, the card details were stolen; the sites contained nothing or legal material only; and the people who allegedly signed up to visit the sites never went there.

The probe - Britain's biggest ever computer crime investigation - started from 1990s activity by a Texan porn portal called Landslide.com. People could sign up with their credit cards to access affiliated porn sites: the porn site got 65% of the sign-up fee, while Landslide took the rest, and dealt with the credit card companies.
In 1999 the US Postal Inspection Service investigated sites linked to Landslide that seemed to be dealing in child pornography. The company was raided by 50 agents, who took computers listing the credit card details of thousands of Britons. These were handed to the British police, who thought they had a goldmine. All they needed to do was seize the computers of those people, find evidence of having viewed child pornography on the sites and secure a conviction - the perfect case. Society would be protected and the police's reputation for defeating computer-based child abuse would be boosted.

The UK investigation was sparked by a U.S. Postal Service investigation, but in many cases the accused were victims of crime themselves. Credit card fraud against them was enough to label them "sex offender."

It makes you wonder how many Americans had to face the same problem.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Mon - April 23, 2007 at 02:00 PM  Tag


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