The computer screen in the State Police control room in Alexandria shows a map of Louisiana covered with hundreds of red dots. Each dot represents a town or community where child pornography traders are at work.

A mouse click on a dot pops open a matrix of more dots, each one representing an individual computer address involved in possible criminal activity.

A click on one of the News Orleans dots fans open to 329 more dots: a snapshot of the users in town engaged in trafficking of sexually explicit images of children. A click on a Metairie dot shows 172 users.

In all, on a recent weekday, 3,588 computers in Louisiana were trafficking in child pornography.

“Truly, truly there are so many, that if we put every single resource we had today, we could not eliminate these red dots,” cyber crimes Detective Chad Gremillion said.

G. Andrew Boyd / The Times-PicayuneLouisiana State Police Detective Chad Gremillion, head of Operation Child Watch, shows a real-time Google Earth map of Louisiana with child porn ‘hot spots’ displayed as red dots. Each dot represents a cluster of computers engaged in child porn file sharing or downloading.

Not every red dot on Gremillion’s screen represents a guilty adult computer owner. Investigators say some computer users with unsecured wireless  Internet connections are victimized by criminals tapping into their wireless systems.

In some cases, children in the homes are the culprits downloading the contraband images. Because there is no age limit for such offenders in Louisiana, police have the option to make an arrest and book the youth into a detention facility or give a warning and release the minor back to the parents, said David Ferris, an investigator in the Louisiana attorney general’s High Technology Crime Unit. The state has just begun a juvenile sex offender pilot diversion program that will provide a new option for an intensive treatment program in lieu of an arrest, he said.

In the great majority of cases, however, the dots on Gremillion’s screen prove to be intentional criminal activity by adults, law enforcement officials said. Some of those offenders also could be sexually abusing a child.

“The real sad thing about this, is that these red dots also represent victims. Victims that are in homes right now, who are being abused by family members, who are being abused by siblings, by people they don’t even know,” Gremillion said. “And the real key here is that if law enforcement can get to one of these red dots, and actually get into one of these homes and save a victim from the evil hands of their abuser, then at the end of the day, we’ve saved a child, we’ve rescued a child and taken that child out of harm’s way.”

Laws are helping

Major trends in legislation, federal and local cooperation and new computer tracking systems have been working in favor of law enforcement’s recently expanded crackdown on child pornography.

For most of the last century police would have had to use obscenity laws to make arrests rather than any specific laws aimed at child pornography. The first national child pornography legislation in 1978 banned the commercial sale of the material. The Child Protection Act of 1984 prohibited all trading and, for the purpose of identifying victims, set the age of a minor at 17 or younger.

In 1990 Congress made it unlawful to possess sexually explicit images of children, and further changes during the decade broadened the statute to encompass the Internet.

The Internet Crimes Against Children program, started in 1998, is widely credited with breaking down jurisdictional boundaries between the local, state and federal levels. The network has 59 task forces coordinated mostly on state levels, including one for Louisiana.

The results of the initiatives have been tangible. From 1998 to 2006, the number of defendants sent to federal prison with a lead charge of child sex exploitation, including pornography and sexual abuse, grew from 523 to 1,634 per year, according to the Federal Justice Statistics Program. During that same period, the average federal prison sentence imposed on child sex exploitation criminals rose steadily from 33 months to 63 months.

In Louisiana, the Legislature has toughened criminal statutes related to child abuse and sexual predators. Gov. Bobby Jindal has made the issue a priority, championing passage of six bills in 2008 and nine bills this year, including a law against use of a wireless Internet router to download sexually explicit images of children.

An inadvertent acquisition of an illegal image on the Internet is not likely to get someone in trouble. State law is aimed at intentional possession and distribution. Federal law applies to those who do it knowingly and contains a caveat for those who possess fewer than three images.

Child pornography convictions under state law bring two to 10 years in prison without benefit of parole or probation, while federal law calls for sentences of five to 10 years. Cases of molestation or rape would be prosecuted under state law, which includes mandatory life sentences for aggravated rape.

With the help of federal grants, the Louisiana Department of Justice’s cyber crimes unit focused on sexual abusers of juveniles in 1997 and currently under Attorney General Buddy Caldwell is the state’s primary operator and training center for law enforcement on the issue.

Sophisticated software systems

State Police Superintendent Mike Edmonson last year led the launch of Operation Child Watch, an anti-exploitation program coordinated with other state and local offices. In the first seven months this year, State Police began 100 investigations of child pornography possession and distribution cases, more than triple the agency’s number of all child exploitation cases last year.

Many of these criminal cases came to light because someone stepped forward with a complaint or tip about sex abuse. But an extraordinary surge within the overall crackdown is being fueled by the new software systems that ferret out Internet communications made by traders of sexually explicit images of children.

These systems can identify the digital coding of exploitative videos or photos known by child protection agencies. When those codes are transferred online between computers, the state’s detection system can identify which Internet addresses in Louisiana are sending or receiving them. Unlike investigative measures such as wiretaps or electronic surveillance that would require court approval, this screening system does not record everything that an individual might be doing on a computer.

There are millions of digital images of children whose codes are known. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, working with the U.S. Department of Justice and several local centers, catalogs the images.

Operation Fairplay, a Wyoming state initiative used worldwide, began scanning for Internet contraband in October 2005, when it counted 22,000 computers in the United States trafficking in child pornography. Since then, as more agencies have used the system and as Internet trading has increased, the count has surpassed 700,000 traceable U.S. computer serial numbers and about the same amount of untraceable numbers. Among Internet Crimes Against Children units nationwide, formal charges on child pornography distribution suspects grew from about 5,000 in fiscal 2007 to nearly 12,000 the next year.

New detection methods are under development. A Florida business called TLO was launched this year by software entrepreneur Hank Asher, a board member of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Teaming computer specialists and child abuse investigators, TLO is creating a new generation software that Asher plans to donate to police agencies.

Even with the current technology, law enforcement agencies are overwhelmed by the number of suspects and turn to methods of triage to decide which cases to pursue. Quantity might be one indicator. Some seized computers have tens of thousands of images.

But the primary focus is on traders of child pornography who might also be molesting a child. In those cases, the types of images being acquired might be the best tip off.

“What we’re learning today is that it’s not the amount — the quantity of child porn that a suspect has on their machines — it’s certain files. We can pinpoint the certain files to determine who’s doing the hands-on molestation,” said Corey Bourgeois, lab supervisor for the state Department of Justice High Technology Crime Unit.

Investigators will not discuss details about the methods of their work or the types of files that set off alarms. They do say, however, that they are seeing a disturbing trend toward images depicting younger and younger children being raped and tortured.

“We’ve focused on the baddest of the bad,” Bourgeois said.

Read the complete series on the crackdown on child pornography.

SOURCE: http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2009/11/post_73.html