CHILD PORNOGRAPHY AND PEDOPHILIA

The Houston CHRONICLE recently published an in-depth article about “the

war on child porn.” The article profiled four well-established members of
the community who shared one thing in common: a predilection for viewing
children either naked or engaged in some form of sexual activity, usually
with an adult. One was a wealthy oil and gas businessman; another was an
accomplished small-town pilot; another was a grade-school teacher; and the
fourth worked in a home builder’s purchasing department.

Altogether the CHRONCILE examined the court records of more than one
hundred cases in Harris County over the last 3 ½ years involving child
pornography. The newspaper found that the people charged in these cases
came from all walks of life with good jobs, education, and family ties. Some
of these people, like most involved in child pornography, either engaged in
or attempt to engage in sex with young teens or children.

Claude Davenport, chief of the U.S. Immigration and Customs

Enforcement’s Child Exploitation Section, estimated for the CHRONICLE
that there are 150 to 200 commercial child exploitation websites globally.

“These are not baby in the bathtub type images,” said Richard Magness,
Bazoria County First Assistant District Attorney. “These are crime scene
photos of kids being raped.”

Child pornography is a violent crime involving sadism and torture, the

CHRONICLE reported.

“We see knives [and] we see plastic bags over children’s heads,” said
Michelle Collins, director of the National Center for Missing and Exploited
Children.

The case of Bruce H. Perrin is a classic example of the nature of the child
pornography business. Perrin was a student at the Louisiana State University
in 2004. The university’s police department received information that Perrin
was “trading” images of child pornography across the Internet with someone
in Kentucky. LSU police secured a search warrant and searched Perrin’s
residence. They seized a computer and other digital media storage devices
that contained 4,237 images of child pornography [3,942 still images and
295 videos]. Most of these images were of prepubescent children being
raped by adults and six depicted children engaged in bestiality. Perrin’s pre-
sentence report described some of the images as follows:

“(1) a video depicting an adult male ejaculating into the mouth of

approximately four-year-old female child while the child says, ‘please stop,
stop, stop ....’;

“(2) multiple images depicting sexual activity between an approximately

six-year-old female child and a dog; and

“(3) images of an approximately three-year-old female child being anally

penetrated by an adult male.”

Perrin categorized and segregated his images by content. For example, he

had one folder entitled “young” that contained pornographic images of
children between the ages of three and ten. He informed the U.S. District
Court that sentenced him to the minimum term of 60 months and ten years
of supervised release following incarceration that he had been actively
receiving and distributing child pornography for several years. He told the
court that he had created a program which made his images available for
trading on the Internet at all times. He added that hundreds had downloaded
child pornography from his computer. The National Drug Intelligence
Center identified the children in 849 of Perrin’s images as known victims of
child pornography. See: United States v. Perrin, 478 F.3d 672 (5th Cir. 2007).

The United States Supreme Court in Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, 534
U.S. 234 (2002) held that images in child pornography cases must be real,
not virtual, images of children. The plain language of Texas’ child
pornography statute requires the images to be that of an “actual child.” See:
Tex. Penal Code § 43.25 (Vernon’s 2003). See also: Webb v. State, 109
S.W.3d 580, 583 (Tex.App.-Fort Worth 2003 no. pet.).

What draws a person to the horrific images of child pornography, whether

real or vitual?

A 2001 study published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior offers some

clues to answering this question. The study found that 46 percent of
homosexuals and 22 percent of lesbian women of the adult participants in
the study reported homosexual molestation in childhood. Only 7 percent of
the heterosexual men and 1 percent of the heterosexual women reported
homosexual molestation in childhood. See: Tomeo, M., Templer, D.,
Anderson, S., Kotler, D., "Comparative Data of Childhood and Adolescence
Molestation in Heterosexual and Homosexual Persons," Archives of Sexual
Behavior Vol. 30(3), pp. 535-541, 2001.

This study and a large amount of other research reaffirms a link between
adult sexual preference and childhood sexual abuse. It can reasonably be
inferred that most adult purveyors of child pornography experienced some
form of childhood sexual abuse. The CHRONICLE study revealed that by a
more than 2-to-1 margin the child pornography offenders it examined were
either single or divorced. This indicates that these overwhelmingly male
offenders did not fit well into “normal” heterosexual relationships. The
sexual preference for child sex had been wired into some of their brains by
childhood sexual abuse, the vast majority of it being homosexual
molestation. While purveyors of child pornography can establish careers as
railroad engineers, attorneys, prosecutors, doctors, educators, scientists, and
law enforcement officers, they cannot manage the secret sexual desires that
compel them to risk everything they worked for in life for images of child
sex.

That’s what happened to Joseph Michael Buchanan. He was employed as a

park ranger with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Texas. He was
stationed at the Lake Texoma location. The Army Corps assigned each park
ranger an individual computer accessible only with a unique password.
Through this password, the Corps was able to maintain a “log of actions” by
each specific ranger.

In early 2001 the Texoma station reported to a Tulsa, Oklahoma

administrator that its office access to the Internet had slowed considerably.
The Tulsa administrator quickly determined that Buchanan’s computer was
the reason for the reduced Internet access speed. Buchanan was accessing
what the Tulsa administrator called “an X-rated porn site.” The administrator
began to monitor Buchanan’s computer activities.

Buchanan was subsequently confronted by his superiors about the computer

“misuse.” He admitted to the misuse and assured the superiors he would
never do it again. However, in March 2002 Lake Texoma manager Ron
Jordan received a report that Buchanan was once again accessing
pornography sites. Utilizing his administrator’s password, Jordan accessed
Buchanan’s computer where he discovered pornographic photographs and
movies involving adults as well as bestiality.

Jordan once again confronted Buchanan about the pornography. He again

admitted to accessing pornography sites and again promised to never to it
again. Jordan accepted Buchanan’s assurances.

But the following month Jordan received yet another report informing him
that pornographic images were once again found on Buchanan’s computer.
This time Jordan suspended Buchanan for two days.

In the summer of 2002 Jordon received yet another report that Buchanan had
resumed his pornography viewing. In August Jordon began monitoring
Buchanan’s computer. On August 28 he discovered pornographic images in
a “temporary internet folder.” He made copies of some of Buchanan’s
internet folder files to his computer. The following day Jordon found that
Buchanan had added more files to the temporary internet folder. These latest
files contained images of nude prepubescent children. Buchanan was adding
and deleting the files as he viewed the folder over a period of several
minutes. Jordon then copied some of the files containing both child and
adult pornography to a compact disc and turned it over to law enforcement
officials.

The FBI analyzed the CD furnished by Jordon and found that it contained
four large images of children from 10 to 12 years of age engaged in sexually
explicit conduct. The FBI on September 12 confronted Buchanan who
readily admitted that he had accessed child pornography sites, saved images
for later viewing, and ultimately deleted them. A subsequent analysis of the
CD by an FBI computer forensic examiner revealed that it contained 127
images, 54 of them involving minors from ages 5 to 15. The examiner also
used sophisticated software to locate a number of “encrypted files” on the
hard drive of Buchanan’s computer. These files contained more than 3,000
images of pornography, 300 of them involving children ages 3 to 15 engaged
sexually explicit conduct.

Buchanan was eventually given a 71-month prison sentence and a $5,500

fine. See: United States v. Buchanan, 485 F.3d 274 (5th Cir. 2007).

Joseph Michael Buchanan was compelled by psychological forces not so

clearly understood to view child pornography. There is no indication that
Buchanan ever fulfilled the perverse sexual fantasies spawned by his
addiction to child porn. What is clearly understood, however, is that people
like Buchanan leave an incriminating trail of evidence on whatever
computer they use to access child pornography sites.

Child pornography has become over the past decade a high technology crime
fueled by the Internet. It is now an international growth industry. “Several
years ago, you might see 15 pictures, 20, 100, or 150 and a few videotapes,”
said Detective Sergeant Paul Gillespie, head of the Toronto Police
Department’s child exploitation section, in a 2004 interview. “Now, we’re to
the point, on a typical seizure, we could see up to 10,000, 100,000, 500,000
images.” Magazines, photographs, and videotapes are obsolete. Today’s
purveyors of child pornography use digital images downloaded from Internet
sites to ply their trade.

But it is the computers that access these Internet sites that are providing law
enforcement forensic examiners with volumes of evidence. When offenders
like Buchanan and Perrin access a webpage, “ … the web browser stores a
copy of the page on the computer’s hard drive in a folder or directory. That
folder is known as the cache (pronounced “cash”), and the individual files
within the cache are known as temporary Internet files. When the user later
returns to a previously visited webpage, the browser retrieves the cached file
to display the webpage instead of retrieving the file from the Internet. By
retrieving the page from the cache, instead of the Internet, the browser can
display the page more quickly.” See: Ty E. Howard, “Don’t Cache Out Your
Case: Prosecuting Child Pornography Possession Based On Images Located
in Temporary Internet Files,” 19 Berkeley Tech. L.J. 1227, 1230 (Fall 2004)

Howard pointed out that the size of a cache can be customized allowing for
deceasing and increasing in its size. By increasing the size of a cache, the
child pornographer can view more files more quickly – something essential
when the computer being used is in the work place – but it occupies more
space on the computer’s hard drive. Id. These limitations on the size of the
cache forces the offender to create and then discard on a “first in, first out”
basis temporary Internet files. Id.

Ty Howard next described how a “forensic examination” of a computer is

conducted:
“Computer forensic examinations involve three basic steps: acquisition,
authentication, and recovery. First, the investigator must acquire the
electronic information contained on a computer or computer media. Once
the original computer is seized, the examiner makes an exact physical copy
or ‘mirror image’ of all the data from the hard drive to preserve the data
exactly as it existed at the time of seizure. To do so, the examiner may use a
commercially available software program such as EnCase. The software
alone, or in conjunction with some additional software, allows the examiner
to keep the data constant. Once the acquisition is completed, the software
allows the examiner to make a mirror image of all or part of the computer
media. The examiner can then use the mirror image for purposes of his
forensic examination without corrupting or altering the original hard drive.

“The second step of a forensic investigation involves authenticating the

electronic information acquired through the imaged computer media.
Authentication ensures that the forensic image and the original computer
media are identical. Again, the forensic software plays the primary role. The
software creates a mathematical validation figure called a message digest
(version 5) hash or what is generally referred to as an ‘MD5 hash.’ An MD5
hash is an algorithm that takes a large chunk of data and transforms it into a
number known as a hash or hash value. The hash value corresponds to the
precise content of the information contained in the imaged copy of the
seized computer, acting as a type of ‘electronic fingerprint’ that enables the
investigator to verify that the data on the imaged computer media is, and
remains, identical to the data on the original computer. If even one bit of
data is altered--say, one space of text is added-- the hash value would
change.

“The third step in a forensic examination is the recovery process through

which the forensic examiner actually views and analyzes the data. This
process entails the recovery of not only the data that was immediately
accessible to the suspect user, but also hidden files with renamed file
extensions, deleted files, evidence from swap files, evidence from file slack,
metadata from unallocated clusters, and other data. During the recovery
process, forensic examiners generally can recover any temporary Internet
files from a computer's cache, along with detailed information about those
files. In addition, examiners can learn extensive information about a
suspect's browsing history, including the particular websites visited, the
number of times visited, the degree of manipulation (such as enlarging,
cutting, or pasting) of images, and any downloading activity. Once the
examination is complete and the information has been gathered, prosecutors
must determine whether the results justify a criminal charge.” Id., 1232-36.

Courts have held that cache files containing images of child pornography
constitute a knowing possession of child pornography. See: United States v.
Romm, 455 F.3d 990, 999 (9th Cir. 2006). And it doesn’t make any
difference how many images there are. Houston resident Tom Zaratti learned
this the hard way. He was convicted by a jury of possessing a single
computer image of a child under the age of 18 years involved in sexual
intercourse and assessed a punishment of 10 years in prison and a fine of
$10,000. See: Zaratti v. State, 2006 WL 2506899 (Tex.App.-Houston [1st
Dist.] 2007).

And it doesn’t matter how the State comes by the evidence contained in
cache files. Dallas resident Gregg Hopwood was unable to turn on his
computer in January 2003. He took it to a repair center for repairs and
upgrades. Since he didn’t know what was wrong with the computer,
Hopwood simply asked the repair center to fix it. During the examination of
the computer, a technician discovered files containing child pornography.
The technician reported this information to law enforcement officials. It was
subsequently determined that the technician did not have to access the files
containing the child pornography in order to repair it. But that didn’t matter.
The only thing that mattered was the Hopwood’s computer contained child
pornography. Hopwood was placed under community supervision for ten
years and fined $1,000. See: Hopwood v. State, 2006 WL 349503
(Tex.App.-Dallas 2006).

Federal and state investigators told the CHRONICLE that they really don’t
know how many people in Harris County are child porn users. Since 2004
federal prosecutors have charged 38 people in the Houston/Galveston district
with child pornography offenses. During that same period the Harris County
District Attorney’s Office filed charges in 114 child pornography cases.
Thirty-one of the federal defendants and 77 of the state defendants plead
guilty because the computer evidence against them was so overwhelming.

“It’s just very difficult to put our heads around how many people are trading
this type of material,” Michele Collins told the CHRONICLE. “It’s certainly
is in demand, and it is a high-dollar business.”