Darknet: hunting online child abusers

Along with two Interpol colleagues, Det Sgt Michael Moran manages a nerve centre of global policing efforts against online child abuse, one of the darkest and most technically challenging crimes for police worldwide, writes RUADHÁN Mac CORMAICin Lyons

OFF A LONG CORRIDOR on the third floor of the Interpol headquarters in Lyons, the RTÉ radio news signature tune leads you to Det Sgt Michael Moran’s office, a narrow space made bigger by the window’s widescreen view of the Rhône river below. Were it not for the heavy security and the barbed-wire fence around the building it would be a standard-issue corporate office: stacks of reports, books, badges, hard drives and notebooks are piled high on the shelves and desktops. A tangled spider chart hangs on one wall, thick with digits and dots and impenetrable acronyms, and on the wall above Moran’s computer hangs a huge detailed map of the world. His patch.

Next door two of Moran’s colleagues in the human-trafficking section, Anders Persson and Bjørn-Erik Ludvigsen, sit before banks of computer screens, only the hum of the machines and the odd ringtone breaking the relaxed silence. From here the three officers manage a nerve centre of global policing efforts against online child abuse, one of the darkest and most technically challenging crimes for police worldwide.

There are no reliable figures about the scale of the trade. Its nature – the perpetrators, their methods, their victims – remains mysterious to all but a handful of experts in the field, not least, Moran believes, because child-abuse material (Interpol rejects the term child pornography, which it says implies consent and a certain social acceptance) remains one of the great taboos. There’s a line from Schopenhauer on the wall behind him. “All truth passes though three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”

“One of my opening gambits when I give talks is: let’s talk about death,” says Moran, a cheerful, energetic 42-year-old from Ashbourne, Co Meath, who has served as a criminal-intelligence officer at Interpol, on secondment from the Garda, since 2006. “We all know death is coming: there’s nothing surer. But yet we don’t want to talk about it, and we don’t think about it except in our darkest moments, or when it affects us or the people closest to us. Sexual abuse is the same. These are things people just don’t want to deal with. And that does stifle debate. It stifles policy decisions. It stifles academic inquiry.”

When Persson, the affable Swede who co-ordinates Interpol’s database of child-abuse material, arrived in Lyons, in 2001, the agency had information on just 30 identified victims worldwide. Today it knows of 2,200 identified victims, and its database, accessible to police in 23 countries (including Ireland), contains about 350,000 images. “The number of identified victims has increased in our database, but the real number is many, many times higher,” Persson says.

At one level the Interpol office is facing the quintessential modern crime. Its perpetrators use the internet, digital cameras, external hard drives, peer-to-peer networks and darknets – or closed private networks of computers – to create, distribute and collect material, then take advantage of some of globalisation’s paradoxes (ever more porous borders with no less divergent laws) to evade prosecution. There seems to be relatively little organised-crime involvement, and police believe little money changes hands.

An exception was the recent Operation Tornado, when police broke up an organised-crime gang in Belarus and Ukraine and found, to their surprise, that it was running about 200 websites selling child-abuse material. The gang had made about €5 million in less than six months, but, by the time they were caught, police in the US, Britain and Belarus – brought together by Interpol – were all in pursuit.

Thanks to deals agreed with credit-card and online-payment firms, such profit-making is rare and usually short-lived. Instead, says Moran, the crime is dominated by individuals who operate informal networks, with their own hierarchies and social codes. “There is no money-making here. This is like for like. That’s what is fascinating about this: it’s all about exchange.”

Online-child-abuse investigators work in a way that inverts the age-old police procedure of going after the suspect. The victim is their lead, the image their crime scene.

“I must admit that, in the beginning, of course, I was looking for the bad guy. If I saw a man’s hand I would look through more pictures, trying to see his face,” says Persson. “But every picture I looked through I had the victim in front of me, never thinking, Why not use the victim? When we find the victim, in most cases we also find the abuser.”

Finding the victim can be a complex task, however. When a new image is found by police and added to the Interpol database, software scans its graphic and colour patterns and matches it with any others that were taken by the same camera or in the same location. Technology then gives way to old-fashioned detective work, and officers begin painstakingly to scour the photos for clues. It’s time- consuming, laborious work, but it can be startlingly effective.

In one case Persson recalls from the mid 1990s, police found a batch of images circulating on the internet of a young girl being abused outdoors. Every summer, sets of new photos of the same victim with other children would appear online, but investigators had no idea where to begin their search. A Norwegian unit stepped forward, took control and began methodically poring over the 1,500 images belonging to the same set in the database. They called in vegetation experts to study the grass and the trees in the background and were told that they were taken somewhere in the north, either in Europe or in America. Geologists studied rocks in some of the photos to narrow it down further. Linguistic experts suggested the captions were written by non-native English speakers. And so it continued, the trawl gradually homing in on northern Europe, then on Sweden. After six years the abuser and 45 of his victims, including his own daughter, were identified.

“If you’re going after the people who possess it, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel,” says Moran. “There’s too many offenders. The volume is the biggest problem. I can go on to peer-to-peer networks here and I can show you 10, 15, 20 people trading child-abuse material in any country in the world. Just like that. A better use of our time is to examine and analyse all new child-abuse material coming on to the internet, with a view to identifying the children, thereby stopping the abuse of the child. Is that not a more important and honourable use of resources?”

As the world’s leading experts in the field, the Interpol team have long grappled with the question of a typical abuser profile. They believe none exists. In his office Moran stands up and draws a series of concentric circles on his whiteboard, the child in the middle surrounded first by parents, then extended family, teacher, sports coach, occasional visitors and strangers. “The stranger danger is a long way from the child, and yet we concentrate on teaching children about strangers: don’t get into cars, don’t talk to strangers and everything else. But the reality is it’s actually a lot closer to home.” About 85 per cent of sex-abuse cases occur within the family, he adds – an estimate consistent with figures released this week by Rape Crisis Network Ireland.

THE INTERPOL SPECIALISTS came to the field by accident. Persson jokes that, having learned in the mid 1990s how to save files to disk and move them between computers, “I became the computer expert”. As a long-time technophile, Moran was using the internet before most of his colleagues, and he found his skills in demand as online crime began to surge. Does such disturbing work not take a toll? “Any ordinary person who deals with this stuff, one of their biggest problems is helplessness,” Moran replies. “I can do something about it . . . My emphatic response is, How do I get this guy? Simple. When you’re at it a while you kind of get used to it. You get over it. The odd time you’ll see something that will hit you.”

He speaks passionately about the need for police to “normalise” and “de-technify” the internet rather than making it a specialist policing category that mystifies ordinary officers. Every police officer should receive basic training in online crime, and every station in the world should have unfettered access to the internet. Not only is the internet policeable, after all, but it’s often easier to police than the real world. A quick Facebook search for a criminal in Lyons will provide a full list of his criminal associates, Moran remarks. “On the internet you can do it very easily undercover, and you can do what I call yellow-jacket policing. You can get out there in high-vis jackets on the internet.”

Bjørn-Erik Ludvigsen is the Interpol team’s specialist in such policing. He runs the unit’s blocking system, in which websites containing the worst child-abuse material are made inaccessible to users in countries where such content is illegal. Blocking is a relatively new tactic, but in Norway, where it has been in place since 2004, the evidence shows that the number of hits on child-abuse websites has halved over the past six years. “So when it comes to child-abuse material on the web we’re actually winning,” says Ludvigsen.

To show the scale of the problem he opens a map of the world on his screen showing activity on a text-based child-abuse page as recorded at 7.30am on a Tuesday. South America has a few bright dots, but Africa has hardly any and Asia’s dots are confined mostly to developed zones such as Japan and South Korea. Europe and the US are glowing. In other words it’s a map of the world’s fast, cheap high-speed internet.

Although the authorities believe the web-based battle can be won, it becomes more difficult when users turn to peer-to-peer networks and darknets, where much of the trade in illicit material takes place. Police monitor and retrieve useful intelligence from such places, but a prosecution often requires the user to make a mistake. “People will slip up,” says Moran confidently. “They’re only criminals. They’re not Einsteins. The vast majority of criminals will get sloppy eventually.”

And when they do it can be a moment to savour for those at the front line. “When you identify a child you will not have a better feeling than when you hear that child has been safeguarded,” Moran says. “That’s very important to us. It allows us to justify a lot of the hard work we put in.”