70 arrests in child-porn dragnet

Tom Allard

June 5, 2008

DOZENS of men - including community leaders, a police officer, a teacher and a youth worker - have been arrested over child pornography and abuse offences after the nation's biggest anti- pedophile investigation.

The six-month joint operation by the Australian Federal Police and state police forces uncovered several cases of child molestation and highlighted the astonishing way in which pedophiles form secret communities in cyberspace and use the global reach of the internet to trade child-exploitation images.

To date, 70 arrests have been made across Australia. A further 20 people have been issued with summonses to appear in court, where they will be charged with possessing child-exploitation material. More arrests are expected.

Dubbed Operation Centurion, the investigation was triggered after a hacker infiltrated a respectable European website and inserted 99 degrading and explicit images of young girls from Eastern Europe, the US and Paraguay.

The site, which cannot be named for legal reasons, was besieged by an incredible 12 million hits in just 76 hours after word got around online pedophile networks.

Almost 150,000 different computer users from 170 countries accessed the otherwise obscure website, including Australians using 2883 computer IP addresses. Of those, 1513 had downloaded one or more images in the 76-hour period.

Police were able to match IP addresses to their location. Some were public computers in places such as libraries, some were duplicates, but many could be traced to homes.
Those arrested have ranged in age from 19 to 81 and included individuals with a known history of child abuse, and others with unblemished backgrounds.

Among those charged were:

â- Alan Lilburne Melchert, 59, a board member of the West Australian Sports Federation, former head of the state's volunteers' association, and coach of junior soccer and hockey teams.

â- Steven Thomas Fox Ross, 30, from Wentworthville, Sydney, who is on parole for child abuse offences. He was allegedly found to have 8000 images on hard drives and discs.

â- Michael Edward Hatch, 38, a federal policeman based in Canberra who has pleaded guilty to child pornography possession. He will be sentenced today.

â- A primary school teacher who allegedly photographed his students and transposed their heads onto child abuse images. He then transposed his own image on to the head of the perpetrator of the acts.

â- Gary Bruce Bechaz, 55, from Queensland, who has no criminal record. Along with offences relating to possessing large volumes of child exploitation material, he also faces five rape charges and two charges of taking photographs of an under-age girl in sexual poses.

The child was one of four young Australian victims revealed during the course of the inquiry.
They have been removed from harm. Police say community services have been told of other children potentially at risk.

None of the victims were in the original photos posted on the international website but were detected when police examined computers, discs, USB sticks, DVDs and other material uncovered during the execution of 123 search warrants. One of those arrested had a collection of 50,000 child abuse images.

"The possession of the images, the downloading of the images was the tip of the iceberg," said Andrew Colvin, the AFP's national manager of high-tech crime operations. "It's the networks. It's the children they might have access to. It's the potential for grooming and procuring that these people are involved in as well."

Operation Centurion was twice as large as any other Australian investigation into online child pornography. Police used innovative techniques to keep ahead of the increasingly sophisticated online pedophiles.

Posting images briefly on legitimate websites such as occurred with Operation Centurion is one emerging method adopted by pedophiles, as is hiding images within images and other encryption methods.

The social networking revolution that has swept the internet has been adopted by purveyors of child exploitation.

Child porn chat rooms pop up, then close almost as quickly. There, pedophiles trade images, alert each other to new ones, share tips on how to groom potential victims and how to avoid detection by police, work colleagues and family members.

"It shows you the power of the internet as a communication tool. We are dealing with a medium where communication is so quick and so broad that something like this could happen. It is stunning that millions of people around the world can commit an offence and access child abuse images in one hit, at the same time," Assistant Commissioner Colvin said

During Operation Centurion, police became aware that offenders were using web-enabled devices such as X-Box, Playstation 3 and new generation mobile phones to access the images.
"They don't have to worry about a family member checking the history on the family computer, or ask why they are spending so much time on it," said one investigator.

"Most people don't know games consoles can be linked to the web."

Mr Colvin said that equally, the internet gave police opportunities. "For law enforcement, it is about using the same tools that crooks can use on the internet to serve us."

Among the methods used by police include posing as youngsters on chat rooms and secretly assuming the identities of offenders and joining in discussions on pedophile chat rooms.

Police cyber sleuths will also assume child-like avatars and go onto role-playing sites like Second Life, an increasingly popular forum for pedophiles to recruit and groom potential victims.

Due to the global nature of the internet, co-operation between different police agencies is vital. The AFP has developed extensive links with the FBI, including sharing staff in the child protection area.

The information that sparked Operation Centurion was provided by Interpol in the form of masses of raw computer data.

"What we need to do as law enforcement collectively is make the internet more hostile for these people, make it harder for them to operate," Mr Colvin said.

Perhaps most disconcerting is the scale of the internet child exploitation. As many as 3.5 million child abuse images are on the internet and cannot readily be removed. Identifying and locating children in the photos can be difficult.

"There are kids that international police around the world have seen grow up through these images. We can't identify them and that is very frustrating," Mr Colvin said.

The huge number of people caught up in Operation Centurion meant that police have been unable, so far, to arrest all those who logged on to the website.

The investigation, and arrests, will continue, but one challenge for police may be whether courts accept entreaties from the accused that they were merely being curious or had stumbled across the images by accident.

The Age