Hackers on Steroids (19 page)

Yep, that’s right – billions of US dollars, or the equivalent thereof. A United Nations report from 2009 estimated that the global child pornography business could make between 3 to 20 billion American dollars in profit per year, and the colossal amount of images and videos which those huge sums mean are being produced and sold – including on-demand webcam sexual abuse - doesn’t even begin to take into account all those videos and photographs and child sex abuse cam shows which are being made or swapped non-commercially. A European Union commission has estimated that 50,000 new indecent images of children are being released annually onto the Internet’s highways. And, of course, it’s not just on Facebook which the evidence of this demonic business can be witnessed in all its unimaginable horror. Microsoft’s Windows Messenger is crawling with paedophiles who use images of naked children as their profile pictures. Thousands of them on there, easily. Twitter, the micro-blogging service and social network has become notorious for the child pornography trading that openly goes on between the brazen networks of paedophiles which have nested on it.

The wider Internet, too, is itself awash with child pornography. The exact figures are hard to know but the IWF gave a figure for 2009 of 8,844 websites worldwide that were known to have been set up specifically to host child pornography. American authorities have estimated that 20% of Internet pornography involves children. We’re not talking about stolen photographs of 16-year-old girls in bikinis here: this is hardcore sexual torture of babies, pre-pubescents, and young teenagers that is being traded in. Peer-to-peer file-sharing networks are also being used by the paedophiles to swap images and videos with each other - Christ knows how many videos of child abuse are being uploaded and downloaded in that way daily. And even worse: Who again knows how many emails containing these images and videos are being sent around now that a countless number of paedophiles have been allowed to make contact with each other through the Web.

I’ve saw some of the worst of these images on their Facebook profiles. Not a lot, but enough, more than enough. A boy of about nine years of age, naked and tied on a torture rack. An actual torture rack of some description. A naked paedophile standing over him, a black executioner’s hood on his head. The boy’s face looked like death, maybe this was all he had ever known in his entire existence on this stinking planet. For one second in time I glimpsed that and almost two years later still the horror of it is there in my mind. A video still of a pig being used to sexually abuse a young girl, the pig’s white corkscrew-shaped penis on her little naked body. I didn’t see her face, from the size of her body I would guess that she was about seven. The video was titled something like, ‘Two sisters have sex with a pig.’ Christ help any police officer who has to view those videos. I would prefer to take a gun and shoot myself in the head with it rather than view one of those videos. People I have talked to have saw photographs of babies being raped.

Said one anti-paedophile cop, Paul Gillespie of the Toronto Police Child Exploitation unit to a newspaper back in 2003: ‘We regularly seize hundreds of thousands of images involving children as young as babies in diapers in pictures and in full length movies being brutally tortured, raped, sodomized and bleeding. This is the norm. There are now 3 and 4 year-olds in 20 minute movies screaming for daddy to stop.’

The gates of hell have been unlocked and this is what the results look like. It is hardly being too presumptuous to assume that more and more children are now being sexually abused and more often precisely to feed the insatiable appetite of the snarling beast that is online child pornography. Child sex abusers have always been with us but this is the age of instant gratification for the paedophile, where one or many of them can sit in front of their computers at one end of the world and direct on cam the sexual torture of children at the other end of it, and where the endless demand for more and more videos like ‘Two sisters have sex with a pig’ has helped dig the widest, blackest abyss filled with the screams of children. How could all of this have happened? How could child pornography have become such an open chasm and the paedophiles themselves become so emboldened? Ask a random selection of people as to those they believe to be the worst breed of villain in the world and most of them will answer that it is paedophiles which are that. Ask them again what should be done with them and most again will tell you that they should all be put to death, preferably in horrible and prolonged ways. You’d think that all of the planet’s paedophiles would be deep in hiding, scared to death of a vengeful and ever-watchful world. And clearly a great many of them still are in these times ultra-secret about their desires and activities, but it is the awful truth that increasingly an unbelievable number of them are using the Internet to swap and trade their collections of unspeakable images with each other in the most public of ways. That’s not awful in that they’re not hiding well away from the eyes of the police any more, but awful in that they feel confident enough to come out from underneath their rocks and into the light. Many of these paedophiles have become so proud of their evil that they wear it shamelessly as a badge of honour, they boast and philosophise about it. A shocking percentage of them, and I know this may be hard to believe, will use publicly on Facebook and elsewhere their real names and faces as they uninhibitedly talk of their sexual predilection towards children. Vanessa George was a British nursery worker who in a notorious 2009 case photographed herself abusing 30 different little children in her care for two paedophiles – Colin Blanchard and Angela Allen - whom she met on Facebook. I am wondering if she met them on the easily-found paedophile networks on the site. Because, how else?

But don’t just take my word for it. Here are excerpts from three different media investigations into the child pornography scandal on Facebook alone.

Said the Sydney Morning Herald on December 14th 2010:

Paedophiles are brazenly sharing child pornography pictures and videos on Facebook, and internet safety experts believe the social networking site has failed to curtail the practice.

In an investigation, this website established that there are countless profiles and groups created by paedophiles – sometimes using their real names – who publish child pornography images and videos on the site.

And:

Facebook, which has to police more than 500 million users, cannot keep up with the child pornography trade on its site. Whenever its security team deletes a profile or removes images, they reappear almost instantly.

An October 2010 investigation into the subject by Fox News found that:

Facebook is failing to prevent child predators from posting suggestive and potentially illegal photographs of children on its website, a weeks-long investigation by FoxNews.com reveals, despite its claim that it's doing all it can to keep pedophile materials from being displayed.

Yet a five part report published in May 2012 by the WorldNetDaily (WND.com), an American news and opinion journal, showed that nothing had changed on the social network over 18 months later:

She’s a tiny brunette with brown eyes, barely 10, and she’s naked – posing for the man who raped her and traded her photo like currency with thousands of insatiable predators on Facebook.

The girl doesn’t smile, because she knows what comes next. Her abuser will share photos and earn bragging rights from thousands of others just like him who will exchange their own titillating snapshots – often images uploaded from cell phones – of boys and girls they molest.

And:

Another profile reveals a small boy, about 8, who looks much like a neighborhood Little League champion or Cub Scout. He’s been forced to undress on a bed and hold his ankles behind his head as his captor photographs his exposed genitals and anus.

One more boy, about 12, is lying face down on a bed as an adult male penetrates him. The photo is a mobile upload – likely taken by a third person in the room who observed the child’s rape and posted the image to Facebook with a cell phone.

On other pages, child-porn deviants share a photo of two naked girls who are kissing and fondling one another outdoors.  Yet another boy, who appears to be about 4, is receiving oral sex from a child roughly two years his senior.

Other children just like them are shown sodomizing one another – or being raped by adult men or women – in photos and video links of the abuse posted on Facebook. Entire albums of exploited boys and girls are visible to the public and shared with the click of a mouse.

On the Facebook user page called ‘Kidsex Young,’ one man asks others, ‘Care to trade vids?’ Another posts a video of a naked man fondling a baby on a bed.

Does everyone who bought shares in this company know exactly what daily is taking place in its online realm? I doubt it as the screams of abused children are, it would seem, somewhat muffled under the weight of $100 billion worth of stock.

I can’t take that this is happening. It put me mad then knowing about it and it still puts me mad. I can’t accept that this is going on and that there is nothing which can be done about it. I am haunted still by those images that I saw, and I am haunted by the knowledge of what is taking place. You can’t gaze into that world and then just go away and forget about it.

After becoming aware then of the scale of the problem on Facebook I contacted first an American media personality, and, later then, ITN, the major British television news producers, to ask if they would expose this story through their media. While both were at the beginning extremely interested in doing so, unfortunately in the end neither story happened (for reasons unknown to myself), but they did put me in touch with two anti-paedophile police officers, one from the United States and the other from Britain, to whom I could make reports to about what I and the other members of the group were finding. And so I became as familiar with the paedophiles of Facebook and their world as I had been with that of the memorial page trolls. Like those trolls, paedophiles have developed their own gruesome little universe complete with special vocabulary. Probably the most commonly used term among them is ‘PTHC,’ an acronym for ‘Pre-teen hardcore;’ or to put it another way, pictures and videos of prepubescent children being sexually molested. Most of the paedophiles I observed on Facebook had listed PTHC as an interest of theirs on their profiles. This lets other paedophiles who view these profiles know that they are interested in swapping or buying such material. While the ‘PTHC’ material itself is usually posted in specially made groups with names like ‘girls and boys 5 to 9’ and into which the paedophiles will invite other sickos, sometimes they will just use Facebook to advertise themselves as someone who is willing to swap or buy child pornography. From January 2011 a posting from one ‘Kyle Childs’ on a group called ‘My Secret Photos’: ‘i want to trade pics to plz. girls.guys no limits. pthcluver
***
@
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.com.’ As with the RIP trolls, getting banned by Facebook is a career hazard, but again as with the trolls once one group or profile is ‘nuked,’ it is reincarnated again in only a very short matter of time. 

Another frequently used code word among them is ‘Lolita,’ which they will publicly list on their profiles as a favourite book, although as you might imagine it is not out of any love of literature but only to mark themselves out as having an interest in underage girls. Sometimes the word is shortened to ‘Loli’ (or, less frequently, ‘Lola’), with ‘Lolicon’ being the Westernised name of a form of Japanese ‘erotic’ anime art featuring little girls, something that is quite popular among the paedophiles of the Internet, along with its even more disturbing, and less subtly named, variant of ‘toddlercon.’ ‘Incest’ is another widely used term among them, that along with the rather more discreet sounding ‘Home schooling’ denotes an appetite for child pornography material involving abuse which has been carried out by a parent or sibling.

The code word ‘R@y Gold’ is used a lot by the Internet’s paedophiles to point themselves out to others of their species as being into child pornography in general. This apparently was the online name used by probably the biggest idol to be found in the Internet’s paedophilia subculture, 66-year-old Richard Goldberg, currently serving a 20-year term at the Federal Correctional Institution, Petersburg, Virginia. He had been added to the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives List in the June of 2002 after absconding the previous year while out on bail on charges of child molestation and the making and distribution of child pornography. Captured then in Canada in 2007, his notoriety has made him a folk hero among the members of the paedophile underworld, many of whom seemingly even knew of him from his online child porn swapping days and before his appearance on the Ten Most Wanted list. As well as using it as a code word so that other paedophiles can search them out, some of the Web’s paedos will use R@y Gold as their online handles, something that I suspect may be to distinguish them as being involved in the actual making of child sex abuse images. Goldberg is known to his fans as ‘The King of Child Porn.’ This is how far it has been allowed to get: them having their own idols and ‘kings.’ My thoughts are that it would have been good that if instead of 20 years Virginia had been able to strap this king to an electric throne and so given the paedophiles of the world a dead martyr to mourn instead of them having a living sovereign to celebrate.