Online gathering sites bring pedophiles out of shadows

By Michael Ko and Mike Carter
Seattle Times staff reporters

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For several months before foster father Ronald Harold Young was arrested, investigators say, he met people in at least two Internet newsgroups, where they talked openly about pedophilia and in one exchanged pictures of young boys engaged in sex acts.

Internet chat rooms, newsgroups and free e-mail providers such as Hotmail and Yahoo! have helped pedophiles find a community where just a decade ago they lived in the shadows, say cybercrime investigators.

"The Internet has provided a network, a support group to facilitate this behavior," said Det. Sgt. Chris Gundermann, supervisor of the State Patrol missing and exploited children's task force. "I don't think law enforcement, our nation, has a grasp of how big this problem really is."

One thing is certain, investigators say: Child pornographers are becoming more and more brazen and open.

In the past, the kinds of photos found in association with the Young investigation could only have been obtained through the mail. Child pornographers and collectors were solitary criminals, rarely daring to venture out.

Now they've got a community as close as their keyboard, and law enforcement lacks the resources to come close to keeping track of them.

"What the Internet has done is expose this underground that has existed in one form or another for decades," said FBI Supervisory Special Agent Greg Fowler.

"It becomes easy to exchange images. The false anonymity nature of it lends these people some sort of comfort," he said.

Young, 41, a Pierce County resident, is charged with 44 crimes related to child rape and exploitation. Prosecutors and police believe he took digital pictures of sexual acts with his six foster children, which he distributed on the Internet to other pedophiles. He was arrested last week.
 
Yesterday, a former school superintendent in Leavenworth, Patrick Lyons, was charged with possessing and distributing child pornography on a school computer.

And in another case, a 69-year-old Seattle-area man was recently charged in U.S. District Court, accused of traveling all the way to Cambodia to stalk and have sex with two homeless boys.

Despite the increased visibility of pedophiles, cybercrime investigators say tracking, quantifying and combating child pornography in cyberspace remains difficult.

One reason is child pornography often crosses state and national borders. It's not uncommon, for example, for a picture to be distributed by a computer in Florida and viewed on one in Washington.

And what do authorities in the U.S. do if a Web site is distributing child porn from Europe, Russia or Asia? In general, child porn is less regulated overseas.

Pedophiles also tend to hide in the sheer volume of cyberspace. Many pedophiles use anonymous e-mail addresses and free accounts.

They use peer-to-peer technology, similar to the uploading and downloading of music files, that is much less obvious.

FBI Special Agent Marie Gilliam, a cybercrime investigator, notes there are tens of thousands of newsgroups, visited by millions of people, that cater to almost anything that can be imagined. And that doesn't take into account the private real-time chat rooms where images can be exchanged.

It's impossible to comb all of them, said the State Patrol's Gundermann, who has four full-time detectives on his team.

However, the same technology pedophiles use to hinder their discovery can be used against them, Gilliam said.

Once offensive photographs are found, it is sometimes possible to trace them back to the sender. Which is what happened in the Young case.

Like most local agencies, Pierce County relies on leads from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Since March 1998, the center's CyberTipline generated more than 200,000 tips related to child pornography, including about 82,000 last year.

The center reviews these tips and forwards them to the local agencies.

Gundermann says child pornography is part of a much greater continuum of overall crimes against children:

There are people who might just watch and fantasize. There are people who actually molest boys and girls.

And there are stalkers, who groom young boys and girls online and then try to arrange meetings. Each requires a slightly different approach.

Authorities are dealing with people who have very strong urges.

Gundermann theorizes that "people with these tendencies are first curious, then obsessive compulsive with photos, then interacting through chat rooms, then befriending children, then they act out.

"The computer has provided a forum to accelerate those tendencies," he says.

People who have these tendencies are obsessive and compulsive, Gundermann says. "They trade images much like children trade baseball cards."

This type of law enforcement is difficult work for the officers themselves.

Gundermann says most cops aren't eager to volunteer to spend their days watching and investigating thousands of graphic images of children being raped and molested.

"This is hard work for investigators," Gundermann said. "I've got four kids, and to be honest, I'd rather investigate fatality collisions than look at these images.

"But it's important work. I really believe if we deal with the people who are obsessed with child porn, we're protecting kids."

Material from The Associated Press is included in this report.

Michael Ko: 206-515-5653 or mko@seattletimes.com

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company