Old Laws Work Against Net Porn

There are several widely held notions about Internet-related crime. One holds that law enforcement cannot deal with quick-hit criminals whose global computer transactions can be accomplished in seconds. Another is that the police forces of many nations will never close ranks to share information and coordinate investigations. Still another holds that Washington must have the means to decode computer encryption if law enforcement is to do its job. As Times staff writers Mark Fritz and Solomon Moore showed last Friday in an article about a child pornography investigation, none are necessarily true.

U.S. Customs Service computer experts worked closely with local law enforcement and several foreign police agencies to conduct, over the course of two days, 100 raids in California and 21 other states and in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Britain, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain and Sweden. Their target was the largest Internet child pornography ring discovered to date, known as Wonderland.

“I’m unaware of another police operation that has ever pulled together so many law enforcement agencies worldwide,” Bob Packham, the deputy director general of Britain’s National Crime Squad, told a reporter.

Wonderland was a tight-knit group that freely traded 100,000 images of child pornography. Its members had production studios for live child sex shows that they transmitted over the Net. The operation had a computer-security designer and programming and hardware specialists who built a daunting array of codes and powerful encryption to maintain secrecy.

Encryption employs complicated algorithms to scramble documents until they can be decoded by the intended receiver. Although encryption surely will be a backbone of trust and security in the electronic communications and business transactions of the future, U.S. federal law enforcement agencies presently maintain that they need access and eavesdropping ability to prevent criminals from plying their trade in secrecy. But in the child pornography case, traditional law enforcement means like wiretaps, search warrants and message tracing proved sufficient. In other words, traditional methods were applied to a new medium.

Some privacy advocates are unnerved by what they see as entrapment in this case, but that’s preposterous. Depravity has been brought to light. Some of the children depicted have been identified as relatives and neighbors of accused Wonderland members.

This case exposes vile secrets. But more important, it shows how an electronically well-defended crime ring can be broken without overarching laws and assaults on privacy.