[House Hearing, 109 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
SEXUAL EXPLOITATION OF CHILDREN OVER THE
INTERNET: THE FACE OF A CHILD PREDATOR AND
OTHER ISSUES
HEARING
BEFORE THE
SUBCOMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS
OF THE
COMMITTEE ON ENERGY AND
COMMERCE
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED NINTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
SEPTEMBER 26, 2006
Serial No. 109-143
Printed for the use of the Committee on Energy and Commerce
Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.access.gpo.gov/congress/house
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COMMITTEE ON ENERGY AND COMMERCE
JOE BARTON, Texas, Chairman
RALPH M. HALL, Texas JOHN D. DINGELL, Michigan
MICHAEL BILIRAKIS, Florida Ranking Member
Vice Chairman HENRY A. WAXMAN, California
FRED UPTON, Michigan EDWARD J. MARKEY, Massachusetts
CLIFF STEARNS, Florida RICK BOUCHER, Virginia
PAUL E. GILLMOR, Ohio EDOLPHUS TOWNS, New York
NATHAN DEAL, Georgia FRANK PALLONE, JR., New Jersey
ED WHITFIELD, Kentucky SHERROD BROWN, Ohio
CHARLIE NORWOOD, Georgia BART GORDON, Tennessee
BARBARA CUBIN, Wyoming BOBBY L. RUSH, Illinois
JOHN SHIMKUS, Illinois ANNA G. ESHOO, California
HEATHER WILSON, New Mexico BART STUPAK, Michigan
JOHN B. SHADEGG, Arizona ELIOT L. ENGEL, New York
CHARLES W. "CHIP" PICKERING, Mississippi ALBERT R. WYNN, Maryland
Vice Chairman GENE GREEN, Texas
VITO FOSSELLA, New York TED STRICKLAND, Ohio
ROY BLUNT, Missouri DIANA DEGETTE, Colorado
STEVE BUYER, Indiana LOIS CAPPS, California
GEORGE RADANOVICH, California MIKE DOYLE, Pennsylvania
CHARLES F. BASS, New Hampshire TOM ALLEN, Maine
JOSEPH R. PITTS, Pennsylvania JIM DAVIS, Florida
MARY BONO, California JAN SCHAKOWSKY, Illinois
GREG WALDEN, Oregon HILDA L. SOLIS, California
LEE TERRY, Nebraska CHARLES A. GONZALEZ, Texas
MIKE FERGUSON, New Jersey JAY INSLEE, Washington
MIKE ROGERS, Michigan TAMMY BALDWIN, Wisconsin
C.L. "BUTCH" OTTER, Idaho MIKE ROSS, Arkansas
SUE MYRICK, North Carolina
JOHN SULLIVAN, Oklahoma
TIM MURPHY, Pennsylvania
MICHAEL C. BURGESS, Texas
MARSHA BLACKBURN, Tennessee
BUD ALBRIGHT, Staff Director
DAVID CAVICKE, General Counsel
REID P. F. STUNTZ, Minority Staff Director and Chief Counsel
SUBCOMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS
ED WHITFIELD, Kentucky, Chairman
CLIFF STEARNS, Florida BART STUPAK, Michigan
CHARLES W. "CHIP" PICKERING, Mississippi Ranking Member
CHARLES F. BASS, New Hampshire DIANA DEGETTE, Colorado
GREG WALDEN, Oregon JAN SCHAKOWSKY, Illinois
MIKE FERGUSON, New Jersey JAY INSLEE, Washington
MICHAEL C. BURGESS, Texas TAMMY BALDWIN, Wisconsin
MARSHA BLACKBURN, Tennessee HENRY A. WAXMAN, California
JOE BARTON, Texas JOHN D. DINGELL, Michigan
(EX OFFICIO) (EX OFFICIO)
CONTENTS
Page
Testimony of:
Eichenwald, Kurt, Reporter, The New York Times Company 13
Hernandez, Dr. Andres, Director, Bureau of Prisons' Sex
Offender Treatment Program, Federal Bureau of
Prisons, U.S. Department of Justice 65
Salter, Dr. Anna Carol, Psychologist 70
Jenkins, Dr. Philip, Professor, History and Religious
Studies, Pennsylvania State University 112
Krawawecz, Thomas, Chief Executive Officer, Blue
Gravity Communications, Inc. 149
Jones, Christine, General Counsel, GoDaddy.com, Inc. 153
SEXUAL EXPLOITATION OF CHILDREN OVER THE
INTERNET: THE FACE OF A CHILD PREDATOR AND
OTHER ISSUES
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 2006
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES,
COMMITTEE ON ENERGY AND COMMERCE,
SUBCOMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS,
Washington, DC.
The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:10 a.m., in
Room 2123 of the Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Ed
Whitfield (Chairman) presiding.
Members present: Representatives Whitfield, Walden,
Ferguson, Burgess, Blackburn, Barton (ex officio), and Stupak.
Staff present: Mark Paoletta, Chief Counsel for Oversight and
Investigations; Kelli Andrews, Counsel; Karen Christian, Counsel;
Ryan Ambrose, Legislative Clerk; David Nelson, Minority
Investigator/Economist; Jonathan Brater, Minority Staff Assistant;
and Elizabeth Ertel, Minority Senior Staff Assistant.
MR. WHITFIELD. I would like to call this hearing to order this
morning. And today the subcommittee is holding its seventh
hearing on the topic of the Sexual Exploitation of Children over
the Internet. During the past 6 months, the subcommittee has
learned a lot about what industry and law enforcement is doing and
can do to combat the proliferation of sexually exploited images of
children over the Internet. And I must say all of us have been
appalled at the proliferation of this problem over the Internet.
Today, we are going to turn to a different topic, and that is
hopefully learning more about the child predators that seek to harm
children.
We are going to hear from a distinguished panel today. First,
we have two witnesses that are with us by video conferencing, Dr.
Philip Jenkins, from Penn State University, and Dr. Anna Salter, a
clinical psychologist based in Madison, Wisconsin. I know that
there has been some technical issues relating to Dr. Salter, but we
hope that she will be here and we appreciate her sharing with us
the interview that she conducted with a convicted child sex
offender. We saw this video prior to the hearing, and we are
prepared to ask some questions regarding that video.
Dr. Jenkins, we look forward to hearing your observations of
the online pedophile message boards that you were able to
infiltrate a few years ago and more about your thoughts on this
dangerous online community. I also look forward to hearing from
Dr. Hernandez about the Bureau of Prisons and the only sex
offender treatment program in the country that they have and to
discuss the study that you published in 2000 about the offenders
you were treating that showed a link between possession of child
pornography and contact offenses with children.
I also want to thank Mr. Kurt Eichenwald of the New York
Times. I would say that with his work in this area he provided us a
wonderful service not only to this committee, but also to the
country and his journalism really spurred this subcommittee's
action on this issue. I want to thank him also for his work and
wish him well as he closes out a 20-year career at the New York
Times next week and begins writing for a new publication, so we
wish you the very best in your future challenges, Mr. Eichenwald.
I would say that your work about online child exploitation has
been illuminating and we look forward to hearing more today
about your observations of the online pedophile community, as
well as concerns you have about child modeling sites. I am also
interested in hearing about the new information that you provided
the committee which shows in detail how pedophiles share their
tips on evading detection from law enforcement. These are savvy
criminals that will stop at nothing to insure that they can continue
to build up their collections of sick sexually exploited images of
children.
I would also be interested to hear from our experts today
whether there is a so-called profile of a child predator, and, if not,
are there any signs that parents and children should be aware of
that can give them a clue as to whether or not an individual may be
a child predator. On the second panel we will switch focus a bit
and hear from the leading U.S. domain name registry company
called GoDaddy, and from a Web hosting company, Blue Gravity
Communications, about the steps they can take to remove content
involving he sexual exploitation of children off of their network.
As I understand it, GoDaddy, in addition to being a domain
registry company, also provides Web hosting services. It is
imperative that at every step of this process in setting up websites
from the domain name registry to signing up with the Web hosting
company and to finally getting connectivity to the site with an ISP
that we encourage industry to be as aggressive and innovative as
possible, and take appropriate steps to investigate and weed out
sites that sexually exploit children. I want to thank all the
witnesses for being here today, and at this time I recognize the
gentleman from Michigan, Mr. Stupak.
[The prepared statement of Hon. Ed Whitfield follows:]
PREPARED STATEMENT OF THE HON. ED WHITFIELD, CHAIRMAN,
SUBCOMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS
GOOD MORNING. TODAY THE SUBCOMMITTEE IS
HOLDING ITS SEVENTH HEARING ON THE TOPIC OF THE
SEXUAL EXPLOITATION OF CHILDREN OVER THE
INTERNET. OVER THE COURSE OF THE PAST SIX
MONTHS, THE SUBCOMMITTEE HAS LEARNED A LOT
ABOUT WHAT INDUSTRY AND LAW ENFORCEMENT IS
DOING AND CAN DO TO COMBAT THE PROLIFERATION
OF SEXUALLY EXPLOITATIVE IMAGES OF CHILDREN
OVER THE INTERNET.
TODAY, WE TURN TO AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT
TOPIC-LEARNING MORE ABOUT THE CHILD
PREDATORS THAT SEEK TO HARM CHILDREN. WE ARE
GOING TO HEAR FROM A VERY DISTINGUISHED PANEL
TODAY. FIRST, WE HAVE TWO WITNESSES THAT ARE
WITH US TODAY VIA VIDEOCONFERENCING-DR. PHILIP
JENKINS, FROM PENN STATE UNIVERSITY AND DR.
ANNA SALTER, A CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGIST BASED IN
MADISON WISCONSIN. DR. SALTER, WE APPRECIATE
YOU SHARING WITH US THE INTERVIEW YOU
CONDUCTED WITH A CONVICTED CHILD SEX OFFENDER
AND WE ARE PREPARED TO ASK YOU SOME QUESTIONS
ABOUT THAT. DR JENKINS, WE LOOK FORWARD TO
HEARING YOUR OBSERVATIONS OF THE ON-LINE
PEDOPHILE MESSAGE BOARDS YOU WERE ABLE TO
INFILTRATE A FEW YEARS AGO AND MORE ABOUT
YOUR THOUGHTS ON THIS DANGEROUS ON-LINE
COMMUNITY. I ALSO LOOK FORWARD TO HEARING
FROM DR. HERNANDEZ ABOUT THE BUREAU OF
PRISONS ONLY SEX OFFENDER TREATMENT PROGRAM
IN THE COUNTRY AND TO DISCUSS THE STUDY HE
PUBLISHED IN 2000 ABOUT THE OFFENDERS HE WAS
TREATING WHICH SHOWED A LINK BETWEEN
POSSESSION OF CHILD PORNOGRAPHY AND CONTACT
OFFENSES WITH CHILDREN.
I WOULD ALSO LIKE TO THANK MR. KURT
EICHENWALD OF THE NEW YORK TIMES FOR
TESTIFYING A SECOND TIME AT OUR HEARING ON THIS
TOPIC. YOUR WORK ABOUT ON-LINE CHILD
EXPLOITATION HAS BEEN VERY ILLUMINATING AND
WE LOOK FORWARD TO HEARING MORE ABOUT YOUR
OBSERVATIONS OF THE ON-LINE PEDOPHILE
COMMUNITY, AS WELL AS, CONCERNS YOU HAVE
ABOUT "CHILD MODELING SITES." I AM ALSO
INTERESTED IN HEARING ABOUT THE NEW
INFORMATION THAT MR. EICHENWALD PROVIDED THE
COMMITTEE, WHICH SHOWS IN DETAIL HOW THESE
PEDOPHILES SHARE THEIR TIPS ON EVADING
DETECTION BY LAW ENFORCEMENT. THESE ARE
SAVVY CRIMINALS THAT WILL STOP AT NOTHING TO
ENSURE THAT THEY CAN CONTINUE TO BUILD UP
THEIR COLLECTIONS OF SICK SEXUALLY
EXPLOITATIVE IMAGES OF CHILDREN. I WILL ALSO BE
INTERESTED TO HEAR FROM OUR EXPERTS TODAY
WHETHER THERE IS A SO-CALLED 'PROFILE" OF A
CHILD PREDATOR AND IF NOT, ARE THERE ANY SIGNS
THAT PARENTS AND CHILDREN SHOULD BE AWARE OF
THAT CAN CLUE THEM IN TO WHETHER AN INDIVIDUAL
MAY BE A CHILD PREDATOR.
ON THE SECOND PANEL, WE WILL SWITCH FOCUS A
BIT AND HEAR FROM THE LEADING U.S. DOMAIN NAME
REGISTRY COMPANY, CALLED, "GO DADDY" AND
FROM A WEB HOSTING COMPANY, BLUE GRAVITY
COMMUNICATIONS, ABOUT THE STEPS THEY CAN TAKE
TO REMOVE CONTENT INVOLVING THE SEXUAL
EXPLOITATION OF CHILDREN OFF THEIR NETWORK. AS
I UNDERSTAND IT, GO DADDY -IN ADDITION TO BEING
A DOMAIN REGISTRY COMPANY, ALSO PROVIDES WEB
HOSTING SERVICES. IT IS IMPERATIVE THAT AT EVERY
STEP OF THE PROCESS IN SETTING UP WEBSITES-FROM
THE DOMAIN NAME REGISTRY TO SIGNING UP WITH A
WEB HOSTING COMPANY, AND TO FINALLY GETTING
CONNECTIVITY TO THE SITE WITH AN ISP-- WE
ENCOURAGE INDUSTRY TO BE AS AGGRESSIVE AS
POSSIBLE AND TAKE THE APPROPRIATE STEPS TO
INVESTIGATE AND WEED OUT SITES THAT SEXUALLY
EXPLOIT CHILDREN. I THANK ALL THE WITNESSES FOR
BEING HERE TODAY.
MR. STUPAK. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would like to thank
our first panel of expert witnesses for helping us better understand
child predators and the threat they pose to our children. Thank
you, Mr. Eichenwald, for testifying for the committee about your
ongoing investigation and reporting and good luck in your future
endeavors. The subcommittee's investigations and hearings have
been comprehensive and in depth. Importantly, these hearings
have educated the public on the dangers of Internet child predators
and the hearings have forced change in the industry.
We have heard from Web search engines, Internet service
providers, telecommunications companies, cable companies, and
financial services industry. Each segment of the industry has been
held to account and each industry player has stepped forward at
these hearings to say we can do better. Today, I look forward to
the testimony of GoDaddy and Blue Gravity Communications.
The Web hosting and domain name registration companies can and
must do better to protect our children and rid their systems of child
pornography. Throughout our investigation, I have been impressed
with the voluntary action that Ernie Allen and the Center for
Missing and Exploited Children have elicited from large Internet
companies.
However, voluntary action by a few of the private sector firms
involved is insufficient. For example, we heard last week from the
largest credit card companies and banks that they are making an
effort to end the use of their products by child pornographers, but
we also heard that companies like MasterCard work to eliminate
child pornography from their systems these criminals just move to
alternate payment methods like e-gold and other unregulated
digital currencies. In the months ahead, it is critical that this
subcommittee continue to hold all segments of industry
accountable through oversight and through legislation.
This committee needs to look to best practices, not only in the
U.S., but globally as well and enact the legislation that will root
out these child predators and block them from harming our
children. I was proud to offer an amendment to the
telecommunications bill that will for the first time require Internet
service providers to take action to block child pornography from
their networks. This amendment requires Internet service
providers to be proactive, not merely reactive. But there is more
we can do. We know from previous testimony that fewer than 300
of the few thousand Internet service providers are registered with
the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
Today we will hear from a Web hosting company that
periodically receives complaints about child pornography on its
servers but had never implemented any system for searching for
the source of that content and has only recently begun to report it.
While Internet service providers are required by law to report child
pornography to the National Center for Missing and Exploited
Children Web hosting companies are not. This is yet another hole
in the system that must be addressed.
The committee should build on my amendment to require all
Internet firms that are search engines, Internet service providers,
domain registrars, and host websites to actively search for child
pornography on their system, notify the national committee, and
then remove any and all content that is identified as child porn
from their servers. The United Kingdom was able to reduce the
identified illegal content hosted on British-based servers from 18
percent to 4/10th of 1 percent of the worldwide total. The United
States has over 40 percent of the commercial child porn websites
on U.S. servers.
I understand, however, that as we succeed in greatly reducing
or eliminating the child pornography commercial sites hosted on
U.S. servers the criminals are moving their operations abroad. Our
response to child pornography and exploitation on the Internet
must be global. Again, we can look to the British model. British
Telecom has created the software to block any UK ISP from
connecting with identified child porn sites anywhere in the world.
Furthermore, British Telecom has made this offer available free of
charge to any Internet provider. We are told that all telecom
companies in Britain that connect customers to the Web will have
the British Telecom software or similar blocking software in place
by the end of this year.
Mr. Chairman, we have learned from these hearings the
technologies and strategies at work to rid the Internet of child
pornography and best protect our children. We have also learned
there are efforts in the U.S. have been lacking. It is time to roll up
our sleeves, put this committee to work. Mr. Chairman, thank you
again for holding this hearing. I yield back the balance of my time.
MR. WHITFIELD. Thank you very much, Mr. Stupak, and at
this time I recognize the Chairman of the Energy and Commerce
Committee, Mr. Barton, for his opening statement.
CHAIRMAN BARTON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and Mr.
Stupak for this continuing series of hearings in child pornography
and what normal, decent citizens can do about it. Today we are
going to hear testimony from a distinguished panel of witnesses
about the pedophile and child predator community. This topic
represents a bit of a shift for the subcommittee. We spent months
investigating the response by law enforcement, educators,
prosecutors, Internet service providers, and financial institutions to
Internet child pornography. This hearing is the first time we will
focus solely on those individuals who actually seek or desire to
sexually exploit children.
The witnesses on this panel are experts in what makes
pedophiles or child predators tick, why they desire children and
what can be done about it, if anything. I would like to welcome
Drs. Hernandez, Jenkins, and Salter to our hearing. I thank them
for taking the time to share their expertise with the committee. I
also want to thank Mr. Kurt Eichenwald of the New York Times.
It is a bit of a stretch for me to thank anybody from the New York
Times, but I do want to thank you, sir. This is the second time that
Mr. Eichenwald has testified before our subcommittee. It was his
article about Justin Berry published in December of last year that
brought the issue of Internet child pornography to our attention.
Mr. Eichenwald has recently published two more articles on the
subject. I want to comment you, sir, for what you have done to
bring this issue to light. I look forward to your testimony today.
Our second panel of witnesses continue our subcommittee's
focus on the role of industry in fighting this scourge. We are going
to hear from two companies that are involved in two key steps in
establishing a website. One company named GoDaddy.com is the
largest domain name registration company in the United States. It
also hosts or provides Web hosting services. The second company,
Blue Gravity Communications, only provides Web hosting. As I
understand it, the first step in setting up a website is to register a
domain site. The second step is to contract with the Web hosting
company that would allow the content of the website to reside on
their servers.
Typically, Web hosting companies are not able to access or
change the content that appears on the websites that they host.
Obviously, any effort to combat the Internet child pornography
problem must address the role of domain registration and Web
hosting because without them many child pornography websites
would not be available to the child predators whose desires are
fueled by the images that they see. Ms. Christine Jones of
GoDaddy.com is the first witness on the second panel. She is
going to testify about her company's efforts to investigate and take
down child pornography websites that have either registered their
domain names with GoDaddy or are hosted by them.
I look forward to learning what Ms. Jones believes domain
registration and Web hosting companies can do to prevent child
pornography from ever reaching the Internet. I am also interested
in learning more about the child modeling website phenomenon
that GoDaddy is currently witnessing. The fact that GoDaddy has
found these websites are often linked to child pornography sites.
The second witness, Mr. Thomas Krwawecz, owns a Web hosting
company in New Jersey called Blue Gravity Communications. Mr.
Krwawecz is here under subpoena today because our committee's
investigation revealed that his company perhaps unwittingly has
hosted so-called child modeling websites.
These websites display pictures of young girls posed in a
sexual provocative manner and in sexual clothing. I can think of
no good reason for a young child to be posing this way other than
to appeal to the sexual interests of child predators and pedophiles.
I understand that Mr. Krwawecz took these sites down. We would
like to thank him for doing that upon receiving our subpoena. I
look forward to learning more about his Web hosting company and
how he became involved with these so-called child modeling
websites.
Again, I want to thank you, Mr. Whitfield, you, Mr. Stupak,
and although he is not here, Mr. Dingell, for working together in a
bipartisan fashion on this hearing. There is nothing more
important in our society than protecting our children. And I want
to commend this subcommittee for beginning to fight back and do
just that. And with that, Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
[The prepared statement of Hon. Joe Barton follows:]
PREPARED STATEMENT OF THE HON. JOE BARTON, CHAIRMAN,
COMMITTEE ON ENERGY AND COMMERCE
Thank you, Chairman Whitfield, for convening this hearing.
Today, we will hear testimony from a distinguished panel of
witnesses about the pedophile and child predator community. This
topic represents a bit of a shift for our Subcommittee. While we
have spent months investigating the response by law enforcement,
educators, prosecutors, Internet Service Providers, and financial
institutions to Internet child pornography, this hearing is the first
time we will focus solely on those individuals who actually seek or
desire to sexually exploit children. The witnesses on this panel are
experts in what makes pedophiles or child predators tick, why they
desire children, and what can be done about it, if anything. I
welcome Doctors Hernandez, Jenkins, and Salter to our hearing,
and I thank them for taking the time to share their expertise and
advice with us.
I would also like to recognize Mr. Kurt Eichenwald of the The
New York Times. This is the second time Mr. Eichenwald has
testified before this Subcommittee. It was Mr. Eichenwald's
article about Justin Berry published in December of last year that
brought the issue of Internet child pornography to our attention.
Mr. Eichenwald has recently published two more articles on the
subject. I commend Mr. Eichenwald for all he has done to bring
this issue to light, and I look forward to his testimony today.
Our second panel of witnesses continues our Subcommittee's
focus on the role of industry in fighting this scourge. We will hear
from two companies that are involved in two key steps in
establishing a website. One company, GoDaddy.com, is the
largest domain name registration company in the United States,
and also provides web hosting services. The second company,
Blue Gravity Communications, Inc., only provides web hosting.
As I understand it, the first step in setting up a website is to register
a domain name. The second step is to contract with a web hosting
company that will allow the content of the website to reside on
their servers. Typically, web hosting companies are not able to
access or change the content that appears on the websites they host.
Obviously, any effort to combat the Internet child pornography
problem must address the role of domain registration and web
hosting, because without them, many commercial child
pornography websites would not be available to the child predators
whose desires are fueled by the images they see.
Ms. Christine Jones of GoDaddy.com is the first witness on our
second panel. Ms. Jones will testify about her company's efforts
to investigate and take down child pornography websites that have
either registered their domain names with GoDaddy or are hosted
by them. I look forward to learning what Ms. Jones believes
domain registration and web hosting companies can do to prevent
child pornography from ever reaching the Internet. I am also
interested in learning more about the child modeling website
phenomenon GoDaddy is currently witnessing, and the fact that
GoDaddy has found that these websites are often linked to child
pornography sites.
The second witness, Mr. Thomas Krwawecz, owns a web-
hosting company in New Jersey called Blue Gravity
Communications, Inc. Mr. Krwawecz is here under subpoena
today because our Committee's investigation revealed that his
company, perhaps unwittingly, hosted "child modeling" websites.
These websites displayed pictures of young girls posed in a sexual,
provocative manner and in sexual clothing. There is no reason for
a child to be posed in this way other than to appeal to the sexual
interests of child predators and pedophiles. I understand that Mr.
Krwawecz took these sites down upon receiving our subpoena. I
look forward to learning more about his web-hosting company and
how he came to be involved with these so-called "child modeling"
websites.
Thank you again, Chairman Whitfield, for convening this
important hearing. I yield back the balance of my time.
MR. WHITFIELD. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. At this time, I
recognize the gentleman from New Jersey for his opening
statement, Mr. Ferguson.
MR. FERGUSON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you,
Mr. Stupak, for this continuing series of hearings on this topic
which has become very important to all of us the more we have
learned about it over the last several months. I want to thank our
witnesses for coming before the committee to testify today. I
particularly want to thank Kurt Eichenwald, who has spent a lot of
time bringing this sordid world to light. Kurt, thanks for your
work on this important topic and again for coming to Washington
to share your expertise with us. I also thank the rest of our
witnesses for testifying today as well.
In the past several months, we have all become uncomfortably
familiar with the topic at hand and with every hearing we learn a
little bit more about it. One of the topics of today's hearing, child
modeling websites, is one that would not seem to pose a danger to
our children when in fact young girls are often blatantly marketed
in a sexual manner on these websites. Child pornographers feel
that they can evade law enforcement by running websites featuring
children with clothing, no matter how little. This should not be the
case. I also appreciate our other witnesses coming to help us get to
the root of who a child predator really is.
As we will hear, the grooming process that people put these
young children through is absolutely sickening, and some of us
have had an opportunity to view a video of an interview of
someone who is incarcerated because of molesting young children
and just about the process he would go through and how he would
learn and choose his victims and groom these kids and their
families in order to victimize them. These people prey on the
young and the impressionable. They earn their trust, and then they
take advantage of their innocence. We will hear today that
possession of child pornography opens the door to sexual offenses
against children, and while this his undoubtedly important
information to know, the question becomes how do we stop it?
I am glad that this issue has become a priority for Chairman
Whitfield and for this subcommittee and Mr. Stupak and the other
members of the subcommittee. It should really become a priority
for this Congress. It is our job as lawmakers, as educators, but
most importantly as parents to protect our children at all cost.
Again, I want to thank the witnesses for coming to the committee
this morning, and I look forward to hearing from them today, and I
yield back.
MR. WHITFIELD. Thank you, Mr. Ferguson. There are no
more opening statements, so we will go on and begin with the first
panel. I am going to introduce the first panel again. First of all,
we have Mr. Kurt Eichenwald with the New York Times. We
have Dr. Andres Hernandez who is the Director of the Bureau of
Prisons' Sex Offender Treatment Program, and then we have Mr.
Baxter, John Baxter, who is the Chief Psychologist with the
Bureau of Prisons.
It is my understanding, Dr. Baxter, that while you will not be
giving an opening statement that you may make some comments
during the question period or if we have questions for you, we can
ask you questions. In addition, we have Dr. Anna Carol Salter,
who is with us by video conferencing, who is a psychologist, and
does some work with the Wisconsin Bureau of Prisons and is an
author on this subject. She is testifying from Madison, Wisconsin.
We appreciate your being with us, Dr. Salter. And then we have
Dr. Philip Jenkins, who is a Professor in History and Religious
Studies and does work in this area as well from Pennsylvania State
University up in University Park, Pennsylvania. So we thank both
of you for being with us this morning. We look forward to your
testimony.
This is an Oversight and Investigations hearing, and it our
custom to take testimony under oath, and I am assuming that none
of you five have any difficulty of testifying under oath, so if you
would stand and just raise your right hand, I would like to swear
you in at this time.
[Witnesses sworn]
MR. WHITFIELD. Thank you. All of you are under oath now.
And, Mr. Eichenwald, we will begin with you so you are
recognized for 5 minutes for your opening statement.
TESTIMONY OF KURT EICHENWALD, REPORTER, THE NEW YORK TIMES COMPANY; DR. ANDRES
HERNANDEZ, DIRECTOR, BUREAU OF PRISONS' SEX OFFENDER TREATMENT PROGRAM,
FEDERAL BUREAU OF PRISONS, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE; DR. ANNA CAROL SALTER,
PSYCHOLOGIST; AND DR. PHILIP JENKINS, PROFESSOR, HISTORY AND RELIGIOUS
STUDIES, PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY
MR. EICHENWALD. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Ranking
Member Stupak, other members of the committee. I apologize if
my voice is a little raspy this morning. My name is Kurt
Eichenwald, and I am a senior writer with the New York Times.
This marks the second time I have been subpoenaed to testify
before this subcommittee about my reporting on the dangers to
children from adult predators online. As someone who has
emerged as an unlikely chronicler of this threat, I recognize that
my testimony can assist you in your search for legislative
solutions. But, as in my April testimony, I would caution that,
while I am able to inform you of the published findings of my
investigations, I do not believe it is my place, nor do I believe I am
qualified, to offer policy prescriptions.
My reporting on Internet predators began in June 2005, with
my discovery of Justin Berry, the young man who testified before
the subcommittee in April about his experience of being lured into
webcam child pornography at the age of 13. At the time of that
hearing, I was in the first days of a new investigative effort
observing online conversations among pedophiles, beginning with
those conducted on communication sites first identified to me by
Justin. In the months that followed, I discovered an array of places
on the Internet where pedophiles gathered to swap stories,
experiences, and tips. These conversations seemed to reflect a
belief among pedophiles either that no one outside their
community was watching or that nobody could locate them. Many
readily admitted committing crimes or contemplating them.
I remained immersed in these conversations for 4 months. At
no time did I participate to insure that my presence did not affect
the direction of the discussions. Throughout this period of
reporting, I observed hundreds of conversations, ultimately
recording the pedophiles' world and beliefs through their own
words. This investigation resulted in a two-part series last month
on the front page of the Times. I have submitted those articles to
the committee as an exhibit. What I discovered was terrible. The
online conversation sites, even those ostensibly set up to provide
support to adults wrestling with their sexual attraction to children,
proved to be a means for pedophiles to gain knowledge and
assistance in making contact with minors in the real world. But
they also were part of an infrastructure established by pedophiles
to rationalize and often celebrate their feelings and beliefs.
From the conversations, I learned of Internet radio stations and
downloadable pod casts put together by pedophiles for other adults
attracted to children, online jewelry stores that sold pendants
identifying the wearer to those in the know as a pedophile, as well
as an active social movement that purports to be pushing for the
rights of children to engage in sexual contact with adults. The
rationalizations for molesting children are repeated in these
discussions, endlessly, to the point that participants exhibit almost
a delusional view of the world. They state repeatedly that sexual
contact between adults and children is not only harmless, but
beneficial, so long as it does not involve forcible rape. I have
witnessed conversations where pedophiles justify the molestation
of autistic children under the age of 10, family members, and even
of infants.
Adults who attempt to protect children from molestation by
pedophiles are deemed child haters. Meanwhile, parents and other
adults in children's lives are dismissed as impediments to the
minors' happiness. Many times conversation participants discuss
their own past crimes involving children and their resulting
imprisonment. Speaking of their sentences as reflecting nothing
more than the heavy hand of an authoritarian society. In one
instance, when a pedophile voiced regret for molesting a child, he
was assailed as a traitor to the cause who had been brainwashed by
society.
Observing these conversations provided many disturbing
moments. Pedophiles would come online every day with stories of
the children they had just seen. Many of them were teachers and
school administrators, describing children under their control.
Others were pediatricians, talking about the delight they
experienced during their latest physical exam of a child. There
were even fathers who discussed their own children in sexual
terms, including one who graphically described watching his two
young sons as they changed in a locker room. To help the
committee better understand these types of comments, I have
attached one recent posting by a man who describes himself as a
newly-trained kindergarten teacher, who discusses his desires to
engage in sex with the little girls in his care. It is my hope that by
making this posting public someone may recognize the events
described in detail by this individual, and stop him before it is too
late.
The innocent acts of childhood were often interpreted by the
pedophiles as sexual come-ons by pre-pubescent children. A
second grader holding his crotch at school did not need to go to the
bathroom, one of the pedophiles wrote, he was instead signaling
his eagerness to engage in sex. Pedophiles were convinced that
children who sat with their legs apart were purposely trying to
tempt them. And one man described in detail watching a girl on a
playground whom he was convinced was trying to lure him into
sex. The reason? When she did cartwheels in her skirt, he could
see her panties.
The pedophiles also celebrated something called model sites,
which I learned were the explosive trend last year in child
pornography. By clicking on one of the many Web addresses
posted in a discussion where no illegal sites were supposed to be
linked, I ultimately found myself confronted by a page of images
of pre-pubsecent little girls wearing virtually nothing, posed in
seductive ways to meet the requests of pedophile subscribers.
Given the nature of that site, as the law dictates, I immediately
reported what I found to the authorities. That site which boldly,
and I believe falsely, proclaimed itself legal was run by a company
called Playtoy Enterprises. Playtoy attracted 6,000 members in 6
months, all of whom paid $30 a month processed by credit card
companies and online payment systems.
Since publication of my articles, I have heard that Playtoy
closed, but I discovered hundreds of such sites advertised on
marketing portals for pedophiles. I am sure that many of them are
still around photographing little girls every week and posting their
images for the entertainment of pedophiles. Issues related to child
pornography were frequent topics of conversation, including
repeated advice from pedophiles about how to trade images
without attracting the attention of law enforcement. I have
submitted a posting from a pedophile providing details of how
savvy porn traders use technology to avoid detection. This person
is so certain he will not be caught that he even posted his entire
hard drive directory of child porn videos, more than 100 gigabytes
worth. Included in those, based on the description, were videos of
a child porn victim who has already testified before this
committee.
This posting makes clear that pedophiles understand how law
enforcement is restricted in its investigative tactics and have used
that knowledge to their advantage. My 4 months of observing the
pedophile conversations were nothing short of horrific, but they
served to prove to me the importance, not only of this kind of
reporting, but also of this committee's work to help insure the
safety of our children. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Kurt Eichenwald follows:]
PREPARED STATEMENT OF KURT EICHENWALD, REPORTER, THE
NEW YORK TIMES COMPANY
MR. WHITFIELD. Thank you, Mr. Eichenwald. And, Dr.
Hernandez, you are recognized for 5 minutes for your opening
statement.
DR. HERNANDEZ. Good morning, Mr. Chairman, and members
of the subcommittee. I appreciate the opportunity to appear before
you to discuss a variety of issues regarding the sexual exploitation
of children over the Internet as it pertains to the Bureau of Prisons.
The BOP made a commitment to the psychological treatment of
sexual offenders in 1990 when the population of sex offenders in
the Bureau of Prisons represented less than 1 percent of all Federal
inmates. Since that time, the proportion of sex offenders has more
than doubled. Today, the population of sex offenders in the BOP
is well over 12,000. This figure includes those serving a term of
confinement due to a sexual offense and those with a prior history
of sexual offending. A significant number of sex offenders in
Federal custody are convicted of Internet-related sexual offenses.
The Sex Offender Treatment Program or SOTP was established
in 1990 at the Federal Correctional Institution in Butner, North
Carolina, but it was substantially revised and reorganized in 1997.
It is a 112-bed voluntary residential therapeutic program that
employs cognitive-behavioral and relapse prevention techniques to
treat and manage male sexual offenders. The primary goal of the
SOTP is to help offenders manage their sexual deviance in an
effort to reduce sexual recidivism. The treatment program
encourages its participants to change their criminal lifestyle and to
become honest, responsible, and law-abiding citizens with
effective self-control skills.
Since its inception, the SOTP has treated several hundred child
pornography offenders. The vast majority of sex offenders in the
SOTP are individuals convicted of possession, receipt, distribution,
and transportation of child pornography. The most common
medium of receipt and distribution among inmates in the SOTP is
the Internet. Over the course of my 10 years of clinical work with
federally-convicted sex offenders in the SOTP, I have observed
that in the course of treatment many child pornography offenders
admit to unreported sexual crimes, many of which include multiple
sexual contacts with the victims. I believed it was important to
record this information and share it with the treatment
professionals and researchers in this area of practice in order to
spark the interest of the scientific and treatment communities to
study this emerging population of sex offenders.
In November 2000, I presented a poster at the annual
conference of the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers
in San Diego. This poster summarized archival data from 90
inmates who had been treated in the SOTP. Of that group, 62 were
convicted of Internet-related sexual offenses. These included the
possession and distribution of child pornography, as well as the
interstate travel with the intent to sexually abuse a minor. At the
time of sentencing, the group of 62 Internet sex offenders were
known to have committed contact sexual offenses against a total of
55 victims.
Following treatment, the same group disclosed committing
contact sexual crimes against an additional 1,379 victims. In a
subsequent analysis, I removed the offenders convicted of
interstate travel with the intent to sexually abuse a minor from the
group of 62 offenders. This yielded 55 child pornography
offenders. The rate of contact sexual offenses recorded after
treatment among this group was 80 percent. The dramatic increase
of previously unreported sexual offenses among the 62 offenders I
treated was interesting and worthy of continued observation and
study. As a result, I have continued to record the incidence of self-
reported contact sexual criminality among Internet sex offenders in
the SOTP. The patterns I have observed more recently are
consistent with those reported in the 2000 poster.
I must stress, however, that the population of inmates in the
SOTP is not representative of the entire population of sex
offenders in the BOP. While the 2000 and 2006 analyses reveal
similar patterns, they represent heuristic observations and the basis
for hypothesis testing which must be followed by rigorous
scientific studies. I am hopeful that the Bureau of Prisons and
other researchers will be in a position in the future to provide you
with a sound scientific basis for policy making regarding Internet
sex offenders.
The state of knowledge with respect to Internet child
pornography offenders is in its infancy. My observations of the
offenders described above who participated in the SOTP indicate
that these Internet child pornography offenders are far more
dangerous to society than we previously thought. But I caution the
law enforcement community and others against generalizing
beyond the offenders who were the subjects of my treatment
interviews. I urge the professional and scientific community to
attend to this understudied group of offenders. Chairman
Whitfield, this concludes my formal statement. I would be pleased
to answer any questions you or other members of the
subcommittee may have.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Hernandez follows:]
PREPARED STATEMENT OF DR. ANDRES HERNANDEZ, DIRECTOR,
BUREAU OF PRISONS' SEX OFFENDER TREATMENT PROGRAM,
FEDERAL BUREAU OF PRISONS, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE
Good Morning Chairman Whitfield and Members of the
Subcommittee. I appreciate the opportunity to appear before you
today to discuss a variety of issues regarding the sexual
exploitation of children over the Internet as it pertains to the
Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP). I serve as the Director of the Sex
Offender Treatment Program in Butner, North Carolina. I have
held this position since 1997. Prior to my employment with the
Bureau of Prisons, I worked as an Assistant Professor for the
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Baylor
College of Medicine, where I also completed an internship and
post-doctoral fellowship specializing in the evaluation and
treatment of sex offenders. I have worked in the field of sex
offender treatment since 1992.
The BOP made a commitment to the psychological treatment
of sex offenders in 1990, when the population of sex offenders in
the Bureau of Prisons represented less than 1% of all federal
inmates. Since that time, the proportion of sex offenders has more
than doubled. Today, the population of sex offenders in the BOP is
over 12,000. This figure includes those serving a term of
confinement due to a sex offense and those with a prior history of
sexual offending. A significant number of sex offenders in federal
custody are convicted of Internet-related sexual offenses.
As the federal sex offender population has increased, the BOP
expanded the treatment capacity somewhat. Today, the Sex
Offender Treatment Program (SOTP) has 112 beds at the Federal
Correctional Institution (FCI) in Butner, North Carolina. The Sex
Offender Management Program (SOMP), established in 2003 at
the Federal Medical Center in Devens, Massachusetts, serves
nearly 400 sex offenders by providing risk assessment and
management services. Consistent with recently enacted legislation,
the BOP is actively working to expand sex offender services by
implementing additional SOMPs and SOTPs, as well as a forensic
evaluation service.
Overview of the Sex Offender Treatment Program at FCI Butner,
NC
The Sex Offender Treatment Program was established in 1990
at FCI Butner, North Carolina, but it was substantially revised and
reorganized in 1997. It is a voluntary, residential therapeutic
program that employs cognitive-behavioral and relapse prevention
techniques to treat and manage male sexual offenders. The primary
goal of the SOTP is to help offenders manage their sexual deviance
in an effort to reduce sexual recidivism. The treatment program
encourages its participants to change their criminal lifestyle and
become honest, responsible, and law-abiding citizens with
effective self-control skills. Inmates in the program are assigned to
approximately 15 hours of treatment activities per week. They are
encouraged to participate in activities and programs that promote
personal growth and development outside of the SOTP such as
education and vocational training. The SOTP is divided into seven
phases. Phase I orients the inmate to the SOTP, introduces him to
treatment concepts, and begins the process of psychosexual
evaluation, which includes phallometric assessment (i.e., penile
plethysmography) and polygraph examination. Phase II involves
treatment planning, assignment to therapy groups, and
psychoeducational programming. In Phase II through VI, the
inmate participates in group therapy and psychoeducation focusing
on 1) Victim Impact Awareness, 2) Criminal Thinking and
Cognitive Distortions, 3) Communication Skills and Conflict
Resolution, 4) Emotional Self-Regulation, 5) Management of
Deviant Sexual Arousal, 6) Relationship and Intimacy Skills, 7)
Victim Empathy Enhancement, and 8) Relapse Prevention. Phase
VII involves Community Reintegration and Release planning.
Overview of the population of sex offenders in the SOTP
The population of inmates in the SOTP is not representative of
the entire population of sex offenders in the BOP. It represents a
unique group of offenders with the following general
characteristics: 1) they have volunteered to participate in treatment
and accept some degree of responsibility for their crimes; 2) speak
English; 3) are not severely mentally ill; 4) do not have detainers
or pending charges that would affect their release to the
community; and 5) do not have a history of negative institutional
adjustment. The vast majority of the inmates in the SOTP are
highly educated, and have marketable job skills. These
characteristics, and their willingness to volunteer for treatment are
not typical of all sex offenders in the BOP.
Since its inception in 1990, the SOTP has treated several
hundred child pornography offenders. The vast majority of sex
offenders in the SOTP are individuals convicted of Possession,
Receipt, Distribution, and Transportation of Child Pornography.
The most common medium of receipt and distribution among
inmates in the SOTP is the Internet.
Over the course of my ten years of clinical work with federally
convicted sex offenders in the SOTP, I have observed that in the
course of treatment many child pornography offenders admit to
unreported sexual crimes, many of which include multiple sexual
contacts with the victims. I believed it was important to record this
information and share it with treatment professionals as well as
researchers in this area of practice, to spark the interest of the
scientific and treatment communities to study this emerging
population of sex offenders.
The ATSA Poster Presentation
In November 2000, I presented a poster at the annual
conference of the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers
(ATSA) in San Diego, California, entitled "Self-Reported Contact
Sexual Offenses by Participants in the Federal Bureau of Prisons'
Sex Offender Treatment Program: Implications for Internet Sex
Offenders." This poster summarized archival data from 90 inmates
who had been treated in the SOTP. Of that group, 62 were
convicted of Internet-related sexual offenses. These included the
possession and distribution of child pornography, as well as
interstate travel with the intent to sexually abuse a minor (i.e.,
"travelers"). At the time of sentencing, the group of 62 Internet sex
offenders were known to have committed contact sexual offenses
against a total of 55 victims. Following treatment, the same group
disclosed committing contact sexual crimes against an additional
1,379 victims. Only 42 percent of the offenders were known to be
contact sexual criminals at the time of sentencing; following
treatment, 76 percent reported contact sexual crimes, an increase of
34%. In a subsequent analysis, I removed the "traveler" offenders
from the group of 62 subjects. This yielded 55 child pornography
offenders. The rate of contact sexual offending recorded after
treatment among this group was 80 percent.
The dramatic increase of previously unreported sexual offenses
among the 62 offenders I treated was interesting and worthy of
continued observation and study. As a result, I have continued to
record the incidence of self-reported contact sexual criminality
among Internet sex offenders in the SOTP. The patterns I have
observed more recently are consistent with those reported in the
2000 poster.
Recently I have reviewed and summarized my observations
regarding a second group of offenders who participated in the
SOTP. The group consisted of 155 men who were convicted of
Internet child pornography possession and/or distribution. Again, I
compared the number of contact sexual offenses that were known
to the criminal justice system upon sentencing with those reported
over the course of treatment in the SOTP. At the time of
sentencing, 115 (74%) subjects had no documented hands-on
victims. Forty (26%) had known histories of abusing a child via a
hands-on sexual act. The number of victims known at the time of
sentencing by the 155 subjects was 75. Following treatment, the
inmates disclosed perpetrating contact sexual crimes against
another 1,702 victims. Eighty-five percent of the inmates were in
fact contact sexual offenders, compared to only 26 percent known
at the time of sentencing. Thus, both groups of Internet child
pornography offenders treated in the SOTP included a significant
proportion (i.e., 80% to 85%) of offenders who perpetrated contact
sexual crimes. These findings are consistent with my clinical
experience treating Internet sex offenders for the past ten years.
While the 2000 and 2006 analyses reveal similar patterns, they
represent heuristic observations and the basis for hypothesis testing
which must be followed by rigorous scientific studies. I am
hopeful that Bureau of Prisons and other researchers will be in a
position in the future to provide you with a sound scientific basis
for making policy decisions regarding internet sex offenders.
While the relationship between contact sexual criminality and
Internet child pornography offenders is an important area of
scientific inquiry, there are many other questions that remain
unanswered. Among these are: 1) what are the protective factors
that keep some Internet child pornography offenders from
perpetrating contact sexual crimes; 2) what are the psychological,
social, technological and other factors that facilitate sexual
offending among Internet offenders; 3) are there different types of
child pornography offenders; and 4) does Internet child
pornography create sexual deviance among the viewers or
consumers. These and many other questions need to be the focus of
discussion, debate, and research among the scientific, professional,
and law enforcement community.
Effectiveness of sex offender treatment
With respect to treatment outcome, the BOP has been studying
the effectiveness of the SOTP. The results of this research are not
available at this time. This is a long-term endeavor that will take
several years to complete. However, while the effectiveness of the
SOTP at FCI Butner remains to be proven, there is a growing body
of scientific literature suggesting that treatment is effective in
reducing the risk of recidivism. It appears that cognitive-behavioral
and psychopharmacological treatments have the strongest effect.
The SOTP employs these methodologies.
Closing
The state of knowledge with respect to Internet child
pornography offenders is in its infancy. My observations of the
217 offenders described above who participated in the SOTP
indicate that these Internet child pornographers are far more
dangerous to society than we previously thought. But, I caution the
law enforcement community and others against generalizing
beyond the offenders who were the subjects of my treatment
interviews. I urge the professional and scientific community to
attend to this understudied group of offenders.
Chairman Whitfield, this concludes my formal statement. I
would be pleased to answer any questions you or other Members
of the Subcommittee may have.
MR. WHITFIELD. Thank you, Dr. Hernandez. We appreciate
your testimony. At this time, I would like to recognize Dr. Anna
Carol Salter for her 5-minute opening statement, and we appreciate
her being with us this morning.
DR. SALTER. I am very happy to be here. I am a psychologist
in Madison, Wisconsin, and I have assessed and treated sex
offenders since the mid-80s for over 20 years. I was asked to
introduce myself briefly. I have written three academic books on
sex offenders, Treating Child Sex Offenders and Victims: A
Practical Guide, in 1988. I also wrote Transforming Trauma,
Understanding and Treating Adult Survivors of Child Sexual
Abuse in 1995. In 2003 I wrote Predators: Pedophiles, Rapists,
and Other Sex Offenders: Who They Are, How They Operate, and
How We Can Protect Ourselves and Our Children. Currently, I
work half time for the Department of Corrections in Wisconsin. I
also do civil commitment evaluations for sex offenders in the State
of Iowa and sometimes other States. I have done trainings for
mental health professionals, judges, clinicians, prison staff, et
cetera. I have trained in 46 States and 10 countries.
Now for my testimony today, I decided to submit a video of a
sex offender describing the grooming techniques that he uses to
ingratiate himself with victims and to fool their parents. I did that
because it is my belief that my committee has probably heard from
many more professionals than they have from offenders, and the
offenders are really the experts on how they get access to children.
No one speaks more powerfully than they do. The interview that I
conducted was done in a State prison. Permissions were obtained
from the prison officials to approach the offenders. The offenders
were asked if they wanted to participate. They were told that the
film would not be used to help them and it would not be used to
hurt them either, and that they would be anonymous in the sense
that I wouldn't release information about their identities.
With those simple protections in place really the only thing I
promised is that I wouldn't give out information about their
identities, it was amazing how many offenders wanted to talk
about how they accessed children. I am sure that the committee
saw the sparkle in Joe's eyes when he talked about it. There is a
great deal of joy in many offenders. There is also a great deal of
duke and delight. I think that the offender that you saw fooling the
parents was probably more exciting than actually molesting the
children. I think if you did see the video, you also saw how
sophisticated the grooming techniques can be, and you can tell just
from watching this man how well he could present if he chose to.
You might be interested in what happened after the film was
made. He was released from prison. He relocated to a city in the
State he was in, and one day he walked into a church and said to
the minister, Father, do you take ex-cons? This was after the
service. The minister said, well, if they are truly repentant, we do.
And Joe said, oh, I am, Father, I am. I was in prison for passing a
cold check, which was a lie. He was in prison for child
molestation. And while I was there I found Jesus. I was dyed in
the blood of the lamb, and I had hymns that I dearly loved, and I
knew what whatever church was playing that hymn on Sunday
morning, that was a sign from God that that was the church for me,
and, Father, you were playing that hymn.
So the minister took him in and he very quickly took over the
children's choir. He was a professional musician. In any case,
eventually the authorities caught up with him. He had offered for
the minister to call the prison and he had given him the name of the
prison, but because he offered the minister hadn't done so thinking
he must be legitimate. Sooner or later a parent wondered why
there was a felon running the children's choir and asked what they
knew about him, and then they did call the prison. When they
caught up with him, it turned out he was operating in two churches
at the same time. And the second minister said we thought he was
legitimate. You see, he had this hymn that he dearly loved and we
were playing that hymn on Sunday morning.
In talking about Joe and in showing that film, however, I don't
mean to imply that all sex offenders can't be treated. I don't think
treatment, frankly, is going to do much good for Joe and it hasn't
in the past. But the reality is that a recent meta-analysis showed
that we can get about a 40 percent reduction in re-offending
through treatment. Forty percent isn't ideal, but it is a tremendous
boom to victims. It means a lot fewer victims out there. The only
group that we can't seem to get a reduction with are psychopath
offenders who don't have a conscience.
I will also say to you that I am not optimistic about educational
programs for parents. I find that the average person cannot
distinguish between likeability and trustworthiness and some of
these offenders are extremely, extremely likeable. I simply find
that likeability will override even a criminal record of child
molestation any day of the week. And that is really all I have for
my opening statement.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Salter follows:]
PREPARED STATEMENT OF DR. ANNA CAROL SALTER,
PSYCHOLOGIST
MR. WHITFIELD. Thank you, Dr. Salter. At this time, we will
recognize Dr. Philip Jenkins for his 5-minute opening statement.
DR. JENKINS. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and
members of the subcommittee. In the year 2000, I had access to
the proceedings of a bulletin board which was the meeting center
for very large scale dealers, traffickers, and manufacturers of child
pornography. The material I found there surprised me enormously
because it ran so contrary to everything in the literature. Quite a
lot of the literature still suggests that child porn on the Internet is
largely a myth or that it results from a misinterpretation of
ambiguous or relatively low level material. That turned out to be
completely wrong, and in contrast to the material Mr. Eichenwald
has described, and his work is of course very important.
This was really the most dangerous hard core material that was
being circulated, and I would ask you to focus just on the concept
which is what is called the KG and KX series of child
pornography. In the 1990s a man in Denmark or German had a
wife who ran a kindergarten and in the space of a couple of years
he took many thousands of images and videos of young girls aged
between three and six, either nude or engaged in sex with adult
men. The most loathsome kind of material, and that was only one
sort of material that was available at that point. When you look at
child porn offenders, when you read about somebody who has
been arrested for the possession of say 50 images, please
remember that there are many people out there whose collections
run between 50,000 and 100,000. I believe the largest collection I
have ever seen, in reference to 120,000 images.
When we think about child porn offenders, please remember
that these elite dealers and manufacturers exist out there in a very
large way and have virtually no fear of law enforcement. There is
something they are afraid of, but it is not law enforcement. What
they are afraid of and the group that did them the most harm in the
period of time we were looking at them was what you could only
call cyber vigilantes, white hat hackers. These people spend a
great deal of their time frankly making fun of law enforcement
agencies, but when the subject of vigilantes, clinical people, people
with their technical level of skill was raised, that is when they
became alarmed.
I came across many people in 2000 who had been working on
the Internet, working on computers for 20 years back from the year
1980. Think of the level of experience and technical expertise they
had and then imagine how difficult it is for an ordinary law
enforcement agent to deal with that. The other word I want to
emphasize here is global. This enterprise is absolutely global and
the most important single thing that happened in the child porn
world in the last 15 years was the liberalization of the Soviet
Union, the break up of the Soviet Union and the East European
nations. This is now, I believe, where a vast amount of this
material is manufactured from which it is circulated. Just
remember, for many of these consumers it is a very strong racial
element. They used to have to deal with photos of Asian children,
but now they have white blonde children and from this very racist
mindset obviously, that is seen as so much more preferable.
A very quick word finally on the subject of profiling. We have
to be so careful about profiling because usually the people we are
profiling are the ones who have been arrested and very often they
are quite low level figures. The thing that strikes you, if you look
at the boards. Dr. Salter made a very wise observation that the
offenders are the experts. I suggest that the offenders who have
not yet been arrested are the experts because they very often speak-
-and I have absolute respect for her very valuable work. The most
dangerous thing, and I echo what she says, is how normal they are,
and these boards very often feature discussions about the morality
of the trade.
Somebody who is a major dealer will raise the subject has it
occurred to you what we are doing is wrong, and they will bounce
back on this for hours, and very often, as Mr. Eichenwald says,
they were using children's rights rhetoric; we are in this to defend
children. So just to emphasize two things. No solution is going to
happen unless it is on a global basis and involves international
cooperation, but it is the technical people, the website providers,
and very often the hackers who are the people who can make the
largest single impact on this alarming subject. Thank you very
much.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Jenkins follows:]
PREPARED STATEMENT OF DR. PHILIP JENKINS, PROFESSOR,
HISTORY AND RELIGIOUS STUDIES, PENNSYLVANIA STATE
UNIVERSITY
I have published extensively on matters of child abuse and
molestation, and child protection. Between 1999 and 2001, I had
access to a series of bulletin boards frequented by dealers,
traffickers and manufacturers of child pornography, and also major
consumers and collectors of this material. (I describe the center of
this activity by the pseudonym "the Maestro Board"). Because this
material was entirely verbal and text-based, I was able to access it
without confronting the legal and ethical dilemmas involved in
visiting sites where actual images were portrayed. My findings
were published in my 2001 book Beyond Tolerance: Child
Pornography on the Internet (New York University Press).
Though I have kept up with later developments in the field, I have
made no attempt to revisit these boards, nor would this be possible
today, since all are now password-protected, and the only way to
gain access would be to supply original material - that is, to
provide fresh images or videos of children.
I would also stress other limitations of my study. For one thing,
the boards I was observing catered to images of small girls,
whereas the excellent investigations of Kurt Eichenwald focused
on sites dealing with young boys: the two areas of interest seem
not to overlap in the slightest. From the nature of the material,
moreover, I have no idea of the actual identities of participants, nor
the scale of the enterprise. In cases where I had any positive
evidence that might point to actual identities or rings, I have
supplied that information to law enforcement agencies. I have also
supplied these agencies with full copies of all the electronic
materials I collected during my study.
Based on this research, I would draw several conclusions.
Except where stated otherwise, I believe that each of these
statements remains true today, and conditions may actually have
become more serious
1.Child pornography is not a myth
It seems odd to start with such a statement, but it is necessary.
Even well-informed commentators dismiss the child porn
subculture as a moralist myth, perhaps a kind of conservative
urban legend, like snuff films. Some years ago, in her otherwise
engrossing study of Internet censorship debates, Net.Wars, Wendy
Grossman occasionally refers to child porn as one of the factors
leading people to support restrictions, though in reality, (she
asserts) only a "small amount of material... shows up on the Net."
She also writes that "many of the newsgroups with names like
alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.children were probably started as
tasteless jokes, and are largely taken up with messages flaming the
groups." This remark is ironic since
alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.pre-teen (abpep-t) is an all too real
phenomenon: by 2000, abpep-t boasted some 40,000 postings,
mainly images of young girls from toddlers through puberty, and
this newsgroup for years served as a central institution of the
kiddie porn Net-culture. In Erotic Innocence, his fine book on
contemporary attitudes to childhood sexuality, James Kincaid
writes that in the mid-1990s, "researchers found nothing on the
Internet that is not also in adult bookstores," though there might be
a marginal trade in child porn, "a cottage industry of sorts, a wary
trading of photos and old magazines back and forth among a small
number of people." Otherwise, he argues, the only people
distributing child porn online are government agencies, seeking to
bait traps for pedophiles. Another major work on commercialized
sex is Laurence O'Toole's Pornocopia. After describing a
celebrated child porn arrest in Great Britain, O'Toole argued that:
When... the hullabaloo over transnational Internet child porn
rings ultimately amounts (in the UK at least) to the possession
of three images dating back a quarter of a century, people are
bound to wonder about the true nature or extent of the dangers
of child porn in cyberspace ..... a lot of the materials described
as 'child porn' are in fact nude pictures of children taken from
art-work, family albums and naturist materials.
Many of the materials do indeed fall into these categories, but
hundreds of thousands of other images do not; and whereas a large
number date back a quarter of a century, many others were made
this year. And they are far more alarming than these accounts
would suggest.
To illustrate this material at its vilest and most exploitative, we
might consider the more recent KG and KX series, the
"kindergarten" photos, which together represented perhaps the
most prized collections available on the Net as of 2000-2001. KG
is a series of many thousands of nude images of several very young
girls, mainly aged between three and six years old, with each item
including the girl's name, like Helga, Inga, and so on. The
photographs date from the mid-nineties, and they likely derive
from either Germany or Scandinavia. In the words of one fan of
the series, "Once upon a time. There was a chemist that had earned
his Ph.D. Well, he got married and along with his wife opened up a
day care center. Well, as the story goes, he managed to take
pictures of lots and lots of things. Eventually he got busted." The
KG collection exists in parallel with a still more sought after
version, KX, which depicts the same children in hard core sexual
situations with one or more men. Put simply, most are pictures of
four and five year old girls performing oral sex and masturbation
on adult men. The immense popularity of the KG images ensured
an enthusiastic market for KX, which entered general circulation in
2000.
We should also remember the case of "Helena," probably a
British girl, who, tragically, was long one of the best-known sex
stars on the Web worldwide. In the late 1980s, as a little girl of
seven or eight, Helena became the subject of a photo series which
depicted her not only in all the familiar nude poses of hard-core
pornography, but also showed her in numerous sex acts with
Gavin, a boy of about the same age. Both are reportedly shown
having sex with an adult man, presumably Helena's father. The
images are collectively known by various names, but the
commonest is "hel-lo," that is, "Helena/lolita." Since their first
appearance, they have had an astonishing afterlife, and probably
not a day has passed without the hel-lo images appearing anew on
some electronic server somewhere in the world, and they are
cherished by thousands of collectors worldwide. They seem to be
the standard starter kit for child porn novices. In addition, Helena's
pictures form part of a much larger series, known under titles like
hel-anal, hel-cum, hel-louise, and so on. Hel-lo itself was recently
described by a child porn enthusiast as
the greatest HC [hardcore] series ever made! She was 'acting'
since she was a toddler until she was twelve years old, which
means there are thousands of pics of her in action out there
somewhere! No other series compares!!!
In addition to the traffic in visual images, many Usenet sites cater
to pedophile interests through stories and written fantasies, which
are entirely supplied by amateurs catering to other enthusiasts. In
the language of the dissident underground of the old USSR, they
are purely samizdat, "self-published." These stories are originally
posted in Usenet groups, and subsequently collected in open
websites. These written works are almost certainly legal protected
speech within the United States, which is paradoxical in that these
stories are often grossly violent or even homicidal in their content.
To put the paradox at its simplest, a photograph of a naked five
year old girl happily eating an ice cream on the beach may be
criminalized, even if the child is shown accompanied by doting
parents, but it is quite legal to publish a detailed fantasy about the
rape, torture and murder of the same child. To give an idea of the
content of some of these tales, the following represents a selection
of the new stories listed on one extreme content site a few years
ago, together with the editor's summaries of the themes offered in
each case (NC is non-consensual, "scat" is scatological, "ws"
means water sports or urination, snuff means killing):
14 Year Old Avenger by brisko65 (Pedo, Bi sex, Scat, WS,
Vomit, Animal, Torture, Spanking, Snuff, Incest)
A Hunt by ***** (Rape, Torture, Cannibalism, Snuff)
A Little Inheritance by S.o.S. (Incest-daddy/daughter, Pedo,
Oral)
A Night in the Kids Room by S.o.S. (Pedo/toddler, Incest-
brothers/sisters, Oral, Anal, Gangbang)
Amanda the Slut Episode 1 by sex freak (Preteen, NC, S/M,
Suggested snuff)
Anne by Kinnik (Rape, Pedo, Torture, Snuff)
B&B 2-Dad visits Kids by Chucketal (Incest-father/son, Pedo)
Baby in the Arcade by S.o.S. (Drug use, Pedo, Toddler rape)
Baby Sex is the Best - Part II by Evil Dad (Child rape & abuse,
Pedo, Scat, WS)
Children's Ward by xtight (Pedo, Anal)
Do You like my Bottom Daddy? by UK Snowy (Oral incest-
father/daughter, Pedo)
Fucking in the Family - The Tradition Continues by Lund
Pasand (Incest-whole family, Pedo, First time)
Nigger Lust by N-lover (Hetero sex, Pedo, Racist, Interracial,
Scat, WS)
Off the Bone by UK Snowy (Rape, Pedo)
The Most Perfect 10 by ***** (Bi sex, Pedo, Fisting)
By no means all story groups are anything like so bizarre or
repulsive in their content, and this is avowedly an extreme site.
Nevertheless, the predominance of underage themes is notable. Of
44 new stories listed at this site in April 2000, no less than twenty
included "pedo" (pedophile) or "preteen" as one of their subject
keywords.
2.The available material is vast in scale, and new material is
coming on line more or less daily
Just how easy it is to find these materials needs to be stressed.
Both the price and quality of illegal commodities are greatly
affected by the relative success of law enforcement intervention.
When for instance police and customs are waging a particularly
successful war against the cocaine trade, making major seizures,
the price of cocaine on American streets rises steeply, while the
quality of the substance being retailed falls dramatically.
Conversely, weaker police responses are reflected in bargain
basement prices and higher purity at street level. Applying this
analogy to child pornography produces disturbing results. In the
mid-1970s, a child porn magazine containing thirty or so pictures
might cost ten dollars in an American city. Today, the entire
contents of that same magazine are available through the Internet
for free, as are tens of thousands of other more recent counterparts.
A month or so of free web-surfing could easily accumulate a child
porn library of several thousand images. The only payments or
charges involved would be the standard fees for computer connect
time, and the cost of storage materials. Prices in the child porn
world have not just fallen, they have all but been eliminated.
"Quality" has also improved immeasurably, in terms of the range
of materials on offer: arguably, the images now coming on line are
becoming ever more explicit and hard-core. Applying the drug
analogy suggests that the role of law enforcement in regulating
supply is approximately zero. I want to keep this problem in
perspective, since the actual numbers of hardcore traffickers are
not vast: we are probably talking about a subculture numbered in
the tens of thousands worldwide, together with a significant
number of casual browsers, but even so, the scale of the enterprise
they support is depressing, as is the constant infusion of new
materials.
To put this in context, I would suggest that thee typical major
collector would possess upwards of forty or fifty thousand items,
videos and images, tho9ugh collections do run into the 100,000-
plus range. This is worth remembering when we read about child
porn arrests of some individual who has perhaps fifty or a hundred
such images.
3.The child porn subculture on the internet is not based on any
close-knit hierarchy, but rather involves a network of
individuals who probably do not know each other's names.
Though networks certainly exist, they are numerous and quite
distinct from each other. There is no single "child porn mafia"
In the countless board discussions on security, one recurrent
theme is that of "safety in numbers", in other words, that porn
users could in theory be tracked down, but the sheer volume of
traffic makes this next to impossible. In a discussion of the wisdom
of using abpep-t, the child porn guru "Godfather Corleone"
advised that
There are millions of people using newsgroups, and tens of
thousands of them do visit abpep-t on a very regular base.
Therefore the likelihood the server would want to spend time
tracing someone down for visiting a newsgroup they are
responsible for providing people with, is rather small.
Such comments raise the difficult but inevitable question of just
how large a community we are dealing with, and the Godfather's
remark about "tens of thousands" is not only plausible, but perhaps
modest.
At a given moment on an average day, the main flagship
discussion board contained contributions from about sixty or so
pseudonymous contributors, though that is only a snapshot, and the
total contributing during a whole day is considerably larger. Given
the delicate subject matter, the figure for "lurkers" (people who
observe but do not contribute) is likely to be far larger than for
typical Usenet groups. At a minimum, the Maestro community
certainly ran into several thousand. A useful analogy may be
provided by other less popular child porn sites which record the
number of hits for each posting. The volume of hits largely
depends on the plausibility that the original message does in fact
lead to a genuine CP site, but where the poster is well-known and
trusted, the number of hits is usually between two and four
thousand, and may well approach ten thousand. Of course, a
person might visit a particular site only sporadically, or concentrate
only on one board to the exclusion of others. Still, that provides an
absolute minimum for the size of the core CP community on the
Internet, those who frequent at least one of the various boards on a
regular basis: we have already seen that egroups sites with child
porn content can run to several thousand members. Confirming
this scale, G-Man, one of the most experienced contributors to the
flagship board, wrote that "To each of my posts I get approx 1,000
to 5,000 visitors to my site (nearly 90,000 in the past five weeks!)"
Gauging the scale of the pedophile audience is a frequent
talking point on the boards. One recent posting ran as follows:
When you think about it, just how many lola lovers do we
have here, maybe? 10,000 15,000 visit this board, what about
other boards, and what of the others that can not find this and
other boards? I have seen some of the log files from some of
the net's search engines, and the top search is childporn and all
the Lola lovers that don't have a computer, there must be
millions out there some where ;).
Others agreed:
*Tomcat> I had a site posted here with a counter that showed
approx. 3,000 access after 4 hours, before the site was shut
down. Extrapolate this to a whole day could be 18,000 only
from this board at one day. And there are many more surfing
in news (probable ratio 1:10 or more) and other boards. The
number is constantly increasing as more people get access to
the net. There was about half of them about half a year ago,
and the increase itself is increasing. So no need to feel alone. I
guess the ratio of posters and lookers on this board is about
1:100 or more.... That's the reason why I'm always stating that
busting them all would hurt national economics.
* Zep > 12 months ago ***'s site, which had links to BBS's on
its front page, was getting over 30,000 hits a day before the
counter was taken off. *** BBS its 'finest hour' (when this
BBS went down for about 3 days about 6 months ago), was
getting over 50,000 hits a day over this period. No, we are not
alone in this world.
I stress, though, that we are dealing with core activists, since casual
browsers might be much more numerous.
Putting the different boards together, I would guess that the
core population as of year 2000 should be counted somewhere in
the range of perhaps fifty to a hundred thousand individuals,
though that is a very loose figure. It is also a global number:
perhaps a third of these are located in the US. Given the
phenomenal expansion of the Internet since the mid-1990s, we can
assume that this figure is changing very rapidly, and certainly
expanding. While some old hands send farewell messages
explaining that their interests have moved on to other things,
almost every day on the boards we find first postings by recently
arrived "newbies."
It is even more difficult to assess the demographics of the
audience for this (or any) board. In many situations on the Internet,
people tend to assume personas which are not necessarily their
own, and in an illegal setting like this there are powerful reasons to
affect a different identity. A general impression, though, suggests
that the vast majority of contributors to the board fall into the
category of males, aged between perhaps 25 and 55, mainly white
but with a sizable Asian minority. This would certainly account for
the vast majority of recorded arrests. My impression may be false
in a number of ways, as several major users at least claim to be
much younger than this would suggest, aged in their late teens.
Given the distribution of computer skills across the population, a
large cohort of teens and young adults would be quite predictable.
Nor can we say much about participants' regional or
occupational backgrounds, except to say that both are highly
diverse. This is indicated by the membership of the Wonderland
Club, which as we will see, was a closed network of elite
traffickers broken up in 1998. The Wonderland group included
some two hundred members in over forty countries, including the
US, Great Britain, Australia, Italy, France, Norway, Sweden,
Germany, Austria, Belgium, Finland, and Portugal. American
members included "an engineer from Portland, Maine, a scientist
in New Britain, Conn. Other suspected members lived in sleepy
towns like Broken Arrow, Oklahoma; Lawrence, Kansas; and
Kennebunk, Maine.... A suspect living in a trailer park in St.
Charles, Mo., was arrested after agents found, along with child
porn, firearms and a stash of the black powder used to make
bombs. According to Customs agents, a law student in New York
City threw his hard drive into a neighbor's yard." Of the first eight
members charged in the UK, we find three computer consultants,
unsurprisingly in view of the level of expertise required for this
world, but there were also two taxi drivers, and three men who
were described as unemployed.
Gender represents another controversial point. Messages are
often posted by individuals identifying themselves as women, and
these claim that far more adult women are sexually interested in
young girls than is commonly realized. One of the major posters on
the boards over the last year or two bears the handle "Goddess."
Goddess's real identity is controversial. Asked to speculate on the
appearance of contributors, one contributor wrote that he saw
"Goddess as a rebellious schoolgirl with holes in her jeans
(probably she is a he and 50 years old)." Still, lending credibility to
claims of female involvement, there are documented cases of girls
and women being involved in making and distributing electronic
child porn, although I presume they represent a small minority of
activity. Generally, we can safely assume that the bulk of board
traffic is the work of white men in their thirties and forties.
4.Many of those involved in the subculture are strikingly
"normal". This has critical implications for the potential for
deterrence.
The reasons why adults become sexually interested in children
are much debated, but given that this enthusiasm does exist, it is
not difficult to see why it should find such a friendly environment
on the Internet, with its anonymity and its ability to transcend
jurisdictional borders. We can also appreciate how novices should
find it so easy to be drawn into the subculture, and once involved,
to absorb its values and practices. In many ways, the seemingly
aberrant world of child porn on the Net represents not a total break
with approved mainstream ways and mores, but their extension
into illegality.
Some degree of tolerance of illegality is common to Internet
culture in general. The whole world of electronic communication
has developed so rapidly that rules and laws are poorly formulated,
and it is common and approved practice for computer users to
violate regulations. People who would never dream of committing
larceny or burglary in the "real" material world think nothing of
hacking an Internet site, using a purloined password, or copying
software illegally, while a widespread opinion holds that copyright
rules simply do not exist on the Net. If something works and
produces benefit without harming an individual (as opposed to a
faceless corporation) then it is acceptable and approved. Even if
technically criminal, misdeeds on computers are likely to be
viewed by many as pranks rather than heinous offenses, and this
approach is largely shared by the media. When, as happens from
time to time, a hacker succeeds in changing the website of a police
agency so that it suddenly depicts hard-core pornographic material,
the news media tend to report the story as quirky or humorous,
rather than a dreadful crime (sabotaging or closing down a popular
site is a different matter). The idea of seeking forbidden material
on the Internet is natural and even socially approved, so that the
heroic deeds of hackers and outlaw computer wizards are the
subject of a hundred Hollywood films. When some years ago an
Israeli teenager hacked into important US government sites, that
nation's then Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, offered the
Americans a cursory apology, but used the incident at home to
boast of Israel's technological prowess and sense of adventure.
Conversely, authorities who try and prevent these efforts are
reactionaries, stuffed shirts, control freaks: the enemy.
Occasionally, the fervently libertarian ethos of the Internet can
extend even to something as condemned as child porn. In a curious
case in 1998, the manager of a small Californian ISP discovered a
child porn web site, which she duly reported to authorities, and
then tried herself to gain more information about the site's
operators. She soon encountered a fiercely critical reaction from
other Internet users, including a hacking attack that shut down her
site. The issue was less tolerance of child porn as such than her
apparent vigilantism, and her willingness to draw officialdom into
what should ideally be the self-regulating world of the Net.
On the Internet, rules are made to be broken. This attitude is
facilitated by the user's psychological sense that whatever occurs
in a computer transaction takes place within his or her own private
space. Although one is visiting a site based in Singapore, the
individual is viewing it on a screen at home in London or in an
office in Los Angeles, and it is intuitively obvious that this is
where the transaction is really occurring. One can after all interrupt
the process at any time to get up and make coffee or wash the car.
The attitude seems to be that it is my home, my desk, my
computer, and my business what I do with it. This is one reason for
the ferocious opposition to schemes to tax commercial transactions
on-line: why should the state of California, say, be able to charge
sales tax on business which is self-evidently done on a desktop in
Connecticut? This sense of private space also promotes a sense of
invulnerability: it is difficult to take seriously all the jeremiads
about the lack of privacy on the Net when the user feels that he or
she is pursuing a personal interest at home, with no one apparently
watching. Even in the case of child pornography, the absolute legal
prohibition on private use is not as widely understood as one may
think. In a surprising survey some years ago, Kimberly McCabe
questioned a sample of citizens who attended law enforcement-
sponsored crime-watch meetings in two cities in the US South,
people who might be presumed to have some interest in criminal
justice issues. Even so, a third of her sample agreed with the
statement that "Downloading child pornography from a newsgroup
is legal." Just under eight percent believed that "Possession of
sexual material involving a minor is legal," and the same
proportion felt that "viewing computer-generated children in
sexual materials is okay."
Also making the child porn subculture more apparently
acceptable is the lack of overtly deviant behaviors or markers
associated with the activity. Participants do not assume an overtly
deviant role in the way that they would if they joined a gang or
cult: they need not shave their heads, wear special clothing, or
attend a meeting every week or even every year, nor need they
relocate to a compound or commune. Entering the child porn
culture might mean assuming or affecting a deviant identity, but
one that has no physical manifestations, or which need continue
after one has switched off the computer. This particular subculture
is one which can be joined without physically moving into a
strange or dangerous-seeming environment, a biker bar, sex club or
drug supermarket, though in practice, using the computer at home
can lead to far more perilous consequences than any of these
places.
It is useful to compare the process of accessing child porn on
the Internet today, which is absolutely illegal, with the semi-
tolerated matter of purchasing a magazine of this sort in an urban
bookstore in 1975. Although the bookstore patron was running
little or no risk of official sanction, it was self-evident from the
surroundings and the social context that the purchaser was in
deviant territory, both physically and metaphorically. The store
was likely in a "bad part of town," in a physical setting perhaps not
far removed from active prostitution and drug use, and not
somewhere where one would wish to be seen. In contrast, the
modern computer user is, in every sense, at home with child
pornography. Today, there appears to be no entry fee to the
subculture, no risk or commitment, and that is perhaps the most
dangerous delusion in the whole process.
In many ways, too, child porn users are extrapolating from the
socially commonplace. On the Internet, sexual material and adult
pornography is extremely abundant, and generally tolerated,
despite the continuing protests of conservative moralists.
Pornography sites are well frequented, and little social stigma
attaches to seeking such material through improper means, for
instance by using computers in libraries or schools. Such misdeeds
are often the subject of humor rather than serious condemnation,
even when the users are young teenagers. A person accessing sex
sites from a workplace computer might technically be violating
corporate rules, but according to most views, is no more criminal
than a colleague who takes home pens or paperclips. Many porn
sites also "push the envelope" in terms of the strange and perverse
practices which they depict, including sadomasochism, bestiality
and toilet functions. Occasionally, too, amateur sites in which
posters offer home-made pictures of wives and (adult) girlfriends
will throw in a soft-core image of a pubescent girl, and the
responses suggest that this action is seen only as mildly naughty,
perhaps a form of tweaking authority. Seeking bizarre or shocking
sexual images on the Internet does not of itself contradict deeply
held social values, especially when - as it appears - the searching is
done in private.
5.Dealers, traffickers, consumers and collectors of child porn
may or may not be personally engaged in actual molestation.
From the nature of the evidence, we are over-informed about
those individuals who actually do molest, and who are
probably not typical of the whole community. That point is not
intended as a defense of the community, but is rather pointed
at the best means of combating them.
The actual relationship between child porn and child abuse is
open to debate, no matter how firmly such a linkage has come to
be viewed as a social orthodoxy. The difficulty is that solid data on
the question are all but unobtainable, and official figures are highly
suspect. To illustrate the problems with available evidence, let us
assume that ninety percent of child porn consumers never become
involved in abuse or molestation, and confine their illegal activities
to merely viewing and collecting images. I have no idea what the
actual figure is, but as I will suggest, nor does anybody else. These
individuals are extremely unlikely to find their way into the
criminal justice system, unless they attempt to trade images, or
barring accidental finds on their hard drives. Conversely, the
minority of users who are also molesters are far more likely to be
arrested and prosecuted: they might try to seduce youngsters
online, or else abduct or molest the children of friends or
neighbors. For whatever reason, the police will probably
apprehend them, and will discover child porn collections upon
searching their belongings. In consequence, the ten percent of CP
consumers who are also abusers will make up a sizable (and
wholly disproportionate) majority of child porn arrests. This allows
anti-porn activists to state, quite accurately, that "in the vast
majority of child porn arrests, the individual involved is also found
to be a molester:" listeners are encouraged to draw the
(unwarranted) conclusion that child pornographers are necessarily
abusers, and perhaps vice versa. In fact, the statistics establish no
causal link between child porn materials and actual behavior, any
more than the similar observation that most sex criminals also
enjoy adult porn. The statement that "Most rapists watch porn
videos" cannot be translated as "Most people who watch porn
videos become rapists." Conceivably, perhaps ninety or ninety-five
percent of child porn fans commit abuse, or perhaps the figure is
closer to five or ten percent: the reality may just be unknowable.
Official statistics (arrests and prosecutions) tell us mainly about
those inept and seemingly atypical offenders who fail to take the
obvious precautions, and who get caught. If for instance we wanted
to study the child porn world from media or official sources, we
might collect media reports of investigations and arrests of the sort
which appear regularly in most advanced nations. Over the last few
years, regional newspapers in the United States have reported
hundreds of such stories, involving all sorts of individuals,
including priests, politicians, police officers and executives, as
well as ordinary citizens. Such stories mainly hit the headlines
when they involve teachers or others working with youth, but
celebrities are also newsworthy. But such instances represent only
the tip of an iceberg. To quote one of the gurus of the electronic
child porn world, "Godfather Corleone,"
Looking at the enormous amount of lolita-lovers out there,
very, very few get arrested, the opposite of what most newbies
[novices] seem to believe is the case, those that actually do get
arrested, do not get arrested for downloading or uploading to
abpep-t or visiting sites. Most people that get arrested do so for
the following reasons: 1. they had to repair their PC when
those repairing the PC discovered pics on the harddrive. 2.
they have been trading thru e-mail. 3. they have been using
ICQ / IRC [chat-lines] for lolita business.
Both trading and chat-lines are so deadly because one is
dealing with faceless individuals who often prove to be police
officers masquerading either as fellow enthusiasts, or as underage
girls: avoiding such chat facilities is a primary rule offered to
novices in this underworld. Another participant on a child porn
bulletin board, "Granpa Bob," claimed that recent arrests in the US
could be categorized as follows: "It was basically 75% caught e-
mail trading with an LEA [law enforcement agency], 20% by
computer repair shops, and 1% caught by either association with
known traders or by do-gooders reporting them." It is very rare for
individuals to be arrested for posting child porn, and virtually
unheard of to be caught "just looking."
In the vast majority of cases which come to court, child
pornographers are caught for another unrelated offense such as
molestation, which leads to the serendipitous discovery of a
collection of images. Though no case is wholly typical, a fairly
representative example involves the man in Revere, Massachusetts,
who was arrested after a young boy complained that he had been
videotaped while having sex. When police searched the suspect's
premises, they found four thousand computerized images of
underage boys, as well as a hundred indecent videotapes. In a case
in Northern California in 2000, child porn charges surfaced as an
incidental element in a suspected murder investigation. Even
where porn alone is the major issue at stake, offenders have almost
gone out of their way to draw attention to themselves, for instance
by viewing illegal materials on computers in public libraries! As
long as enthusiasts maintain their interests solely within the virtual
realm, observing pictures but not seeking to collect or apply the
electronic fantasies in the world of lived action, they appear to be
safe from detection. The virtual world genuinely is protected
territory.
By definition, studies of arrests or convictions only reveal the
failures within the electronic child porn world. The cases which
come to light fulfil a kind of Darwinian function, since they
remove from the subculture those least fit to adapt and survive, and
thus ensure the efficiency of those who remain. Nor can figures for
arrests tell us much about the scale or the geography of electronic
trafficking. If a hundred men were suddenly arrested for computer
child porn offenses in Los Angeles, that would not necessarily
show that that city was a particular center for this activity, but
would rather indicate the interests and technical abilities of law
enforcement agencies in that area. Perhaps such a campaign would
further reveal that child pornographers in this region are singularly
neglectful of security precautions. It is a truism, but criminal
statistics measure official behavior, and nothing more.
6.The child porn underworld is absolutely multinational and
global
A glimpse at any of the boards will demonstrate the thoroughly
globalized nature of the child pornography trade. The whole child
porn underworld survives and flourishes by exploiting differences
between the legal systems of different countries, between countries
that have radically different attitudes to the whole area of
childhood sexuality, or which observe marginal distinctions over
the age of consent or the definitions of obscenity. Through the
early 1980s, child pornography magazines were still legally and
publicly accessible in the Netherlands, posing severe difficulties
for police in other European nations, who fought hard against
importation. Though hard-core child porn largely moved
underground by the 1990s, several countries retained much more
relaxed attitudes about child sexuality, which affected their views
of what could legitimately be portrayed on the Web. While US law
strictly prohibits all depictions of nude or suggestively clad
children, European countries tend to be more liberal about showing
simple nudity in a non-sexual context, as in a nudist camp. Naturist
magazines like the German Jung und Frei and the French Jeune et
Naturel circulated freely in Europe through the late 1990s. At least
until recently, there was no reason why a Swedish server could not
present a picture of a group of naked ten year old girls on a beach
playing volleyball, say, though this picture would be strictly
contraband when it was received on American soil.
In addition, many of the hard-core images circulated on the Net
are the incidental products of "sex tourism." These portray white
men having sex with young Asian or Latina girls, and are
presumably souvenirs taken by sex tourists visiting Third World
countries over the last decade or two: Thailand, Sri Lanka and
Indonesia are the main Asian venues, while the Latin American
pictures could be from any of a dozen countries. These pictures are
distinguished from others of the genre by the fact that the men in
question rarely attempt to conceal their faces, presumably secure in
the knowledge that they were committing no crime under local
laws: as we will see, the legal environment has since changed to
make such neglect of security precautions very risky indeed.
The boards are cosmopolitan. While the major sites were (as of
2001) based in Japan, most users are from North America and
Europe, and the main working languages are English and German.
Specific debates may proceed in a variety of other languages,
including Spanish, Swedish, Dutch, Portuguese, and indeed most
of the European languages. There are exchanges in tongues like
Turkish, Tagalog and Guarani, and other languages that I cannot
identify, though I can at least recognize all the European
languages. In a typical board exchange between, say, five or six
individuals, two may be based in the US, two in Europe, one in
Malaysia and one in Japan: there is no way for the casual observer
to discover this. Indications might be provided by linguistic
peculiarities, for example the use of English or Australian spelling
or slang, such as "I'm off to the pub for a pint," "colour" for
"color," or "knickers" for girls' underwear, while complainers are
"whingers." Equally likely, participants in a quite different nation
might be affecting these habits in order to divert attention from
their real location, just as the often dreadful spelling and grammar
found in messages may be a ruse to feign ignorance of English.
Deception of this kind is rampant on the boards. When listing
survival tips for subculture members, one board participant
included the advice, "Write in English in this board and never in
your own mother language, if you have one. Don't speak about
very personal things, which could help to identify you after
collecting some more informations." The phrasing of the second
sentence ("more informations") implies that the poster, "Thor," is
not a native speaker, but he might well be an American or
Canadian pretending to employ foreign usage. In another instance,
"Rocky" quoted a story from a Detroit newspaper, and concluded,
"Is any one heard of this news and which country this Detroit
belong to?" I have no idea if this is genuine ignorance, or
ingenious camouflage. "Darkstar" remarks, "don't forget the wise
ones who have been here for years know all this, and be telling you
they live in the UK or Belize, Canada, whilst they really in
Cali[fornia]."
Similar caution is advised for those making pornographic
images, since actual locations might well be revealed by incidental
objects in the background. In one case, the maker of the notorious
Marion series was detected because the setting was recognized as
in Germany, leading federal police in that nation to circulate
Marion's photograph. Responding to this arrest, one board member
wrote "This case is a good example what not to do when posting.
Many people look alike on a world wide basis, however when you
show locations and identifiable clothing to verify identity you are
asking for trouble." It would not be beyond the capacity of a
pornographer to litter a room with magazines in some foreign
language to conceal the fact that the shoot was actually occurring
in, say, Illinois. The need for such cosmopolitanism is constantly
stressed: when asked for the best means of securing a truly
anonymous e-mail account, "Helper" wrote "Do not use sites like
Hotmail. .... Best to go to some boolah-boolah country in Africa or
Asia, or sites in the ".nu" neighborhood [Nauru]. Never your own
country, as this only makes legal issues easier for LEA's." Darkstar
advised, "Just use good proxies, make sure they have nym status,
and operate out of territories like Tibet, China, Taiwan, Russia,
Singapore, Mongolia etc. And alter the time domain in your
computer, this is an ID parameter in conjunction with your isp IP
that ties you down."
In addition, the typical posting of a porn website indicates a
total neglect of frontiers: the site is posted by an American on a
European server, announced on a Japanese server, with passwords
posted at a site notionally based in Nauru or Tonga, while those
downloading the pictures might be from fifty countries. One would
need a thorough education in international law to understand the
problems in legal jurisdiction which it poses: what crimes have
been committed, where, and what agencies might conceivably be
involved? And where exactly has this occurred, except in the
emerging nation of Cyberia? Though the whole transaction
originates on one computer in California, the complete story has
literally unfolded across the globe.
Moreover, outside western Europe, large areas of the world
make virtually no pretense at combating underage sex or child
pornography, and from the nature of the web, there need be only
one bandit country to sabotage all international arrangements. In
fact, there are dozens of such wayward states, which pay little
attention to suppressing child pornography or, much more serious,
child prostitution. Former Communist countries tend to be lax in
this regard, and much material prohibited elsewhere stems quite
freely from Russia, Poland and the Czech Republic. This trend
reflects the extreme weakness of law enforcement in those
societies, as well as a common desire to break away from
Communist austerity.
The upsurge of Russian and East European content has
revolutionized the content of the child porn world, Nudist sites are
prevalent, while many pictures emanating from Russia are
unashamedly pornographic, and often extremely hard-core. They
are immensely popular because they depict subjects in
contemporary settings, and thus form a dramatic contrast to much
of the older materials, which largely depicted either contemporary
Asian girls, or Euro-American children in conspicuously dated
1970s settings. Also, and crucially for many fans, the subjects are
white: a distaste or even loathing for non-white subject is a
recurrent theme in exchanges. Some astute fraudsters exploit the
Russian reputation for corruption by advertising child porn sites
with Russian domain names, that is, the suffix "ru." Foreigners
avidly flock to such sites believing they will thereby gain access to
utterly uncensored materials, but they are often disappointed, and
some ru sites are among the most notorious examples of bogus and
deceptive advertising. They offer tantalizing samples, take money,
but deliver nothing. In passing, it is one of the great ironies of
modern history that the hammer and sickle emblem now often
serves as a symbol of extreme hedonism, and provides a logo for
the hardest of hard core web-sites. Czech sites are also popular. As
an enthusiastic board participant wrote in 2000: "Czech Republic
liberal! You can search, view and store pedo material without any
penalty. For trading is maximum penalty one year." This country
is a major source of images of nude young boys, though as in
Scandinavia, depicting sexual activity in such contexts is strictly
taboo.
The child porn boards offer much advice on how to find
countries where underage sex is readily available, and where child
pornography can easily be obtained or, indeed, manufactured. The
lax morality prevailing in former Communist nations is a common
theme:
* RaNDoM > If you guys are tired of the US why don't you
move out .... I've lived here in Siberia for the past year now
and it's absolute Loli-Heaven! You can't go wrong with the
former Soviet Union. Or if it's a little out of your budget then
consider Mexico. For a few dollars (not pesos) the cops'll look
the other way. It's where I used to live.
* Cross > I hear Russia is becoming the epicenter of Loliland.
Such information in general should help everybody in matters
such as proxies, setting up sites, and many more.
* Greasey > in Russia be prepared to get mugged and maybe
even killed. Russia has no law now, the Russian mafia runs the
whole country
* TEST_ONE > if you have enough money, people at the
[Moscow] Crime Dept. will drive you to the girls
In answer to a question about one photo series, G-Man replied,
Looks Rumanian to me... In some places there you can just go
to an orphanage and give the adults some money (not a lot -
many have not been paid their wages in years!) and you can
have your way with some of the kids... The only thing is - the
children have never even seen a bath and the beds have never
been cleaned. They also shave the heads of the kids, so you'll
have to do a bald girl.
After a decade of extreme laissez faire, some east European
countries may finally be undergoing a moral reaction. Czech
laissez-faire seems to be weakening as the country becomes ever
more closely integrated into the European economic and political
order, and there have been major crackdowns in recent months.
Poland too has recently passed stringent anti-porn legislation,
which if enforced would suppress most adult soft-core material,
but it remains to be seen how far such action would extend to the
Internet. Nor is there much likelihood that countries like Russia or
Rumania will return to anything like Stalinist moral discipline in
the foreseeable future, or will succeed in regulating their thriving
organized crime enterprises.
Despite the attention paid to the former Communist world and
Japan, most "bandit" countries are however found in the Third
World nations of Asia and Latin America, where westerners can
readily find underage sex, as well as visual depictions of such
activity. In coming years, these nations may also host the
electronic servers central to the child porn world.
In 1999, one correspondent asked the Maestro community,
"Generally speaking - Where do you think the best place to travel
to? Does anyone want to come along?" He received numerous
replies, most highlighting the Third World:
* Ms Knickerworthy > Israel is a good place for pristine
preteen arse... If you're not fussy about skin colour or AIDS
then try Fiji, Bali, Jamaica, and similar Third World holes.
* jo > Contrary to popular belief the Philippines is still one of
the best places to go but you have to be very cautious. Stay
away from the tourist areas. The back streets of Manila are a
good place to walk around mid afternoon. People are very
friendly, and very poor.
* Pedro Phylle > As suggested above, stick with the poorer,
undeveloped countries such as Latin America, Balkans or
preferably S.E. Asia. In Bangkok, go to a red light district
named Patpong.... Very lax laws and you don't have to worry
about getting mugged or killed. To be really safe, talk to a
cabbie and some of them will have a photo album of lovelies.
Take your pick and he will deliver to your hotel room.
* Soldo > By and large, Northern Europe including
Scandinavia is very anti-pedo, Holland seems somewhat more
tolerant than its neighbors. Southern Europe is more relaxed
and a lot of the old Eastern European states don't have many
laws in place - and if they do then don't enforce them because
of lack of funds. Thailand seems to enforce laws only for the
purpose of satisfying western govts, but if you're the one
caught then look out. Most other S.E. Asian and Third world
countries have far more pressing needs for their funds than
stamping out loli material etc.
The easy availability of child sex in many third world nations
means that pornographic images are readily obtained, and
continuing levels of poverty in these countries suggests that this
problem will not be eliminated for many years.
7.The child porn underworld demonstrates extraordinarily
high levels of technical capacity, probably far above that of
most of the law enforcement agencies attempting to combat
them. Often, investigations and convictions grow out of chance
discoveries.
Already by the late 1980s, pedophiles and child pornography
enthusiasts were among the most experienced and knowledgeable
members of the computerized communication world, so they were
magnificently placed to benefit from the many technological leaps
of the next few years. Operating websites was a vastly easier
matter than the chore of running traditional BBS's, and offered the
virtues (and the dangers) of a much wider audience. Instead of
trading between a few dozen enthusiasts in a particular city or
region, it was now feasible to gain instant access to materials
emanating from other continents, and from countries with very
different legal environments. Moreover, as computers themselves
became faster, with far larger memories and faster processors, it
became possible to store and transmit much more complex
information, including large numbers of high-resolution color
images, and movies. The child porn subculture on the Internet now
began a boom that shows no sign of waning.
There are today veterans whose careers in circulating electronic
child porn span twenty years or more. These dinosaurs
occasionally reminisce about the primitive ages: "Hey, I remember
things before there was abpep-t. Zmodem 8088 PC, 20 Meg hard
drive with RGB monitor, when there wasn't even jpeg's, only gif's.
... Its just amazing how things have changed." Another veteran
recalls, "Twenty years ago I had a 300 baud modem, 16k memory
and a 180k floppy drive. Didn't even consider a picture. My first
HD cost about 500$US for 20megs in about 1984. It was about '87
before I had pictures with a 1 meg video card and SVGA." "Master
Blaster," a venerated name on the child porn boards, wrote in 2000
that "I have been using it before most of you even knew the Net
existed. I was online using a PDP-11 mainframe in 1980. We were
hooked up to the **** intranet and in turn they were connected to
the world via government and schools." Attacking a rival who was
trying to appropriate his nickname, "Zapper" declared in 2000 that
"I have had this nic since 1987 and will continue to use it." We
must be struck by the difficulty of tracking down people who have
remained at liberty in such a dangerous environment for so many
years. Sending police officers on intensive two or three week
courses to learn about the Internet is simply not going to equip
investigators adequately to confront such accumulated expertise.
8. The attitudes expressed by the child porn elite to law
enforcement are so contemptuous as to be sobering. What the
dealers and collectors are really afraid of is private vigilantes,
"militias" and white hat hackers.
I quote a typical opinion from one of the elite figures within the
CP underworld:
In fact, extremely few persons actually get arrested and sent to
jail, that is a myth really. There are thousands of vhs's out
there, many from 1999, thousands of people present at this bbs
[bulletin board] and millions of loli-lovers in various countries,
yet you only see a couple of persons getting arrested, and the
media writes about it like they have been busting Al Capone.
Experienced members of the subculture have little but
contempt for the capacities of "LEA," that is, law enforcement. In
one exchange on the boards, a poster suggested an ingenious tactic
which might in theory serve to entrap many child porn fans, and
asked whether police were likely to deploy it. Responses were
sarcastically dismissive:
*Godfather Corleone > I don't really think the LEA work that
way as I'm sure they have better things to do which they know
are more efficient. For instance, trying to catch newbies
trading per e-mail or newbies visiting IRC etc.
*Kidflash > LEA is not smart enough or have time to do such
things.
9. Massive technical and legal obstacles prevent any easy
solution to the undoubted problem posed by child porn. It is
difficult to think of new laws that would make advances
against the problem, which must involve close international
collaboration.
From the outset, we have to realize what goals are achievable,
and the total elimination of electronic child porn simply may not
be within the bounds of possibility. That does not mean that we
have to learn to accept or live with the problem, and we might well
achieve a massive reduction of production and availability, on the
lines of what was accomplished in the 1980s. The great majority of
child porn users are rational enough to be deterred, if the proper
methods are applied. If we could achieve, say, a 90 or 95 percent
reduction of availability, that would be a massive victory in its own
right. The fact that some residual trade will continue indefinitely
should not provide grounds for ever-increasing encroachments on
the liberties of law-abiding "netizens."
To illustrate just how intractable the child porn problem is, let
us imagine a means by which this material could be removed or
destroyed entirely. Purely as a fantasy, let us suggest that the
Internet should simply be prohibited, along with private
communication over computer networks. Even if a hypothetical
government did prohibit computer networks, it still would not
eliminate child porn. Such a ban could only be enforced by
computers in the hands of police or security forces, and many
precedents indicate that these government employees would
surreptitiously be sharing pornographic images. If there are
computers, there will be computerized child pornography.
To take a marginally less outrageous solution, consider the
experience of China, which like many authoritarian nations, faces a
fundamental paradox in its attitudes to Internet technology. The
Chinese want the massive economic benefits of the Net, and also
realize the military implications of having a computer-literate
populace. The ongoing cold war between the People's Republic
and Taiwan is increasingly fought in the form of hacker attacks on
each other's electronic installations. At the same time, the PRC's
rulers are nervous about the democratic implications of the
Internet, the ability of ordinary citizens to form political or cultural
groupings online, and to circulate information critical of the state.
In response to this dilemma, the Chinese government has ordained
that all Internet traffic must pass through two portals, both run by
the state: the authorities strictly limit what sites can be accessed,
and keep detailed records of who is visiting what site. All ISPs and
Internet users have to register with authorities. Anyone using
encryption technology is required to notify a government agency
of that fact. Other countries with comparably strict laws are
Singapore, Saudi Arabia and Vietnam, and one state has taken the
principle of control to its logical extent: "Burma [Myanmar] has
taken the strongest measures by outlawing the use of the Internet
and making ownership of an unregistered computer with
networking capabilities illegal."
With such a model, much child pornography could indeed be
kept off the Internet, and its aficionados rounded up or terrorized
into inactivity. The difficulty is that a Western nation would find
such a solution unacceptable from a myriad different perspectives,
not least because it would hamstring the whole Internet, and
introduce controls which most members of a democratic society
would regard as utterly intolerable. But would it even work? China
has an agelong tradition of technological innovation, while
successive generations of Chinese dissidents over long centuries
have devised ever more imaginative means of outwitting repressive
governments, and distributing their own propaganda. Not
surprisingly, the latest restrictions do not appear too burdensome in
practice. Chinese computer users access forbidden sites by means
of proxy servers, of which there are far too many to permit
concerted government action. Users also make extensive use of
Internet cafes rather than private machines, so even if authorities
note the fact that an unregulated site has been accessed, the odds of
detecting a specific individual are slight. The Chinese experience
neatly illustrates the remark of Internet pioneer John Gilmore that
"the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."
Once again, too, we face the issue of "who guards the guards?" We
may wonder what frivolous, decadent and obscene websites are
regularly frequented by the guardians of electronic morality in
socialist China.
While a Chinese (or Burmese) solution is inconceivable in the
West, it is scarcely less Orwellian than some of the ideas which
have been floated, however speculatively. Given the nature of the
child porn trade, the only policies which might conceivably
attempt eradication would involve wide-ranging surveillance of
Web traffic by official agencies. This effort might be carried out in
a directed way under the approval of court warrants, or else
randomly through general fishing expeditions undertaken against
the sort of people thought likely to offend in this particular way.
Yet as the Chinese example indicates, even such an intolerable set
of burdens probably would not eliminate the underlying issue.
If the traffic cannot altogether be eliminated, the next question
is how far it can be detected and combated, with a view to
suppressing the bulk of the trade, and ending the present easy
availability of this material. And how far can this be achieved
without destroying the privacy rights of law-abiding Net users?
When considering this, it is useful to recall just how far the Net has
already eroded privacy, and the resentment which such intrusions
have already caused. In reaction to current threats, legislators have
come under pressure to enact safeguards from electronic snooping,
at exactly the same time that the perceived need to combat
cybercrime encourages the same law-makers to enhance official
surveillance powers. The result is a strange and fast-moving
struggle of priorities, between what might be the irreconcilable
values of individual privacy and public security.
The biggest single problem facing police is simply recognizing
and understanding the nature of the child porn world on the Net.
Despite all the enforcement efforts of recent years, it is still
remarkably easy for any reasonably discreet person to pursue this
highly illegal conduct indefinitely, so long as obvious traps are
avoided. This does not mean that police have been lackadaisical or
incompetent, still less that their hands have been tied by legislators.
Hitherto, law enforcement agencies, and their political masters,
have just had a very poor idea of the organization and mechanisms
of the child porn subculture, and above all, its critical institutions,
like the newsgroups and bulletin boards. To take a glaring
example, given the public loathing of child porn and the support
that could be mobilized against it, it is incredible that virtually
nobody outside the subculture itself ever heard of abpep-t: the
name barely appears in searches of media databases.
In observing this neglect, we might think of an analogy with
illegal drugs, in which there is both a supply side (manufacturers
and importers) and a demand side (street-level users). Looking at
current efforts against child porn, it is almost as if anti-drug
policing was solely confined to arresting users and addicts, while
ignoring organized rings and suppliers. In this fantasy world, no
attention would be given to tracing the origin of supplies of (say)
cocaine, and the assumption would be that the substance "just
grew", or perhaps appeared naturally in neighborhood gardens.
Police would remain blissfully unaware of potent names like
"Colombia." Such an approach might result in numerous arrests
and convictions, but it could never make a dent in illicit drug
supplies: nor does a pure demand-side approach work for child
porn. This needs stressing because the occasional attempts to
outline anti-child porn strategies concentrate entirely on
intimidating the ordinary users. Filling the prisons with child porn
users is as likely to be ineffective as the zero-tolerance drug
strategy which has incarcerated hundreds of thousands of small
time consumers, combining minimal deterrence with maximum
social devastation.
All too often, "get tough" campaigns garner rich publicity by
appearing to be striking at the problem enthusiastically, but the
effects are minimal, if not counterproductive. Furthermore, the
horror inspired by child pornography naturally inspires politicians
to try and "do something," but the "something" in question has
nothing to do with the issue at hand. Though child porn is
harrowing enough in its own right, the massive reaction to web-
based obscenity by politicians and media undoubtedly reflects a
sense of loss of control in the face of Internet technology,
augmented by a recognition of the fragility of international
boundaries and laws. So deep is this unfocused concern that it all
too readily justifies legal efforts directed not against the genuinely
harmful area of child pornography, but against far milder forms of
adult-themed indecency, of explicit images, and even language.
Hence the instant appeal of successive high-octane campaigns
against "cyberporn," none of which would have the slightest
impact on the real world of child pornography. When misdirected
laws fail to suppress child porn, the predictable result is to pass
still more laws of the same hue, and so the cycle continues.
Agreeing unhesitatingly that child porn is an unqualified evil
should not mean acceding to every measure proposed, however
tenuously, under an "anti-child porn" rubric. When passing laws, it
is useful to recall the opening words of the Hippocratic Oath: first,
to do no harm.
When we consider the thriving kiddie porn culture on the
Internet, we might recall the Maoist dictum that guerrillas move
among the people like fish swim in the sea. The analogy holds to
the extent that child pornographers do indeed travel the Internet
like the proverbial swimming fish, and there is no easy way to
catch the fish without draining or poisoning the entire sea. We
have to find means of killing or crippling the subculture without
destroying the Internet, with which so much good can be
accomplished.
9. On the positive side, some substantial victories have been
achieved.
Comparing the situation today with that in 2000, I am struck by
how many of the easily accessible semi-public sites have been
closed down, usually through the semi-legal actions of vigilantes
and white hat hackers, rather than by law enforcement agencies
themselves. For instance, we no longer have the proliferation of
outrageous sites that used to disgrace yahoo and MSN's groups,
and that provided portals to very hard core material indeed. The
bulletin boards have also been forced to conceal themselves behind
passwords and high firewalls. However tempted we might be to
despair, progress really has been made.
MR. WHITFIELD. Well, I want to thank all of you for your
testimony. We appreciate it very much. Dr. Jenkins, let me ask
you a question. I notice you are a Professor of History and
Religious Studies at Penn State, so how was it that you became
involved in this particular issue?
DR. JENKINS. It is, as they say, a long story. I had been
working for a long while on the history of child abuse and child
molestation, and in one book I wrote in 1998 I discuss the topic of
child porn on the Internet from the context of the congressional
hearings held in the mid-90s. And at that time I believed that it
was largely a myth, if you like, an urban legend. When I found
that it was not, in fact, I stumbled across this material while trying
to write another book, I felt it incumbent on me to counteract the
misleading impression given in my previous book. So it is
basically the historian in me who is speaking. It is a very fair
question you ask.
MR. WHITFIELD. Recently I was talking to someone and they
were talking that in many countries around the world, of course it
is not even a violation of the country's laws for child pornography
to be shown or displayed, and they were talking about they were
having a meeting with some members of the Russian Duma, and
they were trying to introduce legislation to make it illegal for child
pornography. And the members of the Duma told them, they said,
we are going to introduce this legislation in Russia, but that is not
going to come close to solving the problem because in America is
where most of the demand lies. The citizens of America are the
ones that are buying this, that are paying for these sites, that is
where the consumption is taking place.
Now all of you on this panel have been involved in this issue
longer than any of us have, but would you say that that
characterization that I just talked about is actually true?
DR. JENKINS. May I speak to that?
MR. WHITFIELD. Yes.
DR. JENKINS. I would say it is really unknowable because by
definition we do not know how many images are produced or
circulated. All we see is the result of law enforcement. If, for
example, law enforcement in one company works very hard
against enforcement then that is where we will have the most
evidence of consumption. If you want to see the market then you
have to go to these boards which appear to me to describe a
consumption certainly across the western world but also in Japan,
in a very rapidly growing world now across much of Asia. This is
a truly global market. It might be that what we see in America is
just a function of law enforcement findings.
MR. WHITFIELD. Right. Okay. Would anyone else want to
make a comment on that at all?
MR. EICHENWALD. In the course of what I saw, again my
information is far from scientific, but there was clearly a very
heavy American element among the customer base. For example,
on the Playtoy site you had 6,000 members. Many of them put in
an identifier of what country they were from. There were a large
number of Americans. In the discussion sites, it occasionally
would come up about what country people lived in. What was
interesting to me is the number of people who were Americans but
not all of them lived in America. Some had relocated to Mexico
where they thought the laws were more favorable.
And so there is clearly a large American element to the
demand. How much of that in terms of proportions, Dr. Jenkins is
right, it is unknowable.
MR. WHITFIELD. Dr. Salter, you have contributed so much in
this area and have written a number of books, and I did see a
portion of the video that you sent down here of your interview with
the inmate. I must say he was quite an appealing fellow. I mean
his personality seemed to be warm and genuine, and he seemed to
really be interested and responding to your questions providing
information to parents about how they can help on this. In your
experience, these pedophiles, generally speaking, are they that
ingratiating? Do they have that kind of a personality, generally
speaking?
DR. SALTER. Well, the most successful of them are. If you are
going to last as a pedophile, if you are going to get ongoing access
to multiple children for long periods of time, then you have to be
that charming and that likeable and that ingratiating, and the ones
who aren't just get caught much sooner.
MR. WHITFIELD. Now in your testimony, despite your great
leadership on this issue, I certainly get the sense that you are sort
of pessimistic about Congress or anyone else really being able to
deal effectively with this problem. Am I accurately stating--
DR. SALTER. No, not at all.
MR. WHITFIELD. Okay.
DR. SALTER. Not at all. My comments were only that I fear
we can't leave this to parents.
MR. WHITFIELD. Okay.
DR. SALTER. And the reason is that parents are very naive
about this, and, frankly, they are very easily taken in. I have
known of kids who are going into chat rooms with strangers and
warned their parents about it and been told, and they never did
anything about it. They really believed there was no danger at all.
No, I think it is going to take Congress getting involved in this.
MR. WHITFIELD. Do you have any specific suggestions? If you
were a Member of Congress, are there any specific things that you
would be looking at or trying to do?
DR. SALTER. I don't have a complete answer to this, and I
wouldn't again pretend that I do. I would say anything that we can
do to support the cutting off the money by the credit card
companies. Anything we can do to support that would be valuable
because at the end of the day if we could stop the money, we could
stop a lot of it.
MR. WHITFIELD. We have heard a lot of that testimony, and I
appreciate your pointing that out. Now, Dr. Hernandez, it is my
understanding in the Federal prison system that your program is
the only one that is in existence that deals with this issue, is that
correct?
DR. HERNANDEZ. Yes, sir.
MR. WHITFIELD. And it is my understanding there are 112
beds so out of a population of 12,000 Federal prisoners that are
there because of this issue, you can treat 112 at a time, is that
correct?
DR. HERNANDEZ. That is correct.
MR. WHITFIELD. Now you said that it is a voluntary program.
I am assuming that is because they are the only ones you can have
any hope of really helping them deal with their issue?
DR. HERNANDEZ. The issue of voluntary participation
certainly is an important one. It enhances our ability to treat the
offenders. There are other treatment models that have a different
approach to treatment, a required approach. However, we don't
have a policy that requires these offenders to participate in
treatment while incarcerated.
MR. WHITFIELD. Have you been able to measure how effective
your program is and how long has it been in existence, and could
you give some additional information?
DR. HERNANDEZ. The program has been in existence since
1990, and the Office of Research and Evaluation has undertaken a
rather big outcome study. It will take several years to complete
that study, and the reason for that is because in order to measure
recidivism these offenders have to recidivate. They have to be out
in the community and we need to compare those who went through
the treatment program with those who didn't go through the
treatment program, but did have the opportunity to enter such
treatment. Those analyses have not been conducted so we really
cannot tell you with any degree of scientific certainty whether the
treatment program works.
MR. WHITFIELD. So we just haven't time to get an accurate
reading at this point?
DR. HERNANDEZ. Yes, sir.
MR. WHITFIELD. Dr. Salter, do you believe that there is a link
between viewing Internet child pornography and committing
contact sex offenses against children?
DR. SALTER. Certainly. As Dr. Hernandez pointed out, I
believe they have 80 percent of their child porn had contact
offenses. I have seen a recent study where it was 24 percent but
everybody acknowledges, I think, that a considerable percentage of
child pornographers had known contact offenses in the past, and
that is just what we know about. It put the chances of getting
caught for any sexual offense at 3 percent so for every offender
who gets caught they have typically many more offenses they
didn't get caught on.
MR. WHITFIELD. Well, my time has expired, so I recognize
Mr. Stupak.
MR. STUPAK. Dr. Salter, if I may, the last question the
Chairman just asked you was about if people view online
pornography then is there a likelihood to have sexual contact, and I
believe you said your answer was yes?
DR. SALTER. Yes.
MR. STUPAK. Okay. What is different then if people view
Hustler, Playboy, things like that, is there a greater likelihood then
they are going to have improper sexual contact?
DR. SALTER. With children?
MR. STUPAK. Or with other individuals.
DR. SALTER. Not to my knowledge. It looks to me from
reading the porn literature that there are certain kinds of adult porn
that are connected with sexual offenses and it is mostly positive
outcome rates, porn that suggests women want violence, that have
a scene that starts with a rape and ends up with the woman smiling.
And that certainly has a negative impact on people. But the sort of
people who view adult porn are certainly not always interested in
children. Very, very few are. And it is child porn that is directly
tied to assaults on children.
MR. STUPAK. What I am trying to do, if anyone wants to jump
in, I guess I am trying to say at what point do we sort of cross the
line, at what point do we leave where there may be viewing for if
you want to use the words, I am struggling here a little bit, maybe
personal satisfaction or pleasure to criminal activity such as
assaultive behavior, I guess would be the best way to say it. I find
your testimony interesting, but what I am trying to find is there a
point, do we start out on pornography, just looking at sites, and
then suddenly you go further and further? At what point do we
cross that threshold where suddenly what may be personal
observation for whatever pleasure you see in it moves to the point
of being criminal activity? Can anyone help me with that? We got
a criminologist, we got a psychologist, we got everybody.
DR. HERNANDEZ. Well, I will take a stab at it. The answer to
your very direct question is we really don't know. The body of
scientific knowledge is just not there. We are barely scratching the
surface. We are developing some hypothesis. My observations
have been that many of these Internet-related sexual offenders do
have a fair amount of contact sexual criminality. These same
observations which I have to qualify I have made in a specific
context that doesn't really generalize to all sex offenders out there
or all Internet sex offenders. Nonetheless, these observations tell
me that while child pornography images do have an influence on
the user that the reason for them seeking child pornography
predated their looking for these images.
MR. STUPAK. Sure. Mr. Eichenwald, you did some interesting
articles and I want to go to one in particular. I believe it was an
August 21 article. Let me just quote a little bit from it and maybe
you can add a little bit to this. I am reading your article and it says
"some pedophiles revealed that they gain access to children
through their own families." You were quoting one person, "I
have a daughter and I have never been attracted to her. A man
with a screen name of John Boy wrote, but he added I did find her
friends very attractive. Pedophiles chafe at suggestions that such
comments reflect risks to minors. They point out correctly that
family members and friends, not strangers, are the most frequent
predators of child sexual abuse. They never note, however, that
the minors mentioned in their online discussions are most
frequently those they know well like relatives and children of
friends."
I guess maybe what I am trying to get to is back to the question
of where does it go to the point where it becomes criminal, and I
guess probably the answer is with each individual once they cross
that threshold. Can you help us at all with this? I found the
articles pretty interesting reading for this hearing today.
MR. EICHENWALD. Well, I would always caution that
everybody here has statistical analysis, everybody here has
scientific analysis. Mine is purely anecdotal. But I would say that
in the course of what I saw while watching these conversations you
cannot overstate the degree of the obsession with children. These
are people who, as they describe it, their entire lives are built
around being around children, getting near children, watching
children, and seeing children. The result of that is you are almost
asking the question does child pornography lead to sexual assault,
and again I have no statistics to back it up.
Given what I saw, it just seemed like this lunch lead to dinner.
This is something they want. They want children. They want
children in sexualized ways. They talk about it incessively. They
view events that most of us would see as irrelevant and
unimportant, nothing as being hugely important sexual events.
And so again I think that what we are seeing are outgrowths of the
same predilection that the desire for child pornography and the
desire for contact offenses are growing from a pre-existing
problems and that those are both just two sides of the same coin.
MR. STUPAK. Dr. Hernandez, didn't you have some study or
your studies or research has shown like 76 to 80 percent of those
who possess child pornography and those who actually have sexual
contact with children is like 76 to 80 percent, is that right? Did I
summarize that right?
DR. HERNANDEZ. That is correct, 80 to 85 percent.
MR. STUPAK. Okay. Are you familiar then with Joseph
Bushman from the Dutch Ministry of Justice where he did some
polygraph testing? Are you familiar with that study at all?
DR. HERNANDEZ. I am not familiar.
MR. STUPAK. He interviewed apparently and was in this
operation Falcon or RegPay, as we called it last week when we had
the financials in there. According to some testimony there or some
things we had read, he found results somewhat similar to yours that
all the subjects that were caught subscribing to online child porn
sites had in fact some sexual contact with children. So I guess this
would support your conclusions. I am just grasping here. I am
trying, as I think we all have, no one likes holding these hearings.
We are trying to get a profile of the predator and that is the subject
of this hearing. We have heard you really can't profile from Dr.
Jenkins, and when you read Mr. Eichenwald's articles, they are
almost like obsessed or become so obsessed with children that they
acted out to the next extent and where do you get that? When do
they cross that line, I guess is what I am drawing from if anyone
can give us--answer that million dollar question. Dr. Baxter.
DR. BAXTER. We also wrestle with the same desire for
knowledge and that is why we have a lot of research hypothesis.
While we know what Dr. Hernandez has found in the Federal
Bureau of Prisons in a treatment group at Butner, we also
understand the need to do further research to be able to generalize
to other Federal inmates much less State inmates or those who may
have not been apprehended or convicted yet. And so part of what
we are in the planning stages of is for the research in our agency to
find out whether or not Dr. Hernandez's findings at Butner are
generalizable to the rest of our prison population. We too have
many questions about what is the sequence of development of
criminal behavior. How much of it may be triggered by Internet
pornography exposure? Did the predilection exist on the part of
the individual before they were exposed to the Internet? Does the
Internet somehow foster the development in a different way of
those kinds of behaviors?
MR. STUPAK. Dr. Salter, it looked like you were trying to say
something there or wanted to jump in.
DR. SALTER. If I am understanding your question, I do believe
there are men out there who are sexually attracted to children and
who don't act on it. However, I don't think you are going to find
them very often among the people watching child porn. And the
reason I say this is I think that people who just know that they have
an attraction to kids and are horrified by it are actively resisting it.
They don't get involved in child porn because they think it is
immoral. Once you get to the group who are actually seeking out
child porn where they know there are real children being exploited,
you have already crossed the line.
MR. STUPAK. Thank you. Thank you to all of our witnesses.
MR. WHITFIELD. Chairman Barton is recognized for 10
minutes.
CHAIRMAN BARTON. Thank you. Is it a true statement that the
availability of child pornography disseminated by the Internet has
caused an increase in actual pedophilic behavior? Does the
availability increase the incidents of the transgression? Anybody?
DR. JENKINS. In my sense, it is simply not knowable. We do
not know how much behavior is underway. We only know what
might lead to arrest or imprisonment so it really is not knowable. I
would also add one thing. Don't forget in some ways child porn
material was very freely available in this country in the 1970s in
the form of magazines. It was freely available in any large city, so
this is not a new phenomenon but I am afraid the answer to your
question is we don't know and we can't know.
CHAIRMAN BARTON. Well, let me reverse the question. If we
are successful in limiting the availability, the second panel are
Web providers, domain name providers, and one of my goals is to
make it much more difficult to get this garbage available on the
Internet. If we are successful in that, if we make it much more
difficult and limit the availability, does that help with the
pedophile population reduce the numbers of pedophiles and reduce
their transgressions against children?
DR. JENKINS. I would suggest that it helps in two ways. One is
it helps the kind of people who Dr. Salter is describing who might
feel these urges or these desires and they face less provocation to
move to that further stage. The other one is if there is less material
then there is less of a market. There is less encouragement for
people to go out and molest, commit offenses against children for
the sake of this commercial market so it protects children
immediately in that way. So this stuff can never be eliminated, I
don't think, but it can be massively reduced and that is where I
think the work this committee is doing is so important. Yes, I
think it can do a lot of good.
CHAIRMAN BARTON. Dr. Salter, if we are successful in limiting
the availability, and through our window nationally and to some
extent internationally create a peer pressure in the adult population
that this is just bad or you just don't do bad things. Does
somebody who is a latent child pedophile, can we actually create
an environment in which just through lack of availability and peer
pressure that the action itself is wrong prevent a potential
pedophile from acting on their impulses?
DR. SALTER. Yes. I am obviously not saying that you are
going to stop everybody because many people don't come at child
molestation to this point. They just come directly to child
molestation. But are there people on the edge who have some
interest and who get further sensitized by child porn? Sure, I
believe that. And also the fact that they can find it so easily, the
fact that they don't have to go anywhere, they don't have to order
anything, and they don't have to buy anything. It is in their living
rooms. Is that a knock for people on the edge? Yes. I also would
like to second Dr. Jenkins' comments. There are untold numbers
of children being involved in the manufacture of porn. By cutting
down on the child porn you will immediately reduce the number of
victims.
CHAIRMAN BARTON. I am going to reserve my questions for
the second panel, Mr. Whitfield, but it is a goal of this
investigation, we want to increase public awareness and that is
where Mr. Eichenwald has done such a good job helping us. But
we also want to create pressure in the technology community to
make it much more difficult and maybe impossible to get these
images available. Then whatever steps we need to take
legislatively to increase Federal penalties on this type of behavior,
so we actually have three different steps we are trying to approach.
Again, I want to thank you and Mr. Stupak for your personal
involvement in this. It is beginning to pay dividends. I think we
are making a difference in the country on this.
MR. STUPAK. Mr. Chairman, would you yield to me?
CHAIRMAN BARTON. Sure.
MR. STUPAK. I would like to ask a follow-up question or two.
And I think the work the committee has been doing in this area has
been excellent. I think we have helped open up a lot of eyes. In
the 1970s as was testified earlier that child pornography, because
customs was involved, we pretty much cracked down on it and it
moved to the Internet, so it leads me to two questions. What
percentage of our society has tendency to be a pedophile or may be
a pedophile, and then if we take away the Internet access then
where do these pedophiles go whether it is for commercial market
or whether it is for the physical contact. So is there a set like a
percentage, 1 percent, 2 percent, 3 percent, whatever it might be?
If so, if you dry up the mail like we did in the 70s and the Internet
is then gone, where do they go, where do they act out? If the
obsession is so great, they are going to have to find it somewhere.
Any thoughts, anyone?
DR. SALTER. The incidents of people, men, in the society who
are interested in children has been estimated to be as high as 20
percent. There was a report by John Breer, among others, where
they asked people if you could get away with it, if there were no
penalties or whatever, would you have sex with a child or do you
have any interest in children. So it has been estimated to be that
high. In one study that was done where they had some very
complicated ways of guaranteeing confidentiality, 10 percent of
the population admitted to having at some point molested a child.
Now we don't know how many of those were adolescents or
even younger and one-time event. I think it is safe to say that there
is a significant percentage of the population that has some interest
in children. I do not believe by shutting down child porn on the
Internet there would be any increase in child pornography. I think
child pornography increases the arousal to kids and is throwing
gasoline on the fire. I have certainly known of offenders who had
an interest in kids and who did not act on it because they did not
have the social skills. They were too shy, they were too unskilled
to get access to those kids.
So I think when you shut down opportunities for one reason or
another you don't end up with more offending overall. You end up
with less offending.
MR. STUPAK. What is the next avenue of offensive behavior
then? I guess that is what I am trying to stay one step ahead of the
game. I know that is not possible but I guess I am just trying to
think this thing through. If you read the articles in the New York
Times and others these folks are very ingenious in the way they
work it, in the way they manipulate it, not just manipulate the
Internet and hide behind it but also manipulate children and other
people, so they are going to go somewhere. Where would that be?
Go ahead, Mr. Eichenwald.
MR. EICHENWALD. What has changed and what has changed
dramatically is that the socially awkward pedophile now has many,
many people to give him advice on exactly what to do. I saw a
large discussion among a bunch of pedophiles with one who was
trying to gain the attention of a young boy, and he was going to
buy him I think it was a $2,000 computer. And everyone waved
the red flag. Don't do that, don't go that far because immediately
that will attract attention to you. The parents will freak out instead.
Bring it down. Maybe have him work for it. It was all this
discussion on that lines.
What I found so disturbing in these discussions with the
number of times there were people who were saying I have been in
jail for molesting a child, and here they are with full Internet
access talking with other pedophiles, getting reinforced constantly
that their desires are fine, that what they do is acceptable. It is
good for children. That there is something wrong with society,
there is nothing wrong with them. And as I watched that, it just
was so strong, so clear to me that anyone who has this predilection
and who is constantly getting bombarded with the message that
what you want to do is good and beneficial is probably going to act
again.
And it was disturbing to me to recognize that here are people
who had already been in the legal system who are now essentially
being encouraged to commit another crime. And so if you take
away the child porn because magically wave a magic wand and it
is gone tomorrow, what you still have is this justification
community, this community of individuals who are day in and day
out supporting each other, encouraging each other, and telling each
other that the world is very different from what it actually is.
MR. STUPAK. Thank you. And, thank you, Mr. Chairman, for
yielding.
CHAIRMAN BARTON. Yield back.
MR. WHITFIELD. Mr. Ferguson is recognized for 10 minutes.
MR. FERGUSON. It is tough to know where to begin. Every
one of these hearings, you find we have had witnesses as we have
with you today that would be--spend less than hours and hours and
hours with each one of you talking through all these issues seems
to be shortchanging the topic, but we very much appreciate and
value the insights that you have been sharing with us, all of you. I
have several questions for Mr. Eichenwald because I have
reviewed this information that you have shared with us, that you
have submitted from some of what you have seen online.
In your testimony you discussed how you observed these
conversations of these pedophiles in these, I don't know if it is a
chat room or if it is some--
MR. EICHENWALD. It is multiple, sort of multiple systems.
MR. FERGUSON. They are having on these online forums.
They are talking with one another as you have been describing.
How easy is it to access these? Were you able to just go in and
start watching or listening? You didn't participate but--
MR. EICHENWALD. There are certain forums that are password
protected. I didn't go into any of those. But the ones that I found,
there are multiple levels. There is something called Internet relay
chat, which is basically a text based system that exists sort of
underneath the World Wide Web. And you can set up any room
on any topic. People can come in and have a discussion, leave and
the room disappears.
MR. FERGUSON. Do they ever talk about what we are doing
here?
MR. EICHENWALD. Oh, constantly.
MR. FERGUSON. These hearings?
MR. EICHENWALD. They talk about me. They talk about this
committee. They talk about Oprah Winfrey. They talk about
anyone who is in fact dealing with this issue and trying to address
the danger to children from pedophiles. They have a name for all
of us. We are called child haters. And in their view, we are child
haters because we are trying to do something to prevent the
molestation of children. And, again, when I talk about the view of
the world inside these communication systems is very different
from what you would expect to hear in a normal conversation. It is
very different. Up is down. Black is white.
And there are so many vehicles available from the IRC to the
bulletin boards to Web-based forum postings to Web-based live
conversations. And I watched conversations on all of these.
MR. FERGUSON. You have attached an example of this, this
conversation going back and forth between various people
including someone named Tanks or Tanex.
MR. EICHENWALD. Tanks is a bogus e-mail address. It is an
anonymizer. It is not somebody whose real name. And Tanks
posted on a bulletin board, there was a person who goes around the
bulletin boards as vigilante trying to identify people, trying to take
things down, and he was saying to that person you can't stop us,
and look what I can do, and he basically laid out chapter and verse
of how the high end child porn traders have set up a mechanism
under which they are able to trade child porn with a fairly good
belief that they will not be detected.
MR. FERGUSON. What is B&C?
MR. EICHENWALD. B&C is the name of the person who has
been doing--it is Bob and Carol. It is a screen name of the person
who has been going around the bulletin board making trouble for
the pedophiles.
MR. FERGUSON. B&C is the vigilante?
MR. EICHENWALD. Yes. As I understand it, yes. And so he is
saying basically do all you want, you can't stop us.
MR. FERGUSON. Is this something you just sort of stumbled
across as you were observing one of these conversations?
MR. EICHENWALD. Yes. What happened. Actually, the reason
you have that posting in that format, I came across the posting after
it went up. It had an automatic delete function on it that I didn't
realize was there, and it disappeared after 3 days. So somebody
who replied to it accidentally had copied the posting into his
posting, and so that is why what you have is a reply followed by
the original posting. That individual lays out a scenario under
which--it is very detailed--under which he is able to obtain child
porn on a daily basis without anyone knowing anything about it.
MR. FERGUSON. Now on the first page of this though in this
anonymizer name or address, it says, and the quote is "for every
hapless idiot that gets caught with KP--", kiddie porn, "--because
they were too stupid to encrypt there are likely hundreds still living
their KP lives that will never be caught." And then on page 2 this
same person goes on to discuss how much better and safer it is for
pedophiles to trade images on a peer-to-peer network. Is this
directive, this sort of encouragement to go using peer-to-peer
networks, is this a theme, is this something that is common in these
conversations based on your observations? Is this echoed in other
chat rooms?
MR. EICHENWALD. The sense of how to get away with it is
constantly discussed. Actually there was a reference in the story
when a number of technology companies came in and said we are
putting together a new technology that will help us track child porn
and identify it. Literally that day of that announcement, as the
announcement is coming out of the committee, I was watching the
conversations online, and it was here is how we beat it. Before the
technology was up and running, they already knew how to beat it.
This was the most--the posting that you are looking at now is a
description of the most sophisticated mechanism of trading child
porn and is clearly the mechanism that this community is moving
towards. And the reason I have included that in my testimony is I
think that is important for the committee to understand, not just
what has been happening but also where this world is moving to.
MR. FERGUSON. At the end of this e-mail exchange, this
conversation, there is a listing that has some file names, some of
them with very graphic names about the exploitation of children,
most of them it seems. Very briefly, what is your understanding?
What are these?
MR. EICHENWALD. Those are videos.
MR. FERGUSON. They are videos. So at the end of this
conversation they just attached a bunch of--
MR. EICHENWALD. What he was doing was saying look how
much child porn I have been able to obtain in the last number of
months by using this system, and he has 100 gigabytes of child
porn. Now that directory--he wasn't posting the videos
themselves. He was posting his directory listing. And so from his
directory listing, which goes on and on and on, I believe, for like
20 pages, you can see in more graphic terms than any of us could
ever describe not only the magnitude of what they have, but also
the ages of the children involved, and what those children are
being subjected to. And that is what is going on right now in the
peer-to-peer networks.
MR. FERGUSON. Can you talk about these modeling sites for a
second? You talked about how you learned about this child
modeling sites while you were observing these pedophile chat
rooms or where they are talking. What are these folks saying
about the child modeling sites?
MR. EICHENWALD. Well, actually at the point when I first
found it, I didn't know what modeling sites were, and somebody
had posted something to Playtoy Mansion. Now it took me
actually until after the story was published and somebody pointed
out that that was a play on the words Playboy Mansion. But at the
time I didn't know what it was, and I had followed links from
actually that conversation site. That is how I found the radio
station. That is how I found the pod cast. That is actually how I
found the jewelry store. And I clicked on Playtoy Mansion and it
took me to another forum where people were--it is basically--there
is a format for the forum. I recognized it immediately as that
format.
And there were links on that forum to other sites, and when I
clicked on it, it very rapidly became clear that this was a forum for
a collection of child porn sites.
MR. FERGUSON. I realize I am asking your opinion on this but
in your opinion are these modeling sites a gateway to the rest of
the child pornography world, this criminal world?
MR. EICHENWALD. The modeling sites that I saw, again, as
soon as I realized what I was looking at, I had to stop and call law
enforcement, but what I saw was ungodly. I have had a lot of
sleepless nights over the past year and a half when there have been
times I have had to adapt to new things to my mind that I hadn't
considered existed before. And that day when I realized there was
a 3-year-old girl out there, there was a 6-year-old girl out there,
there was an 8-year-old girl out there that were being posed to
meet the demands of 6,000 pedophiles that were being
photographed on a weekly basis that were being placed in
unbelievable sexual positions in order to gratify these people
paying $30 a month.
That was a day or two or three where I just stopped sleeping.
Does this lead to child porn? This is child porn. The only thing
that makes it slightly less horrific is that they have a Band-aid of
clothing on these children, but these children are being abused, and
they are being exploited. And so the reason why the predators are
interested in these sites is because they have convinced themselves,
contrary to law, that these sites are legal. I think they now think
differently because many of these sites shut down. Playtoy and
many other ones have shut down since the article was published.
But what is going on there is terrible.
MR. WHITFIELD. The gentleman's time has expired. Dr.
Salter, did you want to make a comment?
DR. SALTER. No.
MR. WHITFIELD. Okay. I thought that you were getting ready
to say something so I wanted to give you that opportunity.
DR. SALTER. Thank you.
MR. WHITFIELD. Mrs. Blackburn, you are recognized for 10
minutes.
MRS. BLACKBURN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And thank you
to our witnesses that have joined us today. And, Mr. Chairman, I
have a statement that I will submit for the record. I want to come
right in behind where Mr. Ferguson was questioning, and let us
talk for a minute about these children. And, Mr. Eichenwald, I
thank you for continuing to work with us and to answer the call
when we talk with you. Let us talk about these children, because I
cannot even imagine the psychological harm that is done to the
children that are pulled into these gateway sites, if you will, or the
child model sites.
And I guess, Dr. Salter, I will direct the question to you or to
any of you that have actually worked with the children that have
been affected by this. And we have heard from Justin Berry. Have
you been able to establish a method for working with them, talking
with them, trying to pull out what is the best way to help the
children in dealing with addressing this situation? So, Dr. Salter, if
you want to go first.
DR. SALTER. The child sexual abuse treatment field that
specializes in treating children is far larger and better, and
therefore has more research behind it than the sex offender field.
MRS. BLACKBURN. But are you all working with them? Do
you work with any of those that are dealing with the child sexual
abuse and dealing with the children because I think the
psychological harm of the children and just the interaction--
DR. SALTER. I did for 20 years. Currently I am not seeing the
clients.
MRS. BLACKBURN. Okay.
DR. SALTER. But I worked with both and because it is hard to
get offenders in treatment and victims seek treatment far more
often, I saw over the course of those 20 years far more victims than
offenders. And that field is much larger and much better
developed than the small number of people who are willing to
work with sex offenders. And there are good treatment protocols
out there today for helping children. Now the longer the child has
been exposed to it and the more the child has been sexualized the
more difficult it is. One of the big problems in this field is children
who have been socialized into sexual behavior from such an early
age that they really do believe it is normal and are often used to
recruit other children into being victims, and those children are
much, much tougher to treat.
MRS. BLACKBURN. Dr. Salter, one more thing. In listening to
you and Dr. Hernandez talk about the recidivism rates, in reading
the testimony that you all have submitted, what do you think really
works as you are trying to work with sex offenders? You got a
high recidivism rate. As you work with them, what protocol, what
type therapy, what item is giving you the best results?
DR. SALTER. Cognitive behavioral treatment without a
question. The form that is most commonly used is called relapse
prevention, the only type of treatment that has been shown to
reduce recidivism. Freudian or psycho-dynamic treatment, open-
ended groups, none of those has been shown to reduce recidivism
at all. The problem is there is not enough treatment. The Federal
Bureau of Prisons has a 112-bed unit and 12,000 offenders. I
would be willing to bet there are more offenders who would seek
treatment than 112. In the State systems, I have never seen a State
system that had enough treatment. They typically have long
waiting lines for treatment. We do have offenders seeking
treatment who can't get it.
MRS. BLACKBURN. Okay. Relapse prevention then is what
you say works?
DR. SALTER. Yes.
MRS. BLACKBURN. Okay. And we have one Federal facility
that is a 112-bed unit that is dealing with relapse prevention and no
State systems, am I understanding you correctly?
DR. SALTER. No. The State systems have programs as well,
but they in my experience never have enough treatment for all the
offenders.
MRS. BLACKBURN. Got it.
DR. SALTER. We have a 100-bed unit in Wisconsin that
doesn't begin to tap the waiting list.
MRS. BLACKBURN. All right. Okay. Excellent. Well, thank
you with that. Dr. Hernandez, do you have anything to add?
DR. HERNANDEZ. Just agree with Dr. Salter that the choice of
treatment for sexual offenders is cognitive behavioral therapies,
and I may add that augmented by psych-pharmacological
approaches, those therapies seem to work better with some
offenders.
MRS. BLACKBURN. Okay. Let me ask you this. When you
talk about the recidivism rate and working toward reductions, what
impact does the child sex offender registry have? Is it a helpful
tool? How does that fit in?
DR. HERNANDEZ. My understanding of the scientific research
is that sex offender registries have little to no impact on recidivism.
MRS. BLACKBURN. Okay. Mr. Eichenwald, in the chat rooms
and those that you have talked to in your research, what do they
have to say about the sex offender registry? Do they ridicule it?
Do they fear it?
MR. EICHENWALD. They hate them. They deem them the
equivalent of the scarlet P, I guess. But being on the sex offender
registry is not--there is not a lot of shame in this world. There is
not a lot of people saying, oh, I am so upset that this has happened.
But what there is, and I think this goes to Dr. Jenkins' point about
the vigilantes, there is an enormous fear among those who have not
been publicly revealed before of having their predilections publicly
revealed. And so, again, I don't know of the effect of sex
registries, but I do know that there is enormous fear of having to
explain themselves in public.
MRS. BLACKBURN. I guess the brazenness of some of the
pedophiles just amazes me as I have read different things that you
all have submitted to us, just the brazenness of their nature and
how they are emboldened in some ways by the chat rooms and the
work on the Internet. And I think it does concern me, and, Dr.
Salter, your comment is not lost that credit cards and cutting off
the use of credit cards for these sites is a very important step for us,
and I think that is an area where we can do a little bit more work.
With that, Mr. Chairman, I am going to stop my questions. I know
some others want to question before we have votes and I know that
is coming up on us very quickly. Thank you all very much.
MR. WHITFIELD. At this time, I will recognize Dr. Burgess for
10 minutes.
MR. BURGESS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Eichenwald,
welcome back to the committee. Can I just ask you, and this is
more follow up from hearings we have done previously, obviously
you were here the day that Justin Berry was before the committee,
and a lot of frustration over not being able to hold the people
accountable after he had provided data, names and IP addresses,
credit card numbers, et cetera. Can you bring us up to date on the
several months that intervened now, have any of those individuals
been brought to justice? Can you kind of bring us up to date on
what the FBI and the Department of Justice is doing to hold those
people accountable? What has happened in Justin Berry's life in
the 2 or 3 or 4 months since he was here?
MR. EICHENWALD. Well, there have been a number of
developments. If you remember, this committee had subpoenaed
Ken Gourlay, who had been identified by Justin as both one of the
people who assisted him on his website and also one of the people
who molested him. Very shortly after this committee's hearing,
the Michigan Attorney General's office reached out to Justin and
interviewed him about Ken Gourlay. There was a raid on his
house. If I remember correctly, it was about 6 days later.
MR. BURGESS. That was a State Attorney General?
MR. EICHENWALD. That was a State Attorney General. And
now, again Ken Gourlay is one of the names that the Justice
Department had for a while. But the State Attorney General raided
his house 6 days later, took a lot of computers out, found child
porn on the computer of one of the other people in the house who
was then arrested. That individual then began providing testimony
against Ken Gourlay. Ken Gourlay was arrested in May on, I
believe it was 10 counts, many of them involving the molestation
of Justin Berry.
He was re-arrested in, I believe it was July because in the
course of following down the evidence in his computer they
located other children who he had contact with and found one of
them, who has since testified that he also was molested by Ken
Gourlay during 2005. My big horror on hearing that was fearing
that that molestation had taken place after the Justice Department
had been made aware of Ken Gourlay's existence and his role in
this. It ends up though that that does not seem to have been the
case that that molestation took place in early 2005, and Ken
Gourlay was identified to the Justice Department in July or
August.
So right now he is in jail awaiting trial on two sets of counts,
one involving Justin Berry, and one involving the other individual.
There was an arrest of a gentleman by the name of Aaron Brown.
He was the person who was arrested by the Justice Department.
He was the person who ran niova.net, the credit card transacting
company that was doing business with Justin's websites. There
was a sentence of one of the other business partners/molesters of
Justin, and he received 150 years in prison.
Justin himself had trouble. By May--he had always had a great
deal of difficulty, as members of this committee probably know, he
had a great deal of difficulty dealing with what happened with him
involving Ken Gourlay. It was always a very traumatic thing for
him to discuss. After Mr. Gourlay was arrested and Justin was
being interviewed over and over again, he started showing some
real signs that emotionally he wasn't holding up. In June, in what I
think was a wonderful development, he voluntarily went to a
hospital where he stayed for a couple of weeks to get some help
because he needed some help. He has since been released. He was
there for only 2 weeks. He testified against Ken Gourlay at his
trial. And he is now, as I understand it, about to start a new job.
And when I spoke with him last, he sounded healthy and happy
and eager to get on with his life.
In terms of other activities probably the biggest development
came from this committee's referral of I believe it is some 700
names to different States Attorney General. I know that at least
one State is conducting an aggressive investigation into those
names. I don't know how widespread it is. Again, I haven't been
chasing it down to find it out but I know that that information--that
there are actual investigators who are actually conducting
interviews.
MR. BURGESS. But at the State level, and I guess that is what is
troubling to me.
MR. EICHENWALD. That is at the State level.
MR. BURGESS. It has been difficult to engage our own
Department of Justice in the enforcement of what you would think
would be a fairly straightforward investigation and hopefully
prosecution. Mr. Hernandez, in your testimony, and I appreciate
you being so thorough with us, the line here about the rate of
sexual offending contact recorded after treatment is 80 percent.
That is a pretty startling figure. Is your treatment program
providing any benefit at all or was this before treatment?
DR. HERNANDEZ. These disclosures were made over the
course of treatment about past behavior and for most of these
offenders their contact sexual criminality preceded their use of the
Internet.
MR. BURGESS. Preceded the use of the Internet?
DR. HERNANDEZ. Yes.
MR. BURGESS. So that 80 percent figure is before the Internet?
DR. HERNANDEZ. For a great majority of them, yes.
MR. BURGESS. Would you speculate as to what effect the
Internet has had on this figure? It probably made it go up, didn't
it?
DR. HERNANDEZ. It has been the subject of discussion. We
really don't know the effect of the Internet and how it has impacted
those who have pedophilic impulses as Dr. Salter noted earlier.
The incidents of pedophilia is considerable. The estimates suggest
that 1 in 20 or 20 percent, and that is a significant proportion. I
should say 5 in 20, not 1 in 20. That is a significant proportion.
Now does the Internet in my opinion highlight this problem? From
my vantage point, it does.
MR. BURGESS. Let me just ask you a question. These
individuals that you were talking about in your study were
individuals in prison, is that correct?
DR. HERNANDEZ. Yes, sir.
MR. BURGESS. Now do you know, what was the incidents of
say sexually transmitted disease in this group of individuals that
you dealt with, the incidents of Hepatitis C, Hepatitis B, HIV, do
you know that?
DR. HERNANDEZ. I have no idea.
MR. BURGESS. Is that a concern for us that these individuals
when they get out of prison who may have been exposed to these
illnesses in prison may then act out on their impulses outside and
further endanger this group of very vulnerable citizens?
DR. HERNANDEZ. Absolutely.
MR. BURGESS. Dr. Salter, Mr. Hernandez has already
referenced the continuum of 20 percent with desire, 10 percent
who have admitted. Do you think the Internet is driving this
continuum from the 10 percent figure to the 20 percent figure?
Could it be as high as 1 in 5 as Mr. Hernandez pointed out?
DR. SALTER. These studies predated the spread of the Internet.
MR. BURGESS. Predated the Internet.
DR. SALTER. Well, let me think. One was at least 10 years old.
MR. BURGESS. My time is running out so let me reframe the
question. From this committee's perspective, and I don't know
that we really have that much as far as legislative initiatives that
we are putting forward, there are a couple of things, but in an effort
to control this spread through the Internet, is that a worthwhile
thing for this committee to be pursuing in your opinion?
DR. SALTER. Oh, absolutely. Yes, it is incredibly worthwhile.
MR. BURGESS. Mr. Eichenwald, let me just ask you a question.
You spent time in the chat rooms and know the aliases and the
buzz words that are used, and this committee and the child haters
are talked about in the room as your answer to Mr. Ferguson's
question pointed out. Do they perhaps sow the seeds of their own
control in these chat rooms? Do they talk about things that would
provide that degree of inhibition that quite frankly many of us on
this side of the dais would like to see? Is there anything you see
talked about that they truly fear or have they just really grown to
the point where they are beyond fear?
MR. EICHENWALD. Exposure. They fear exposure. They fear
their identities being learned. They fear--there are some of these
websites that have rules. Among the rules are you can never use a
real name. You can never provide any identifying detail. You
can't say what city you are in. They are very, very particular about
people knowing who they are and where they are, but they are also
very good at hiding it. And so, if there is anything that goes
towards that it is some level of exposure. In terms of fear of law
enforcement, fear of anything else, no. I mean going to prison
seems to be as uncontroversial as going to the Caribbean.
MR. BURGESS. Part of the cost of doing business?
MR. EICHENWALD. Yeah. There are a lot of them saying, well,
when I was in prison, oh, when I was in prison, and it is just sort of
casually thrown around. At one point every one of these people
had been in prison.
MR. BURGESS. Doesn't going to prison equate with exposure
because the crime itself is--the trial is public?
MR. EICHENWALD. Apparently but it is not--if you think about
it if somebody has been arrested in Portland for some local crime
and they go to jail the world doesn't know what they have done,
and you really have to work to find out about it. And, ultimately
even the ones who sort of hold themselves up as leaders of this
rights movement won't give their names and hide behind aliases
and anonymizers, and so at the end of the day that that is clearly
the thing that they are most concerned about. But so long as they
have the ability to utilize the Internet, they can be as anonymous as
they want to be.
MR. BURGESS. Mr. Chairman, I see my time has expired. I
note later on in the week we are dealing with pre-texting. I don't
know, maybe we should turn the pre-texters loose on the predators.
I don't know if that would do any good at all. Thank you, Mr.
Chairman.
MR. WHITFIELD. That is a good idea, by the way. Thank you.
I certainly want to thank this panel for your time and your
contributions to these hearings. I know that you took time away
from other activities, and we appreciate it and hope that we might
stay in touch with you as we move forward with some suggestions
on legislation. And so with that, we will release the first panel and
thank you again for participating. I would also like to call up panel
two at this time. And on panel two we have two witnesses, Mr.
Thomas Krwawecz, who is the Chief Executive Officer of Blue
Gravity Communications out of New Jersey, and then Ms.
Christine Jones, who is the General Counsel for GoDaddy.com out
of Scottsdale, Arizona.
Mr. Krwawecz, we appreciate you and Ms. Jones being with us
today, and as you know this is an Oversight and Investigations
Subcommittee hearing, and we do take our testimony under oath.
Do either of you have any objection to testifying under oath? If
you would stand and raise your hand, I would swear you in.
[Witnesses sworn]
MR. WHITFIELD. You are both under oath now, and, Mr.
Krwawecz, we will recognize you for your 5-minute opening
statement.
TESTIMONY OF THOMAS KRWAWECZ, CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, BLUE GRAVITY
COMMUNICATIONS, INC.; AND CHRISTINE JONES, GENERAL COUNSEL, GODADDY.COM, INC.
MR. KRAWAWECZ. Thank you. Chairman Whitfield, Ranking
Member Stupak, members of the subcommittee, I would like to
thank you for providing me with the opportunity to testify today.
As an owner of a small business that serves as a host for websites,
I am pleased to see that the subcommittee is focusing its attention
on the problem of child pornography on the Internet and hope that
my testimony can be of assistance to the subcommittee. My name
is Thomas Krwawecz, III, and I am the founder and owner of Blue
Gravity Communication, Incorporated, a Web hosting company. I
founded Blue Gravity in July of 1997 as a college student. At that
time we had only one server and myself as the only employee. In
just 9 years, however, we have grown substantially, now having
nearly 200 servers and four full-time employees. Blue Gravity
currently services almost 7,000 customer accounts and hosts
approximately 50,000 domains.
It is important for the subcommittee to understand that as a
Web hosting company we provide customers with a platform from
which to display their websites to Internet users as well as
technical and administrative support relating to that service. Our
terms of service strictly prohibit any of our customers from posting
illegal content, including child pornography, on websites hosted on
our servers, but we otherwise have no influence or control over the
websites content. In addition, we are not involved in the domain
registration process. Customers come to us with existing domain
names which they have already registered or we refer them to a
third party that is in the business of registering domain names.
When a customer applies for an account, we confirm that their
mailing address matches the location of their computer's IP
address, and that the name of the credit card provided for our
records matches the contact information supplied by the customer.
If any such information is inconsistent, the application for a Blue
Gravity account is denied. When we learn that a website we host
contains illegal content, we take immediate steps to rectify the
situation. All complaints or other notifications received from
citizens, watchdog groups, or law enforcement are investigated.
After receiving notification of potential illegal content, we
immediately examine the website named in the complaint. If there
is blatant illegal content, we immediately disable the account and
notify the customer via email that service has been suspended due
to illegal content.
When our examination does not conclusively reveal illegal
content because, for example, we cannot tell whether or not the
individuals are under the age of 18, we contact the customer and
request proof of age for the models. If satisfactory proof cannot be
provided, the website is shut down immediately, and the customer
receives the suspension email that I just described. We are always
looking for ways to improve our ability to detect and eliminate
child pornography from websites which we host on our servers.
Thanks to this subcommittee, we have learned of some additional
improvements that we can, and will, make at Blue Gravity.
For example, we are placing a panic button on our Blue
Gravity Web page to provide people with a mechanism to report
child pornography. Individuals who utilize this function will send
a message to a unique email address for the purpose of reporting
child pornography. All complaints will be immediately
investigated and forwarded to the National Center for Missing and
Exploited Children. In an attempt to further aid law enforcement,
Blue Gravity has always stored the content of illegal sites on our
system for 1-2 weeks after being disabled in case it should be
requested for prosecutorial purposes.
We believed that this provided law enforcement with sufficient
time to make a preservation request or to send us a subpoena. In
preparation for this hearing, we learned that many of the larger
Internet companies, including the ISPs which testified previously,
maintain such content information for 20-30 days after being
disabled. Accordingly, Blue Gravity will now hold such content
for 30 days. If a request for preservation is received before the
expiration of that 30 days, we will preserve the content for as long
as necessary.
Blue Gravity also supports the steps being taken by members
of the subcommittee to legislatively regulate the maintenance of
account information for websites displaying child pornography.
Blue Gravity already maintains such records, including IP address,
contact, and credit card information indefinitely. This information
is available to law enforcement groups at any time and has been
provided on numerous occasions. We are actively considering a
number of other improvements which we can make in order to help
stem the tide of child pornography, and we welcome any further
suggestions by the subcommittee or its staff. Again, thank you for
the opportunity to testify on this important topic.
[The prepared statement of Thomas Krwawecz follows:]
PREPARED STATEMENT OF THOMAS KRAWAWECZ, CHIEF
EXECUTIVE OFFICER, BLUE GRAVITY COMMUNICATIONS, INC.
Chairman Whitfield, Ranking Member Stupak, Members of the
Subcommittee, I would like to thank you for providing me with the
opportunity to testify today. As an owner of a small business that
serves as a host for websites, I am pleased to see that the
Subcommittee is focusing its attention on the problem of child
pornography on the internet and hope that my testimony can be of
assistance to the Subcommittee.
My name is Thomas Krwawecz, III, and I am the founder and
owner of Blue Gravity Communication, Incorporated, a web
hosting company. I founded Blue Gravity in July of 1997 as a
college student. At that time we had only one server and no
employees. In just nine years, however, we have grown
substantially, now having nearly 200 servers and 4 full-time
employees. Blue Gravity currently services almost 7,000 customer
accounts and hosts approximately 50,000 domains.
It is important for the Subcommittee to understand that as a
web hosting company we provide customers with a platform from
which to display their websites to internet users as well as
technical and administrative support relating to that service. Our
terms of service strictly prohibit any of our customers from posting
illegal content, including child pornography, on websites hosted on
our servers, but we otherwise have no influence or control over the
websites content. In addition, we are not involved in the domain
name registration process. Customers come to us with existing
domain names which they have already registered or we refer them
to a third party that is in the business of registering domain names.
When a customer applies for an account, we confirm that their
mailing address matches the location of their computer's IP
address, and that the name on the credit card provided for our
records matches the contact information supplied by the customer.
If any such information is inconsistent, the application for a Blue
Gravity account is denied.
When we learn that a website we host contains illegal content,
we take immediate steps to rectify the situation. All complaints or
other notifications received from citizens, watchdog groups or law
enforcement are investigated. After receiving notification of
potential illegal content, we immediately examine the website
named in the complaint. If there is blatant illegal content, we
immediately disable the account and notify the customer via email
that service has been suspended due to "illegal content." When our
examination does not conclusively reveal illegal content because,
for example, we cannot tell whether or not the individuals are
under the age of 18, we contact the customer and request proof of
age for the models. If satisfactory proof cannot be provided, the
website is shut down immediately, and the customer receives the
suspension email that I just described.
We are always looking for ways to improve our ability to
detect and eliminate child pornography from websites which we
host on our servers. Thanks to this Subcommittee, we have
learned of some additional improvements that we can, and will,
make at Blue Gravity. For example, we are placing a "panic
button" on our Blue Gravity web page to provide people with a
mechanism to report child pornography. Individuals who utilize
this function will send a message to a unique email address for the
reporting of child pornography. All complaints will be
immediately investigated and forwarded to the National Center for
Missing and Exploited Children.
In an attempt to further aid law enforcement, Blue Gravity has
always stored the content of illegal sites on our system for 1-2
weeks after being disabled in case it should be requested for
prosecutorial purposes. We believed that this provided law
enforcement with sufficient time to make a preservation request or
to send us a subpoena. In preparation for this hearing, we learned
that many of the larger internet companies, including the ISPs
which testified previously, maintain such content information for
20-30 days after being disabled. Accordingly, Blue Gravity will
now hold such content for 30 days. If a request for preservation is
received before the expiration of that 30 days, we will preserve the
content for as long as necessary.
Blue Gravity also supports the steps being taken by members
of the Subcommittee to legislatively regulate the maintenance of
account information for websites displaying child pornography.
Blue Gravity already maintains all such records, including IP
address, contact and credit card information, indefinitely. This
information is available to law enforcement groups at any time,
and has been provided on numerous occasions.
We are actively considering a number of other improvements
which we can make in order to help stem the tide of child
pornography, and we welcome any further suggestions by this
Subcommittee or its staff.
Again, thank you for the opportunity to testify on this
important topic.
MR. WHITFIELD. Thank you very much. Ms. Jones, you are
recognized for your 5-minute opening statement.
MS. JONES. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am Christine Jones,
General Counsel and Corporate Secretary for the GoDaddy Group.
GoDaddy's principal business is domain name registration. When
I joined GoDaddy back in early 2002 it was a very small registrar
with well under 100 employees. Today, we have over 1,200
employees and more than 15 million domain names under
management. That makes us the number one registrar in the entire
world. We register a domain name about once every 3 seconds or
less. The domain name registrar serves as the point of entry to the
Internet so if you wanted to register the domain name
ChairmanWhitfield.com, which by the way I did in anticipation of
this hearing, and I will be happy to give that over to your staff at
the conclusion.
MR. WHITFIELD. Thank you so much.
MS. JONES. You are welcome. So you can go to GoDaddy and
register that domain name. And then once ChairmanWhitfield.com
is registered, you would need to actually build a website and find a
place to store, or what we call host, the information that you
created. Again, you could to GoDaddy.com for storage or hosting
services or you could go to my colleague's company, Blue Gravity,
for that same service. Because we see it so frequently in our
business, I want to focus on how GoDaddy deals with online child
pornography. We devote considerable time and resources to
working with law enforcement on preserving the integrity and
safety of the Internet. We quickly close down websites and
domain names engaged in illegal activities. I personally, and this
company in general, have made it a high priority to use our
position as the world's largest registrar to make the Internet a
better and safer place.
With over 15 million domain names under management most
of our data does and must come from third party complaints or
notices. We have a network abuse department that works 24 hours
a day, 7 days a week, to receive those types of complaints. They
come from third parties via email, via telephone, from employees
who notice child pornography content during the ordinary course
of their work day, and also from notifications from Cyber Tipline
and other watchdog organizations. Once we are made aware there
is a potential child pornography site, we immediately investigate to
determine whether or not there is in fact child pornography
content, and, if so, whether that customer has other domain names
resolving to that particular site, and then whether there are other
hosting accounts in that customer's account which contain
pornographic content as well.
Once that investigation is complete, we report the offending
domain names, the websites, and the registrant information to law
enforcement, and then we give law enforcement a short amount of
time to request that we leave the website intact, and this is an issue
that came up last week at a similar hearing on this topic, and we do
that to assist in investigations. We also report to the National
Center for Missing and Exploited Children, of course. We then
permanently suspend our services to that customer. On the
numbers, we investigate thousands of domain names and websites
each year for child pornography. The number of unique customers
that we investigated in the past 12 months is approximately 1,200.
That is unique customers. Many of those customers have multiple,
multiple domain names, and this number does not include the child
modeling sites that I am going to address in a moment.
Approximately 90 percent of the sites that we suspend are
domain name registrations only. This means that in about 90
percent of the cases another company provides the hosting service.
We provide the domain name registration only. About 75 percent
of the child porn websites we have investigated in the past year
were registered to an individual or company in Russia, the
Ukraine, and Romania, so that theme seems to continue in these
hearings. Much like child pornography websites, we routinely
investigate and suspend sites involving child modeling. As these
sites typically do not rise to the level of technical child
pornography, we classify these sites as morally objectionable
which is a term that I put into our universal terms of service for
situations such as these.
We typically remove them even if we can't find child
pornography because our experience has been that the operators of
child modeling sites tend to be associated even if attenuated with
child pornography in some way. We also remove the non-
traditional forms of child pornography like nudist sites and cartoon
child porn. We follow basically the same procedures for child
modeling sites as I just described for the child porn investigations,
and of course we report those to the National Center as well.
One child modeling investigation we conducted recently
uncovered a registrant of child pornography. We discovered this
customer in particular had over 200 active child modeling
websites. After following our standard operating procedures, the
information was submitted to authorities. About 2 weeks later that
same customer had been arrested and indicted on multiple counts
of child pornography. I just point that out to demonstrate that it is
very important for all Internet service providers, domain name
registrars, and hosting companies to take these child modeling sites
seriously.
The number of unique customers investigated in the past 12
months on child modeling sites was approximately 780 so they are
significant, and of course these people have multiple domain
names as well. About 70 percent of those were domain name
registrations only and about 77 percent of them come also from
Russia, Ukraine, and Romania. So I want to thank you, Chairman
Whitfield, for the invitation to testify here today. GoDaddy is
committed to working with law enforcement and others in the
industry to remove child pornography content from the Internet,
and we would challenge our counterparts on the Internet to make
that same commitment. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Christine Jones follows:]
PREPARED STATEMENT OF CHRISTINE JONES, GENERAL COUNSEL,
GODADDY.COM, INC.
MR. WHITFIELD. Thank you very much. You heard all the
bells going off, and this is because we have about three votes on
the House floor, so we are going to recess this hearing and we will
be back here I would say about 10 minutes till 1:00. It is 12:15
now, so about 10 minutes till 1:00. And there is a dining room
downstairs and whatever, so anyway we will be back with some
questions for you all. I am very sorry for this inconvenience. And
so we will recess until 10 till 1:00.
[Recess]
MR. WHITFIELD. We have another vote on the floor but we
have some time here so we may be able to work this out. Does
your company have a policy of not allowing certain names to be
used or do you ever deny the use of a particular name?
MS. JONES. We don't prohibit the registration before the
registration takes place because many domain names are
registered, and I mean thousands upon thousands are registered and
never used.
MR. WHITFIELD. Right.
MS. JONES. And some are actually registered pre-emptively so
like, for example, we may have a whole series of Lolita names
registered, which are just placed in an account to pre-empt
somebody else from using them. So the answer is, no, we don't
prohibit for the registration.
MR. WHITFIELD. And so as long as they continue to pay their
annual fee then they can keep that name forever?
MS. JONES. Yes, sir, as long as they are not using it for some
inappropriate person.
MR. WHITFIELD. Okay. Okay. Now I know in this case out of
Russia the Playtoy Enterprises, they used an anonymizing service,
and they allowed someone else to register the name for them, and I
understand that even you all have a policy where you will register
a name for someone and they are not actually listed as the owner of
the name. Is that correct?
MS. JONES. That is correct.
MR. WHITFIELD. Now why would a person running a lawful
Internet business choose this type of domain registry?
MS. JONES. Most of the people that use our service, and by the
way it is not an anonymous service, it is just privacy protection,
most of the people that do it are sole proprietors or at-home
businesses that don't want to list their personal information in the
public database. And we find to our great satisfaction that most of
the people that use that service are legitimate users because people
who are criminal or crooks, if you will, don't pay extra money to
protect bad information. They just give us that information that
looks valid.
MR. WHITFIELD. Right. Mr. Krwawecz, you host these
websites. I get the impression that you all are really not proactive
on monitoring any of these sites but that if someone calls and
brings it to your attention then you will take action, but are you
doing anything from a proactive standpoint yourself out there
looking to see if a website is hosting, for example, child
pornography?
MR. KRAWAWECZ. Due to the volume of websites that we
host, the number of pages that can be set up under any particular
website, and the fact that they can change on a daily basis, it is
very difficult for us to monitor. Since over the last few weeks we
have had some discussions about some additional things that we
may be able to implement to help us monitor the types of websites
that are on our services; but we do rely on feedback from users or
some of the other watchdog groups, the other organizations out
there that handle the complaints and then report to us.
MR. WHITFIELD. Is there any kind of technology that is
available to monitor that would be available for either GoDaddy or
Blue Gravity? Is there technology out there that you could acquire
to do this in a more proactive manner?
MR. KRAWAWECZ. From a Web hosting standpoint and even
with what GoDaddy does I am not aware of anything that is
currently available. You know, without physically looking at an
image there is no software technology that I am aware of that
would be able to determine whether or not to differentiate between,
let us say, a picture of an apple or a picture of an orange or a
picture of a model or an underage model.
MR. WHITFIELD. Well, because the financial services group
that testified the other day, the MasterCards and Visas and
whatever, they referred to something as a Web crawler with a log
rhythm type of--it looked for certain words and from that they
would go check and there was a likelihood that it was a site with
pornography or something. Have you heard of a Web crawler or
are you familiar with that?
MR. KRAWAWECZ. I am familiar with Web crawlers. I don't
know that that would necessarily help us determine--we looked
and did research during the course of this investigation on one
server that we have websites hosted on, and a search for the term
Lolita and model and returned about 150 pages worth of data with
maybe 30 to 50 individual Web pages on each of those 120 to 150
pages. You would really physically have to go through that and
just because of the size of our company it is not practical for us to
go through and be able to examine all that data. If there was some
technology, Web crawler, or if there is something out there that I
am not aware of, we are certainly open to suggestions or whatever
technology Visa, MasterCard, or any of the other companies that
are out there might be using.
MR. WHITFIELD. So, Ms. Jones, you feel like you all are doing
everything that you can do as far as preventing these sites from
being out there or do you think you can do more?
MS. JONES. In terms of prevention?
MR. WHITFIELD. Yeah.
MS. JONES. Well, one of the things that we do and it is pretty
easy is to look and examine files by file size. We find often that
Web hosting customers, for example, who have very large volumes
of data tend to have video files because they take up a lot of space.
On that, for example, we can go view the content, and of course as
the gentleman suggests you have to look at the content, but we can
do that and we do do that from time to time, not just on child
pornography but on all kinds of violations. If I had a staff of a
thousand people that could go review all of our hosting boxes
every day then, absolutely, we could prevent more of this but at
$1.99 a month for a hosting account the economy is not really
there for us to do that.
MR. WHITFIELD. Right. Mr. Stupak.
MR. STUPAK. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Krwawecz, am I
saying that right?
MR. KRAWAWECZ. Krwawecz.
MR. STUPAK. Krwawecz. The way I understand it, Blue
Gravity began as an adult pornography site and you don't create
any of your own content, is that correct?
MR. KRAWAWECZ. That is correct.
MR. STUPAK. Okay. It is also my understanding that 70
percent of your websites that you host are adult content, is that
correct?
MR. KRAWAWECZ. That is correct, approximately.
MR. STUPAK. Were you present when the last panel testified,
the doctors and all them, the guy from corrections?
MR. KRAWAWECZ. Yes.
MR. STUPAK. Okay. In there, they were talking about
illegality. Would your websites have like violent rapes on them of
mature women, things like that?
MR. KRAWAWECZ. No.
MR. STUPAK. Where do you decide what would be proper and
improper website, what guidelines do you have?
MR. KRAWAWECZ. You know, content, we use the U.S. law to
dictate what content is legal and is not legal. We made sure--
MR. STUPAK. Well, is there a prohibition to have violent rapes
amongst adults on websites?
MR. KRAWAWECZ. We never had any of that type of contact.
MR. STUPAK. The point I am trying to get at, in child
pornography they said, well, that is sort of throwing gas on the fire.
Remember that conversation we were talking about? So why
wouldn't yours be any different? Why would you have adult
websites that may or may not depict that?
MR. KRAWAWECZ. I am not sure I understand the question
exactly. The websites that we had were similar to subscribing to
Playboy, for example, that type of material. We never--there--
MR. STUPAK. Nothing more graphic depictions than that?
MR. KRAWAWECZ. No, there are very nitched categories of
content that is I guess more violent more along the terms of what
you are talking about, but that is nothing that we ever got into or
put up on any websites that we had.
MR. STUPAK. Okay. The point I am trying to make for people
if you show young children and that may provoke improper sexual
contact why wouldn't your websites do the same thing?
MR. KRAWAWECZ. I don't believe that someone is subscribing
to an issue of Playboy has more or less of a tendency to be
involved in any kind of violent or aggressive behavior.
MR. STUPAK. You said you store now for 30 days?
MR. KRAWAWECZ. No. Currently we keep the content for
about 7 to 14 days unless we have an order to preserve the content
for longer. If we get subpoenas for websites sometimes the terms
on there dictate that we retain that material for 30, 60, 90 days,
depending on the length of the investigation.
MR. STUPAK. There have been some proposals to maintain it
for a year automatically with or without a warrant. Would you be
in favor of that?
MR. KRAWAWECZ. To maintain the actual website content?
MR. STUPAK. Correct. Website content.
MR. KRAWAWECZ. A year might be a little long. It really
depends on every website varies in size. What we did on this most
recent issue was put a copy of that website on DVD and archive it,
which is also a possibility.
MR. STUPAK. So you could do that then?
MR. KRAWAWECZ. Yeah. It would be something that we
would definitely be open to if there were some guidelines for
maintaining that data for a specific period of time. I don't think it
is a bad idea at all.
MR. STUPAK. Ms. Jones, any reason why if we do legislation
to compel data retention, is there any reason why Web hosting sites
should be treated differently than ISPs?
MS. JONES. No, I don't think so. To your earlier point, I
listened with interest to the testimony last week about data
retention. I think it would be very helpful for hosting providers
and Internet service providers both to have some kind of a
requirement to maintain data, particularly customer data, not the
content so much because we automatically produce the content
when we find it. But to retain this customer data that is helpful to
them because then they don't have to jump through this additional
hoop of getting me a document preservation letter or an NSL or
some other form of subpoena or document. I just automatically
know I am required to maintain that for X number of days or
months or years or whatever it is. So I think that would be helpful,
and I think it would be productive to helping law enforcement who
needs all the help they can get on this.
MR. STUPAK. Well, I guess I am going to have to cut off my
questions. We got 20 seconds left.
MRS. BLACKBURN. [Presiding] All right. Ms. Jones, thank
you, and thank you all for hanging in here with us as we go to
votes. We had an unexpected vote called, and I know that it is a
little bit disconcerting. Ms. Jones, I really wanted to come to you
primarily, and thank you for your testimony about GoDaddy and
the registrars and the websites and the domain registration. And I
want to ask you in the earlier questioning with the first panel, we
talked a little bit about credit cards.
MS. JONES. Yes, ma'am.
MRS. BLACKBURN. And the use of credit cards. And Dr.
Salter's testimony on one of the ways to really aggressively go
after this would be cutting off the use of credit cards. And I was
noticing in yesterday's Wall Street Journal there is also, and you
may have seen this, about fines that are being put in place,
additional fines for companies that are not adhering to the fraud
protection elements that are there. I would like to hear from you
what your advice to us would be on addressing the credit card
situation for access to these child pornography sites.
MS. JONES. Well, first of all, I was very enthusiastic when I
read and heard some of the testimony from the financial
institutions panel that you had a couple of weeks ago, or last week,
because they are seeing fewer incidents of applications for
merchant accounts for child pornographers than I thought that they
would be, but I think the best advice is they have to continue a
stringent due diligence process in both issuing merchant accounts
and relationships with acquirers, but also the alternative forms of
payment like, for example, putting money into an online account
and just debiting it as you go along or PayPal or gold or Western
Union or those sorts of things.
They seem to be much more effective in eliminating the money
trail because, for example, at GoDaddy we have a 24-hour, 7-day a
week fraud department that checks credit card transactions. Any
of the transactions that are coming out of the known areas of
offensive behavior, we review. So if we know you are a guy that
buys this kind of stuff, we eliminate your transaction, but that is
with credit cards because those are easy for us to track. If it is
cash, it is a much more difficult situation so I guess the point I am
trying to make is the focus, I think, needs to be on those alternative
forms and determining how we can get those people to cooperate
and have a relationship with ISPs, domain registrars, hosting
providers, and all the people that enable the content to be put on
the Internet in the first place.
And I don't see why they wouldn't support it. I mean this
subject matters seems to be non-controversial. Nobody thinks it is
a bad idea to stop these guys from getting on the Internet.
MRS. BLACKBURN. Okay. On the website names and on
registering a domain name, and you may have answered some of
the questions about complaints that you get on domain names
while I was gone to vote, but with companies like yours when they
are registering domain names that would lend you to believe
something is a pornographic site, what kind of action can you take
on the front end?
MS. JONES. Well, we can certainly monitor for particular
words or particular combinations of words.
MRS. BLACKBURN. Do you have a unit that does that?
MS. JONES. With a registration once every 3 seconds or less it
is very difficult for us to do that particularly on any kind of
ongoing basis with human intervention, but we can and do monitor
certain words. The trouble comes in somebody registering
CongresswomanBlackburn.com and leaving that domain dormant
for some period of time, and then after 60 or 90 or 120 days
attaching a website to it. That is where the real bad behavior
comes because the domain name may have offensive words in it,
but if there is no content associated with that domain name, if it is
just sitting in a database somewhere there is nothing improper
about it. It isn't resolved to a website. It is not generating any
revenue for the person. It is just a random domain name sitting
there. That is where the real problem comes in and that is where it
is really important to us to have these reports from third parties. It
is very helpful to us to get those reports.
MRS. BLACKBURN. So it is not always the gateway or the site
itself, it is the portals that you can enter from that site?
MS. JONES. Yes, ma'am.
MRS. BLACKBURN. Mr. Krwawecz, am I saying it properly?
MR. KRAWAWECZ. Yes.
MRS. BLACKBURN. For Blue Gravity, any thought on either the
credit cards or the domain registry?
MR. KRAWAWECZ. I agree with Ms. Jones as far as the credit
card processing. I think the companies like Visa and MasterCard
have the resources to be able to monitor the merchants that are
processing transactions, the websites that are associated with it,
where the money is going and being able to shut down or
discontinue processing transactions for sites that are promoting
child pornography. As far as the domain registration, one of the
things that I had discussed earlier in the week was there is a fine
line between registering a domain related to supporting rape
victims and then a domain that is promoting rape and being able to
distinguish which website or domain name is being used for
legitimate purposes versus someone who is trying to promote child
pornography or rape or something that is criminal of offensive.
MRS. BLACKBURN. Okay. Ms. Jones, in the testimony that you
have given, you talked about the investigation on the child
modeling sites. Did you elaborate on that during questioning?
MS. JONES. I did not.
MRS. BLACKBURN. Would you please do that for the record
and then that is going to be my last question. Just give a little bit
more of the background of the investigation.
MS. JONES. Okay. Typically, we get notices from their parties
or employees who suspect child modeling sites are on the Internet.
We conduct an investigation similar to what we do for child
pornography. Our abuse department would go view the site, would
determine that there were inappropriate images. Depending on
whether or not there are links to or relationships with actual child
pornography, we would either report actually to law enforcement
or just to the National Center, the domain names, the websites, and
the registrant information for the child modeling sites, but under
any circumstances when we find these, we do take them down
because they are clearly exploiting children, and I think the
gentleman from the New York Times demonstrated some of those
shocking behaviors that they are obviously forcing these children
to engage in. So the investigation is maybe a little bit simpler than
it would be with child pornography because the analysis doesn't
have to be as careful because the images are typically of children
with clothing on.
But we do take them very seriously, and over the last probably
4 to 6 months we have seen a huge rise in the number of these
sites, so we are very concerned about those.
MRS. BLACKBURN. And your investigation led to the
awareness of over 200 sites, am I correct?
MS. JONES. In the last 12 months we have investigated 780
unique customers. That equates to thousands of domain names.
The one example I gave was one customer who had over 200
domain names. One guy had 200 websites so that is 200 different
children that he had active modeling sites on. And they are all the
same format, the same content, the same type of--generally the
same type of behavior but it is every kind of child you could
possibly want to look at.
MRS. BLACKBURN. And then your company, do you follow
this through with law enforcement to be sure those sites come
down and then do you continue if a person is known to set up these
sites to prohibit from registering new domain names for them?
MS. JONES. Yes. What we do is we report to law enforcement
and to the National Center, and we eliminate all of the content and
domain names in that customer's account. We can also block that
credit card from ever using our system again. They could always
come back as a different name or a different credit card, but, yes,
we take all of the steps and to the point of sometimes even
blocking the IP address from which those transactions originated
from accessing our system.
MRS. BLACKBURN. Thank you so much. I thank both of you
for your patience and for your testimony, and for working with us
on the hearing. As you are aware, this is part of a series of
hearings that we are doing as we review this entire process and
work on the online child pornography issue. And at this time, I
will thank you all for your testimony and adjourn the hearing.
[Whereupon, at 1:35 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]