Legal challenge to web child abuse inquiry

Claim that hundreds were convicted through flawed credit card evidence

By Sandra Laville, crime correspondent

The Guardian, UK: 2 July 2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/jul/02/web-child-abuse-inquiry-challenge
[ http://tinyurl.com/n85xjn ]

One of Britain's biggest online paedophile inquiries is to be
challenged in the court of appeal amid allegations from campaigners
that hundreds of men have been wrongly convicted in a mass miscarriage
of justice.

For more than two years a small group of experts have claimed that
Operation Ore, the police inquiry into thousands of British men, was
tainted because the database at the centre of the investigation
contained evidence of widespread credit card fraud. Their allegations
will be tested for the first time in the appeal court within weeks,
when a judge examines a test case that could expose a huge miscarriage
of justice, lawyers say.

The single judge will decide whether the case should go to a full
appeal.

Chris Saltrese, the solicitor representing the convicted man, Anthony
O'Shea, said: "If his appeal is successful the convictions of others
for the same offence will fall too. We are talking in the hundreds and
we say this is a huge miscarriage of justice."

An estimated 39 men have killed themselves as a result of being
arrested and prosecuted during the Ore inquiry, and the details of
every individual who was convicted or cautioned have been placed on
the sex offenders register.

Senior officers in Ceop, the child exploitation and online protection
unit, who co-ordinated the inquiry, have been anticipating the test
case for some time. They are adamant that Ore was an extremely
successful operation, which led to more than 2,600 British men who
downloaded images of child abuse, or attempted to, being brought to
justice. The vast majority of them pleaded guilty.

Operation Ore began in 2001 after the conviction in America of a
couple behind Landslide Inc, an online trading company that provided
access to adult pornography and child abuse images.

US investigators passed the names of 7,100 Britons on the Landslide
database to the national criminal intelligence service, a forerunner
of Ceop.

The last prosecutions in Ore took place earlier this year.

O'Shea's case is one of an estimated 200 or more involving men who
were convicted of incitement to distribute indecent images of
children. A father of two, he was jailed for five months in 2005 for
two counts of incitement to distribute indecent photographs of
children and three of attempted incitement to distribute indecent
images. A lesser charge than possession, incitement was used in those
cases where someone's details were on the Landslide database but there
were no images found on the suspect's computer or in his home.

O'Shea's home was raided in 2002 but no images were found. Saltrese
said his case was that he accessed adult pornography but that his
legal team would produce evidence that his credit card had been
fraudulently used to access a paedophile site within Landslide.

At the time the card was used O'Shea was at a festival in the
south-west of England, Saltrese said.

Ceop says its figures suggest that 161 individuals were convicted of
incitement, with 68% pleading guilty. But Saltrese, who represents
dozens of those convicted, believes the figure could be much higher. A
separate campaign group says that it is dealing with the cases of more
than 80 men.

"I have clients who have lost everything: their jobs, their homes,
their marriages, their children and their health," Saltrese said.

He and his experts have been able to get a copy of the Landslide
database - which was never disclosed in full to the defence teams in
Ore cases.

"It is absolutely riddled with fraud," he said. "We are not just
talking about isolated incidents here. In some cases clients did make
a complaint to their credit card companies that they had been the
victims of fraud, in others they didn't, but that is kind of by the by
- even if they hadn't made a complaint we say the evidence against
them is unreliable."

But other experts who worked closely with the police during the Ore
inquiry and with defence teams strongly dispute the case put by
Saltrese and his team.

Professor Peter Sommer, a leading expert in computer crime, said:
"There were very high levels of correlation between people having
subscribed to that website and people being found in possession with
child abuse images.

"In the incitement cases they did not just use the details on the
database as a reason to prosecute. They went to the individual's bank
to confirm that transactions had taken place, they checked whether the
individual had ever complained that his card had been used
fraudulently. They did not charge everyone they investigated."

He said that although the defence teams were not allowed access to the
whole database, experts had been given access to parts of it. "I am
not saying there may not be individual cases where the convictions
might be unsafe but to say there was widespread fraud and a widespread
miscarriage of justice does not to my mind stand up."

Brian Underhill, the computer expert who travelled to America to copy
the Landslide database for the police as part of the Ore inquiry, told
the Guardian: "It's been two years since the allegation of widespread
credit card fraud was put forward and I have yet to see a fragment of
tangible evidence to support the allegation."

Ceop said that Operation Ore had involved an unprecedented number of
cases, each of which was tested several times to ensure the validity
of the intelligence and evidence before a prosecution was brought.

It said in a statement: "No evidence of widespread or endemic fraud
has ever been found in relation to cases pursued to prosecution as
part of Operation Ore. The veracity of any evidence to contradict this
should be tested in the criminal justice environment.

"To the best of our knowledge all incitement cases included additional
evidence to support the prosecution beyond simple, single credit card
details.

"At the time of Operation Ore, individuals were suspected of
subscribing to a website offering child abuse images. Those who had
would have provided personal data to a registration page... name,
postal address, email address, a personal password and their credit
card details... The IP address of the subscriber may have been
captured by the system.

"We would have expected that once a defendant had raised the
possibility of being a victim of credit card fraud, inquiries would be
undertaken in order to ascertain if that was correct."