Sex, Lies & Kids: Internet Boosts Child Pornography
By Lorna Thackeray, of The Gazette Staff
Originally published in The Billings Gazette, February 18, 2002
Tens of thousands of pictures of the most revolting stuff imaginable are stored on a small computer in the Billings office of Assistant U.S. Attorney Marcia Good Sept.
The machine contains vast collections of child pornography that Montana men have accumulated on their computers at home or at work—evidence Good plans to present at their trials for one of the fastest-growing crimes in the country.
There are pictures of children being tortured or in bondage; shots of toddlers being sodomized; and images of sex involving children and animals.
"It's just completely sickening," she said. And it's growing all across Montana.
"At any one time, I probably have 30 cases open," she said.
Not long ago she saw two or three a year.
"It's completely terrifying to me, the number we have in a state this small," she said. "I dread what we're going to see when we start getting proactive (in investigating)."
All of Good's current cases, and numerous cases she has prosecuted in the last two years, have more or less walked in law enforcement doors. Right now no one in Montana law enforcement is proactively searching for child pornographers on the Internet. But that's coming, Good said, and it's coming "very, very soon."
Suspects in current cases have come to law enforcement attention through computer repair services, spouses, fellow employees or employers. A couple have been reported as tips to "Innocent Images," an FBI initiative aimed at taking kiddie porn off line.
Most of the stuff is generated out of state, even out of country. But Good is putting together a case against a Montana man who purportedly took digital pictures of a child he was sexually abusing and distributed them over the Internet.
She expects there will be more. With computers, Good said, it's just so easy. During the 1970s, distribution of child pornography in print and on film was largely brought under control by Customs officials and Postal investigators, she said.
"With computers, it's 1,000 times as bad as it was," the prosecutor said.
Said the FBI's Vierthaler: "If you have any computer aptitude at all, it's shocking how easy it is (to get child pornography)."
He said his impression is that child pornography cases abruptly started appearing in the local FBI files a couple years ago, and never slowed down.
"We went from having none to suddenly it's become a significant aspect of what we do in this office," Vierthaler said. "Right now we have 26 pending cases in Eastern Montana alone."
According to national FBI statistics, between 1996 and 2000, the number of child pornography and child sexual exploitation cases grew from 113 to 1,541. The agency anticipates the numbers will continue to rise over the next few years.
"It's so pervasive in the medium itself," said Mike Mayott, a forensic computer analyst for the IRS. "If you don't know where to find it, somebody's going to take you by the hand and lead you."
Mayott is often called to search the computers of suspects in child pornography cases, and warns, "If you're doing it, we will eventually find you. If it's out there, we can get it, even if they've tried to make it go away. Even if it's erased, we can get it back."
A disturbing trend Mayott has noticed is that the age of the victims seems to be migrating downward.
"We now have victims who are pre-walking infants," he said. "Ten- to 16-year-olds used to be the thing."
Both boys and girls are victims, Good said, but the pornographers tend to have a definite preference for one or the other. They may also have age preferences or a hankering for redheads or certain poses. Child pornography buffs often have very specific interests and sometimes keep detailed filing systems of the images they have collected, she said.
So far no women with an interest in child pornography have surfaced in Montana, but Good said pornography often depicts women engaging in sexual acts with children.
The prosecutor said the people she goes after aren't men with a few pictures of bikini-clad teenagers. Defendants in her sights are people with clear attractions to child pornography, and lots of it.
"We don't ever have people with just a few," Good said. "They have hundreds, thousands and tens of thousands. In one case, the guy had between 40,000 and 50,000 images."
In almost every case, defendants simply are unable to grasp that they have done anything wrong, she said.
"They justify it with 'I was just looking at pictures,' " she said. "Somehow kids are not being harmed. They don't seem to make the connection that these are real children being raped for their benefit. That just drives me crazy."
