Dreamboard bulletin trading in thousands of images to promote paedophilia causes 43 US arrests with 72 charged worldwide
Seventy-two people have been charged with participating in an international child abuse network that prosecutors say used an online bulletin board called Dreamboard to trade tens of thousands of images and videos of sexually abused children.
Attorney General Eric Holder and Homeland security secretary Janet Napolitano said on Wednesday that a 20-month law enforcement effort called Operation Delego targeted more than 600 Dreamboard members around the world for allegedly participating in the private, members-only internet club created to promote paedophilia.
Numerous participants in the network sexually abused children ages 12 and under, produced images and video of the abuse and then shared it with other club members, according to court papers released in the case.
Of the 72 charged in the United States, 43 have been arrested there, and nine in other countries. Another 20 are known to authorities only by their internet names and remain at large.
Authorities have arrested people in 13 other countries Canada, Denmark, Ecuador, France, Germany, Hungary, Kenya, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Qatar, Serbia, Sweden and Switzerland, but some of those were arrested on local rather than the US charges.
At a news conference at the Justice Department, the attorney general called the criminal activity a "nightmare for the children" and said that some of the children featured in the images and videos were just infants.
In many cases, the children being victimised were in obvious, and intentional, pain – just as the rules for one area of the bulletin board mandated, the attorney general said.
Napolitano said the amount of child abuse material swapped by participants in the network was massive, the equivalent to 16,000 DVDs.
To conceal their conduct, members used screen names rather than actual names and accessed the bulletin board via proxy servers, with internet traffic routed through other computers to disguise a user's location, according to the court papers.
Participants were required to continually upload images of child sexual abuse to maintain their membership.
Participants who molested children and created new images of child abuse were placed in a "Super VIP" category that gave them access to the entire quantity of child abuse on the bulletin board, the court papers stated.
A "super hardcore" section of the bulletin board was limited to posts showing adults having violent sexual intercourse with "very young kids" subjected to physical and sexual abuse.
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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/aug/03/child-abuse-website-multiple-arrests
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