News Headlines . . .

Louisiana criminals still not under Texas' eye

1,500 parolees, probationers remain without supervision after fleeing Hurricane Katrina.

Friday, April 14, 2006

More than seven months after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and thousands of Louisiana criminals on parole and probation fled to Texas, as many as 1,500 are still without proper supervision, officials confirmed Thursday.

Only a few hundred are reporting to parole and probation officers in Texas despite months of negotiations, they acknowledged, and state officials are increasingly angry and frustrated about their inability to get more of the Louisiana offenders to report to Texas authorities — before they commit new crimes.

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Anti-meth Measures Aim at Borders

Posted: March 16th, 2006 10:45 AM EDT

By MATT STEARNS
The Kansas City Star via Knight Ridder

WASHINGTON -- In his efforts to fight the methamphetamine scourge, Sen. Jim Talent has turned his attention from local labs to the nation's borders.

Experts say international trafficking is the chief source of the meth consumed in this country.

Talent, a Missouri Republican, and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, are urging more action to stem the massive tide of meth from Mexico and, to a much lesser extent, from Canada. Their effort comes days after anti-meth measures they worked on for years was included in the reauthorization of the Patriot Act.

 
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Gang Members In California To Be Tracked By GPS System

Posted: March 16th, 2006 09:33 PM EDT

KELLY RAYBURN
San Bernardino County Sun

The movement of some of the city's most dangerous gangbangers will be tracked using GPS technology under a new state-city collaboration announced Tuesday.

Mayor Pat Morris and Interim Police Chief Michael Billdt were joined by state corrections and parole officials in announcing the pilot program billed as a significant step toward quelling violent crime.

The program is similar to past efforts to track sex offenders in communities throughout the state, but San Bernardino will be the first city to use the technology to monitor gang-member activity.

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IACP Issues New Shoot-To-Kill Guidelines for Confronting Suicide Bombers

August 4th, 2005 10:14 AM EDT

WASHINGTON (AP) -- An international organization representing the heads of police departments across the world has issued new guidelines recommending that officers who confront a suicide bomber should shoot the suspect in the head, the Washington Post reported.

The recommendations by the International Association of Chiefs of Police take a more aggressive posture than typical lethal-force guidelines for police departments, the newspaper reported on its Web Site late Wednesday. It said the guidelines were published July 8 - before the London police, acting on a similar policy, on July 22 fatally shot a Brazilian electrician in the head because they mistook him for a suicide bomber.

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Texas commutes 28 death sentences
in response to Supreme Court ruling

June 23, 2005

(AP) - AUSTIN-Responding to the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling that juveniles cannot be executed, Texas Gov. Rick Perry commuted 28 death sentences to life in prison for inmates who were under 18 when they committed capital murder.

The Supreme Court forced the commutations with its March ruling that executing juveniles violates the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment in the U.S. Constitution.

Texas - the nation's most active death penalty state - was one of 18 states that allowed the practice.

Perry's order issued Wednesday starts the process of moving the inmates off death row.

"While these individuals were convicted by juries of brutal murders and sentenced to die for their heinous crimes, I have no choice but to commute these sentences to life in prison as a result of the Supreme Court ruling," Perry said.

Nine convicted killers have been put to death in Texas so far this year.

Supreme Court Strikes Down Death Penalty for Juveniles

Updated: March 1st, 2005 11:10:32 AM

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that the Constitution forbids the execution of killers who were under 18 when they committed their crimes, ending a practice used in 19 states.

The 5-4 decision throws out the death sentences of about 70 juvenile murderers and bars states from seeking to execute minors for future crimes. The executions, the court said, were unconstitutionally cruel.

It was the second major defeat at the high court in three years for supporters of the death penalty. Justices in 2002 banned the execution of the mentally retarded, also citing the Constitution's Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishments.

The court had already outlawed executions for those who were 15 and younger when they committed their crimes. Tuesday's ruling prevents states from making 16- and 17-year-olds eligible for execution.

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Court OKs Dog Sniff During Traffic Stop

Jan 24, 6:56 PM (ET)

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Supreme Court ruled Monday that police can have dogs check out motorists' vehicles for drugs even if officers have no particular reason to suspect illegal activity.

The 6-2 opinion, written by Justice John Paul Stevens, stipulates police dogs may sniff only the outside of a car after a motorist is lawfully stopped for a traffic violation, such as speeding or failing to stop at a stop sign.

But privacy rights advocates said the ruling would lead to far more traffic stops as a way to find drugs. They also warned that the decision could open the door to more expansive searches, from sniffs inside the vehicle to checks of cars parked along sidewalks and pedestrians on the street.

Before Monday's ruling, the Supreme Court had authorized drug dogs primarily to sniff luggage at airports.

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Cybercrime News . . .

U.S., Canadian Investigators Crack International Child Pornography Ring

Posted: March 16th, 2006 04:52 PM EDT

SARAH GALASHAN and CTV News Staff
CTV

Canadian and U.S. investigators have cracked an international child pornography ring that featured live molestations of children streamed over the Internet.

"The behaviour in these chat rooms and the images ... are the worst imaginable forms of child pornography," U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales told a Chicago news conference on Wednesday.

"We are not going to tolerate those who intend to harm our children."

A private Internet chat room, used worldwide to facilitate the trading of thousands of images of child pornography, was infiltrated as part of the sting.

Seven child victims of sexual molestation have been identified as a result of the investigation. The youngest victim in the images was just 18 months old, Gonzales said.

Nine of the 27 accused are from Canada, 13 from the United States, three from Australia and two from Britain.

The primary host was allegedly a user from Clarksville, Tenn., with the screen name G.O.D., who was arrested March 6.

Tony Warr, of Toronto Police Services, described the arrests as "a significant achievement."

Warr said he wanted the public to know "how well the international law enforcement community can work together by pursuing this investigation using different techniques."

All but one out of the 27 charged has been arrested. The one who remains at large is considered a fugitive, officials said.

The case began when an Edmonton woman overheard two children talking and reported their conversation to police, said Det. Randy Wickens of the city's Internet Child Exploitation unit.

That led to an arrest in Edmonton in May 2005. The man, whose name has been banned from publication, was sentenced to 14 years in prison.

Another man, 49-year-old Carl Edmond Treleaven, of Edmonton, was charged with distributing child porn in January after police raided his home.

He pleaded guilty last month and is scheduled to be sentenced Friday.

Undercover police in Toronto who were monitoring a chat room in 2005 targeted Treleaven and traced his Internet address to Alberta.

During a raid on his home, police allege they found more than 20 gigabytes of child porn on a computer -- including incest, bestiality and rape.

According to the agreed statement of facts, police say they found some 90 subscribers on Treleaven's computer. During the forty minutes they were inside the home, they say another 20 people logged on looking to download images.

Staff Insp. Jane Wilcox, commander of the Toronto police sex crimes unit, said besides the Edmonton arrests, there were two in British Columbia, two in Alberta, two in Manitoba, three in Ontario and one in Quebec.

They have been charged with various offences, including possession, receipt, distribution and manufacture of child pornography.

Porn becoming increasingly aggressive

RCMP Insp. Michelle Martin warned at a presentation to a public form that child pornography is becoming increasingly aggressive and violent.

"They are infants, they are not even walking and they are still in diapers," she said in Fredericton.

"And adults are having sexual intercourse with them. There are pictures with animals."

Martin, who heads a five-member Internet child exploitation unit based in Fredericton, said while such behaviour has been around for a long time, the Internet has made it easier to access.

"It's a $2.6-billion industry with 20,000 new child porn websites every month," said Martin.

A decade ago, the Toronto sex crime squad would seize about hundreds of photos a year. Last year, they seized more than 3 million pictures and videos, approximately 90 per cent of them from western nations.

Toronto police Det. Sgt. Paul Gillespie says much of that is thanks to Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, who helped Canada develop a specialized tracking system.

Gillespie, who heads Toronto's 17-member child exploitation tracking unit, emailed Gates in early 2003 and asked for help to create a tool to catch online pornographers.

Microsoft Canada responded by pumping $4.5 million Cdn into creating the Child Exploitation Tracking System, which was instrumental in dismantling the ring that was announced Wednesday.

"He's done an awful lot of good in the world," Gillespie said. "He recognizes that as much good as the Internet brings, it also brings the bad and Microsoft has to work closely with law enforcement."

The tracking system contains data gathered from international sources, allowing authorities to plug in an email address, credit card number or even an Internet nickname and see what information may pop up.

"It's being used all across Canada, we're presently in the very stages of development and deployment in six other countries around the world as we speak, and someday it will be a global database when the police officers all over the world can work together," Gillespie said, appearing on CTV Newsnet Thursday.

"It's time that law enforcement changed the fundamental thinking on how they do business. We have to work together collectively."

• There are 1.3 million porn websites (N2H2, 9/23/03).
  
  
• More than 32 million unique individuals visited a porn site in Sept. of 2003. Nearly 22.8 million of them were male (71 percent), while 9.4 million adult site visitors were female (29 percent)
  (Nielsen/Net Ratings, Sept. 2003).
  
  
• Pornographic web pages now top 260 million and growing at an unprecedented rate (N2H2, 9/23/03).
  
  
• N2H2's database contained 14 million identified pages of pornography in 1998, so the growth to 260 million represents an almost 20-fold increase in just five years (N2H2, 9/23/03).
  
  
• The cybersex industry generates approximately billion annually and is expected to grow to -7 billion over the next 5 years, barring unforeseen change (National Research Council Report, 2002).
  
  
• The total porn industry - estimates from billion to billion (National Research Council Report, 2002).
  
  
• The two largest individual buyers of bandwidth are U.S. firms in the adult online industry (National Research Council Report, 3-1, 2002).
  
  
• 40,000 expired domain names were porn-napped
  (National Research Council).
  
  
• Commercial pornography sites:
  
  • 74 percent display free teaser porn images on the homepage, often porn banner ads.
    
  • 66 percent did not include a warning of adult content.
    
  • 11 percent included such a warning but did not have sexually explicit content on the homepage.
    
  • 25 percent prevented users from exiting the site (mousetrapping).
    
  • Only 3 percent required adult verification.
    (Child-Proofing on the World Wide Web: A Survey of Adult Webservers, 2001, Jurimetrics. National Research Council Report, 2002).
    
    
• Sex is the #1 searched for topic on the Internet. (Dr. Robert Weiss, Sexual Recovery Institute, Washington Times 1/26/2000)
  
  
• 60% of all web-site visits are sexual in nature. (MSNBC/Standford/Duquesne Study, Washington Times, 1/26/2000)
  
  
• 58% of the public surveyed believed that "the government should be able to restrict the posting of sexually explicit materials on the Internet, even though those same materials can be legally published in books and magazines." (State of the First Amendment Study, First Amendment Center, Freedom Forum, 2000)
  

CHILD PORN

• More than 20,000 images of child pornography are posted on the Internet every week (National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, 10/8/03).
  
  
• 140,000 child pornography images were posted to the Internet according to researchers who monitored the Internet over six weeks. Twenty children were estimated to have been abused for the first time and more than 1,000 images of each child created (National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, 10/8/03).
  
  
• More than half of all illegal sites reported to the Internet Watch Foundation are hosted in the United States. Illegal sites in Russia have more than doubled from 286 to 706 in 2002 (National Criminal Intelligence Service, 8/21/03).
  
  
• Demand for pornographic images of babies and toddlers on the Internet is soaring (Prof. Max Taylor, Combating Paedophile Information Networks in Europe, March 2003).
  
  
• More babies and toddlers are appearing on the net and the abuse is getting worse. It is more torturous and sadistic than it was before. The typical age of children is between six and 12, but the profile is getting younger (Prof. Max Taylor, Combating Paedophile Information Networks in Europe, March 2003).
  
  
• Approximately 20 new children appear on the porn sites every month - many kidnapped or sold into sex (Combating Paedophile Information Networks in Europe, March 2003).
  
  
• In the last couple of years, we've just seen such young children on regular seizures - babies, 2-, 3-, 4-year-olds (Det. Sgt. Paul Gillespie, Toronto Police Force).
  
  
• The U.S. Customs Service estimates that there are more than 100,000 Web sites offering child pornography - which is illegal worldwide. Revenue estimates for the industry range from about 0 million to more than billion per year. These unlawful sexual images can be purchased as easily as shopping at Amazon.com. "Subscribers" typically use credit cards to pay a monthly fee of between and to download photos and videos, or a one-time fee of a few dollars for single images. (Red Herring Magazine, 1/18/02)
  
  
• 345% increase in child pornography sites between 2/2001-7/2001. (N2H2 press release, 8/01)
  
  
• N2H2 reported 403 child porn sites, or 67 per month, for the six months of April to September 2000. Child porn sites rose dramatically for the six months of February to July 2001 to 1,391 or 231 per month. That's an increase of 345% at the rate of about 8 per day. (N2H2 Filtering Service Press Release, 8/8/01)
  
  
• 50 percent of those questioned for the Pew Internet and American Life survey ranked child pornography as the Internet crime that concerns them most. (The Pew Internet and American Life Project Survey conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates, 4/2/01)
  
  

ONLINE SEXUAL PREDATORS

• Internet pedophiles are increasingly adopting counter-intelligence techniques to protect themselves from being traced (National Criminal Intelligence Service, 8/21/03).
  
  
• Forty percent of people charged with child pornography also sexually abuse children, police say. But finding the predators and identifying the victims are daunting tasks (Reuters, 2003).
  
  
• One in five children who use computer chatrooms has been approached over the Internet by pedophiles. (Detective Chief Superintendent Keith Akerman, Telegraph.co.uk January 2002 )
  
  
• 89% of sexual solicitations were made in either chat rooms or Instant Messages. (Pew Study reported in JAMA, 2001)
  
  
• 13 million youth use Instant Messaging. (Pew Study reported in JAMA, 6/01)
  
  
• 1 in 5 received sexual solicitation or approach in last year. (Online Victimization, NCMEC, June 2000)
  
  
• 1 in 33 received AGGRESSIVE sexual solicitation (asked to meet, called them via phone, sent mail, money or gifts). Online Victimization, NCMEC, June 2000)
  
  
• 25% of youth who received sexual solicitation told a parent. (Online Victimization, NCMEC, June 2000)
  
  
• 1 in 4 kids participate in Real Time Chat. (FamilyPC Survey, 2000)
  

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To go to the FBI's "A Parent's Guide to Internet Safety"

Child Pornography: Patterns From NIBRS

(NCJ 204911) December 2004

OJJDP Crimes Against Children Series, Bulletin, 8 pages

Finkelhor, D., Ormrod, R.

Presents findings from the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). By collecting data on pornography/obscene material offenses from law enforcement jurisdictions, NIBRS enables researchers to draw conclusions about the number, locations, and characteristics of these crimes. NIBRS data suggest that approximately 2,900 crime incidents of pornography with juvenile involvement were known to state and local police in 2000; these offenses most often were committed by a lone adult male offender, occurred in a residence, and did not involve a computer. Currently, NIBRS data represent about 14 percent of the population. As more jurisdictions support uniform reporting of accurate data to NIBRS and as its codes become more refined, NIBRS will become even more useful in identifying and tracking trends in child pornography.

Click here to download the report >>Child Pornography: Patterns from NIBRS (file size is 2.14 MB)

Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force Program

The Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) Task Force Program helps state and local law enforcement agencies develop an effective response to cyber enticement and child pornography cases. This help encompasses forensic and investigative components, training and technical assistance, victim services, and community education. Numerous task forces have been established throughout the nation.

The ICAC Program was developed in response to the increasing number of children and teenagers using the Internet, the proliferation of child pornography, and the heightened online activity by predators searching for unsupervised contact with underage victims. The FY 1998 Justice Appropriations Act (Pub. L. No. 105–119) directed OJJDP to create a national network of state and local law enforcement cyber units to investigate cases of child sexual exploitation (i.e., ICAC).

OJJDP Contact:

Chris Holloway
Program Manager
202-305-9838
christopher.holloway@usdoj.gov

Training and Technical Assistance Contacts:

Crimes Against Children Research Center
OJJDP ICAC Task Force
University of New Hampshire
Huddleston Hall
Durham, NH 03824
603-778-8068
603-778-8068 (fax)
http://www.unh.edu/ccrc/

Brad Russ
Director, TTA
brad.russ@unh.edu

Fox Valley Technical College
1825 North Bluemound Drive
P.O. Box 2277
Appleton, WI 54912
800-735-3882
info@fvtc.edu
http://www.foxvalley.tec.wi.us/
National Center for Missing and Exploited Children
Charles B. Wang International Children's Building
699 Prince Street
Alexandria, VA 22314
800-843-5678
http://www.ncmec.org
National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C)
7401 Beaufont Springs Drive, Suite 300
Richmond, VA 23225
804-323-3563
http://www.nw3c.org
SEARCH, The National Consortium for Justice Information and Statistics
7311 Greenhaven Drive, Suite 145
Sacramento, CA 95831
916-392-2550
916-392-8440 (fax)
cheryl.moore@search.org
http://www.search.org

OJJDP Publications:

Protecting Children in Cyberspace: The ICAC Task Force Program
Bulletin, January 2002. Discusses efforts by OJJDP's Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force Program that address emerging online threats, such as computer-facilitated sex crimes, directed at children and teenagers. 8 pages. NCJ 191213.
Abstract

For More Information, this link will take you to OJJDP

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