Raids Nab 11 for Child Pornography

Police say high-tech investigation marks start of a crackdown
By: Trey Bundy

San Jose police led a team of local and federal law enforcement agencies that arrested 11 suspects Thursday on felony charges of possession of child pornography. More than 140 officers from 13 affiliate agencies, including Bay Area police departments and the FBI, participated in the raids, called “Operation Peer Block.”

“If you choose to share child pornography and victimize our children in the Bay Area, we are coming after you,” San Jose police chief Rob Davis said at a press conference Monday, stressing that Bay Area law enforcement agencies are ramping up efforts to capture anyone who exploits children on the Web. “There’s a saying in law enforcement that goes, ‘nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide.’ It could not be more applicable in this situation.”

The 10 San Jose suspects, along with one from Santa Clara, range in age from 17 to 65. All are suspected of sharing violent pornographic images and videos of children on the Internet.

The San Jose Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) task force spent six weeks using cutting-edge web-crawling software to locate the disturbing images and trace them back to specific computers. Kendra Nunes, a San Jose police detective in the ICAC unit, said investigators focused on videos and images depicting prepubescent victims of sadomasochism, bondage and bestiality.

“On each of the search warrants we were successful in finding what we were looking for,” Nunes said. “We didn’t come up empty on any of them.”

Authorities confiscated more than 70 computers during the raids, as well as DVDs and other media.

“Sometimes people say, ‘Well, it’s just a picture, what harm am I doing? It’s behind closed doors, I’m in private,’” Nunes said. “But if you were to talk to any child sexual abuse victim about their victimization and the fact that their pictures are circulating on the Internet forevermore, they’ll tell you that there’s a lot of harm done.”

Police said the ultimate goal of the operation is to locate the abusers and rescue the victims.

“What we know in this business is that children don’t report, typically, for a very long time,” Nunes said, “and so the abuse will continue and continue and continue, and our goal is to stop it, and prevent it from happening to someone else.”

The San Jose ICAC team will now begin using forensic computer programs to extract the child pornography from the seized computers. What investigators call “digital fingerprints” will then be sent to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which will analyze the material, try to identify the victims and possibly rescue some of them.

“Make no mistake about it,” Davis said. “This effort was one of the opening salvos. We now have agencies around the Bay Area that have seen this particular operation who are going to go back and begin to mimic this operation in their local jurisdictions as well.”