A wrongly identified website button and other instances of possible police malfeasance may invalidate dozens of arrests and prosecutions, which ultimately may cause the collapse of Britain's largest-ever Internet child-porn sweep, Operation Ore, British news reports said over the weekend.
The reports indicated a Dallas police detective and a U.S. postal inspector claimed those going to the notorious Landslide child-porn site entered through a front-page button inviting users to click it for child porn—but an investigative journalist brought in as an expert witness, Duncan Campbell, showed the button was never on the front page but was deep inside the website.
"If someone is involved in child pornography, they should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. However, the fact that people seemingly were accused of buying or downloading CP and they were any actually buying adult content is frightening," said Association of Sites Advocating Child Protection Executive Director Joan Irvine. "It demonstrates that some law enforcement agencies do not understand how adult entertainment sites could unknowingly be used by child pornography criminals."
Irvine said her group demonstrated as much with hotline reports investigations in 2003, but Operation Ore "was already in progress, and ASACP did not have the validated data and professional recognition from law enforcement prior to this date."
Merseyside police officer Peter Johnston is said to have quit the force over his disgust with Operation Ore having turned into a witch hunt, while Operation Ore arrests led to at least 33 suicides, including that of the commander of British military forces in Gibraltar, David White, the British reports said.
“I began to doubt the validity of the evidence surrounding the circumstances of the initial investigation in America. … I found it difficult to rationalize how offenders had been identified solely on a credit card number,” Johnston said in a letter to one British newspaper.
A prosecution expert, computer technician Jim Bates, was quoted as saying records of Landslide credit card transactions may be unreliable as well, meaning names of suspected subscribers can't be used as evidence. In fact, Bates also said Landslide may have perpetrated "massive fraud," including an undetermined number of fake subscriptions. Landslide's mastermind, Thomas Reedy, turned out to have been under FBI investigation for fraud in the 1990s.
As it happened, the credit card number question ended up acquitting one Operation Ore suspect who could only prove his innocence at trial. Dr. Paul Grout, a Royal Hull Infirmary accident specialist, lost his 130,000-plus-pounds-a-year job – as well as numerous friends and almost his marriage – after he was accused in an Operation Ore arrest.
Gout's case collapsed when it got to trial in Hull Crown Court in 2004 after his attorneys showed he was a victim of identity theft: Someone said to be based in Lake Tahoe had access to and use of his credit card. The judge in the Grout case threw out some police evidence as "utter nonsense" and chastised prosecutors for withholding information critical to Grout's defense.
Another attorney for another Operation Ore suspect, Steve Barker, told reporters that police never disproved several Operation Ore defendants had found legal adult porn and not child porn, while other cases may have involved inadvertent child porn access by those seeking adult porn.
Operation Ore began three years ago when a list of 7,200 British child porn suspects was given to British law enforcement by American authorities. For its part, Britain's Child Protection Service has defended what it called those Operation Ore cases that led to guilty pleas.
CPS also said its own internal probe raised questions about evidence offered by a critical police witness named Brian Underhill. The CPS told reporters it would discuss that with defense attorneys before future Operation Ore-related trials get underway.
