WUNRN
WUNRN
posts this release for human rights, health, safety, & dignity
of THE GIRL CHILD.
CHILD PORNOGRAPHY, SEXUAL ABUSE
INTERNATIONAL NETWORK PROBE
|Associated Press
- August 03, 2011
WASHINGTON –
Seventy-two
people have been charged with participating in an international child
pornography network that prosecutors say used an online bulletin board called
Dreamboard to trade tens of thousands of images and videos of sexually abused
children.
Attorney
General Eric Holder and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said
Wednesday a 20-month law enforcement effort called Operation Delego targeted
more than 600 Dreamboard members around the world for allegedly participating
in the private, members-only Internet club created to promote pedophilia.
Numerous
participants in the network sexually abused children ages 12 and under,
produced images and video of the abuse and then shared it with other club
members, according to court papers released in the case.
At a news
conference at the Justice Department, the attorney general called the criminal
activity a "nightmare" for the children and said that some of the
children featured in the images and videos were just infants.
In many
cases, the children being victimized were in obvious, and intentional, pain --
even in distress and crying, just as the rules for one area of the bulletin
board mandated, the attorney general said.
Fifteen
arrested Dreamboard participants personally created child pornography,
according to the Justice Department.
Napolitano
said the amount of child porn swapped by participants in the network was
massive, the equivalent to 16,000 DVDs. Assistant Attorney General Lanny
Breuer, who heads Justice's criminal division, called the criminal enterprise
"a living horror."
Of the 72
charged in the United States, 43 have been arrested in this country and nine
abroad. Another 20 are known to authorities only by their Internet names and
remain at large.
Authorities
have arrested people in 13 other countries -- Canada, Denmark, Ecuador, France,
Germany, Hungary, Kenya, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Qatar, Serbia,
Sweden and Switzerland, but some of those were arrested on local rather than
the U.S. charges.
To conceal
their conduct, members used screen names rather than actual names and accessed
the bulletin board via proxy servers, with Internet traffic routed through
other computers to disguise a user's location, according to the court papers.
Participants
were required to continually upload images of child sexual abuse to maintain
their membership.
Participants
who molested children and created new images of child pornography were placed
in a "Super VIP" category that gave them access to the entire quantity
of child porn on the bulletin board, the court papers stated.
A
"Super Hardcore" section of the bulletin board was limited to posts
showing adults having violent sexual intercourse with "very young
kids" subjected to physical and sexual abuse.
All 72 U.S.
defendants are charged with conspiring to advertise and distribute child
pornography, and 50 of them are also charged with engaging in a child
pornography enterprise. Thirteen of the 52 defendants who have been arrested
have pleaded guilty in the conspiracy. Of the four who have been sentenced, the
least amount of prison time was 20 years behind bars and the most was 30 years.