SEXUAL EXPLOITATION OF 

CHILDREN OVER THE INTERNET: 

THE FACE OF A CHILD PREDATOR 

AND OTHER ISSUES 

HEARING 

BEFORE THE 

SUBCOMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND 

INVESTIGATIONS 

OF THE 

COMMITTEE ON ENERGY AND 

COMMERCE 

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES 

ONE HUNDRED NINTH CONGRESS 

SECOND SESSION 

SEPTEMBER 26, 2006 

Serial No. 109-143 

Printed for the use of the Committee on Energy and Commerce 

Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.access.gpo.gov/congress/house 

U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE 

WASHINGTON : 2006 

For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office 

Internet: bookstore.gpo.gov Phone: toll free (866) 512-1800; DC area (202) 512-1800 

Fax: (202) 512-2250 Mail: Stop SSOP, Washington, DC 20402-0001 

31-469PDF 
COMMITTEE ON ENERGY AND COMMERCE 

JOE BARTON, Texas, Chairman 

RALPH M. HALL, Texas 

MICHAEL BILIRAKIS, Florida 

 Vice Chairman 

FRED UPTON, Michigan 

CLIFF STEARNS, Florida 

PAUL E. GILLMOR, Ohio 

NATHAN DEAL, Georgia 

ED WHITFIELD, Kentucky 

CHARLIE NORWOOD, Georgia 

BARBARA CUBIN, Wyoming 

JOHN SHIMKUS, Illinois 

HEATHER WILSON, New Mexico 

JOHN B. SHADEGG, Arizona 

CHARLES W. “CHIP” PICKERING, Mississippi 

 Vice Chairman

VITO FOSSELLA, New York 

ROY BLUNT, Missouri

STEVE BUYER, Indiana 

GEORGE RADANOVICH, California 

CHARLES F. BASS, New Hampshire 

JOSEPH R. PITTS, Pennsylvania 

MARY BONO, California 

GREG WALDEN, Oregon 

LEE TERRY, Nebraska 

MIKE FERGUSON, New Jersey 

MIKE ROGERS, Michigan 

C.L. “BUTCH” OTTER, Idaho 

SUE MYRICK, North Carolina 

JOHN SULLIVAN, Oklahoma 

TIM MURPHY, Pennsylvania 

MICHAEL C. BURGESS, Texas 

MARSHA BLACKBURN, Tennessee 

JOHN D. DINGELL, Michigan 

 Ranking Member 

HENRY A. WAXMAN, California 

EDWARD J. MARKEY, Massachusetts 

RICK BOUCHER, Virginia 

EDOLPHUS TOWNS, New York 

FRANK PALLONE, JR., New Jersey 

SHERROD BROWN, Ohio 

BART GORDON, Tennessee 

BOBBY L. RUSH, Illinois 

ANNA G. ESHOO, California 

BART STUPAK, Michigan 

ELIOT L. ENGEL, New York 

ALBERT R. WYNN, Maryland 

GENE GREEN, Texas 

TED STRICKLAND, Ohio 

DIANA DEGETTE, Colorado 

LOIS CAPPS, California 

MIKE DOYLE, Pennsylvania 

TOM ALLEN, Maine 

JIM DAVIS, Florida 

JAN SCHAKOWSKY, Illinois 

HILDA L. SOLIS, California 

CHARLES A. GONZALEZ, Texas 

JAY INSLEE, Washington 

TAMMY BALDWIN, Wisconsin 

MIKE ROSS, Arkansas 

BUD ALBRIGHT, Staff Director 

DAVID CAVICKE, General Counsel

REID P. F. STUNTZ, Minority Staff Director and Chief Counsel

UBCOMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS 

ED WHITFIELD, Kentucky, Chairman 

CLIFF STEARNS, Florida 

CHARLES W. “CHIP” PICKERING, Mississippi 

CHARLES F. BASS, New Hampshire 

GREG WALDEN, Oregon 

MIKE FERGUSON, New Jersey 

MICHAEL C. BURGESS, Texas 

MARSHA BLACKBURN, Tennessee 

JOE BARTON, Texas 

 (EX OFFICIO)

BART STUPAK, Michigan 

 Ranking Member 

DIANA DEGETTE, Colorado 

JAN SCHAKOWSKY, Illinois 

JAY INSLEE, Washington 

TAMMY BALDWIN, Wisconsin 

HENRY A. WAXMAN, California 

JOHN D. DINGELL, Michigan 

 (EX OFFICIO)

(II)
CONTENTS 

Page 

Testimony of: 

Eichenwald, Kurt, Reporter, The New York Times Company ......................................... 13 

Hernandez, Dr. Andres, Director, Bureau of Prisons’ Sex Offender Treatment 

Program, Federal Bureau of Prisons, U.S. Department of Justice ................................ 65 

Salter, Dr. Anna Carol, Psychologist .................................................................................. 70 

Jenkins, Dr. Philip, Professor, History and Religious Studies, Pennsylvania State 

University ....................................................................................................................... 112 

Krawawecz, Thomas, Chief Executive Officer, Blue Gravity Communications, Inc. ...... 149 

Jones, Christine, General Counsel, GoDaddy.com, Inc. .................................................... 153 

(III) 

(1) 

SEXUAL EXPLOITATION OF CHILDREN 

OVER THE INTERNET: THE FACE OF A 

CHILD PREDATOR AND OTHER ISSUES 

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 2006 

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, 

COMMITTEE ON ENERGY AND COMMERCE, 

SUBCOMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS, 

Washington, DC. 

 The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:10 a.m., in Room 

2123 of the Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Ed Whitfield 

(Chairman) presiding. 

 Members present: Representatives Whitfield, Walden, Ferguson, 

Burgess, Blackburn, Barton (ex officio), and Stupak. 

 Staff present: Mark Paoletta, Chief Counsel for Oversight and 

Investigations; Kelli Andrews, Counsel; Karen Christian, Counsel; Ryan 

Ambrose, Legislative Clerk; David Nelson, Minority 

Investigator/Economist; Jonathan Brater, Minority Staff Assistant; and 

Elizabeth Ertel, Minority Senior Staff Assistant. 

 MR. WHITFIELD. I would like to call this hearing to order this 

morning. And today the subcommittee is holding its seventh hearing on 

the topic of the Sexual Exploitation of Children over the Internet. 

During the past 6 months, the subcommittee has learned a lot about what 

industry and law enforcement is doing and can do to combat the 

proliferation of sexually exploited images of children over the Internet. 

And I must say all of us have been appalled at the proliferation of this 

problem over the Internet. Today, we are going to turn to a different 

topic, and that is hopefully learning more about the child predators that 

seek to harm children. 

 We are going to hear from a distinguished panel today. First, we 

have two witnesses that are with us by video conferencing, Dr. Philip 

Jenkins, from Penn State University, and Dr. Anna Salter, a clinical 

psychologist based in Madison, Wisconsin. I know that there has been 

some technical issues relating to Dr. Salter, but we hope that she will be 

here and we appreciate her sharing with us the interview that she 

conducted with a convicted child sex offender. We saw this video prior 

to the hearing, and we are prepared to ask some questions regarding that 

video. 
2

 Dr. Jenkins, we look forward to hearing your observations of the 

online pedophile message boards that you were able to infiltrate a few 

years ago and more about your thoughts on this dangerous online 

community. I also look forward to hearing from Dr. Hernandez about 

the Bureau of Prisons and the only sex offender treatment program in the 

country that they have and to discuss the study that you published in 

2000 about the offenders you were treating that showed a link between 

possession of child pornography and contact offenses with children. 

 I also want to thank Mr. Kurt Eichenwald of the New York Times. I 

would say that with his work in this area he provided us a wonderful 

service not only to this committee, but also to the country and his 

journalism really spurred this subcommittee’s action on this issue. I 

want to thank him also for his work and wish him well as he closes out a 

20-year career at the New York Times next week and begins writing for 

a new publication, so we wish you the very best in your future 

challenges, Mr. Eichenwald. I would say that your work about online 

child exploitation has been illuminating and we look forward to hearing 

more today about your observations of the online pedophile community, 

as well as concerns you have about child modeling sites. I am also 

interested in hearing about the new information that you provided the 

committee which shows in detail how pedophiles share their tips on 

evading detection from law enforcement. These are savvy criminals that 

will stop at nothing to insure that they can continue to build up their 

collections of sick sexually exploited images of children. 

 I would also be interested to hear from our experts today whether 

there is a so-called profile of a child predator, and, if not, are there any 

signs that parents and children should be aware of that can give them a 

clue as to whether or not an individual may be a child predator. On the 

second panel we will switch focus a bit and hear from the leading U.S. 

domain name registry company called GoDaddy, and from a Web 

hosting company, Blue Gravity Communications, about the steps they 

can take to remove content involving he sexual exploitation of children 

off of their network. 

 As I understand it, GoDaddy, in addition to being a domain registry 

company, also provides Web hosting services. It is imperative that at 

every step of this process in setting up websites from the domain name 

registry to signing up with the Web hosting company and to finally 

getting connectivity to the site with an ISP that we encourage industry to 

be as aggressive and innovative as possible, and take appropriate steps to 

investigate and weed out sites that sexually exploit children. I want to 

thank all the witnesses for being here today, and at this time I recognize 

the gentleman from Michigan, Mr. Stupak. 

 [The prepared statement of Hon. Ed Whitfield follows:] 
3

PREPARED STATEMENT OF THE HON. ED WHITFIELD, CHAIRMAN, SUBCOMMITTEE ON 

OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS

 GOOD MORNING. TODAY THE SUBCOMMITTEE IS HOLDING ITS 

SEVENTH HEARING ON THE TOPIC OF THE SEXUAL EXPLOITATION OF 

CHILDREN OVER THE INTERNET. OVER THE COURSE OF THE PAST SIX 

MONTHS, THE SUBCOMMITTEE HAS LEARNED A LOT ABOUT WHAT 

INDUSTRY AND LAW ENFORCEMENT IS DOING AND CAN DO TO COMBAT 

THE PROLIFERATION OF SEXUALLY EXPLOITATIVE IMAGES OF CHILDREN 

OVER THE INTERNET. 

 TODAY, WE TURN TO AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT TOPIC—LEARNING 

MORE ABOUT THE CHILD PREDATORS THAT SEEK TO HARM CHILDREN. 

WE ARE GOING TO HEAR FROM A VERY DISTINGUISHED PANEL TODAY. 

FIRST, WE HAVE TWO WITNESSES THAT ARE WITH US TODAY VIA 

VIDEOCONFERENCING—DR. PHILIP JENKINS, FROM PENN STATE 

UNIVERSITY AND DR. ANNA SALTER, A CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGIST BASED 

IN MADISON WISCONSIN. DR. SALTER, WE APPRECIATE YOU SHARING 

WITH US THE INTERVIEW YOU CONDUCTED WITH A CONVICTED CHILD 

SEX OFFENDER AND WE ARE PREPARED TO ASK YOU SOME QUESTIONS 

ABOUT THAT. DR JENKINS, WE LOOK FORWARD TO HEARING YOUR 

OBSERVATIONS OF THE ON-LINE PEDOPHILE MESSAGE BOARDS YOU 

WERE ABLE TO INFILTRATE A FEW YEARS AGO AND MORE ABOUT YOUR 

THOUGHTS ON THIS DANGEROUS ON-LINE COMMUNITY. I ALSO LOOK 

FORWARD TO HEARING FROM DR. HERNANDEZ ABOUT THE BUREAU OF 

PRISONS ONLY SEX OFFENDER TREATMENT PROGRAM IN THE COUNTRY 

AND TO DISCUSS THE STUDY HE PUBLISHED IN 2000 ABOUT THE 

OFFENDERS HE WAS TREATING WHICH SHOWED A LINK BETWEEN 

POSSESSION OF CHILD PORNOGRAPHY AND CONTACT OFFENSES WITH 

CHILDREN. 

 I WOULD ALSO LIKE TO THANK MR. KURT EICHENWALD OF THE NEW 

YORK TIMES FOR TESTIFYING A SECOND TIME AT OUR HEARING ON THIS 

TOPIC. YOUR WORK ABOUT ON-LINE CHILD EXPLOITATION HAS BEEN 

VERY ILLUMINATING AND WE LOOK FORWARD TO HEARING MORE ABOUT 

YOUR OBSERVATIONS OF THE ON-LINE PEDOPHILE COMMUNITY, AS WELL 

AS, CONCERNS YOU HAVE ABOUT “CHILD MODELING SITES.” I AM ALSO 

INTERESTED IN HEARING ABOUT THE NEW INFORMATION THAT MR. 

EICHENWALD PROVIDED THE COMMITTEE, WHICH SHOWS IN DETAIL HOW 

THESE PEDOPHILES SHARE THEIR TIPS ON EVADING DETECTION BY LAW 

ENFORCEMENT. THESE ARE SAVVY CRIMINALS THAT WILL STOP AT 

NOTHING TO ENSURE THAT THEY CAN CONTINUE TO BUILD UP THEIR 

COLLECTIONS OF SICK SEXUALLY EXPLOITATIVE IMAGES OF CHILDREN. I 

WILL ALSO BE INTERESTED TO HEAR FROM OUR EXPERTS TODAY 

WHETHER THERE IS A SO-CALLED ‘PROFILE” OF A CHILD PREDATOR AND 

IF NOT, ARE THERE ANY SIGNS THAT PARENTS AND CHILDREN SHOULD BE 

AWARE OF THAT CAN CLUE THEM IN TO WHETHER AN INDIVIDUAL MAY 

BE A CHILD PREDATOR. 

 ON THE SECOND PANEL, WE WILL SWITCH FOCUS A BIT AND HEAR 

FROM THE LEADING U.S. DOMAIN NAME REGISTRY COMPANY, CALLED, 

“GO DADDY” AND FROM A WEB HOSTING COMPANY, BLUE GRAVITY 

COMMUNICATIONS, ABOUT THE STEPS THEY CAN TAKE TO REMOVE 

CONTENT INVOLVING THE SEXUAL EXPLOITATION OF CHILDREN OFF 

THEIR NETWORK. AS I UNDERSTAND IT, GO DADDY –IN ADDITION TO 

BEING A DOMAIN REGISTRY COMPANY, ALSO PROVIDES WEB HOSTING 
4

SERVICES. IT IS IMPERATIVE THAT AT EVERY STEP OF THE PROCESS IN 

SETTING UP WEBSITES—FROM THE DOMAIN NAME REGISTRY TO SIGNING 

UP WITH A WEB HOSTING COMPANY, AND TO FINALLY GETTING 

CONNECTIVITY TO THE SITE WITH AN ISP-- WE ENCOURAGE INDUSTRY TO 

BE AS AGGRESSIVE AS POSSIBLE AND TAKE THE APPROPRIATE STEPS TO 

INVESTIGATE AND WEED OUT SITES THAT SEXUALLY EXPLOIT CHILDREN. 

I THANK ALL THE WITNESSES FOR BEING HERE TODAY. 

 MR. STUPAK. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would like to thank our 

first panel of expert witnesses for helping us better understand child 

predators and the threat they pose to our children. Thank you, Mr. 

Eichenwald, for testifying for the committee about your ongoing 

investigation and reporting and good luck in your future endeavors. The 

subcommittee’s investigations and hearings have been comprehensive 

and in depth. Importantly, these hearings have educated the public on 

the dangers of Internet child predators and the hearings have forced 

change in the industry. 

 We have heard from Web search engines, Internet service providers, 

telecommunications companies, cable companies, and financial services 

industry. Each segment of the industry has been held to account and 

each industry player has stepped forward at these hearings to say we can 

do better. Today, I look forward to the testimony of GoDaddy and Blue 

Gravity Communications. The Web hosting and domain name 

registration companies can and must do better to protect our children and 

rid their systems of child pornography. Throughout our investigation, I 

have been impressed with the voluntary action that Ernie Allen and the 

Center for Missing and Exploited Children have elicited from large 

Internet companies. 

 However, voluntary action by a few of the private sector firms 

involved is insufficient. For example, we heard last week from the 

largest credit card companies and banks that they are making an effort to 

end the use of their products by child pornographers, but we also heard 

that companies like MasterCard work to eliminate child pornography 

from their systems these criminals just move to alternate payment 

methods like e-gold and other unregulated digital currencies. In the 

months ahead, it is critical that this subcommittee continue to hold all 

segments of industry accountable through oversight and through 

legislation. 

 This committee needs to look to best practices, not only in the U.S., 

but globally as well and enact the legislation that will root out these child 

predators and block them from harming our children. I was proud to 

offer an amendment to the telecommunications bill that will for the first 

time require Internet service providers to take action to block child 

pornography from their networks. This amendment requires Internet 

service providers to be proactive, not merely reactive. But there is more 
5

we can do. We know from previous testimony that fewer than 300 of the 

few thousand Internet service providers are registered with the National 

Center for Missing and Exploited Children. 

 Today we will hear from a Web hosting company that periodically 

receives complaints about child pornography on its servers but had never 

implemented any system for searching for the source of that content and 

has only recently begun to report it. While Internet service providers are 

required by law to report child pornography to the National Center for 

Missing and Exploited Children Web hosting companies are not. This is 

yet another hole in the system that must be addressed. 

 The committee should build on my amendment to require all Internet 

firms that are search engines, Internet service providers, domain 

registrars, and host websites to actively search for child pornography on 

their system, notify the national committee, and then remove any and all 

content that is identified as child porn from their servers. The United 

Kingdom was able to reduce the identified illegal content hosted on 

British-based servers from 18 percent to 4/10th of 1 percent of the 

worldwide total. The United States has over 40 percent of the 

commercial child porn websites on U.S. servers. 

 I understand, however, that as we succeed in greatly reducing or 

eliminating the child pornography commercial sites hosted on U.S. 

servers the criminals are moving their operations abroad. Our response 

to child pornography and exploitation on the Internet must be global. 

Again, we can look to the British model. British Telecom has created the 

software to block any UK ISP from connecting with identified child porn 

sites anywhere in the world. Furthermore, British Telecom has made this 

offer available free of charge to any Internet provider. We are told that 

all telecom companies in Britain that connect customers to the Web will 

have the British Telecom software or similar blocking software in place 

by the end of this year. 

 Mr. Chairman, we have learned from these hearings the technologies 

and strategies at work to rid the Internet of child pornography and best 

protect our children. We have also learned there are efforts in the U.S. 

have been lacking. It is time to roll up our sleeves, put this committee to 

work. Mr. Chairman, thank you again for holding this hearing. I yield 

back the balance of my time. 

 MR. WHITFIELD. Thank you very much, Mr. Stupak, and at this time 

I recognize the Chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, Mr. 

Barton, for his opening statement. 

 CHAIRMAN BARTON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and Mr. Stupak for 

this continuing series of hearings in child pornography and what normal, 

decent citizens can do about it. Today we are going to hear testimony 

from a distinguished panel of witnesses about the pedophile and child 
6

predator community. This topic represents a bit of a shift for the 

subcommittee. We spent months investigating the response by law 

enforcement, educators, prosecutors, Internet service providers, and 

financial institutions to Internet child pornography. This hearing is the 

first time we will focus solely on those individuals who actually seek or 

desire to sexually exploit children. 

 The witnesses on this panel are experts in what makes pedophiles or 

child predators tick, why they desire children and what can be done 

about it, if anything. I would like to welcome Drs. Hernandez, Jenkins, 

and Salter to our hearing. I thank them for taking the time to share their 

expertise with the committee. I also want to thank Mr. Kurt Eichenwald 

of the New York Times. It is a bit of a stretch for me to thank anybody 

from the New York Times, but I do want to thank you, sir. This is the 

second time that Mr. Eichenwald has testified before our subcommittee. 

It was his article about Justin Berry published in December of last year 

that brought the issue of Internet child pornography to our attention. Mr. 

Eichenwald has recently published two more articles on the subject. I 

want to comment you, sir, for what you have done to bring this issue to 

light. I look forward to your testimony today. 

 Our second panel of witnesses continue our subcommittee’s focus on 

the role of industry in fighting this scourge. We are going to hear from 

two companies that are involved in two key steps in establishing a 

website. One company named GoDaddy.com is the largest domain name 

registration company in the United States. It also hosts or provides Web 

hosting services. The second company, Blue Gravity Communications, 

only provides Web hosting. As I understand it, the first step in setting up 

a website is to register a domain site. The second step is to contract with 

the Web hosting company that would allow the content of the website to 

reside on their servers. 

 Typically, Web hosting companies are not able to access or change 

the content that appears on the websites that they host. Obviously, any 

effort to combat the Internet child pornography problem must address the 

role of domain registration and Web hosting because without them many 

child pornography websites would not be available to the child predators 

whose desires are fueled by the images that they see. Ms. Christine 

Jones of GoDaddy.com is the first witness on the second panel. She is 

going to testify about her company’s efforts to investigate and take down 

child pornography websites that have either registered their domain 

names with GoDaddy or are hosted by them. 

 I look forward to learning what Ms. Jones believes domain 

registration and Web hosting companies can do to prevent child 

pornography from ever reaching the Internet. I am also interested in 

learning more about the child modeling website phenomenon that 
7

GoDaddy is currently witnessing. The fact that GoDaddy has found 

these websites are often linked to child pornography sites. The second 

witness, Mr. Thomas Krwawecz, owns a Web hosting company in New 

Jersey called Blue Gravity Communications. Mr. Krwawecz is here 

under subpoena today because our committee’s investigation revealed 

that his company perhaps unwittingly has hosted so-called child 

modeling websites. 

 These websites display pictures of young girls posed in a sexual 

provocative manner and in sexual clothing. I can think of no good 

reason for a young child to be posing this way other than to appeal to the 

sexual interests of child predators and pedophiles. I understand that Mr. 

Krwawecz took these sites down. We would like to thank him for doing 

that upon receiving our subpoena. I look forward to learning more about 

his Web hosting company and how he became involved with these socalled child modeling websites. 

 Again, I want to thank you, Mr. Whitfield, you, Mr. Stupak, and 

although he is not here, Mr. Dingell, for working together in a bipartisan 

fashion on this hearing. There is nothing more important in our society 

than protecting our children. And I want to commend this subcommittee 

for beginning to fight back and do just that. And with that, Mr. 

Chairman, I yield back. 

 [The prepared statement of Hon. Joe Barton follows:] 

PREPARED STATEMENT OF THE HON. JOE BARTON, CHAIRMAN, COMMITTEE ON ENERGY 

AND COMMERCE

 Thank you, Chairman Whitfield, for convening this hearing. 

 Today, we will hear testimony from a distinguished panel of witnesses about the 

pedophile and child predator community. This topic represents a bit of a shift for our 

Subcommittee. While we have spent months investigating the response by law 

enforcement, educators, prosecutors, Internet Service Providers, and financial institutions 

to Internet child pornography, this hearing is the first time we will focus solely on those 

individuals who actually seek or desire to sexually exploit children. The witnesses on 

this panel are experts in what makes pedophiles or child predators tick, why they desire 

children, and what can be done about it, if anything. I welcome Doctors Hernandez, 

Jenkins, and Salter to our hearing, and I thank them for taking the time to share their 

expertise and advice with us. 

 I would also like to recognize Mr. Kurt Eichenwald of the The New York Times. 

This is the second time Mr. Eichenwald has testified before this Subcommittee. It was 

Mr. Eichenwald’s article about Justin Berry published in December of last year that 

brought the issue of Internet child pornography to our attention. Mr. Eichenwald has 

recently published two more articles on the subject. I commend Mr. Eichenwald for all 

he has done to bring this issue to light, and I look forward to his testimony today. 

 Our second panel of witnesses continues our Subcommittee’s focus on the role of 

industry in fighting this scourge. We will hear from two companies that are involved in 

two key steps in establishing a website. One company, GoDaddy.com, is the largest 

domain name registration company in the United States, and also provides web hosting 

services. The second company, Blue Gravity Communications, Inc., only provides web 
8

hosting. As I understand it, the first step in setting up a website is to register a domain 

name. The second step is to contract with a web hosting company that will allow the 

content of the website to reside on their servers. Typically, web hosting companies are 

not able to access or change the content that appears on the websites they host. 

Obviously, any effort to combat the Internet child pornography problem must address the 

role of domain registration and web hosting, because without them, many commercial 

child pornography websites would not be available to the child predators whose desires 

are fueled by the images they see. 

 Ms. Christine Jones of GoDaddy.com is the first witness on our second panel. Ms. 

Jones will testify about her company’s efforts to investigate and take down child 

pornography websites that have either registered their domain names with GoDaddy or 

are hosted by them. I look forward to learning what Ms. Jones believes domain 

registration and web hosting companies can do to prevent child pornography from ever 

reaching the Internet. I am also interested in learning more about the child modeling 

website phenomenon GoDaddy is currently witnessing, and the fact that GoDaddy has 

found that these websites are often linked to child pornography sites. 

 The second witness, Mr. Thomas Krwawecz, owns a web-hosting company in New 

Jersey called Blue Gravity Communications, Inc. Mr. Krwawecz is here under subpoena 

today because our Committee’s investigation revealed that his company, perhaps 

unwittingly, hosted “child modeling” websites. These websites displayed pictures of 

young girls posed in a sexual, provocative manner and in sexual clothing. There is no 

reason for a child to be posed in this way other than to appeal to the sexual interests of 

child predators and pedophiles. I understand that Mr. Krwawecz took these sites down 

upon receiving our subpoena. I look forward to learning more about his web-hosting 

company and how he came to be involved with these so-called “child modeling” 

websites. 

 Thank you again, Chairman Whitfield, for convening this important hearing. I yield 

back the balance of my time. 

 MR. WHITFIELD. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. At this time, I 

recognize the gentleman from New Jersey for his opening statement, Mr. 

Ferguson. 

 MR. FERGUSON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you, Mr. 

Stupak, for this continuing series of hearings on this topic which has 

become very important to all of us the more we have learned about it 

over the last several months. I want to thank our witnesses for coming 

before the committee to testify today. I particularly want to thank Kurt 

Eichenwald, who has spent a lot of time bringing this sordid world to 

light. Kurt, thanks for your work on this important topic and again for 

coming to Washington to share your expertise with us. I also thank the 

rest of our witnesses for testifying today as well. 

 In the past several months, we have all become uncomfortably 

familiar with the topic at hand and with every hearing we learn a little bit 

more about it. One of the topics of today’s hearing, child modeling 

websites, is one that would not seem to pose a danger to our children 

when in fact young girls are often blatantly marketed in a sexual manner 

on these websites. Child pornographers feel that they can evade law 

enforcement by running websites featuring children with clothing, no 
9

matter how little. This should not be the case. I also appreciate our other 

witnesses coming to help us get to the root of who a child predator really 

is. 

 As we will hear, the grooming process that people put these young 

children through is absolutely sickening, and some of us have had an 

opportunity to view a video of an interview of someone who is 

incarcerated because of molesting young children and just about the 

process he would go through and how he would learn and choose his 

victims and groom these kids and their families in order to victimize 

them. These people prey on the young and the impressionable. They 

earn their trust, and then they take advantage of their innocence. We will 

hear today that possession of child pornography opens the door to sexual 

offenses against children, and while this his undoubtedly important 

information to know, the question becomes how do we stop it? 

 I am glad that this issue has become a priority for Chairman 

Whitfield and for this subcommittee and Mr. Stupak and the other 

members of the subcommittee. It should really become a priority for this 

Congress. It is our job as lawmakers, as educators, but most importantly 

as parents to protect our children at all cost. Again, I want to thank the 

witnesses for coming to the committee this morning, and I look forward 

to hearing from them today, and I yield back. 

 MR. WHITFIELD. Thank you, Mr. Ferguson. There are no more 

opening statements, so we will go on and begin with the first panel. I am 

going to introduce the first panel again. First of all, we have Mr. Kurt 

Eichenwald with the New York Times. We have Dr. Andres Hernandez 

who is the Director of the Bureau of Prisons’ Sex Offender Treatment 

Program, and then we have Mr. Baxter, John Baxter, who is the Chief 

Psychologist with the Bureau of Prisons. 

 It is my understanding, Dr. Baxter, that while you will not be giving 

an opening statement that you may make some comments during the 

question period or if we have questions for you, we can ask you 

questions. In addition, we have Dr. Anna Carol Salter, who is with us by 

video conferencing, who is a psychologist, and does some work with the 

Wisconsin Bureau of Prisons and is an author on this subject. She is 

testifying from Madison, Wisconsin. We appreciate your being with us, 

Dr. Salter. And then we have Dr. Philip Jenkins, who is a Professor in 

History and Religious Studies and does work in this area as well from 

Pennsylvania State University up in University Park, Pennsylvania. So 

we thank both of you for being with us this morning. We look forward 

to your testimony. 

 This is an Oversight and Investigations hearing, and it our custom to 

take testimony under oath, and I am assuming that none of you five have 
10

any difficulty of testifying under oath, so if you would stand and just 

raise your right hand, I would like to swear you in at this time. 

 [Witnesses sworn] 

 MR. WHITFIELD. Thank you. All of you are under oath now. And, 

Mr. Eichenwald, we will begin with you so you are recognized for 5 

minutes for your opening statement. 

TESTIMONY OF KURT EICHENWALD, REPORTER, THE 

NEW YORK TIMES COMPANY; DR. ANDRES 

HERNANDEZ, DIRECTOR, BUREAU OF PRISONS’ SEX 

OFFENDER TREATMENT PROGRAM, FEDERAL BUREAU 

OF PRISONS, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE; DR. ANNA 

CAROL SALTER, PSYCHOLOGIST; AND DR. PHILIP 

JENKINS, PROFESSOR, HISTORY AND RELIGIOUS 

STUDIES, PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY 

 MR. EICHENWALD. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member 

Stupak, other members of the committee. I apologize if my voice is a 

little raspy this morning. My name is Kurt Eichenwald, and I am a 

senior writer with the New York Times. This marks the second time I 

have been subpoenaed to testify before this subcommittee about my 

reporting on the dangers to children from adult predators online. As 

someone who has emerged as an unlikely chronicler of this threat, I 

recognize that my testimony can assist you in your search for legislative 

solutions. But, as in my April testimony, I would caution that, while I 

am able to inform you of the published findings of my investigations, I 

do not believe it is my place, nor do I believe I am qualified, to offer 

policy prescriptions. 

 My reporting on Internet predators began in June 2005, with my 

discovery of Justin Berry, the young man who testified before the 

subcommittee in April about his experience of being lured into webcam 

child pornography at the age of 13. At the time of that hearing, I was in 

the first days of a new investigative effort observing online conversations 

among pedophiles, beginning with those conducted on communication 

sites first identified to me by Justin. In the months that followed, I 

discovered an array of places on the Internet where pedophiles gathered 

to swap stories, experiences, and tips. These conversations seemed to 

reflect a belief among pedophiles either that no one outside their 

community was watching or that nobody could locate them. Many 

readily admitted committing crimes or contemplating them. 

 I remained immersed in these conversations for 4 months. At no 

time did I participate to insure that my presence did not affect the 

direction of the discussions. Throughout this period of reporting, I 
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observed hundreds of conversations, ultimately recording the pedophiles’ 

world and beliefs through their own words. This investigation resulted in 

a two-part series last month on the front page of the Times. I have 

submitted those articles to the committee as an exhibit. What I 

discovered was terrible. The online conversation sites, even those 

ostensibly set up to provide support to adults wrestling with their sexual 

attraction to children, proved to be a means for pedophiles to gain 

knowledge and assistance in making contact with minors in the real 

world. But they also were part of an infrastructure established by 

pedophiles to rationalize and often celebrate their feelings and beliefs. 

 From the conversations, I learned of Internet radio stations and 

downloadable pod casts put together by pedophiles for other adults 

attracted to children, online jewelry stores that sold pendants identifying 

the wearer to those in the know as a pedophile, as well as an active social 

movement that purports to be pushing for the rights of children to engage 

in sexual contact with adults. The rationalizations for molesting children 

are repeated in these discussions, endlessly, to the point that participants 

exhibit almost a delusional view of the world. They state repeatedly that 

sexual contact between adults and children is not only harmless, but 

beneficial, so long as it does not involve forcible rape. I have witnessed 

conversations where pedophiles justify the molestation of autistic 

children under the age of 10, family members, and even of infants. 

 Adults who attempt to protect children from molestation by 

pedophiles are deemed child haters. Meanwhile, parents and other adults 

in children’s lives are dismissed as impediments to the minors’ 

happiness. Many times conversation participants discuss their own past 

crimes involving children and their resulting imprisonment. Speaking of 

their sentences as reflecting nothing more than the heavy hand of an 

authoritarian society. In one instance, when a pedophile voiced regret 

for molesting a child, he was assailed as a traitor to the cause who had 

been brainwashed by society. 

 Observing these conversations provided many disturbing moments. 

Pedophiles would come online every day with stories of the children they 

had just seen. Many of them were teachers and school administrators, 

describing children under their control. Others were pediatricians, 

talking about the delight they experienced during their latest physical 

exam of a child. There were even fathers who discussed their own 

children in sexual terms, including one who graphically described 

watching his two young sons as they changed in a locker room. To help 

the committee better understand these types of comments, I have 

attached one recent posting by a man who describes himself as a newlytrained kindergarten teacher, who discusses his desires to engage in sex 

with the little girls in his care. It is my hope that by making this posting 
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public someone may recognize the events described in detail by this 

individual, and stop him before it is too late. 

 The innocent acts of childhood were often interpreted by the 

pedophiles as sexual come-ons by pre-pubescent children. A second 

grader holding his crotch at school did not need to go to the bathroom, 

one of the pedophiles wrote, he was instead signaling his eagerness to 

engage in sex. Pedophiles were convinced that children who sat with 

their legs apart were purposely trying to tempt them. And one man 

described in detail watching a girl on a playground whom he was 

convinced was trying to lure him into sex. The reason? When she did 

cartwheels in her skirt, he could see her panties. 

 The pedophiles also celebrated something called model sites, which I 

learned were the explosive trend last year in child pornography. By 

clicking on one of the many Web addresses posted in a discussion where 

no illegal sites were supposed to be linked, I ultimately found myself 

confronted by a page of images of pre-pubsecent little girls wearing 

virtually nothing, posed in seductive ways to meet the requests of 

pedophile subscribers. Given the nature of that site, as the law dictates, I 

immediately reported what I found to the authorities. That site which 

boldly, and I believe falsely, proclaimed itself legal was run by a 

company called Playtoy Enterprises. Playtoy attracted 6,000 members in 

6 months, all of whom paid $30 a month processed by credit card 

companies and online payment systems. 

 Since publication of my articles, I have heard that Playtoy closed, but 

I discovered hundreds of such sites advertised on marketing portals for 

pedophiles. I am sure that many of them are still around photographing 

little girls every week and posting their images for the entertainment of 

pedophiles. Issues related to child pornography were frequent topics of 

conversation, including repeated advice from pedophiles about how to 

trade images without attracting the attention of law enforcement. I have 

submitted a posting from a pedophile providing details of how savvy 

porn traders use technology to avoid detection. This person is so certain 

he will not be caught that he even posted his entire hard drive directory 

of child porn videos, more than 100 gigabytes worth. Included in those, 

based on the description, were videos of a child porn victim who has 

already testified before this committee. 

 This posting makes clear that pedophiles understand how law 

enforcement is restricted in its investigative tactics and have used that 

knowledge to their advantage. My 4 months of observing the pedophile 

conversations were nothing short of horrific, but they served to prove to 

me the importance, not only of this kind of reporting, but also of this 

committee’s work to help insure the safety of our children. Thank you. 

 [The prepared statement of Kurt Eichenwald follows:] 
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PREPARED STATEMENT OF KURT EICHENWALD, REPORTER, THE NEW YORK TIMES 

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 MR. WHITFIELD. Thank you, Mr. Eichenwald. And, Dr. Hernandez, 

you are recognized for 5 minutes for your opening statement. 

 DR. HERNANDEZ. Good morning, Mr. Chairman, and members of 

the subcommittee. I appreciate the opportunity to appear before you to 

discuss a variety of issues regarding the sexual exploitation of children 

over the Internet as it pertains to the Bureau of Prisons. The BOP made a 

commitment to the psychological treatment of sexual offenders in 1990 
64

when the population of sex offenders in the Bureau of Prisons 

represented less than 1 percent of all Federal inmates. Since that time, 

the proportion of sex offenders has more than doubled. Today, the 

population of sex offenders in the BOP is well over 12,000. This figure 

includes those serving a term of confinement due to a sexual offense and 

those with a prior history of sexual offending. A significant number of 

sex offenders in Federal custody are convicted of Internet-related sexual 

offenses. 

 The Sex Offender Treatment Program or SOTP was established in 

1990 at the Federal Correctional Institution in Butner, North Carolina, 

but it was substantially revised and reorganized in 1997. It is a 112-bed 

voluntary residential therapeutic program that employs cognitivebehavioral and relapse prevention techniques to treat and manage male 

sexual offenders. The primary goal of the SOTP is to help offenders 

manage their sexual deviance in an effort to reduce sexual recidivism. 

The treatment program encourages its participants to change their 

criminal lifestyle and to become honest, responsible, and law-abiding 

citizens with effective self-control skills. 

 Since its inception, the SOTP has treated several hundred child 

pornography offenders. The vast majority of sex offenders in the SOTP 

are individuals convicted of possession, receipt, distribution, and 

transportation of child pornography. The most common medium of 

receipt and distribution among inmates in the SOTP is the Internet. Over 

the course of my 10 years of clinical work with federally-convicted sex 

offenders in the SOTP, I have observed that in the course of treatment 

many child pornography offenders admit to unreported sexual crimes, 

many of which include multiple sexual contacts with the victims. I 

believed it was important to record this information and share it with the 

treatment professionals and researchers in this area of practice in order to 

spark the interest of the scientific and treatment communities to study 

this emerging population of sex offenders. 

 In November 2000, I presented a poster at the annual conference of 

the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers in San Diego. This 

poster summarized archival data from 90 inmates who had been treated 

in the SOTP. Of that group, 62 were convicted of Internet-related sexual 

offenses. These included the possession and distribution of child 

pornography, as well as the interstate travel with the intent to sexually 

abuse a minor. At the time of sentencing, the group of 62 Internet sex 

offenders were known to have committed contact sexual offenses against 

a total of 55 victims. 

 Following treatment, the same group disclosed committing contact 

sexual crimes against an additional 1,379 victims. In a subsequent 

analysis, I removed the offenders convicted of interstate travel with the 
65

intent to sexually abuse a minor from the group of 62 offenders. This 

yielded 55 child pornography offenders. The rate of contact sexual 

offenses recorded after treatment among this group was 80 percent. The 

dramatic increase of previously unreported sexual offenses among the 62 

offenders I treated was interesting and worthy of continued observation 

and study. As a result, I have continued to record the incidence of selfreported contact sexual criminality among Internet sex offenders in the 

SOTP. The patterns I have observed more recently are consistent with 

those reported in the 2000 poster. 

 I must stress, however, that the population of inmates in the SOTP is 

not representative of the entire population of sex offenders in the BOP. 

While the 2000 and 2006 analyses reveal similar patterns, they represent 

heuristic observations and the basis for hypothesis testing which must be 

followed by rigorous scientific studies. I am hopeful that the Bureau of 

Prisons and other researchers will be in a position in the future to provide 

you with a sound scientific basis for policy making regarding Internet 

sex offenders. 

 The state of knowledge with respect to Internet child pornography 

offenders is in its infancy. My observations of the offenders described 

above who participated in the SOTP indicate that these Internet child 

pornography offenders are far more dangerous to society than we 

previously thought. But I caution the law enforcement community and 

others against generalizing beyond the offenders who were the subjects 

of my treatment interviews. I urge the professional and scientific 

community to attend to this understudied group of offenders. Chairman 

Whitfield, this concludes my formal statement. I would be pleased to 

answer any questions you or other members of the subcommittee may 

have. 

 [The prepared statement of Dr. Hernandez follows:] 

PREPARED STATEMENT OF DR. ANDRES HERNANDEZ, DIRECTOR, BUREAU OF PRISONS’ SEX 

OFFENDER TREATMENT PROGRAM, FEDERAL BUREAU OF PRISONS, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF 

JUSTICE

 Good Morning Chairman Whitfield and Members of the Subcommittee. I appreciate 

the opportunity to appear before you today to discuss a variety of issues regarding the 

sexual exploitation of children over the Internet as it pertains to the Federal Bureau of 

Prisons (BOP). I serve as the Director of the Sex Offender Treatment Program in Butner, 

North Carolina. I have held this position since 1997. Prior to my employment with the 

Bureau of Prisons, I worked as an Assistant Professor for the Department of Psychiatry 

and Behavioral Sciences at Baylor College of Medicine, where I also completed an 

internship and post-doctoral fellowship specializing in the evaluation and treatment of 

sex offenders. I have worked in the field of sex offender treatment since 1992. 

 The BOP made a commitment to the psychological treatment of sex offenders in 

1990, when the population of sex offenders in the Bureau of Prisons represented less than 

1% of all federal inmates. Since that time, the proportion of sex offenders has more than 
66

doubled. Today, the population of sex offenders in the BOP is over 12,000. This figure 

includes those serving a term of confinement due to a sex offense and those with a prior 

history of sexual offending. A significant number of sex offenders in federal custody are 

convicted of Internet-related sexual offenses. 

 As the federal sex offender population has increased, the BOP expanded the 

treatment capacity somewhat. Today, the Sex Offender Treatment Program (SOTP) has 

112 beds at the Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) in Butner, North Carolina. The Sex 

Offender Management Program (SOMP), established in 2003 at the Federal Medical 

Center in Devens, Massachusetts, serves nearly 400 sex offenders by providing risk 

assessment and management services. Consistent with recently enacted legislation, the 

BOP is actively working to expand sex offender services by implementing additional 

SOMPs and SOTPs, as well as a forensic evaluation service. 

Overview of the Sex Offender Treatment Program at FCI Butner, NC

 The Sex Offender Treatment Program was established in 1990 at FCI Butner, North 

Carolina, but it was substantially revised and reorganized in 1997. It is a voluntary, 

residential therapeutic program that employs cognitive-behavioral and relapse prevention 

techniques to treat and manage male sexual offenders. The primary goal of the SOTP is 

to help offenders manage their sexual deviance in an effort to reduce sexual recidivism. 

The treatment program encourages its participants to change their criminal lifestyle and 

become honest, responsible, and law-abiding citizens with effective self-control skills. 

Inmates in the program are assigned to approximately 15 hours of treatment activities per 

week. They are encouraged to participate in activities and programs that promote 

personal growth and development outside of the SOTP such as education and vocational 

training. The SOTP is divided into seven phases. Phase I orients the inmate to the SOTP, 

introduces him to treatment concepts, and begins the process of psychosexual evaluation, 

which includes phallometric assessment (i.e., penile plethysmography) and polygraph 

examination. Phase II involves treatment planning, assignment to therapy groups, and 

psychoeducational programming. In Phase II through VI, the inmate participates in group 

therapy and psychoeducation focusing on 1) Victim Impact Awareness, 2) Criminal 

Thinking and Cognitive Distortions, 3) Communication Skills and Conflict Resolution, 4) 

Emotional Self-Regulation, 5) Management of Deviant Sexual Arousal, 6) Relationship 

and Intimacy Skills, 7) Victim Empathy Enhancement, and 8) Relapse Prevention. Phase 

VII involves Community Reintegration and Release planning. 

Overview of the population of sex offenders in the SOTP

 The population of inmates in the SOTP is not representative of the entire population 

of sex offenders in the BOP. It represents a unique group of offenders with the following 

general characteristics: 1) they have volunteered to participate in treatment and accept 

some degree of responsibility for their crimes; 2) speak English; 3) are not severely 

mentally ill; 4) do not have detainers or pending charges that would affect their release to 

the community; and 5) do not have a history of negative institutional adjustment. The 

vast majority of the inmates in the SOTP are highly educated, and have marketable job 

skills. These characteristics, and their willingness to volunteer for treatment are not 

typical of all sex offenders in the BOP. 

 Since its inception in 1990, the SOTP has treated several hundred child pornography 

offenders. The vast majority of sex offenders in the SOTP are individuals convicted of 

Possession, Receipt, Distribution, and Transportation of Child Pornography. The most 

common medium of receipt and distribution among inmates in the SOTP is the Internet. 

 Over the course of my ten years of clinical work with federally convicted sex 

offenders in the SOTP, I have observed that in the course of treatment many child 

pornography offenders admit to unreported sexual crimes, many of which include 

multiple sexual contacts with the victims. I believed it was important to record this 
67

information and share it with treatment professionals as well as researchers in this area of 

practice, to spark the interest of the scientific and treatment communities to study this 

emerging population of sex offenders. 

The ATSA Poster Presentation

 In November 2000, I presented a poster at the annual conference of the Association 

for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers (ATSA) in San Diego, California, entitled “SelfReported Contact Sexual Offenses by Participants in the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ Sex 

Offender Treatment Program: Implications for Internet Sex Offenders.” This poster 

summarized archival data from 90 inmates who had been treated in the SOTP. Of that 

group, 62 were convicted of Internet-related sexual offenses. These included the 

possession and distribution of child pornography, as well as interstate travel with the 

intent to sexually abuse a minor (i.e., “travelers”). At the time of sentencing, the group of 

62 Internet sex offenders were known to have committed contact sexual offenses against 

a total of 55 victims. Following treatment, the same group disclosed committing contact 

sexual crimes against an additional 1,379 victims. Only 42 percent of the offenders were 

known to be contact sexual criminals at the time of sentencing; following treatment, 76 

percent reported contact sexual crimes, an increase of 34%. In a subsequent analysis, I 

removed the “traveler” offenders from the group of 62 subjects. This yielded 55 child 

pornography offenders. The rate of contact sexual offending recorded after treatment 

among this group was 80 percent. 

 The dramatic increase of previously unreported sexual offenses among the 62 

offenders I treated was interesting and worthy of continued observation and study. As a 

result, I have continued to record the incidence of self-reported contact sexual criminality 

among Internet sex offenders in the SOTP. The patterns I have observed more recently 

are consistent with those reported in the 2000 poster. 

 Recently I have reviewed and summarized my observations regarding a second 

group of offenders who participated in the SOTP. The group consisted of 155 men who 

were convicted of Internet child pornography possession and/or distribution. Again, I 

compared the number of contact sexual offenses that were known to the criminal justice 

system upon sentencing with those reported over the course of treatment in the SOTP. At 

the time of sentencing, 115 (74%) subjects had no documented hands-on victims. Forty 

(26%) had known histories of abusing a child via a hands-on sexual act. The number of 

victims known at the time of sentencing by the 155 subjects was 75. Following treatment, 

the inmates disclosed perpetrating contact sexual crimes against another 1,702 victims. 

Eighty-five percent of the inmates were in fact contact sexual offenders, compared to 

only 26 percent known at the time of sentencing. Thus, both groups of Internet child 

pornography offenders treated in the SOTP included a significant proportion (i.e., 80% to 

85%) of offenders who perpetrated contact sexual crimes. These findings are consistent 

with my clinical experience treating Internet sex offenders for the past ten years. 

 While the 2000 and 2006 analyses reveal similar patterns, they represent heuristic 

observations and the basis for hypothesis testing which must be followed by rigorous 

scientific studies. I am hopeful that Bureau of Prisons and other researchers will be in a 

position in the future to provide you with a sound scientific basis for making policy 

decisions regarding internet sex offenders. 

 While the relationship between contact sexual criminality and Internet child 

pornography offenders is an important area of scientific inquiry, there are many other 

questions that remain unanswered. Among these are: 1) what are the protective factors 

that keep some Internet child pornography offenders from perpetrating contact sexual 

crimes; 2) what are the psychological, social, technological and other factors that 

facilitate sexual offending among Internet offenders; 3) are there different types of child 

pornography offenders; and 4) does Internet child pornography create sexual deviance 

among the viewers or consumers. These and many other questions need to be the focus of 
68

discussion, debate, and research among the scientific, professional, and law enforcement 

community. 

Effectiveness of sex offender treatment

 With respect to treatment outcome, the BOP has been studying the effectiveness of 

the SOTP. The results of this research are not available at this time. This is a long-term 

endeavor that will take several years to complete. However, while the effectiveness of the 

SOTP at FCI Butner remains to be proven, there is a growing body of scientific literature 

suggesting that treatment is effective in reducing the risk of recidivism. It appears that 

cognitive-behavioral and psychopharmacological treatments have the strongest effect. 

The SOTP employs these methodologies. 

Closing

 The state of knowledge with respect to Internet child pornography offenders is in its 

infancy. My observations of the 217 offenders described above who participated in the 

SOTP indicate that these Internet child pornographers are far more dangerous to society 

than we previously thought. But, I caution the law enforcement community and others 

against generalizing beyond the offenders who were the subjects of my treatment 

interviews. I urge the professional and scientific community to attend to this understudied 

group of offenders. 

 Chairman Whitfield, this concludes my formal statement. I would be pleased to 

answer any questions you or other Members of the Subcommittee may have. 

 MR. WHITFIELD. Thank you, Dr. Hernandez. We appreciate your 

testimony. At this time, I would like to recognize Dr. Anna Carol Salter 

for her 5-minute opening statement, and we appreciate her being with us 

this morning. 

 DR. SALTER. I am very happy to be here. I am a psychologist in 

Madison, Wisconsin, and I have assessed and treated sex offenders since 

the mid-80s for over 20 years. I was asked to introduce myself briefly. I 

have written three academic books on sex offenders, Treating Child Sex 

Offenders and Victims: A Practical Guide, in 1988. I also wrote 

Transforming Trauma, Understanding and Treating Adult Survivors of 

Child Sexual Abuse in 1995. In 2003 I wrote Predators: Pedophiles, 

Rapists, and Other Sex Offenders: Who They Are, How They Operate, 

and How We Can Protect Ourselves and Our Children. Currently, I 

work half time for the Department of Corrections in Wisconsin. I also do 

civil commitment evaluations for sex offenders in the State of Iowa and 

sometimes other States. I have done trainings for mental health 

professionals, judges, clinicians, prison staff, et cetera. I have trained in 

46 States and 10 countries. 

 Now for my testimony today, I decided to submit a video of a sex 

offender describing the grooming techniques that he uses to ingratiate 

himself with victims and to fool their parents. I did that because it is my 

belief that my committee has probably heard from many more 

professionals than they have from offenders, and the offenders are really 

the experts on how they get access to children. No one speaks more 
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powerfully than they do. The interview that I conducted was done in a 

State prison. Permissions were obtained from the prison officials to 

approach the offenders. The offenders were asked if they wanted to 

participate. They were told that the film would not be used to help them 

and it would not be used to hurt them either, and that they would be 

anonymous in the sense that I wouldn’t release information about their 

identities. 

 With those simple protections in place really the only thing I 

promised is that I wouldn’t give out information about their identities, it 

was amazing how many offenders wanted to talk about how they 

accessed children. I am sure that the committee saw the sparkle in Joe’s 

eyes when he talked about it. There is a great deal of joy in many 

offenders. There is also a great deal of duke and delight. I think that the 

offender that you saw fooling the parents was probably more exciting 

than actually molesting the children. I think if you did see the video, you 

also saw how sophisticated the grooming techniques can be, and you can 

tell just from watching this man how well he could present if he chose to. 

 You might be interested in what happened after the film was made. 

He was released from prison. He relocated to a city in the State he was 

in, and one day he walked into a church and said to the minister, Father, 

do you take ex-cons? This was after the service. The minister said, well, 

if they are truly repentant, we do. And Joe said, oh, I am, Father, I am. I 

was in prison for passing a cold check, which was a lie. He was in prison 

for child molestation. And while I was there I found Jesus. I was dyed 

in the blood of the lamb, and I had hymns that I dearly loved, and I knew 

what whatever church was playing that hymn on Sunday morning, that 

was a sign from God that that was the church for me, and, Father, you 

were playing that hymn. 

 So the minister took him in and he very quickly took over the 

children’s choir. He was a professional musician. In any case, 

eventually the authorities caught up with him. He had offered for the 

minister to call the prison and he had given him the name of the prison, 

but because he offered the minister hadn’t done so thinking he must be 

legitimate. Sooner or later a parent wondered why there was a felon 

running the children’s choir and asked what they knew about him, and 

then they did call the prison. When they caught up with him, it turned 

out he was operating in two churches at the same time. And the second 

minister said we thought he was legitimate. You see, he had this hymn 

that he dearly loved and we were playing that hymn on Sunday morning. 

 In talking about Joe and in showing that film, however, I don’t mean 

to imply that all sex offenders can’t be treated. I don’t think treatment, 

frankly, is going to do much good for Joe and it hasn’t in the past. But 

the reality is that a recent meta-analysis showed that we can get about a 
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40 percent reduction in re-offending through treatment. Forty percent 

isn’t ideal, but it is a tremendous boom to victims. It means a lot fewer 

victims out there. The only group that we can’t seem to get a reduction 

with are psychopath offenders who don’t have a conscience. 

 I will also say to you that I am not optimistic about educational 

programs for parents. I find that the average person cannot distinguish 

between likeability and trustworthiness and some of these offenders are 

extremely, extremely likeable. I simply find that likeability will override 

even a criminal record of child molestation any day of the week. And 

that is really all I have for my opening statement. 

 [The prepared statement of Dr. Salter follows:] 

PREPARED STATEMENT OF DR. ANNA CAROL SALTER, PSYCHOLOGIST
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 MR. WHITFIELD. Thank you, Dr. Salter. At this time, we will 

recognize Dr. Philip Jenkins for his 5-minute opening statement. 

 DR. JENKINS. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and members of 

the subcommittee. In the year 2000, I had access to the proceedings of a 

bulletin board which was the meeting center for very large scale dealers, 

traffickers, and manufacturers of child pornography. The material I 

found there surprised me enormously because it ran so contrary to 

everything in the literature. Quite a lot of the literature still suggests that 

child porn on the Internet is largely a myth or that it results from a 
111

misinterpretation of ambiguous or relatively low level material. That 

turned out to be completely wrong, and in contrast to the material Mr. 

Eichenwald has described, and his work is of course very important. 

 This was really the most dangerous hard core material that was being 

circulated, and I would ask you to focus just on the concept which is 

what is called the KG and KX series of child pornography. In the 1990s 

a man in Denmark or German had a wife who ran a kindergarten and in 

the space of a couple of years he took many thousands of images and 

videos of young girls aged between three and six, either nude or engaged 

in sex with adult men. The most loathsome kind of material, and that 

was only one sort of material that was available at that point. When you 

look at child porn offenders, when you read about somebody who has 

been arrested for the possession of say 50 images, please remember that 

there are many people out there whose collections run between 50,000 

and 100,000. I believe the largest collection I have ever seen, in 

reference to 120,000 images. 

 When we think about child porn offenders, please remember that 

these elite dealers and manufacturers exist out there in a very large way 

and have virtually no fear of law enforcement. There is something they 

are afraid of, but it is not law enforcement. What they are afraid of and 

the group that did them the most harm in the period of time we were 

looking at them was what you could only call cyber vigilantes, white hat 

hackers. These people spend a great deal of their time frankly making 

fun of law enforcement agencies, but when the subject of vigilantes, 

clinical people, people with their technical level of skill was raised, that 

is when they became alarmed. 

 I came across many people in 2000 who had been working on the 

Internet, working on computers for 20 years back from the year 1980. 

Think of the level of experience and technical expertise they had and 

then imagine how difficult it is for an ordinary law enforcement agent to 

deal with that. The other word I want to emphasize here is global. This 

enterprise is absolutely global and the most important single thing that 

happened in the child porn world in the last 15 years was the 

liberalization of the Soviet Union, the break up of the Soviet Union and 

the East European nations. This is now, I believe, where a vast amount 

of this material is manufactured from which it is circulated. Just 

remember, for many of these consumers it is a very strong racial element. 

They used to have to deal with photos of Asian children, but now they 

have white blonde children and from this very racist mindset obviously, 

that is seen as so much more preferable. 

 A very quick word finally on the subject of profiling. We have to be 

so careful about profiling because usually the people we are profiling are 

the ones who have been arrested and very often they are quite low level 
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figures. The thing that strikes you, if you look at the boards. Dr. Salter 

made a very wise observation that the offenders are the experts. I 

suggest that the offenders who have not yet been arrested are the experts 

because they very often speak--and I have absolute respect for her very 

valuable work. The most dangerous thing, and I echo what she says, is 

how normal they are, and these boards very often feature discussions 

about the morality of the trade. 

 Somebody who is a major dealer will raise the subject has it occurred 

to you what we are doing is wrong, and they will bounce back on this for 

hours, and very often, as Mr. Eichenwald says, they were using 

children’s rights rhetoric; we are in this to defend children. So just to 

emphasize two things. No solution is going to happen unless it is on a 

global basis and involves international cooperation, but it is the technical 

people, the website providers, and very often the hackers who are the 

people who can make the largest single impact on this alarming subject. 

Thank you very much. 

 [The prepared statement of Dr. Jenkins follows:] 

PREPARED STATEMENT OF DR. PHILIP JENKINS, PROFESSOR, HISTORY AND RELIGIOUS 

STUDIES, PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY

 I have published extensively on matters of child abuse and molestation, and child 

protection. Between 1999 and 2001, I had access to a series of bulletin boards frequented 

by dealers, traffickers and manufacturers of child pornography, and also major consumers 

and collectors of this material. (I describe the center of this activity by the pseudonym 

“the Maestro Board”). Because this material was entirely verbal and text-based, I was 

able to access it without confronting the legal and ethical dilemmas involved in visiting 

sites where actual images were portrayed. My findings were published in my 2001 book 

Beyond Tolerance: Child Pornography on the Internet (New York University Press). 

Though I have kept up with later developments in the field, I have made no attempt to 

revisit these boards, nor would this be possible today, since all are now passwordprotected, and the only way to gain access would be to supply original material – that is, 

to provide fresh images or videos of children. 

 I would also stress other limitations of my study. For one thing, the boards I was 

observing catered to images of small girls, whereas the excellent investigations of Kurt 

Eichenwald focused on sites dealing with young boys: the two areas of interest seem not 

to overlap in the slightest. From the nature of the material, moreover, I have no idea of 

the actual identities of participants, nor the scale of the enterprise. In cases where I had 

any positive evidence that might point to actual identities or rings, I have supplied that 

information to law enforcement agencies. I have also supplied these agencies with full 

copies of all the electronic materials I collected during my study. 

 Based on this research, I would draw several conclusions. Except where stated 

otherwise, I believe that each of these statements remains true today, and conditions may 

actually have become more serious 

1.Child pornography is not a myth 

 It seems odd to start with such a statement, but it is necessary. Even well-informed 

commentators dismiss the child porn subculture as a moralist myth, perhaps a kind of 

conservative urban legend, like snuff films. Some years ago, in her otherwise engrossing 
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study of Internet censorship debates, Net.Wars, Wendy Grossman occasionally refers to 

child porn as one of the factors leading people to support restrictions, though in reality, 

(she asserts) only a “small amount of material... shows up on the Net.” She also writes 

that “many of the newsgroups with names like alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.children were 

probably started as tasteless jokes, and are largely taken up with messages flaming the 

groups.” This remark is ironic since alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.pre-teen (abpep-t) is an 

all too real phenomenon: by 2000, abpep-t boasted some 40,000 postings, mainly images 

of young girls from toddlers through puberty, and this newsgroup for years served as a 

central institution of the kiddie porn Net-culture. In Erotic Innocence, his fine book on 

contemporary attitudes to childhood sexuality, James Kincaid writes that in the mid1990s, “researchers found nothing on the Internet that is not also in adult bookstores,” 

though there might be a marginal trade in child porn, “a cottage industry of sorts, a wary 

trading of photos and old magazines back and forth among a small number of people.” 

Otherwise, he argues, the only people distributing child porn online are government 

agencies, seeking to bait traps for pedophiles. Another major work on commercialized 

sex is Laurence O’Toole’s Pornocopia. After describing a celebrated child porn arrest in 

Great Britain, O’Toole argued that: 

When... the hullabaloo over transnational Internet child porn rings ultimately 

amounts (in the UK at least) to the possession of three images dating back a quarter 

of a century, people are bound to wonder about the true nature or extent of the 

dangers of child porn in cyberspace ..... a lot of the materials described as ‘child 

porn’ are in fact nude pictures of children taken from art-work, family albums and 

naturist materials. 

Many of the materials do indeed fall into these categories, but hundreds of thousands of 

other images do not; and whereas a large number date back a quarter of a century, many 

others were made this year. And they are far more alarming than these accounts would 

suggest. 

 To illustrate this material at its vilest and most exploitative, we might consider the 

more recent KG and KX series, the “kindergarten” photos, which together represented 

perhaps the most prized collections available on the Net as of 2000-2001. KG is a series 

of many thousands of nude images of several very young girls, mainly aged between 

three and six years old, with each item including the girl’s name, like Helga, Inga, and so 

on. The photographs date from the mid-nineties, and they likely derive from either 

Germany or Scandinavia. In the words of one fan of the series, “Once upon a time. There 

was a chemist that had earned his Ph.D. Well, he got married and along with his wife 

opened up a day care center. Well, as the story goes, he managed to take pictures of lots 

and lots of things. Eventually he got busted.” The KG collection exists in parallel with a 

still more sought after version, KX, which depicts the same children in hard core sexual 

situations with one or more men. Put simply, most are pictures of four and five year old 

girls performing oral sex and masturbation on adult men. The immense popularity of the 

KG images ensured an enthusiastic market for KX, which entered general circulation in 

2000. 

 We should also remember the case of “Helena,” probably a British girl, who, 

tragically, was long one of the best-known sex stars on the Web worldwide. In the late 

1980s, as a little girl of seven or eight, Helena became the subject of a photo series which 

depicted her not only in all the familiar nude poses of hard-core pornography, but also 

showed her in numerous sex acts with Gavin, a boy of about the same age. Both are 

reportedly shown having sex with an adult man, presumably Helena’s father. The images 

are collectively known by various names, but the commonest is “hel-lo,” that is, 

“Helena/lolita.” Since their first appearance, they have had an astonishing afterlife, and 

probably not a day has passed without the hel-lo images appearing anew on some 
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electronic server somewhere in the world, and they are cherished by thousands of 

collectors worldwide. They seem to be the standard starter kit for child porn novices. In 

addition, Helena’s pictures form part of a much larger series, known under titles like helanal, hel-cum, hel-louise, and so on. Hel-lo itself was recently described by a child porn 

enthusiast as 

the greatest HC [hardcore] series ever made! She was ‘acting’ since she was a 

toddler until she was twelve years old, which means there are thousands of pics of 

her in action out there somewhere! No other series compares!!! 

 

In addition to the traffic in visual images, many Usenet sites cater to pedophile interests 

through stories and written fantasies, which are entirely supplied by amateurs catering to 

other enthusiasts. In the language of the dissident underground of the old USSR, they are 

purely samizdat, “self-published.” These stories are originally posted in Usenet groups, 

and subsequently collected in open websites. These written works are almost certainly 

legal protected speech within the United States, which is paradoxical in that these stories 

are often grossly violent or even homicidal in their content. To put the paradox at its 

simplest, a photograph of a naked five year old girl happily eating an ice cream on the 

beach may be criminalized, even if the child is shown accompanied by doting parents, but 

it is quite legal to publish a detailed fantasy about the rape, torture and murder of the 

same child. To give an idea of the content of some of these tales, the following represents 

a selection of the new stories listed on one extreme content site a few years ago, together 

with the editor’s summaries of the themes offered in each case (NC is non-consensual, 

“scat” is scatological, “ws” means water sports or urination, snuff means killing): 

14 Year Old Avenger by brisko65 (Pedo, Bi sex, Scat, WS, Vomit, Animal, Torture, 

Spanking, Snuff, Incest) 

A Hunt by ***** (Rape, Torture, Cannibalism, Snuff) 

A Little Inheritance by S.o.S. (Incest-daddy/daughter, Pedo, Oral) 

A Night in the Kids Room by S.o.S. (Pedo/toddler, Incest-brothers/sisters, Oral, 

Anal, Gangbang) 

Amanda the Slut Episode 1 by sex freak (Preteen, NC, S/M, Suggested snuff) 

Anne by Kinnik (Rape, Pedo, Torture, Snuff) 

B&B 2-Dad visits Kids by Chucketal (Incest-father/son, Pedo) 

Baby in the Arcade by S.o.S. (Drug use, Pedo, Toddler rape) 

Baby Sex is the Best - Part II by Evil Dad (Child rape & abuse, Pedo, Scat, WS) 

Children's Ward by xtight (Pedo, Anal) 

Do You like my Bottom Daddy? by UK Snowy (Oral incest-father/daughter, Pedo) 

Fucking in the Family - The Tradition Continues by Lund Pasand (Incest-whole 

family, Pedo, First time) 

Nigger Lust by N-lover (Hetero sex, Pedo, Racist, Interracial, Scat, WS) 

Off the Bone by UK Snowy (Rape, Pedo) 

The Most Perfect 10 by ***** (Bi sex, Pedo, Fisting) 

 By no means all story groups are anything like so bizarre or repulsive in their 

content, and this is avowedly an extreme site. Nevertheless, the predominance of 

underage themes is notable. Of 44 new stories listed at this site in April 2000, no less 

than twenty included “pedo” (pedophile) or “preteen” as one of their subject keywords. 

2.The available material is vast in scale, and new material is coming on line more or 

less daily

 Just how easy it is to find these materials needs to be stressed. Both the price and 

quality of illegal commodities are greatly affected by the relative success of law 
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enforcement intervention. When for instance police and customs are waging a 

particularly successful war against the cocaine trade, making major seizures, the price of 

cocaine on American streets rises steeply, while the quality of the substance being 

retailed falls dramatically. Conversely, weaker police responses are reflected in bargain 

basement prices and higher purity at street level. Applying this analogy to child 

pornography produces disturbing results. In the mid-1970s, a child porn magazine 

containing thirty or so pictures might cost ten dollars in an American city. Today, the 

entire contents of that same magazine are available through the Internet for free, as are 

tens of thousands of other more recent counterparts. A month or so of free web-surfing 

could easily accumulate a child porn library of several thousand images. The only 

payments or charges involved would be the standard fees for computer connect time, and 

the cost of storage materials. Prices in the child porn world have not just fallen, they have 

all but been eliminated. “Quality” has also improved immeasurably, in terms of the range 

of materials on offer: arguably, the images now coming on line are becoming ever more 

explicit and hard-core. Applying the drug analogy suggests that the role of law 

enforcement in regulating supply is approximately zero. I want to keep this problem in 

perspective, since the actual numbers of hardcore traffickers are not vast: we are probably 

talking about a subculture numbered in the tens of thousands worldwide, together with a 

significant number of casual browsers, but even so, the scale of the enterprise they 

support is depressing, as is the constant infusion of new materials. 

 To put this in context, I would suggest that thee typical major collector would 

possess upwards of forty or fifty thousand items, videos and images, tho9ugh collections 

do run into the 100,000-plus range. This is worth remembering when we read about child 

porn arrests of some individual who has perhaps fifty or a hundred such images. 

3.The child porn subculture on the internet is not based on any close-knit hierarchy, 

but rather involves a network of individuals who probably do not know each other’s 

names. Though networks certainly exist, they are numerous and quite distinct from 

each other. There is no single “child porn mafia”

 In the countless board discussions on security, one recurrent theme is that of “safety 

in numbers”, in other words, that porn users could in theory be tracked down, but the 

sheer volume of traffic makes this next to impossible. In a discussion of the wisdom of 

using abpep-t, the child porn guru “Godfather Corleone” advised that 

There are millions of people using newsgroups, and tens of thousands of them do 

visit abpep-t on a very regular base. Therefore the likelihood the server would want 

to spend time tracing someone down for visiting a newsgroup they are responsible 

for providing people with, is rather small. 

Such comments raise the difficult but inevitable question of just how large a community 

we are dealing with, and the Godfather’s remark about “tens of thousands” is not only 

plausible, but perhaps modest. 

 At a given moment on an average day, the main flagship discussion board contained 

contributions from about sixty or so pseudonymous contributors, though that is only a 

snapshot, and the total contributing during a whole day is considerably larger. Given the 

delicate subject matter, the figure for “lurkers” (people who observe but do not 

contribute) is likely to be far larger than for typical Usenet groups. At a minimum, the 

Maestro community certainly ran into several thousand. A useful analogy may be 

provided by other less popular child porn sites which record the number of hits for each 

posting. The volume of hits largely depends on the plausibility that the original message 

does in fact lead to a genuine CP site, but where the poster is well-known and trusted, the 

number of hits is usually between two and four thousand, and may well approach ten 

thousand. Of course, a person might visit a particular site only sporadically, or 
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concentrate only on one board to the exclusion of others. Still, that provides an absolute 

minimum for the size of the core CP community on the Internet, those who frequent at 

least one of the various boards on a regular basis: we have already seen that egroups sites 

with child porn content can run to several thousand members. Confirming this scale, GMan, one of the most experienced contributors to the flagship board, wrote that “To each 

of my posts I get approx 1,000 to 5,000 visitors to my site (nearly 90,000 in the past five 

weeks!)” 

 Gauging the scale of the pedophile audience is a frequent talking point on the 

boards. One recent posting ran as follows: 

When you think about it, just how many lola lovers do we have here, maybe? 

10,000 15,000 visit this board, what about other boards, and what of the others that 

can not find this and other boards? I have seen some of the log files from some of 

the net’s search engines, and the top search is childporn and all the Lola lovers that 

don't have a computer, there must be millions out there some where ;). 

Others agreed: 

*Tomcat> I had a site posted here with a counter that showed approx. 3,000 access 

after 4 hours, before the site was shut down. Extrapolate this to a whole day could 

be 18,000 only from this board at one day. And there are many more surfing in 

news (probable ratio 1:10 or more) and other boards. The number is constantly 

increasing as more people get access to the net. There was about half of them about 

half a year ago, and the increase itself is increasing. So no need to feel alone. I 

guess the ratio of posters and lookers on this board is about 1:100 or more.... That's 

the reason why I'm always stating that busting them all would hurt national 

economics. 

* Zep > 12 months ago ***’s site, which had links to BBS's on its front page, was 

getting over 30,000 hits a day before the counter was taken off. *** BBS its 'finest 

hour' (when this BBS went down for about 3 days about 6 months ago), was getting 

over 50,000 hits a day over this period. No, we are not alone in this world. 

I stress, though, that we are dealing with core activists, since casual browsers might be 

much more numerous. 

 Putting the different boards together, I would guess that the core population as of 

year 2000 should be counted somewhere in the range of perhaps fifty to a hundred 

thousand individuals, though that is a very loose figure. It is also a global number: 

perhaps a third of these are located in the US. Given the phenomenal expansion of the 

Internet since the mid-1990s, we can assume that this figure is changing very rapidly, and 

certainly expanding. While some old hands send farewell messages explaining that their 

interests have moved on to other things, almost every day on the boards we find first 

postings by recently arrived “newbies.” 

 It is even more difficult to assess the demographics of the audience for this (or any) 

board. In many situations on the Internet, people tend to assume personas which are not 

necessarily their own, and in an illegal setting like this there are powerful reasons to 

affect a different identity. A general impression, though, suggests that the vast majority of 

contributors to the board fall into the category of males, aged between perhaps 25 and 55, 

mainly white but with a sizable Asian minority. This would certainly account for the vast 

majority of recorded arrests. My impression may be false in a number of ways, as several 

major users at least claim to be much younger than this would suggest, aged in their late 

teens. Given the distribution of computer skills across the population, a large cohort of 

teens and young adults would be quite predictable. 
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 Nor can we say much about participants’ regional or occupational backgrounds, 

except to say that both are highly diverse. This is indicated by the membership of the 

Wonderland Club, which as we will see, was a closed network of elite traffickers broken 

up in 1998. The Wonderland group included some two hundred members in over forty 

countries, including the US, Great Britain, Australia, Italy, France, Norway, Sweden, 

Germany, Austria, Belgium, Finland, and Portugal. American members included “an 

engineer from Portland, Maine, a scientist in New Britain, Conn. Other suspected 

members lived in sleepy towns like Broken Arrow, Oklahoma; Lawrence, Kansas; and 

Kennebunk, Maine.... A suspect living in a trailer park in St. Charles, Mo., was arrested 

after agents found, along with child porn, firearms and a stash of the black powder used 

to make bombs. According to Customs agents, a law student in New York City threw his 

hard drive into a neighbor's yard.” Of the first eight members charged in the UK, we find 

three computer consultants, unsurprisingly in view of the level of expertise required for 

this world, but there were also two taxi drivers, and three men who were described as 

unemployed. 

 Gender represents another controversial point. Messages are often posted by 

individuals identifying themselves as women, and these claim that far more adult women 

are sexually interested in young girls than is commonly realized. One of the major posters 

on the boards over the last year or two bears the handle “Goddess.” Goddess’s real 

identity is controversial. Asked to speculate on the appearance of contributors, one 

contributor wrote that he saw “Goddess as a rebellious schoolgirl with holes in her jeans 

(probably she is a he and 50 years old).” Still, lending credibility to claims of female 

involvement, there are documented cases of girls and women being involved in making 

and distributing electronic child porn, although I presume they represent a small minority 

of activity. Generally, we can safely assume that the bulk of board traffic is the work of 

white men in their thirties and forties. 

4.Many of those involved in the subculture are strikingly “normal”. This has critical 

implications for the potential for deterrence.

 The reasons why adults become sexually interested in children are much debated, 

but given that this enthusiasm does exist, it is not difficult to see why it should find such 

a friendly environment on the Internet, with its anonymity and its ability to transcend 

jurisdictional borders. We can also appreciate how novices should find it so easy to be 

drawn into the subculture, and once involved, to absorb its values and practices. In many 

ways, the seemingly aberrant world of child porn on the Net represents not a total break 

with approved mainstream ways and mores, but their extension into illegality. 

 Some degree of tolerance of illegality is common to Internet culture in general. The 

whole world of electronic communication has developed so rapidly that rules and laws 

are poorly formulated, and it is common and approved practice for computer users to 

violate regulations. People who would never dream of committing larceny or burglary in 

the “real” material world think nothing of hacking an Internet site, using a purloined 

password, or copying software illegally, while a widespread opinion holds that copyright 

rules simply do not exist on the Net. If something works and produces benefit without 

harming an individual (as opposed to a faceless corporation) then it is acceptable and 

approved. Even if technically criminal, misdeeds on computers are likely to be viewed by 

many as pranks rather than heinous offenses, and this approach is largely shared by the 

media. When, as happens from time to time, a hacker succeeds in changing the website of 

a police agency so that it suddenly depicts hard-core pornographic material, the news 

media tend to report the story as quirky or humorous, rather than a dreadful crime 

(sabotaging or closing down a popular site is a different matter). The idea of seeking 

forbidden material on the Internet is natural and even socially approved, so that the heroic 

deeds of hackers and outlaw computer wizards are the subject of a hundred Hollywood 

films. When some years ago an Israeli teenager hacked into important US government 
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sites, that nation’s then Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, offered the Americans a 

cursory apology, but used the incident at home to boast of Israel’s technological prowess 

and sense of adventure. Conversely, authorities who try and prevent these efforts are 

reactionaries, stuffed shirts, control freaks: the enemy. 

 Occasionally, the fervently libertarian ethos of the Internet can extend even to 

something as condemned as child porn. In a curious case in 1998, the manager of a small 

Californian ISP discovered a child porn web site, which she duly reported to authorities, 

and then tried herself to gain more information about the site’s operators. She soon 

encountered a fiercely critical reaction from other Internet users, including a hacking 

attack that shut down her site. The issue was less tolerance of child porn as such than her 

apparent vigilantism, and her willingness to draw officialdom into what should ideally be 

the self-regulating world of the Net. 

 On the Internet, rules are made to be broken. This attitude is facilitated by the user’s 

psychological sense that whatever occurs in a computer transaction takes place within his 

or her own private space. Although one is visiting a site based in Singapore, the 

individual is viewing it on a screen at home in London or in an office in Los Angeles, and 

it is intuitively obvious that this is where the transaction is really occurring. One can after 

all interrupt the process at any time to get up and make coffee or wash the car. The 

attitude seems to be that it is my home, my desk, my computer, and my business what I 

do with it. This is one reason for the ferocious opposition to schemes to tax commercial 

transactions on-line: why should the state of California, say, be able to charge sales tax 

on business which is self-evidently done on a desktop in Connecticut? This sense of 

private space also promotes a sense of invulnerability: it is difficult to take seriously all 

the jeremiads about the lack of privacy on the Net when the user feels that he or she is 

pursuing a personal interest at home, with no one apparently watching. Even in the case 

of child pornography, the absolute legal prohibition on private use is not as widely 

understood as one may think. In a surprising survey some years ago, Kimberly McCabe 

questioned a sample of citizens who attended law enforcement-sponsored crime-watch 

meetings in two cities in the US South, people who might be presumed to have some 

interest in criminal justice issues. Even so, a third of her sample agreed with the 

statement that “Downloading child pornography from a newsgroup is legal.” Just under 

eight percent believed that “Possession of sexual material involving a minor is legal,” and 

the same proportion felt that “viewing computer-generated children in sexual materials is 

okay.” 

 Also making the child porn subculture more apparently acceptable is the lack of 

overtly deviant behaviors or markers associated with the activity. Participants do not 

assume an overtly deviant role in the way that they would if they joined a gang or cult: 

they need not shave their heads, wear special clothing, or attend a meeting every week or 

even every year, nor need they relocate to a compound or commune. Entering the child 

porn culture might mean assuming or affecting a deviant identity, but one that has no 

physical manifestations, or which need continue after one has switched off the computer. 

This particular subculture is one which can be joined without physically moving into a 

strange or dangerous-seeming environment, a biker bar, sex club or drug supermarket, 

though in practice, using the computer at home can lead to far more perilous 

consequences than any of these places. 

 It is useful to compare the process of accessing child porn on the Internet today, 

which is absolutely illegal, with the semi-tolerated matter of purchasing a magazine of 

this sort in an urban bookstore in 1975. Although the bookstore patron was running little 

or no risk of official sanction, it was self-evident from the surroundings and the social 

context that the purchaser was in deviant territory, both physically and metaphorically. 

The store was likely in a “bad part of town,” in a physical setting perhaps not far removed 

from active prostitution and drug use, and not somewhere where one would wish to be 

seen. In contrast, the modern computer user is, in every sense, at home with child 
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pornography. Today, there appears to be no entry fee to the subculture, no risk or 

commitment, and that is perhaps the most dangerous delusion in the whole process. 

 In many ways, too, child porn users are extrapolating from the socially 

commonplace. On the Internet, sexual material and adult pornography is extremely 

abundant, and generally tolerated, despite the continuing protests of conservative 

moralists. Pornography sites are well frequented, and little social stigma attaches to 

seeking such material through improper means, for instance by using computers in 

libraries or schools. Such misdeeds are often the subject of humor rather than serious 

condemnation, even when the users are young teenagers. A person accessing sex sites 

from a workplace computer might technically be violating corporate rules, but according 

to most views, is no more criminal than a colleague who takes home pens or paperclips. 

Many porn sites also “push the envelope” in terms of the strange and perverse practices 

which they depict, including sadomasochism, bestiality and toilet functions. 

Occasionally, too, amateur sites in which posters offer home-made pictures of wives and 

(adult) girlfriends will throw in a soft-core image of a pubescent girl, and the responses 

suggest that this action is seen only as mildly naughty, perhaps a form of tweaking 

authority. Seeking bizarre or shocking sexual images on the Internet does not of itself 

contradict deeply held social values, especially when - as it appears - the searching is 

done in private. 

5.Dealers, traffickers, consumers and collectors of child porn may or may not be 

personally engaged in actual molestation. From the nature of the evidence, we are 

over-informed about those individuals who actually do molest, and who are 

probably not typical of the whole community. That point is not intended as a 

defense of the community, but is rather pointed at the best means of combating 

them. 

 The actual relationship between child porn and child abuse is open to debate, no 

matter how firmly such a linkage has come to be viewed as a social orthodoxy. The 

difficulty is that solid data on the question are all but unobtainable, and official figures 

are highly suspect. To illustrate the problems with available evidence, let us assume that 

ninety percent of child porn consumers never become involved in abuse or molestation, 

and confine their illegal activities to merely viewing and collecting images. I have no 

idea what the actual figure is, but as I will suggest, nor does anybody else. These 

individuals are extremely unlikely to find their way into the criminal justice system, 

unless they attempt to trade images, or barring accidental finds on their hard drives. 

Conversely, the minority of users who are also molesters are far more likely to be 

arrested and prosecuted: they might try to seduce youngsters online, or else abduct or 

molest the children of friends or neighbors. For whatever reason, the police will probably 

apprehend them, and will discover child porn collections upon searching their 

belongings. In consequence, the ten percent of CP consumers who are also abusers will 

make up a sizable (and wholly disproportionate) majority of child porn arrests. This 

allows anti-porn activists to state, quite accurately, that “in the vast majority of child porn 

arrests, the individual involved is also found to be a molester:” listeners are encouraged 

to draw the (unwarranted) conclusion that child pornographers are necessarily abusers, 

and perhaps vice versa. In fact, the statistics establish no causal link between child porn 

materials and actual behavior, any more than the similar observation that most sex 

criminals also enjoy adult porn. The statement that “Most rapists watch porn videos” 

cannot be translated as “Most people who watch porn videos become rapists.” 

Conceivably, perhaps ninety or ninety-five percent of child porn fans commit abuse, or 

perhaps the figure is closer to five or ten percent: the reality may just be unknowable. 

 Official statistics (arrests and prosecutions) tell us mainly about those inept and 

seemingly atypical offenders who fail to take the obvious precautions, and who get 

caught. If for instance we wanted to study the child porn world from media or official 
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sources, we might collect media reports of investigations and arrests of the sort which 

appear regularly in most advanced nations. Over the last few years, regional newspapers 

in the United States have reported hundreds of such stories, involving all sorts of 

individuals, including priests, politicians, police officers and executives, as well as 

ordinary citizens. Such stories mainly hit the headlines when they involve teachers or 

others working with youth, but celebrities are also newsworthy. But such instances 

represent only the tip of an iceberg. To quote one of the gurus of the electronic child porn 

world, “Godfather Corleone,” 

Looking at the enormous amount of lolita-lovers out there, very, very few get 

arrested, the opposite of what most newbies [novices] seem to believe is the case, 

those that actually do get arrested, do not get arrested for downloading or uploading 

to abpep-t or visiting sites. Most people that get arrested do so for the following 

reasons: 1. they had to repair their PC when those repairing the PC discovered pics 

on the harddrive. 2. they have been trading thru e-mail. 3. they have been using ICQ 

/ IRC [chat-lines] for lolita business. 

 Both trading and chat-lines are so deadly because one is dealing with faceless 

individuals who often prove to be police officers masquerading either as fellow 

enthusiasts, or as underage girls: avoiding such chat facilities is a primary rule offered to 

novices in this underworld. Another participant on a child porn bulletin board, “Granpa 

Bob,” claimed that recent arrests in the US could be categorized as follows: “It was 

basically 75% caught e-mail trading with an LEA [law enforcement agency], 20% by 

computer repair shops, and 1% caught by either association with known traders or by dogooders reporting them.” It is very rare for individuals to be arrested for posting child 

porn, and virtually unheard of to be caught “just looking.” 

 In the vast majority of cases which come to court, child pornographers are caught 

for another unrelated offense such as molestation, which leads to the serendipitous 

discovery of a collection of images. Though no case is wholly typical, a fairly 

representative example involves the man in Revere, Massachusetts, who was arrested 

after a young boy complained that he had been videotaped while having sex. When police 

searched the suspect’s premises, they found four thousand computerized images of 

underage boys, as well as a hundred indecent videotapes. In a case in Northern California 

in 2000, child porn charges surfaced as an incidental element in a suspected murder 

investigation. Even where porn alone is the major issue at stake, offenders have almost 

gone out of their way to draw attention to themselves, for instance by viewing illegal 

materials on computers in public libraries! As long as enthusiasts maintain their interests 

solely within the virtual realm, observing pictures but not seeking to collect or apply the 

electronic fantasies in the world of lived action, they appear to be safe from detection. 

The virtual world genuinely is protected territory. 

 By definition, studies of arrests or convictions only reveal the failures within the 

electronic child porn world. The cases which come to light fulfil a kind of Darwinian 

function, since they remove from the subculture those least fit to adapt and survive, and 

thus ensure the efficiency of those who remain. Nor can figures for arrests tell us much 

about the scale or the geography of electronic trafficking. If a hundred men were 

suddenly arrested for computer child porn offenses in Los Angeles, that would not 

necessarily show that that city was a particular center for this activity, but would rather 

indicate the interests and technical abilities of law enforcement agencies in that area. 

Perhaps such a campaign would further reveal that child pornographers in this region are 

singularly neglectful of security precautions. It is a truism, but criminal statistics measure 

official behavior, and nothing more. 
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6.The child porn underworld is absolutely multinational and global

 A glimpse at any of the boards will demonstrate the thoroughly globalized nature of 

the child pornography trade. The whole child porn underworld survives and flourishes by 

exploiting differences between the legal systems of different countries, between countries 

that have radically different attitudes to the whole area of childhood sexuality, or which 

observe marginal distinctions over the age of consent or the definitions of obscenity. 

Through the early 1980s, child pornography magazines were still legally and publicly 

accessible in the Netherlands, posing severe difficulties for police in other European 

nations, who fought hard against importation. Though hard-core child porn largely 

moved underground by the 1990s, several countries retained much more relaxed attitudes 

about child sexuality, which affected their views of what could legitimately be portrayed 

on the Web. While US law strictly prohibits all depictions of nude or suggestively clad 

children, European countries tend to be more liberal about showing simple nudity in a 

non-sexual context, as in a nudist camp. Naturist magazines like the German Jung und 

Frei and the French Jeune et Naturel circulated freely in Europe through the late 1990s. 

At least until recently, there was no reason why a Swedish server could not present a 

picture of a group of naked ten year old girls on a beach playing volleyball, say, though 

this picture would be strictly contraband when it was received on American soil. 

 In addition, many of the hard-core images circulated on the Net are the incidental 

products of “sex tourism.” These portray white men having sex with young Asian or 

Latina girls, and are presumably souvenirs taken by sex tourists visiting Third World 

countries over the last decade or two: Thailand, Sri Lanka and Indonesia are the main 

Asian venues, while the Latin American pictures could be from any of a dozen countries. 

These pictures are distinguished from others of the genre by the fact that the men in 

question rarely attempt to conceal their faces, presumably secure in the knowledge that 

they were committing no crime under local laws: as we will see, the legal environment 

has since changed to make such neglect of security precautions very risky indeed. 

 The boards are cosmopolitan. While the major sites were (as of 2001) based in 

Japan, most users are from North America and Europe, and the main working languages 

are English and German. Specific debates may proceed in a variety of other languages, 

including Spanish, Swedish, Dutch, Portuguese, and indeed most of the European 

languages. There are exchanges in tongues like Turkish, Tagalog and Guarani, and other 

languages that I cannot identify, though I can at least recognize all the European 

languages. In a typical board exchange between, say, five or six individuals, two may be 

based in the US, two in Europe, one in Malaysia and one in Japan: there is no way for the 

casual observer to discover this. Indications might be provided by linguistic peculiarities, 

for example the use of English or Australian spelling or slang, such as “I’m off to the pub 

for a pint,” “colour” for “color,” or “knickers” for girls’ underwear, while complainers 

are “whingers.” Equally likely, participants in a quite different nation might be affecting 

these habits in order to divert attention from their real location, just as the often dreadful 

spelling and grammar found in messages may be a ruse to feign ignorance of English. 

 Deception of this kind is rampant on the boards. When listing survival tips for 

subculture members, one board participant included the advice, “Write in English in this 

board and never in your own mother language, if you have one. Don't speak about very 

personal things, which could help to identify you after collecting some more 

informations.” The phrasing of the second sentence (“more informations”) implies that 

the poster, “Thor,” is not a native speaker, but he might well be an American or Canadian 

pretending to employ foreign usage. In another instance, “Rocky” quoted a story from a 

Detroit newspaper, and concluded, “Is any one heard of this news and which country this 

Detroit belong to?” I have no idea if this is genuine ignorance, or ingenious camouflage. 

“Darkstar” remarks, “don’t forget the wise ones who have been here for years know all 

this, and be telling you they live in the UK or Belize, Canada, whilst they really in 

Cali[fornia].” 
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 Similar caution is advised for those making pornographic images, since actual 

locations might well be revealed by incidental objects in the background. In one case, the 

maker of the notorious Marion series was detected because the setting was recognized as 

in Germany, leading federal police in that nation to circulate Marion’s photograph. 

Responding to this arrest, one board member wrote “This case is a good example what 

not to do when posting. Many people look alike on a world wide basis, however when 

you show locations and identifiable clothing to verify identity you are asking for trouble.” 

It would not be beyond the capacity of a pornographer to litter a room with magazines in 

some foreign language to conceal the fact that the shoot was actually occurring in, say, 

Illinois. The need for such cosmopolitanism is constantly stressed: when asked for the 

best means of securing a truly anonymous e-mail account, “Helper” wrote “Do not use 

sites like Hotmail. .... Best to go to some boolah-boolah country in Africa or Asia, or sites 

in the ".nu" neighborhood [Nauru]. Never your own country, as this only makes legal 

issues easier for LEA's.” Darkstar advised, “Just use good proxies, make sure they have 

nym status, and operate out of territories like Tibet, China, Taiwan, Russia, Singapore, 

Mongolia etc. And alter the time domain in your computer, this is an ID parameter in 

conjunction with your isp IP that ties you down.” 

 In addition, the typical posting of a porn website indicates a total neglect of 

frontiers: the site is posted by an American on a European server, announced on a 

Japanese server, with passwords posted at a site notionally based in Nauru or Tonga, 

while those downloading the pictures might be from fifty countries. One would need a 

thorough education in international law to understand the problems in legal jurisdiction 

which it poses: what crimes have been committed, where, and what agencies might 

conceivably be involved? And where exactly has this occurred, except in the emerging 

nation of Cyberia? Though the whole transaction originates on one computer in 

California, the complete story has literally unfolded across the globe. 

 Moreover, outside western Europe, large areas of the world make virtually no 

pretense at combating underage sex or child pornography, and from the nature of the 

web, there need be only one bandit country to sabotage all international arrangements. In 

fact, there are dozens of such wayward states, which pay little attention to suppressing 

child pornography or, much more serious, child prostitution. Former Communist 

countries tend to be lax in this regard, and much material prohibited elsewhere stems 

quite freely from Russia, Poland and the Czech Republic. This trend reflects the extreme 

weakness of law enforcement in those societies, as well as a common desire to break 

away from Communist austerity. 

 The upsurge of Russian and East European content has revolutionized the content of 

the child porn world, Nudist sites are prevalent, while many pictures emanating from 

Russia are unashamedly pornographic, and often extremely hard-core. They are 

immensely popular because they depict subjects in contemporary settings, and thus form 

a dramatic contrast to much of the older materials, which largely depicted either 

contemporary Asian girls, or Euro-American children in conspicuously dated 1970s 

settings. Also, and crucially for many fans, the subjects are white: a distaste or even 

loathing for non-white subject is a recurrent theme in exchanges. Some astute fraudsters 

exploit the Russian reputation for corruption by advertising child porn sites with Russian 

domain names, that is, the suffix “ru.” Foreigners avidly flock to such sites believing they 

will thereby gain access to utterly uncensored materials, but they are often disappointed, 

and some ru sites are among the most notorious examples of bogus and deceptive 

advertising. They offer tantalizing samples, take money, but deliver nothing. In passing, 

it is one of the great ironies of modern history that the hammer and sickle emblem now 

often serves as a symbol of extreme hedonism, and provides a logo for the hardest of hard 

core web-sites. Czech sites are also popular. As an enthusiastic board participant wrote in 

2000: “Czech Republic liberal! You can search, view and store pedo material without any 

penalty. For trading is maximum penalty one year.” This country is a major source of 
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images of nude young boys, though as in Scandinavia, depicting sexual activity in such 

contexts is strictly taboo. 

 The child porn boards offer much advice on how to find countries where underage 

sex is readily available, and where child pornography can easily be obtained or, indeed, 

manufactured. The lax morality prevailing in former Communist nations is a common 

theme: 

 * RaNDoM > If you guys are tired of the US why don't you move out .... I've lived 

here in Siberia for the past year now and it's absolute Loli-Heaven! You can't go 

wrong with the former Soviet Union. Or if it's a little out of your budget then 

consider Mexico. For a few dollars (not pesos) the cops'll look the other way. It's 

where I used to live. 

* Cross > I hear Russia is becoming the epicenter of Loliland. Such information in 

general should help everybody in matters such as proxies, setting up sites, and many 

more. 

 * Greasey > in Russia be prepared to get mugged and maybe even killed. Russia 

has no law now, the Russian mafia runs the whole country 

 * TEST_ONE > if you have enough money, people at the [Moscow] Crime Dept. 

will drive you to the girls 

In answer to a question about one photo series, G-Man replied, 

Looks Rumanian to me... In some places there you can just go to an orphanage and 

give the adults some money (not a lot - many have not been paid their wages in 

years!) and you can have your way with some of the kids... The only thing is - the 

children have never even seen a bath and the beds have never been cleaned. They 

also shave the heads of the kids, so you'll have to do a bald girl. 

 After a decade of extreme laissez faire, some east European countries may finally be 

undergoing a moral reaction. Czech laissez-faire seems to be weakening as the country 

becomes ever more closely integrated into the European economic and political order, 

and there have been major crackdowns in recent months. Poland too has recently passed 

stringent anti-porn legislation, which if enforced would suppress most adult soft-core 

material, but it remains to be seen how far such action would extend to the Internet. Nor 

is there much likelihood that countries like Russia or Rumania will return to anything like 

Stalinist moral discipline in the foreseeable future, or will succeed in regulating their 

thriving organized crime enterprises. 

 Despite the attention paid to the former Communist world and Japan, most “bandit” 

countries are however found in the Third World nations of Asia and Latin America, 

where westerners can readily find underage sex, as well as visual depictions of such 

activity. In coming years, these nations may also host the electronic servers central to the 

child porn world. 

 In 1999, one correspondent asked the Maestro community, “Generally speaking - 

Where do you think the best place to travel to? Does anyone want to come along?” He 

received numerous replies, most highlighting the Third World: 

* Ms Knickerworthy > Israel is a good place for pristine preteen arse... If you're not 

fussy about skin colour or AIDS then try Fiji, Bali, Jamaica, and similar Third 

World holes. 

 * jo > Contrary to popular belief the Philippines is still one of the best places to go 

but you have to be very cautious. Stay away from the tourist areas. The back streets 

of Manila are a good place to walk around mid afternoon. People are very friendly, 

and very poor. 
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 * Pedro Phylle > As suggested above, stick with the poorer, undeveloped countries 

such as Latin America, Balkans or preferably S.E. Asia. In Bangkok, go to a red 

light district named Patpong.... Very lax laws and you don't have to worry about 

getting mugged or killed. To be really safe, talk to a cabbie and some of them will 

have a photo album of lovelies. Take your pick and he will deliver to your hotel 

room. 

* Soldo > By and large, Northern Europe including Scandinavia is very anti-pedo, 

Holland seems somewhat more tolerant than its neighbors. Southern Europe is more 

relaxed and a lot of the old Eastern European states don't have many laws in place - 

and if they do then don't enforce them because of lack of funds. Thailand seems to 

enforce laws only for the purpose of satisfying western govts, but if you're the one 

caught then look out. Most other S.E. Asian and Third world countries have far 

more pressing needs for their funds than stamping out loli material etc. 

The easy availability of child sex in many third world nations means that pornographic 

images are readily obtained, and continuing levels of poverty in these countries suggests 

that this problem will not be eliminated for many years. 

7.The child porn underworld demonstrates extraordinarily high levels of technical 

capacity, probably far above that of most of the law enforcement agencies 

attempting to combat them. Often, investigations and convictions grow out of 

chance discoveries.

 Already by the late 1980s, pedophiles and child pornography enthusiasts were 

among the most experienced and knowledgeable members of the computerized 

communication world, so they were magnificently placed to benefit from the many 

technological leaps of the next few years. Operating websites was a vastly easier matter 

than the chore of running traditional BBS’s, and offered the virtues (and the dangers) of a 

much wider audience. Instead of trading between a few dozen enthusiasts in a particular 

city or region, it was now feasible to gain instant access to materials emanating from 

other continents, and from countries with very different legal environments. Moreover, as 

computers themselves became faster, with far larger memories and faster processors, it 

became possible to store and transmit much more complex information, including large 

numbers of high-resolution color images, and movies. The child porn subculture on the 

Internet now began a boom that shows no sign of waning. 

 There are today veterans whose careers in circulating electronic child porn span 

twenty years or more. These dinosaurs occasionally reminisce about the primitive ages: 

“Hey, I remember things before there was abpep-t. Zmodem 8088 PC, 20 Meg hard drive 

with RGB monitor, when there wasn't even jpeg's, only gif's. ... Its just amazing how 

things have changed.” Another veteran recalls, “Twenty years ago I had a 300 baud 

modem, 16k memory and a 180k floppy drive. Didn't even consider a picture. My first 

HD cost about 500$US for 20megs in about 1984. It was about ‘87 before I had pictures 

with a 1 meg video card and SVGA.” “Master Blaster,” a venerated name on the child 

porn boards, wrote in 2000 that “I have been using it before most of you even knew the 

Net existed. I was online using a PDP-11 mainframe in 1980. We were hooked up to the 

**** intranet and in turn they were connected to the world via government and schools.” 

Attacking a rival who was trying to appropriate his nickname, “Zapper” declared in 2000 

that “I have had this nic since 1987 and will continue to use it.” We must be struck by the 

difficulty of tracking down people who have remained at liberty in such a dangerous 

environment for so many years. Sending police officers on intensive two or three week 

courses to learn about the Internet is simply not going to equip investigators adequately to 

confront such accumulated expertise. 
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8. The attitudes expressed by the child porn elite to law enforcement are so 

contemptuous as to be sobering. What the dealers and collectors are really afraid of 

is private vigilantes, “militias” and white hat hackers. 

 I quote a typical opinion from one of the elite figures within the CP underworld: 

In fact, extremely few persons actually get arrested and sent to jail, that is a myth 

really. There are thousands of vhs’s out there, many from 1999, thousands of people 

present at this bbs [bulletin board] and millions of loli-lovers in various countries, 

yet you only see a couple of persons getting arrested, and the media writes about it 

like they have been busting Al Capone. 

 Experienced members of the subculture have little but contempt for the capacities of 

“LEA,” that is, law enforcement. In one exchange on the boards, a poster suggested an 

ingenious tactic which might in theory serve to entrap many child porn fans, and asked 

whether police were likely to deploy it. Responses were sarcastically dismissive: 

*Godfather Corleone > I don ́t really think the LEA work that way as I ́m sure they 

have better things to do which they know are more efficient. For instance, trying to 

catch newbies trading per e-mail or newbies visiting IRC etc. 

*Kidflash > LEA is not smart enough or have time to do such things. 

9. Massive technical and legal obstacles prevent any easy solution to the undoubted 

problem posed by child porn. It is difficult to think of new laws that would make 

advances against the problem, which must involve close international collaboration. 

 From the outset, we have to realize what goals are achievable, and the total 

elimination of electronic child porn simply may not be within the bounds of possibility. 

That does not mean that we have to learn to accept or live with the problem, and we 

might well achieve a massive reduction of production and availability, on the lines of 

what was accomplished in the 1980s. The great majority of child porn users are rational 

enough to be deterred, if the proper methods are applied. If we could achieve, say, a 90 or 

95 percent reduction of availability, that would be a massive victory in its own right. The 

fact that some residual trade will continue indefinitely should not provide grounds for 

ever-increasing encroachments on the liberties of law-abiding “netizens.” 

 To illustrate just how intractable the child porn problem is, let us imagine a means 

by which this material could be removed or destroyed entirely. Purely as a fantasy, let us 

suggest that the Internet should simply be prohibited, along with private communication 

over computer networks. Even if a hypothetical government did prohibit computer 

networks, it still would not eliminate child porn. Such a ban could only be enforced by 

computers in the hands of police or security forces, and many precedents indicate that 

these government employees would surreptitiously be sharing pornographic images. If 

there are computers, there will be computerized child pornography. 

 To take a marginally less outrageous solution, consider the experience of China, 

which like many authoritarian nations, faces a fundamental paradox in its attitudes to 

Internet technology. The Chinese want the massive economic benefits of the Net, and 

also realize the military implications of having a computer-literate populace. The ongoing 

cold war between the People’s Republic and Taiwan is increasingly fought in the form of 

hacker attacks on each other’s electronic installations. At the same time, the PRC’s rulers 

are nervous about the democratic implications of the Internet, the ability of ordinary 

citizens to form political or cultural groupings online, and to circulate information critical 

of the state. In response to this dilemma, the Chinese government has ordained that all 

Internet traffic must pass through two portals, both run by the state: the authorities strictly 

limit what sites can be accessed, and keep detailed records of who is visiting what site. 
126

All ISPs and Internet users have to register with authorities. Anyone using encryption 

technology is required to notify a government agency of that fact. Other countries with 

comparably strict laws are Singapore, Saudi Arabia and Vietnam, and one state has taken 

the principle of control to its logical extent: “Burma [Myanmar] has taken the strongest 

measures by outlawing the use of the Internet and making ownership of an unregistered 

computer with networking capabilities illegal.” 

 With such a model, much child pornography could indeed be kept off the Internet, 

and its aficionados rounded up or terrorized into inactivity. The difficulty is that a 

Western nation would find such a solution unacceptable from a myriad different 

perspectives, not least because it would hamstring the whole Internet, and introduce 

controls which most members of a democratic society would regard as utterly intolerable. 

But would it even work? China has an agelong tradition of technological innovation, 

while successive generations of Chinese dissidents over long centuries have devised ever 

more imaginative means of outwitting repressive governments, and distributing their own 

propaganda. Not surprisingly, the latest restrictions do not appear too burdensome in 

practice. Chinese computer users access forbidden sites by means of proxy servers, of 

which there are far too many to permit concerted government action. Users also make 

extensive use of Internet cafes rather than private machines, so even if authorities note 

the fact that an unregulated site has been accessed, the odds of detecting a specific 

individual are slight. The Chinese experience neatly illustrates the remark of Internet 

pioneer John Gilmore that “the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes 

around it.” Once again, too, we face the issue of “who guards the guards?” We may 

wonder what frivolous, decadent and obscene websites are regularly frequented by the 

guardians of electronic morality in socialist China. 

 While a Chinese (or Burmese) solution is inconceivable in the West, it is scarcely 

less Orwellian than some of the ideas which have been floated, however speculatively. 

Given the nature of the child porn trade, the only policies which might conceivably 

attempt eradication would involve wide-ranging surveillance of Web traffic by official 

agencies. This effort might be carried out in a directed way under the approval of court 

warrants, or else randomly through general fishing expeditions undertaken against the 

sort of people thought likely to offend in this particular way. Yet as the Chinese example 

indicates, even such an intolerable set of burdens probably would not eliminate the 

underlying issue. 

 If the traffic cannot altogether be eliminated, the next question is how far it can be 

detected and combated, with a view to suppressing the bulk of the trade, and ending the 

present easy availability of this material. And how far can this be achieved without 

destroying the privacy rights of law-abiding Net users? When considering this, it is 

useful to recall just how far the Net has already eroded privacy, and the resentment which 

such intrusions have already caused. In reaction to current threats, legislators have come 

under pressure to enact safeguards from electronic snooping, at exactly the same time that 

the perceived need to combat cybercrime encourages the same law-makers to enhance 

official surveillance powers. The result is a strange and fast-moving struggle of priorities, 

between what might be the irreconcilable values of individual privacy and public 

security. 

 The biggest single problem facing police is simply recognizing and understanding 

the nature of the child porn world on the Net. Despite all the enforcement efforts of 

recent years, it is still remarkably easy for any reasonably discreet person to pursue this 

highly illegal conduct indefinitely, so long as obvious traps are avoided. This does not 

mean that police have been lackadaisical or incompetent, still less that their hands have 

been tied by legislators. Hitherto, law enforcement agencies, and their political masters, 

have just had a very poor idea of the organization and mechanisms of the child porn 

subculture, and above all, its critical institutions, like the newsgroups and bulletin boards. 

To take a glaring example, given the public loathing of child porn and the support that 
127

could be mobilized against it, it is incredible that virtually nobody outside the subculture 

itself ever heard of abpep-t: the name barely appears in searches of media databases. 

 In observing this neglect, we might think of an analogy with illegal drugs, in which 

there is both a supply side (manufacturers and importers) and a demand side (street-level 

users). Looking at current efforts against child porn, it is almost as if anti-drug policing 

was solely confined to arresting users and addicts, while ignoring organized rings and 

suppliers. In this fantasy world, no attention would be given to tracing the origin of 

supplies of (say) cocaine, and the assumption would be that the substance “just grew”, or 

perhaps appeared naturally in neighborhood gardens. Police would remain blissfully 

unaware of potent names like “Colombia.” Such an approach might result in numerous 

arrests and convictions, but it could never make a dent in illicit drug supplies: nor does a 

pure demand-side approach work for child porn. This needs stressing because the 

occasional attempts to outline anti-child porn strategies concentrate entirely on 

intimidating the ordinary users. Filling the prisons with child porn users is as likely to be 

ineffective as the zero-tolerance drug strategy which has incarcerated hundreds of 

thousands of small time consumers, combining minimal deterrence with maximum social 

devastation. 

 All too often, “get tough” campaigns garner rich publicity by appearing to be 

striking at the problem enthusiastically, but the effects are minimal, if not 

counterproductive. Furthermore, the horror inspired by child pornography naturally 

inspires politicians to try and “do something,” but the “something” in question has 

nothing to do with the issue at hand. Though child porn is harrowing enough in its own 

right, the massive reaction to web-based obscenity by politicians and media undoubtedly 

reflects a sense of loss of control in the face of Internet technology, augmented by a 

recognition of the fragility of international boundaries and laws. So deep is this 

unfocused concern that it all too readily justifies legal efforts directed not against the 

genuinely harmful area of child pornography, but against far milder forms of adultthemed indecency, of explicit images, and even language. Hence the instant appeal of 

successive high-octane campaigns against “cyberporn,” none of which would have the 

slightest impact on the real world of child pornography. When misdirected laws fail to 

suppress child porn, the predictable result is to pass still more laws of the same hue, and 

so the cycle continues. Agreeing unhesitatingly that child porn is an unqualified evil 

should not mean acceding to every measure proposed, however tenuously, under an “antichild porn” rubric. When passing laws, it is useful to recall the opening words of the 

Hippocratic Oath: first, to do no harm. 

 When we consider the thriving kiddie porn culture on the Internet, we might recall 

the Maoist dictum that guerrillas move among the people like fish swim in the sea. The 

analogy holds to the extent that child pornographers do indeed travel the Internet like the 

proverbial swimming fish, and there is no easy way to catch the fish without draining or 

poisoning the entire sea. We have to find means of killing or crippling the subculture 

without destroying the Internet, with which so much good can be accomplished. 

9. On the positive side, some substantial victories have been achieved. 

 Comparing the situation today with that in 2000, I am struck by how many of the 

easily accessible semi-public sites have been closed down, usually through the semi-legal 

actions of vigilantes and white hat hackers, rather than by law enforcement agencies 

themselves. For instance, we no longer have the proliferation of outrageous sites that 

used to disgrace yahoo and MSN’s groups, and that provided portals to very hard core 

material indeed. The bulletin boards have also been forced to conceal themselves behind 

passwords and high firewalls. However tempted we might be to despair, progress really 

has been made. 
128

 MR. WHITFIELD. Well, I want to thank all of you for your testimony. 

We appreciate it very much. Dr. Jenkins, let me ask you a question. I 

notice you are a Professor of History and Religious Studies at Penn State, 

so how was it that you became involved in this particular issue? 

 DR. JENKINS. It is, as they say, a long story. I had been working for 

a long while on the history of child abuse and child molestation, and in 

one book I wrote in 1998 I discuss the topic of child porn on the Internet 

from the context of the congressional hearings held in the mid-90s. And 

at that time I believed that it was largely a myth, if you like, an urban 

legend. When I found that it was not, in fact, I stumbled across this 

material while trying to write another book, I felt it incumbent on me to 

counteract the misleading impression given in my previous book. So it is 

basically the historian in me who is speaking. It is a very fair question 

you ask. 

 MR. WHITFIELD. Recently I was talking to someone and they were 

talking that in many countries around the world, of course it is not even a 

violation of the country’s laws for child pornography to be shown or 

displayed, and they were talking about they were having a meeting with 

some members of the Russian Duma, and they were trying to introduce 

legislation to make it illegal for child pornography. And the members of 

the Duma told them, they said, we are going to introduce this legislation 

in Russia, but that is not going to come close to solving the problem 

because in America is where most of the demand lies. The citizens of 

America are the ones that are buying this, that are paying for these sites, 

that is where the consumption is taking place. 

 Now all of you on this panel have been involved in this issue longer 

than any of us have, but would you say that that characterization that I 

just talked about is actually true? 

 DR. JENKINS. May I speak to that? 

 MR. WHITFIELD. Yes. 

 DR. JENKINS. I would say it is really unknowable because by 

definition we do not know how many images are produced or circulated. 

All we see is the result of law enforcement. If, for example, law 

enforcement in one company works very hard against enforcement then 

that is where we will have the most evidence of consumption. If you 

want to see the market then you have to go to these boards which appear 

to me to describe a consumption certainly across the western world but 

also in Japan, in a very rapidly growing world now across much of Asia. 

This is a truly global market. It might be that what we see in America is 

just a function of law enforcement findings. 

 MR. WHITFIELD. Right. Okay. Would anyone else want to make a 

comment on that at all? 
129

 MR. EICHENWALD. In the course of what I saw, again my 

information is far from scientific, but there was clearly a very heavy 

American element among the customer base. For example, on the 

Playtoy site you had 6,000 members. Many of them put in an identifier 

of what country they were from. There were a large number of 

Americans. In the discussion sites, it occasionally would come up about 

what country people lived in. What was interesting to me is the number 

of people who were Americans but not all of them lived in America. 

Some had relocated to Mexico where they thought the laws were more 

favorable. 

 And so there is clearly a large American element to the demand. 

How much of that in terms of proportions, Dr. Jenkins is right, it is 

unknowable. 

 MR. WHITFIELD. Dr. Salter, you have contributed so much in this 

area and have written a number of books, and I did see a portion of the 

video that you sent down here of your interview with the inmate. I must 

say he was quite an appealing fellow. I mean his personality seemed to 

be warm and genuine, and he seemed to really be interested and 

responding to your questions providing information to parents about how 

they can help on this. In your experience, these pedophiles, generally 

speaking, are they that ingratiating? Do they have that kind of a 

personality, generally speaking? 

 DR. SALTER. Well, the most successful of them are. If you are 

going to last as a pedophile, if you are going to get ongoing access to 

multiple children for long periods of time, then you have to be that 

charming and that likeable and that ingratiating, and the ones who aren’t 

just get caught much sooner. 

 MR. WHITFIELD. Now in your testimony, despite your great 

leadership on this issue, I certainly get the sense that you are sort of 

pessimistic about Congress or anyone else really being able to deal 

effectively with this problem. Am I accurately stating-- 

 DR. SALTER. No, not at all. 

 MR. WHITFIELD. Okay. 

 DR. SALTER. Not at all. My comments were only that I fear we 

can’t leave this to parents. 

 MR. WHITFIELD. Okay. 

 DR. SALTER. And the reason is that parents are very naive about 

this, and, frankly, they are very easily taken in. I have known of kids 

who are going into chat rooms with strangers and warned their parents 

about it and been told, and they never did anything about it. They really 

believed there was no danger at all. No, I think it is going to take 

Congress getting involved in this. 
130

 MR. WHITFIELD. Do you have any specific suggestions? If you were 

a Member of Congress, are there any specific things that you would be 

looking at or trying to do? 

 DR. SALTER. I don’t have a complete answer to this, and I wouldn’t 

again pretend that I do. I would say anything that we can do to support 

the cutting off the money by the credit card companies. Anything we can 

do to support that would be valuable because at the end of the day if we 

could stop the money, we could stop a lot of it. 

 MR. WHITFIELD. We have heard a lot of that testimony, and I 

appreciate your pointing that out. Now, Dr. Hernandez, it is my 

understanding in the Federal prison system that your program is the only 

one that is in existence that deals with this issue, is that correct? 

 DR. HERNANDEZ. Yes, sir. 

 MR. WHITFIELD. And it is my understanding there are 112 beds so 

out of a population of 12,000 Federal prisoners that are there because of 

this issue, you can treat 112 at a time, is that correct? 

 DR. HERNANDEZ. That is correct. 

 MR. WHITFIELD. Now you said that it is a voluntary program. I am 

assuming that is because they are the only ones you can have any hope of 

really helping them deal with their issue? 

 DR. HERNANDEZ. The issue of voluntary participation certainly is an 

important one. It enhances our ability to treat the offenders. There are 

other treatment models that have a different approach to treatment, a 

required approach. However, we don’t have a policy that requires these 

offenders to participate in treatment while incarcerated. 

 MR. WHITFIELD. Have you been able to measure how effective your 

program is and how long has it been in existence, and could you give 

some additional information? 

 DR. HERNANDEZ. The program has been in existence since 1990, 

and the Office of Research and Evaluation has undertaken a rather big 

outcome study. It will take several years to complete that study, and the 

reason for that is because in order to measure recidivism these offenders 

have to recidivate. They have to be out in the community and we need to 

compare those who went through the treatment program with those who 

didn’t go through the treatment program, but did have the opportunity to 

enter such treatment. Those analyses have not been conducted so we 

really cannot tell you with any degree of scientific certainty whether the 

treatment program works. 

 MR. WHITFIELD. So we just haven’t time to get an accurate reading 

at this point? 

 DR. HERNANDEZ. Yes, sir. 
131

 MR. WHITFIELD. Dr. Salter, do you believe that there is a link 

between viewing Internet child pornography and committing contact sex 

offenses against children? 

 DR. SALTER. Certainly. As Dr. Hernandez pointed out, I believe 

they have 80 percent of their child porn had contact offenses. I have 

seen a recent study where it was 24 percent but everybody 

acknowledges, I think, that a considerable percentage of child 

pornographers had known contact offenses in the past, and that is just 

what we know about. It put the chances of getting caught for any sexual 

offense at 3 percent so for every offender who gets caught they have 

typically many more offenses they didn’t get caught on. 

 MR. WHITFIELD. Well, my time has expired, so I recognize Mr. 

Stupak. 

 MR. STUPAK. Dr. Salter, if I may, the last question the Chairman 

just asked you was about if people view online pornography then is there 

a likelihood to have sexual contact, and I believe you said your answer 

was yes? 

 DR. SALTER. Yes. 

 MR. STUPAK. Okay. What is different then if people view Hustler, 

Playboy, things like that, is there a greater likelihood then they are going 

to have improper sexual contact? 

 DR. SALTER. With children? 

 MR. STUPAK. Or with other individuals. 

 DR. SALTER. Not to my knowledge. It looks to me from reading the 

porn literature that there are certain kinds of adult porn that are 

connected with sexual offenses and it is mostly positive outcome rates, 

porn that suggests women want violence, that have a scene that starts 

with a rape and ends up with the woman smiling. And that certainly has 

a negative impact on people. But the sort of people who view adult porn 

are certainly not always interested in children. Very, very few are. And 

it is child porn that is directly tied to assaults on children. 

 MR. STUPAK. What I am trying to do, if anyone wants to jump in, I 

guess I am trying to say at what point do we sort of cross the line, at what 

point do we leave where there may be viewing for if you want to use the 

words, I am struggling here a little bit, maybe personal satisfaction or 

pleasure to criminal activity such as assaultive behavior, I guess would 

be the best way to say it. I find your testimony interesting, but what I am 

trying to find is there a point, do we start out on pornography, just 

looking at sites, and then suddenly you go further and further? At what 

point do we cross that threshold where suddenly what may be personal 

observation for whatever pleasure you see in it moves to the point of 

being criminal activity? Can anyone help me with that? We got a 

criminologist, we got a psychologist, we got everybody. 
132

 DR. HERNANDEZ. Well, I will take a stab at it. The answer to your 

very direct question is we really don’t know. The body of scientific 

knowledge is just not there. We are barely scratching the surface. We 

are developing some hypothesis. My observations have been that many 

of these Internet-related sexual offenders do have a fair amount of 

contact sexual criminality. These same observations which I have to 

qualify I have made in a specific context that doesn’t really generalize to 

all sex offenders out there or all Internet sex offenders. Nonetheless, 

these observations tell me that while child pornography images do have 

an influence on the user that the reason for them seeking child 

pornography predated their looking for these images. 

 MR. STUPAK. Sure. Mr. Eichenwald, you did some interesting 

articles and I want to go to one in particular. I believe it was an August 

21 article. Let me just quote a little bit from it and maybe you can add a 

little bit to this. I am reading your article and it says “some pedophiles 

revealed that they gain access to children through their own families.” 

You were quoting one person, “I have a daughter and I have never been 

attracted to her. A man with a screen name of John Boy wrote, but he 

added I did find her friends very attractive. Pedophiles chafe at 

suggestions that such comments reflect risks to minors. They point out 

correctly that family members and friends, not strangers, are the most 

frequent predators of child sexual abuse. They never note, however, that 

the minors mentioned in their online discussions are most frequently 

those they know well like relatives and children of friends.” 

I guess maybe what I am trying to get to is back to the question of 

where does it go to the point where it becomes criminal, and I guess 

probably the answer is with each individual once they cross that 

threshold. Can you help us at all with this? I found the articles pretty 

interesting reading for this hearing today. 

 MR. EICHENWALD. Well, I would always caution that everybody 

here has statistical analysis, everybody here has scientific analysis. Mine 

is purely anecdotal. But I would say that in the course of what I saw 

while watching these conversations you cannot overstate the degree of 

the obsession with children. These are people who, as they describe it, 

their entire lives are built around being around children, getting near 

children, watching children, and seeing children. The result of that is 

you are almost asking the question does child pornography lead to sexual 

assault, and again I have no statistics to back it up. 

 Given what I saw, it just seemed like this lunch lead to dinner. This 

is something they want. They want children. They want children in 

sexualized ways. They talk about it incessively. They view events that 

most of us would see as irrelevant and unimportant, nothing as being 

hugely important sexual events. And so again I think that what we are 
133

seeing are outgrowths of the same predilection that the desire for child 

pornography and the desire for contact offenses are growing from a preexisting problems and that those are both just two sides of the same coin. 

 MR. STUPAK. Dr. Hernandez, didn’t you have some study or your 

studies or research has shown like 76 to 80 percent of those who possess 

child pornography and those who actually have sexual contact with 

children is like 76 to 80 percent, is that right? Did I summarize that 

right? 

 DR. HERNANDEZ. That is correct, 80 to 85 percent. 

 MR. STUPAK. Okay. Are you familiar then with Joseph Bushman 

from the Dutch Ministry of Justice where he did some polygraph testing? 

Are you familiar with that study at all? 

 DR. HERNANDEZ. I am not familiar. 

 MR. STUPAK. He interviewed apparently and was in this operation 

Falcon or RegPay, as we called it last week when we had the financials 

in there. According to some testimony there or some things we had read, 

he found results somewhat similar to yours that all the subjects that were 

caught subscribing to online child porn sites had in fact some sexual 

contact with children. So I guess this would support your conclusions. I 

am just grasping here. I am trying, as I think we all have, no one likes 

holding these hearings. We are trying to get a profile of the predator and 

that is the subject of this hearing. We have heard you really can’t profile 

from Dr. Jenkins, and when you read Mr. Eichenwald’s articles, they are 

almost like obsessed or become so obsessed with children that they acted 

out to the next extent and where do you get that? When do they cross 

that line, I guess is what I am drawing from if anyone can give us--

answer that million dollar question. Dr. Baxter. 

 DR. BAXTER. We also wrestle with the same desire for knowledge 

and that is why we have a lot of research hypothesis. While we know 

what Dr. Hernandez has found in the Federal Bureau of Prisons in a 

treatment group at Butner, we also understand the need to do further 

research to be able to generalize to other Federal inmates much less State 

inmates or those who may have not been apprehended or convicted yet. 

And so part of what we are in the planning stages of is for the research in 

our agency to find out whether or not Dr. Hernandez’s findings at Butner 

are generalizable to the rest of our prison population. We too have many 

questions about what is the sequence of development of criminal 

behavior. How much of it may be triggered by Internet pornography 

exposure? Did the predilection exist on the part of the individual before 

they were exposed to the Internet? Does the Internet somehow foster the 

development in a different way of those kinds of behaviors? 

 MR. STUPAK. Dr. Salter, it looked like you were trying to say 

something there or wanted to jump in. 
134

 DR. SALTER. If I am understanding your question, I do believe there 

are men out there who are sexually attracted to children and who don’t 

act on it. However, I don’t think you are going to find them very often 

among the people watching child porn. And the reason I say this is I 

think that people who just know that they have an attraction to kids and 

are horrified by it are actively resisting it. They don’t get involved in 

child porn because they think it is immoral. Once you get to the group 

who are actually seeking out child porn where they know there are real 

children being exploited, you have already crossed the line. 

 MR. STUPAK. Thank you. Thank you to all of our witnesses. 

 MR. WHITFIELD. Chairman Barton is recognized for 10 minutes. 

 CHAIRMAN BARTON. Thank you. Is it a true statement that the 

availability of child pornography disseminated by the Internet has caused 

an increase in actual pedophilic behavior? Does the availability increase 

the incidents of the transgression? Anybody? 

 DR. JENKINS. In my sense, it is simply not knowable. We do not 

know how much behavior is underway. We only know what might lead 

to arrest or imprisonment so it really is not knowable. I would also add 

one thing. Don’t forget in some ways child porn material was very freely 

available in this country in the 1970s in the form of magazines. It was 

freely available in any large city, so this is not a new phenomenon but I 

am afraid the answer to your question is we don’t know and we can’t 

know. 

 CHAIRMAN BARTON. Well, let me reverse the question. If we are 

successful in limiting the availability, the second panel are Web 

providers, domain name providers, and one of my goals is to make it 

much more difficult to get this garbage available on the Internet. If we 

are successful in that, if we make it much more difficult and limit the 

availability, does that help with the pedophile population reduce the 

numbers of pedophiles and reduce their transgressions against children? 

 DR. JENKINS. I would suggest that it helps in two ways. One is it 

helps the kind of people who Dr. Salter is describing who might feel 

these urges or these desires and they face less provocation to move to 

that further stage. The other one is if there is less material then there is 

less of a market. There is less encouragement for people to go out and 

molest, commit offenses against children for the sake of this commercial 

market so it protects children immediately in that way. So this stuff can 

never be eliminated, I don’t think, but it can be massively reduced and 

that is where I think the work this committee is doing is so important. 

Yes, I think it can do a lot of good. 

 CHAIRMAN BARTON. Dr. Salter, if we are successful in limiting the 

availability, and through our window nationally and to some extent 

internationally create a peer pressure in the adult population that this is 
135

just bad or you just don’t do bad things. Does somebody who is a latent 

child pedophile, can we actually create an environment in which just 

through lack of availability and peer pressure that the action itself is 

wrong prevent a potential pedophile from acting on their impulses? 

 DR. SALTER. Yes. I am obviously not saying that you are going to 

stop everybody because many people don’t come at child molestation to 

this point. They just come directly to child molestation. But are there 

people on the edge who have some interest and who get further 

sensitized by child porn? Sure, I believe that. And also the fact that they 

can find it so easily, the fact that they don’t have to go anywhere, they 

don’t have to order anything, and they don’t have to buy anything. It is 

in their living rooms. Is that a knock for people on the edge? Yes. I also 

would like to second Dr. Jenkins’ comments. There are untold numbers 

of children being involved in the manufacture of porn. By cutting down 

on the child porn you will immediately reduce the number of victims. 

 CHAIRMAN BARTON. I am going to reserve my questions for the 

second panel, Mr. Whitfield, but it is a goal of this investigation, we 

want to increase public awareness and that is where Mr. Eichenwald has 

done such a good job helping us. But we also want to create pressure in 

the technology community to make it much more difficult and maybe 

impossible to get these images available. Then whatever steps we need 

to take legislatively to increase Federal penalties on this type of behavior, 

so we actually have three different steps we are trying to approach. 

Again, I want to thank you and Mr. Stupak for your personal 

involvement in this. It is beginning to pay dividends. I think we are 

making a difference in the country on this. 

 MR. STUPAK. Mr. Chairman, would you yield to me? 

 CHAIRMAN BARTON. Sure. 

 MR. STUPAK. I would like to ask a follow-up question or two. And I 

think the work the committee has been doing in this area has been 

excellent. I think we have helped open up a lot of eyes. In the 1970s as 

was testified earlier that child pornography, because customs was 

involved, we pretty much cracked down on it and it moved to the 

Internet, so it leads me to two questions. What percentage of our society 

has tendency to be a pedophile or may be a pedophile, and then if we 

take away the Internet access then where do these pedophiles go whether 

it is for commercial market or whether it is for the physical contact. So 

is there a set like a percentage, 1 percent, 2 percent, 3 percent, whatever 

it might be? If so, if you dry up the mail like we did in the 70s and the 

Internet is then gone, where do they go, where do they act out? If the 

obsession is so great, they are going to have to find it somewhere. Any 

thoughts, anyone? 
136

 DR. SALTER. The incidents of people, men, in the society who are 

interested in children has been estimated to be as high as 20 percent. 

There was a report by John Breer, among others, where they asked 

people if you could get away with it, if there were no penalties or 

whatever, would you have sex with a child or do you have any interest in 

children. So it has been estimated to be that high. In one study that was 

done where they had some very complicated ways of guaranteeing 

confidentiality, 10 percent of the population admitted to having at some 

point molested a child. 

 Now we don’t know how many of those were adolescents or even 

younger and one-time event. I think it is safe to say that there is a 

significant percentage of the population that has some interest in 

children. I do not believe by shutting down child porn on the Internet 

there would be any increase in child pornography. I think child 

pornography increases the arousal to kids and is throwing gasoline on the 

fire. I have certainly known of offenders who had an interest in kids and 

who did not act on it because they did not have the social skills. They 

were too shy, they were too unskilled to get access to those kids. 

 So I think when you shut down opportunities for one reason or 

another you don’t end up with more offending overall. You end up with 

less offending. 

 MR. STUPAK. What is the next avenue of offensive behavior then? I 

guess that is what I am trying to stay one step ahead of the game. I know 

that is not possible but I guess I am just trying to think this thing through. 

If you read the articles in the New York Times and others these folks are 

very ingenious in the way they work it, in the way they manipulate it, not 

just manipulate the Internet and hide behind it but also manipulate 

children and other people, so they are going to go somewhere. Where 

would that be? Go ahead, Mr. Eichenwald. 

 MR. EICHENWALD. What has changed and what has changed 

dramatically is that the socially awkward pedophile now has many, many 

people to give him advice on exactly what to do. I saw a large discussion 

among a bunch of pedophiles with one who was trying to gain the 

attention of a young boy, and he was going to buy him I think it was a 

$2,000 computer. And everyone waved the red flag. Don’t do that, 

don’t go that far because immediately that will attract attention to you. 

The parents will freak out instead. Bring it down. Maybe have him 

work for it. It was all this discussion on that lines. 

 What I found so disturbing in these discussions with the number of 

times there were people who were saying I have been in jail for 

molesting a child, and here they are with full Internet access talking with 

other pedophiles, getting reinforced constantly that their desires are fine, 

that what they do is acceptable. It is good for children. That there is 
137

something wrong with society, there is nothing wrong with them. And as 

I watched that, it just was so strong, so clear to me that anyone who has 

this predilection and who is constantly getting bombarded with the 

message that what you want to do is good and beneficial is probably 

going to act again. 

 And it was disturbing to me to recognize that here are people who 

had already been in the legal system who are now essentially being 

encouraged to commit another crime. And so if you take away the child 

porn because magically wave a magic wand and it is gone tomorrow, 

what you still have is this justification community, this community of 

individuals who are day in and day out supporting each other, 

encouraging each other, and telling each other that the world is very 

different from what it actually is. 

 MR. STUPAK. Thank you. And, thank you, Mr. Chairman, for 

yielding. 

 CHAIRMAN BARTON. Yield back. 

 MR. WHITFIELD. Mr. Ferguson is recognized for 10 minutes. 

 MR. FERGUSON. It is tough to know where to begin. Every one of 

these hearings, you find we have had witnesses as we have with you 

today that would be--spend less than hours and hours and hours with 

each one of you talking through all these issues seems to be 

shortchanging the topic, but we very much appreciate and value the 

insights that you have been sharing with us, all of you. I have several 

questions for Mr. Eichenwald because I have reviewed this information 

that you have shared with us, that you have submitted from some of what 

you have seen online. 

 In your testimony you discussed how you observed these 

conversations of these pedophiles in these, I don’t know if it is a chat 

room or if it is some-- 

 MR. EICHENWALD. It is multiple, sort of multiple systems. 

 MR. FERGUSON. They are having on these online forums. They are 

talking with one another as you have been describing. How easy is it to 

access these? Were you able to just go in and start watching or listening? 

You didn’t participate but-- 

 MR. EICHENWALD. There are certain forums that are password 

protected. I didn’t go into any of those. But the ones that I found, there 

are multiple levels. There is something called Internet relay chat, which 

is basically a text based system that exists sort of underneath the World 

Wide Web. And you can set up any room on any topic. People can 

come in and have a discussion, leave and the room disappears. 

 MR. FERGUSON. Do they ever talk about what we are doing here? 

 MR. EICHENWALD. Oh, constantly. 

 MR. FERGUSON. These hearings? 
138

 MR. EICHENWALD. They talk about me. They talk about this 

committee. They talk about Oprah Winfrey. They talk about anyone 

who is in fact dealing with this issue and trying to address the danger to 

children from pedophiles. They have a name for all of us. We are called 

child haters. And in their view, we are child haters because we are trying 

to do something to prevent the molestation of children. And, again, 

when I talk about the view of the world inside these communication 

systems is very different from what you would expect to hear in a normal 

conversation. It is very different. Up is down. Black is white. 

 And there are so many vehicles available from the IRC to the 

bulletin boards to Web-based forum postings to Web-based live 

conversations. And I watched conversations on all of these. 

 MR. FERGUSON. You have attached an example of this, this 

conversation going back and forth between various people including 

someone named Tanks or Tanex. 

 MR. EICHENWALD. Tanks is a bogus e-mail address. It is an 

anonymizer. It is not somebody whose real name. And Tanks posted on 

a bulletin board, there was a person who goes around the bulletin boards 

as vigilante trying to identify people, trying to take things down, and he 

was saying to that person you can’t stop us, and look what I can do, and 

he basically laid out chapter and verse of how the high end child porn 

traders have set up a mechanism under which they are able to trade child 

porn with a fairly good belief that they will not be detected. 

 MR. FERGUSON. What is B&C? 

 MR. EICHENWALD. B&C is the name of the person who has been 

doing--it is Bob and Carol. It is a screen name of the person who has 

been going around the bulletin board making trouble for the pedophiles. 

 MR. FERGUSON. B&C is the vigilante? 

 MR. EICHENWALD. Yes. As I understand it, yes. And so he is 

saying basically do all you want, you can’t stop us. 

 MR. FERGUSON. Is this something you just sort of stumbled across 

as you were observing one of these conversations? 

 MR. EICHENWALD. Yes. What happened. Actually, the reason you 

have that posting in that format, I came across the posting after it went 

up. It had an automatic delete function on it that I didn’t realize was 

there, and it disappeared after 3 days. So somebody who replied to it 

accidentally had copied the posting into his posting, and so that is why 

what you have is a reply followed by the original posting. That 

individual lays out a scenario under which--it is very detailed--under 

which he is able to obtain child porn on a daily basis without anyone 

knowing anything about it. 

 MR. FERGUSON. Now on the first page of this though in this 

anonymizer name or address, it says, and the quote is “for every hapless 
139

idiot that gets caught with KP--”, kiddie porn, “--because they were too 

stupid to encrypt there are likely hundreds still living their KP lives that 

will never be caught.” And then on page 2 this same person goes on to 

discuss how much better and safer it is for pedophiles to trade images on 

a peer-to-peer network. Is this directive, this sort of encouragement to go 

using peer-to-peer networks, is this a theme, is this something that is 

common in these conversations based on your observations? Is this 

echoed in other chat rooms? 

 MR. EICHENWALD. The sense of how to get away with it is 

constantly discussed. Actually there was a reference in the story when a 

number of technology companies came in and said we are putting 

together a new technology that will help us track child porn and identify 

it. Literally that day of that announcement, as the announcement is 

coming out of the committee, I was watching the conversations online, 

and it was here is how we beat it. Before the technology was up and 

running, they already knew how to beat it. 

 This was the most--the posting that you are looking at now is a 

description of the most sophisticated mechanism of trading child porn 

and is clearly the mechanism that this community is moving towards. 

And the reason I have included that in my testimony is I think that is 

important for the committee to understand, not just what has been 

happening but also where this world is moving to. 

 MR. FERGUSON. At the end of this e-mail exchange, this 

conversation, there is a listing that has some file names, some of them 

with very graphic names about the exploitation of children, most of them 

it seems. Very briefly, what is your understanding? What are these? 

 MR. EICHENWALD. Those are videos. 

 MR. FERGUSON. They are videos. So at the end of this conversation 

they just attached a bunch of-- 

 MR. EICHENWALD. What he was doing was saying look how much 

child porn I have been able to obtain in the last number of months by 

using this system, and he has 100 gigabytes of child porn. Now that 

directory--he wasn’t posting the videos themselves. He was posting his 

directory listing. And so from his directory listing, which goes on and on 

and on, I believe, for like 20 pages, you can see in more graphic terms 

than any of us could ever describe not only the magnitude of what they 

have, but also the ages of the children involved, and what those children 

are being subjected to. And that is what is going on right now in the 

peer-to-peer networks. 

 MR. FERGUSON. Can you talk about these modeling sites for a 

second? You talked about how you learned about this child modeling 

sites while you were observing these pedophile chat rooms or where they 

are talking. What are these folks saying about the child modeling sites? 
140

 MR. EICHENWALD. Well, actually at the point when I first found it, I 

didn’t know what modeling sites were, and somebody had posted 

something to Playtoy Mansion. Now it took me actually until after the 

story was published and somebody pointed out that that was a play on 

the words Playboy Mansion. But at the time I didn’t know what it was, 

and I had followed links from actually that conversation site. That is 

how I found the radio station. That is how I found the pod cast. That is 

actually how I found the jewelry store. And I clicked on Playtoy 

Mansion and it took me to another forum where people were--it is 

basically--there is a format for the forum. I recognized it immediately as 

that format. 

 And there were links on that forum to other sites, and when I clicked 

on it, it very rapidly became clear that this was a forum for a collection 

of child porn sites. 

 MR. FERGUSON. I realize I am asking your opinion on this but in 

your opinion are these modeling sites a gateway to the rest of the child 

pornography world, this criminal world? 

 MR. EICHENWALD. The modeling sites that I saw, again, as soon as I 

realized what I was looking at, I had to stop and call law enforcement, 

but what I saw was ungodly. I have had a lot of sleepless nights over the 

past year and a half when there have been times I have had to adapt to 

new things to my mind that I hadn’t considered existed before. And that 

day when I realized there was a 3-year-old girl out there, there was a 6-

year-old girl out there, there was an 8-year-old girl out there that were 

being posed to meet the demands of 6,000 pedophiles that were being 

photographed on a weekly basis that were being placed in unbelievable 

sexual positions in order to gratify these people paying $30 a month. 

 That was a day or two or three where I just stopped sleeping. Does 

this lead to child porn? This is child porn. The only thing that makes it 

slightly less horrific is that they have a Band-aid of clothing on these 

children, but these children are being abused, and they are being 

exploited. And so the reason why the predators are interested in these 

sites is because they have convinced themselves, contrary to law, that 

these sites are legal. I think they now think differently because many of 

these sites shut down. Playtoy and many other ones have shut down 

since the article was published. But what is going on there is terrible. 

 MR. WHITFIELD. The gentleman’s time has expired. Dr. Salter, did 

you want to make a comment? 

 DR. SALTER. No. 

 MR. WHITFIELD. Okay. I thought that you were getting ready to say 

something so I wanted to give you that opportunity. 

 DR. SALTER. Thank you. 
141

 MR. WHITFIELD. Mrs. Blackburn, you are recognized for 10 

minutes. 

 MRS. BLACKBURN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And thank you to 

our witnesses that have joined us today. And, Mr. Chairman, I have a 

statement that I will submit for the record. I want to come right in 

behind where Mr. Ferguson was questioning, and let us talk for a minute 

about these children. And, Mr. Eichenwald, I thank you for continuing 

to work with us and to answer the call when we talk with you. Let us 

talk about these children, because I cannot even imagine the 

psychological harm that is done to the children that are pulled into these 

gateway sites, if you will, or the child model sites. 

 And I guess, Dr. Salter, I will direct the question to you or to any of 

you that have actually worked with the children that have been affected 

by this. And we have heard from Justin Berry. Have you been able to 

establish a method for working with them, talking with them, trying to 

pull out what is the best way to help the children in dealing with 

addressing this situation? So, Dr. Salter, if you want to go first. 

 DR. SALTER. The child sexual abuse treatment field that specializes 

in treating children is far larger and better, and therefore has more 

research behind it than the sex offender field. 

 MRS. BLACKBURN. But are you all working with them? Do you 

work with any of those that are dealing with the child sexual abuse and 

dealing with the children because I think the psychological harm of the 

children and just the interaction-- 

 DR. SALTER. I did for 20 years. Currently I am not seeing the 

clients. 

 MRS. BLACKBURN. Okay. 

 DR. SALTER. But I worked with both and because it is hard to get 

offenders in treatment and victims seek treatment far more often, I saw 

over the course of those 20 years far more victims than offenders. And 

that field is much larger and much better developed than the small 

number of people who are willing to work with sex offenders. And there 

are good treatment protocols out there today for helping children. Now 

the longer the child has been exposed to it and the more the child has 

been sexualized the more difficult it is. One of the big problems in this 

field is children who have been socialized into sexual behavior from such 

an early age that they really do believe it is normal and are often used to 

recruit other children into being victims, and those children are much, 

much tougher to treat. 

 MRS. BLACKBURN. Dr. Salter, one more thing. In listening to you 

and Dr. Hernandez talk about the recidivism rates, in reading the 

testimony that you all have submitted, what do you think really works as 

you are trying to work with sex offenders? You got a high recidivism 
142

rate. As you work with them, what protocol, what type therapy, what 

item is giving you the best results? 

 DR. SALTER. Cognitive behavioral treatment without a question. 

The form that is most commonly used is called relapse prevention, the 

only type of treatment that has been shown to reduce recidivism. 

Freudian or psycho-dynamic treatment, open-ended groups, none of 

those has been shown to reduce recidivism at all. The problem is there is 

not enough treatment. The Federal Bureau of Prisons has a 112-bed unit 

and 12,000 offenders. I would be willing to bet there are more offenders 

who would seek treatment than 112. In the State systems, I have never 

seen a State system that had enough treatment. They typically have long 

waiting lines for treatment. We do have offenders seeking treatment who 

can’t get it. 

 MRS. BLACKBURN. Okay. Relapse prevention then is what you say 

works? 

 DR. SALTER. Yes. 

 MRS. BLACKBURN. Okay. And we have one Federal facility that is 

a 112-bed unit that is dealing with relapse prevention and no State 

systems, am I understanding you correctly? 

 DR. SALTER. No. The State systems have programs as well, but 

they in my experience never have enough treatment for all the offenders. 

 MRS. BLACKBURN. Got it. 

 DR. SALTER. We have a 100-bed unit in Wisconsin that doesn’t 

begin to tap the waiting list. 

 MRS. BLACKBURN. All right. Okay. Excellent. Well, thank you 

with that. Dr. Hernandez, do you have anything to add? 

 DR. HERNANDEZ. Just agree with Dr. Salter that the choice of 

treatment for sexual offenders is cognitive behavioral therapies, and I 

may add that augmented by psych-pharmacological approaches, those 

therapies seem to work better with some offenders. 

 MRS. BLACKBURN. Okay. Let me ask you this. When you talk 

about the recidivism rate and working toward reductions, what impact 

does the child sex offender registry have? Is it a helpful tool? How does 

that fit in? 

 DR. HERNANDEZ. My understanding of the scientific research is that 

sex offender registries have little to no impact on recidivism. 

 MRS. BLACKBURN. Okay. Mr. Eichenwald, in the chat rooms and 

those that you have talked to in your research, what do they have to say 

about the sex offender registry? Do they ridicule it? Do they fear it? 

 MR. EICHENWALD. They hate them. They deem them the equivalent 

of the scarlet P, I guess. But being on the sex offender registry is not--

there is not a lot of shame in this world. There is not a lot of people 

saying, oh, I am so upset that this has happened. But what there is, and I 
143

think this goes to Dr. Jenkins’ point about the vigilantes, there is an 

enormous fear among those who have not been publicly revealed before 

of having their predilections publicly revealed. And so, again, I don’t 

know of the effect of sex registries, but I do know that there is enormous 

fear of having to explain themselves in public. 

 MRS. BLACKBURN. I guess the brazenness of some of the pedophiles 

just amazes me as I have read different things that you all have submitted 

to us, just the brazenness of their nature and how they are emboldened in 

some ways by the chat rooms and the work on the Internet. And I think 

it does concern me, and, Dr. Salter, your comment is not lost that credit 

cards and cutting off the use of credit cards for these sites is a very 

important step for us, and I think that is an area where we can do a little 

bit more work. With that, Mr. Chairman, I am going to stop my 

questions. I know some others want to question before we have votes 

and I know that is coming up on us very quickly. Thank you all very 

much. 

 MR. WHITFIELD. At this time, I will recognize Dr. Burgess for 10 

minutes. 

 MR. BURGESS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Eichenwald, 

welcome back to the committee. Can I just ask you, and this is more 

follow up from hearings we have done previously, obviously you were 

here the day that Justin Berry was before the committee, and a lot of 

frustration over not being able to hold the people accountable after he 

had provided data, names and IP addresses, credit card numbers, et 

cetera. Can you bring us up to date on the several months that intervened 

now, have any of those individuals been brought to justice? Can you 

kind of bring us up to date on what the FBI and the Department of 

Justice is doing to hold those people accountable? What has happened in 

Justin Berry’s life in the 2 or 3 or 4 months since he was here? 

 MR. EICHENWALD. Well, there have been a number of 

developments. If you remember, this committee had subpoenaed Ken 

Gourlay, who had been identified by Justin as both one of the people 

who assisted him on his website and also one of the people who molested 

him. Very shortly after this committee’s hearing, the Michigan Attorney 

General’s office reached out to Justin and interviewed him about Ken 

Gourlay. There was a raid on his house. If I remember correctly, it was 

about 6 days later. 

 MR. BURGESS. That was a State Attorney General? 

 MR. EICHENWALD. That was a State Attorney General. And now, 

again Ken Gourlay is one of the names that the Justice Department had 

for a while. But the State Attorney General raided his house 6 days later, 

took a lot of computers out, found child porn on the computer of one of 

the other people in the house who was then arrested. That individual 
144

then began providing testimony against Ken Gourlay. Ken Gourlay was 

arrested in May on, I believe it was 10 counts, many of them involving 

the molestation of Justin Berry. 

 He was re-arrested in, I believe it was July because in the course of 

following down the evidence in his computer they located other children 

who he had contact with and found one of them, who has since testified 

that he also was molested by Ken Gourlay during 2005. My big horror 

on hearing that was fearing that that molestation had taken place after the 

Justice Department had been made aware of Ken Gourlay’s existence 

and his role in this. It ends up though that that does not seem to have 

been the case that that molestation took place in early 2005, and Ken 

Gourlay was identified to the Justice Department in July or August. 

 So right now he is in jail awaiting trial on two sets of counts, one 

involving Justin Berry, and one involving the other individual. There 

was an arrest of a gentleman by the name of Aaron Brown. He was the 

person who was arrested by the Justice Department. He was the person 

who ran niova.net, the credit card transacting company that was doing 

business with Justin’s websites. There was a sentence of one of the other 

business partners/molesters of Justin, and he received 150 years in 

prison. 

 Justin himself had trouble. By May--he had always had a great deal 

of difficulty, as members of this committee probably know, he had a 

great deal of difficulty dealing with what happened with him involving 

Ken Gourlay. It was always a very traumatic thing for him to discuss. 

After Mr. Gourlay was arrested and Justin was being interviewed over 

and over again, he started showing some real signs that emotionally he 

wasn’t holding up. In June, in what I think was a wonderful 

development, he voluntarily went to a hospital where he stayed for a 

couple of weeks to get some help because he needed some help. He has 

since been released. He was there for only 2 weeks. He testified against 

Ken Gourlay at his trial. And he is now, as I understand it, about to start 

a new job. And when I spoke with him last, he sounded healthy and 

happy and eager to get on with his life. 

 In terms of other activities probably the biggest development came 

from this committee’s referral of I believe it is some 700 names to 

different States Attorney General. I know that at least one State is 

conducting an aggressive investigation into those names. I don’t know 

how widespread it is. Again, I haven’t been chasing it down to find it 

out but I know that that information--that there are actual investigators 

who are actually conducting interviews. 

 MR. BURGESS. But at the State level, and I guess that is what is 

troubling to me. 

 MR. EICHENWALD. That is at the State level. 
145

 MR. BURGESS. It has been difficult to engage our own Department 

of Justice in the enforcement of what you would think would be a fairly 

straightforward investigation and hopefully prosecution. Mr. Hernandez, 

in your testimony, and I appreciate you being so thorough with us, the 

line here about the rate of sexual offending contact recorded after 

treatment is 80 percent. That is a pretty startling figure. Is your 

treatment program providing any benefit at all or was this before 

treatment? 

 DR. HERNANDEZ. These disclosures were made over the course of 

treatment about past behavior and for most of these offenders their 

contact sexual criminality preceded their use of the Internet. 

 MR. BURGESS. Preceded the use of the Internet? 

 DR. HERNANDEZ. Yes. 

 MR. BURGESS. So that 80 percent figure is before the Internet? 

 DR. HERNANDEZ. For a great majority of them, yes. 

 MR. BURGESS. Would you speculate as to what effect the Internet 

has had on this figure? It probably made it go up, didn’t it? 

 DR. HERNANDEZ. It has been the subject of discussion. We really 

don’t know the effect of the Internet and how it has impacted those who 

have pedophilic impulses as Dr. Salter noted earlier. The incidents of 

pedophilia is considerable. The estimates suggest that 1 in 20 or 20 

percent, and that is a significant proportion. I should say 5 in 20, not 1 in 

20. That is a significant proportion. Now does the Internet in my 

opinion highlight this problem? From my vantage point, it does. 

 MR. BURGESS. Let me just ask you a question. These individuals 

that you were talking about in your study were individuals in prison, is 

that correct? 

 DR. HERNANDEZ. Yes, sir. 

 MR. BURGESS. Now do you know, what was the incidents of say 

sexually transmitted disease in this group of individuals that you dealt 

with, the incidents of Hepatitis C, Hepatitis B, HIV, do you know that? 

 DR. HERNANDEZ. I have no idea. 

 MR. BURGESS. Is that a concern for us that these individuals when 

they get out of prison who may have been exposed to these illnesses in 

prison may then act out on their impulses outside and further endanger 

this group of very vulnerable citizens? 

 DR. HERNANDEZ. Absolutely. 

 MR. BURGESS. Dr. Salter, Mr. Hernandez has already referenced the 

continuum of 20 percent with desire, 10 percent who have admitted. Do 

you think the Internet is driving this continuum from the 10 percent 

figure to the 20 percent figure? Could it be as high as 1 in 5 as Mr. 

Hernandez pointed out? 

 DR. SALTER. These studies predated the spread of the Internet. 
146

 MR. BURGESS. Predated the Internet. 

 DR. SALTER. Well, let me think. One was at least 10 years old. 

 MR. BURGESS. My time is running out so let me reframe the 

question. From this committee’s perspective, and I don’t know that we 

really have that much as far as legislative initiatives that we are putting 

forward, there are a couple of things, but in an effort to control this 

spread through the Internet, is that a worthwhile thing for this committee 

to be pursuing in your opinion? 

 DR. SALTER. Oh, absolutely. Yes, it is incredibly worthwhile. 

 MR. BURGESS. Mr. Eichenwald, let me just ask you a question. You 

spent time in the chat rooms and know the aliases and the buzz words 

that are used, and this committee and the child haters are talked about in 

the room as your answer to Mr. Ferguson’s question pointed out. Do 

they perhaps sow the seeds of their own control in these chat rooms? Do 

they talk about things that would provide that degree of inhibition that 

quite frankly many of us on this side of the dais would like to see? Is 

there anything you see talked about that they truly fear or have they just 

really grown to the point where they are beyond fear? 

 MR. EICHENWALD. Exposure. They fear exposure. They fear their 

identities being learned. They fear--there are some of these websites that 

have rules. Among the rules are you can never use a real name. You can 

never provide any identifying detail. You can’t say what city you are in. 

They are very, very particular about people knowing who they are and 

where they are, but they are also very good at hiding it. And so, if there 

is anything that goes towards that it is some level of exposure. In terms 

of fear of law enforcement, fear of anything else, no. I mean going to 

prison seems to be as uncontroversial as going to the Caribbean. 

 MR. BURGESS. Part of the cost of doing business? 

 MR. EICHENWALD. Yeah. There are a lot of them saying, well, 

when I was in prison, oh, when I was in prison, and it is just sort of 

casually thrown around. At one point every one of these people had been 

in prison. 

 MR. BURGESS. Doesn’t going to prison equate with exposure 

because the crime itself is--the trial is public? 

 MR. EICHENWALD. Apparently but it is not--if you think about it if 

somebody has been arrested in Portland for some local crime and they go 

to jail the world doesn’t know what they have done, and you really have 

to work to find out about it. And, ultimately even the ones who sort of 

hold themselves up as leaders of this rights movement won’t give their 

names and hide behind aliases and anonymizers, and so at the end of the 

day that that is clearly the thing that they are most concerned about. But 

so long as they have the ability to utilize the Internet, they can be as 

anonymous as they want to be. 
147

 MR. BURGESS. Mr. Chairman, I see my time has expired. I note 

later on in the week we are dealing with pre-texting. I don’t know, 

maybe we should turn the pre-texters loose on the predators. I don’t 

know if that would do any good at all. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

 MR. WHITFIELD. That is a good idea, by the way. Thank you. I 

certainly want to thank this panel for your time and your contributions to 

these hearings. I know that you took time away from other activities, 

and we appreciate it and hope that we might stay in touch with you as we 

move forward with some suggestions on legislation. And so with that, 

we will release the first panel and thank you again for participating. I 

would also like to call up panel two at this time. And on panel two we 

have two witnesses, Mr. Thomas Krwawecz, who is the Chief Executive 

Officer of Blue Gravity Communications out of New Jersey, and then 

Ms. Christine Jones, who is the General Counsel for GoDaddy.com out 

of Scottsdale, Arizona. 

 Mr. Krwawecz, we appreciate you and Ms. Jones being with us 

today, and as you know this is an Oversight and Investigations 

Subcommittee hearing, and we do take our testimony under oath. Do 

either of you have any objection to testifying under oath? If you would 

stand and raise your hand, I would swear you in. 

 [Witnesses sworn] 

 MR. WHITFIELD. You are both under oath now, and, Mr. Krwawecz, 

we will recognize you for your 5-minute opening statement. 

TESTIMONY OF THOMAS KRWAWECZ, CHIEF EXECUTIVE 

OFFICER, BLUE GRAVITY COMMUNICATIONS, INC.; 

AND CHRISTINE JONES, GENERAL COUNSEL, 

GODADDY.COM, INC. 

 MR. KRAWAWECZ. Thank you. Chairman Whitfield, Ranking 

Member Stupak, members of the subcommittee, I would like to thank 

you for providing me with the opportunity to testify today. As an owner 

of a small business that serves as a host for websites, I am pleased to see 

that the subcommittee is focusing its attention on the problem of child 

pornography on the Internet and hope that my testimony can be of 

assistance to the subcommittee. My name is Thomas Krwawecz, III, and 

I am the founder and owner of Blue Gravity Communication, 

Incorporated, a Web hosting company. I founded Blue Gravity in July of 

1997 as a college student. At that time we had only one server and 

myself as the only employee. In just 9 years, however, we have grown 

substantially, now having nearly 200 servers and four full-time 

employees. Blue Gravity currently services almost 7,000 customer 

accounts and hosts approximately 50,000 domains. 
148

 It is important for the subcommittee to understand that as a Web 

hosting company we provide customers with a platform from which to 

display their websites to Internet users as well as technical and 

administrative support relating to that service. Our terms of service 

strictly prohibit any of our customers from posting illegal content, 

including child pornography, on websites hosted on our servers, but we 

otherwise have no influence or control over the websites content. In 

addition, we are not involved in the domain registration process. 

Customers come to us with existing domain names which they have 

already registered or we refer them to a third party that is in the business 

of registering domain names. 

 When a customer applies for an account, we confirm that their 

mailing address matches the location of their computer’s IP address, and 

that the name of the credit card provided for our records matches the 

contact information supplied by the customer. If any such information is 

inconsistent, the application for a Blue Gravity account is denied. When 

we learn that a website we host contains illegal content, we take 

immediate steps to rectify the situation. All complaints or other 

notifications received from citizens, watchdog groups, or law 

enforcement are investigated. After receiving notification of potential 

illegal content, we immediately examine the website named in the 

complaint. If there is blatant illegal content, we immediately disable the 

account and notify the customer via email that service has been 

suspended due to illegal content. 

 When our examination does not conclusively reveal illegal content 

because, for example, we cannot tell whether or not the individuals are 

under the age of 18, we contact the customer and request proof of age for 

the models. If satisfactory proof cannot be provided, the website is shut 

down immediately, and the customer receives the suspension email that I 

just described. We are always looking for ways to improve our ability to 

detect and eliminate child pornography from websites which we host on 

our servers. Thanks to this subcommittee, we have learned of some 

additional improvements that we can, and will, make at Blue Gravity. 

 For example, we are placing a panic button on our Blue Gravity Web 

page to provide people with a mechanism to report child pornography. 

Individuals who utilize this function will send a message to a unique 

email address for the purpose of reporting child pornography. All 

complaints will be immediately investigated and forwarded to the 

National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. In an attempt to 

further aid law enforcement, Blue Gravity has always stored the content 

of illegal sites on our system for 1-2 weeks after being disabled in case it 

should be requested for prosecutorial purposes. 
149

 We believed that this provided law enforcement with sufficient time 

to make a preservation request or to send us a subpoena. In preparation 

for this hearing, we learned that many of the larger Internet companies, 

including the ISPs which testified previously, maintain such content 

information for 20-30 days after being disabled. Accordingly, Blue 

Gravity will now hold such content for 30 days. If a request for 

preservation is received before the expiration of that 30 days, we will 

preserve the content for as long as necessary. 

 Blue Gravity also supports the steps being taken by members of the 

subcommittee to legislatively regulate the maintenance of account 

information for websites displaying child pornography. Blue Gravity 

already maintains such records, including IP address, contact, and credit 

card information indefinitely. This information is available to law 

enforcement groups at any time and has been provided on numerous 

occasions. We are actively considering a number of other improvements 

which we can make in order to help stem the tide of child pornography, 

and we welcome any further suggestions by the subcommittee or its staff. 

Again, thank you for the opportunity to testify on this important topic. 

 [The prepared statement of Thomas Krwawecz follows:] 

PREPARED STATEMENT OF THOMAS KRAWAWECZ, CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, BLUE 

GRAVITY COMMUNICATIONS, INC. 

Chairman Whitfield, Ranking Member Stupak, Members of the Subcommittee, I 

would like to thank you for providing me with the opportunity to testify today. As an 

owner of a small business that serves as a host for websites, I am pleased to see that the 

Subcommittee is focusing its attention on the problem of child pornography on the 

internet and hope that my testimony can be of assistance to the Subcommittee. 

 My name is Thomas Krwawecz, III, and I am the founder and owner of Blue 

Gravity Communication, Incorporated, a web hosting company. I founded Blue Gravity 

in July of 1997 as a college student. At that time we had only one server and no 

employees. In just nine years, however, we have grown substantially, now having nearly 

200 servers and 4 full-time employees. Blue Gravity currently services almost 7,000 

customer accounts and hosts approximately 50,000 domains. 

 It is important for the Subcommittee to understand that as a web hosting company 

we provide customers with a platform from which to display their websites to internet 

users as well as technical and administrative support relating to that service. Our terms of 

service strictly prohibit any of our customers from posting illegal content, including child 

pornography, on websites hosted on our servers, but we otherwise have no influence or 

control over the websites content. In addition, we are not involved in the domain name 

registration process. Customers come to us with existing domain names which they have 

already registered or we refer them to a third party that is in the business of registering 

domain names. 

 When a customer applies for an account, we confirm that their mailing address 

matches the location of their computer’s IP address, and that the name on the credit card 

provided for our records matches the contact information supplied by the customer. If 

any such information is inconsistent, the application for a Blue Gravity account is denied. 

 When we learn that a website we host contains illegal content, we take immediate 

steps to rectify the situation. All complaints or other notifications received from citizens, 
150

watchdog groups or law enforcement are investigated. After receiving notification of 

potential illegal content, we immediately examine the website named in the complaint. If 

there is blatant illegal content, we immediately disable the account and notify the 

customer via email that service has been suspended due to “illegal content.” When our 

examination does not conclusively reveal illegal content because, for example, we cannot 

tell whether or not the individuals are under the age of 18, we contact the customer and 

request proof of age for the models. If satisfactory proof cannot be provided, the website 

is shut down immediately, and the customer receives the suspension email that I just 

described. 

 We are always looking for ways to improve our ability to detect and eliminate child 

pornography from websites which we host on our servers. Thanks to this Subcommittee, 

we have learned of some additional improvements that we can, and will, make at Blue 

Gravity. For example, we are placing a “panic button” on our Blue Gravity web page to 

provide people with a mechanism to report child pornography. Individuals who utilize 

this function will send a message to a unique email address for the reporting of child 

pornography. All complaints will be immediately investigated and forwarded to the 

National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. 

 In an attempt to further aid law enforcement, Blue Gravity has always stored the 

content of illegal sites on our system for 1-2 weeks after being disabled in case it should 

be requested for prosecutorial purposes. We believed that this provided law enforcement 

with sufficient time to make a preservation request or to send us a subpoena. In 

preparation for this hearing, we learned that many of the larger internet companies, 

including the ISPs which testified previously, maintain such content information for 20-

30 days after being disabled. Accordingly, Blue Gravity will now hold such content for 

30 days. If a request for preservation is received before the expiration of that 30 days, we 

will preserve the content for as long as necessary. 

 Blue Gravity also supports the steps being taken by members of the Subcommittee 

to legislatively regulate the maintenance of account information for websites displaying 

child pornography. Blue Gravity already maintains all such records, including IP 

address, contact and credit card information, indefinitely. This information is available to 

law enforcement groups at any time, and has been provided on numerous occasions. 

 We are actively considering a number of other improvements which we can make in 

order to help stem the tide of child pornography, and we welcome any further suggestions 

by this Subcommittee or its staff. 

 Again, thank you for the opportunity to testify on this important topic. 

 MR. WHITFIELD. Thank you very much. Ms. Jones, you are 

recognized for your 5-minute opening statement. 

 MS. JONES. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am Christine Jones, 

General Counsel and Corporate Secretary for the GoDaddy Group. 

GoDaddy’s principal business is domain name registration. When I 

joined GoDaddy back in early 2002 it was a very small registrar with 

well under 100 employees. Today, we have over 1,200 employees and 

more than 15 million domain names under management. That makes us 

the number one registrar in the entire world. We register a domain name 

about once every 3 seconds or less. The domain name registrar serves as 

the point of entry to the Internet so if you wanted to register the domain 

name ChairmanWhitfield.com, which by the way I did in anticipation of 

this hearing, and I will be happy to give that over to your staff at the 

conclusion. 
151

 MR. WHITFIELD. Thank you so much. 

 MS. JONES. You are welcome. So you can go to GoDaddy and 

register that domain name. And then once ChairmanWhitfield.com is 

registered, you would need to actually build a website and find a place to 

store, or what we call host, the information that you created. Again, you 

could to GoDaddy.com for storage or hosting services or you could go to 

my colleague’s company, Blue Gravity, for that same service. Because 

we see it so frequently in our business, I want to focus on how GoDaddy 

deals with online child pornography. We devote considerable time and 

resources to working with law enforcement on preserving the integrity 

and safety of the Internet. We quickly close down websites and domain 

names engaged in illegal activities. I personally, and this company in 

general, have made it a high priority to use our position as the world’s 

largest registrar to make the Internet a better and safer place. 

 With over 15 million domain names under management most of our 

data does and must come from third party complaints or notices. We 

have a network abuse department that works 24 hours a day, 7 days a 

week, to receive those types of complaints. They come from third parties 

via email, via telephone, from employees who notice child pornography 

content during the ordinary course of their work day, and also from 

notifications from Cyber Tipline and other watchdog organizations. 

Once we are made aware there is a potential child pornography site, we 

immediately investigate to determine whether or not there is in fact child 

pornography content, and, if so, whether that customer has other domain 

names resolving to that particular site, and then whether there are other 

hosting accounts in that customer’s account which contain pornographic 

content as well. 

 Once that investigation is complete, we report the offending domain 

names, the websites, and the registrant information to law enforcement, 

and then we give law enforcement a short amount of time to request that 

we leave the website intact, and this is an issue that came up last week at 

a similar hearing on this topic, and we do that to assist in investigations. 

We also report to the National Center for Missing and Exploited 

Children, of course. We then permanently suspend our services to that 

customer. On the numbers, we investigate thousands of domain names 

and websites each year for child pornography. The number of unique 

customers that we investigated in the past 12 months is approximately 

1,200. That is unique customers. Many of those customers have 

multiple, multiple domain names, and this number does not include the 

child modeling sites that I am going to address in a moment. 

 Approximately 90 percent of the sites that we suspend are domain 

name registrations only. This means that in about 90 percent of the cases 

another company provides the hosting service. We provide the domain 
152

name registration only. About 75 percent of the child porn websites we 

have investigated in the past year were registered to an individual or 

company in Russia, the Ukraine, and Romania, so that theme seems to 

continue in these hearings. Much like child pornography websites, we 

routinely investigate and suspend sites involving child modeling. As 

these sites typically do not rise to the level of technical child 

pornography, we classify these sites as morally objectionable which is a 

term that I put into our universal terms of service for situations such as 

these. 

 We typically remove them even if we can’t find child pornography 

because our experience has been that the operators of child modeling 

sites tend to be associated even if attenuated with child pornography in 

some way. We also remove the non-traditional forms of child 

pornography like nudist sites and cartoon child porn. We follow 

basically the same procedures for child modeling sites as I just described 

for the child porn investigations, and of course we report those to the 

National Center as well. 

 One child modeling investigation we conducted recently uncovered a 

registrant of child pornography. We discovered this customer in 

particular had over 200 active child modeling websites. After following 

our standard operating procedures, the information was submitted to 

authorities. About 2 weeks later that same customer had been arrested 

and indicted on multiple counts of child pornography. I just point that 

out to demonstrate that it is very important for all Internet service 

providers, domain name registrars, and hosting companies to take these 

child modeling sites seriously. 

 The number of unique customers investigated in the past 12 months 

on child modeling sites was approximately 780 so they are significant, 

and of course these people have multiple domain names as well. About 

70 percent of those were domain name registrations only and about 77 

percent of them come also from Russia, Ukraine, and Romania. So I 

want to thank you, Chairman Whitfield, for the invitation to testify here 

today. GoDaddy is committed to working with law enforcement and 

others in the industry to remove child pornography content from the 

Internet, and we would challenge our counterparts on the Internet to 

make that same commitment. Thank you. 

 [The prepared statement of Christine Jones follows:] 
153

PREPARED STATEMENT OF CHRISTINE JONES, GENERAL COUNSEL, GODADDY.COM, INC. 
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 MR. WHITFIELD. Thank you very much. You heard all the bells 

going off, and this is because we have about three votes on the House 
161

floor, so we are going to recess this hearing and we will be back here I 

would say about 10 minutes till 1:00. It is 12:15 now, so about 10 

minutes till 1:00. And there is a dining room downstairs and whatever, 

so anyway we will be back with some questions for you all. I am very 

sorry for this inconvenience. And so we will recess until 10 till 1:00. 

 [Recess] 

 MR. WHITFIELD. We have another vote on the floor but we have 

some time here so we may be able to work this out. Does your company 

have a policy of not allowing certain names to be used or do you ever 

deny the use of a particular name? 

 MS. JONES. We don’t prohibit the registration before the registration 

takes place because many domain names are registered, and I mean 

thousands upon thousands are registered and never used. 

 MR. WHITFIELD. Right. 

 MS. JONES. And some are actually registered pre-emptively so like, 

for example, we may have a whole series of Lolita names registered, 

which are just placed in an account to pre-empt somebody else from 

using them. So the answer is, no, we don’t prohibit for the registration. 

 MR. WHITFIELD. And so as long as they continue to pay their annual 

fee then they can keep that name forever? 

 MS. JONES. Yes, sir, as long as they are not using it for some 

inappropriate person. 

 MR. WHITFIELD. Okay. Okay. Now I know in this case out of 

Russia the Playtoy Enterprises, they used an anonymizing service, and 

they allowed someone else to register the name for them, and I 

understand that even you all have a policy where you will register a 

name for someone and they are not actually listed as the owner of the 

name. Is that correct? 

 MS. JONES. That is correct. 

 MR. WHITFIELD. Now why would a person running a lawful Internet 

business choose this type of domain registry? 

 MS. JONES. Most of the people that use our service, and by the way 

it is not an anonymous service, it is just privacy protection, most of the 

people that do it are sole proprietors or at-home businesses that don’t 

want to list their personal information in the public database. And we 

find to our great satisfaction that most of the people that use that service 

are legitimate users because people who are criminal or crooks, if you 

will, don’t pay extra money to protect bad information. They just give us 

that information that looks valid. 

 MR. WHITFIELD. Right. Mr. Krwawecz, you host these websites. I 

get the impression that you all are really not proactive on monitoring any 

of these sites but that if someone calls and brings it to your attention then 

you will take action, but are you doing anything from a proactive 
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standpoint yourself out there looking to see if a website is hosting, for 

example, child pornography? 

 MR. KRAWAWECZ. Due to the volume of websites that we host, the 

number of pages that can be set up under any particular website, and the 

fact that they can change on a daily basis, it is very difficult for us to 

monitor. Since over the last few weeks we have had some discussions 

about some additional things that we may be able to implement to help 

us monitor the types of websites that are on our services; but we do rely 

on feedback from users or some of the other watchdog groups, the other 

organizations out there that handle the complaints and then report to us. 

 MR. WHITFIELD. Is there any kind of technology that is available to 

monitor that would be available for either GoDaddy or Blue Gravity? Is 

there technology out there that you could acquire to do this in a more 

proactive manner? 

 MR. KRAWAWECZ. From a Web hosting standpoint and even with 

what GoDaddy does I am not aware of anything that is currently 

available. You know, without physically looking at an image there is no 

software technology that I am aware of that would be able to determine 

whether or not to differentiate between, let us say, a picture of an apple 

or a picture of an orange or a picture of a model or an underage model. 

 MR. WHITFIELD. Well, because the financial services group that 

testified the other day, the MasterCards and Visas and whatever, they 

referred to something as a Web crawler with a log rhythm type of--it 

looked for certain words and from that they would go check and there 

was a likelihood that it was a site with pornography or something. Have 

you heard of a Web crawler or are you familiar with that? 

 MR. KRAWAWECZ. I am familiar with Web crawlers. I don’t know 

that that would necessarily help us determine--we looked and did 

research during the course of this investigation on one server that we 

have websites hosted on, and a search for the term Lolita and model and 

returned about 150 pages worth of data with maybe 30 to 50 individual 

Web pages on each of those 120 to 150 pages. You would really 

physically have to go through that and just because of the size of our 

company it is not practical for us to go through and be able to examine 

all that data. If there was some technology, Web crawler, or if there is 

something out there that I am not aware of, we are certainly open to 

suggestions or whatever technology Visa, MasterCard, or any of the 

other companies that are out there might be using. 

 MR. WHITFIELD. So, Ms. Jones, you feel like you all are doing 

everything that you can do as far as preventing these sites from being out 

there or do you think you can do more? 

 MS. JONES. In terms of prevention? 

 MR. WHITFIELD. Yeah. 
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 MS. JONES. Well, one of the things that we do and it is pretty easy is 

to look and examine files by file size. We find often that Web hosting 

customers, for example, who have very large volumes of data tend to 

have video files because they take up a lot of space. On that, for 

example, we can go view the content, and of course as the gentleman 

suggests you have to look at the content, but we can do that and we do do 

that from time to time, not just on child pornography but on all kinds of 

violations. If I had a staff of a thousand people that could go review all 

of our hosting boxes every day then, absolutely, we could prevent more 

of this but at $1.99 a month for a hosting account the economy is not 

really there for us to do that. 

 MR. WHITFIELD. Right. Mr. Stupak. 

 MR. STUPAK. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Krwawecz, am I 

saying that right? 

 MR. KRAWAWECZ. Krwawecz. 

 MR. STUPAK. Krwawecz. The way I understand it, Blue Gravity 

began as an adult pornography site and you don’t create any of your own 

content, is that correct? 

 MR. KRAWAWECZ. That is correct. 

 MR. STUPAK. Okay. It is also my understanding that 70 percent of 

your websites that you host are adult content, is that correct? 

 MR. KRAWAWECZ. That is correct, approximately. 

 MR. STUPAK. Were you present when the last panel testified, the 

doctors and all them, the guy from corrections? 

 MR. KRAWAWECZ. Yes. 

 MR. STUPAK. Okay. In there, they were talking about illegality. 

Would your websites have like violent rapes on them of mature women, 

things like that? 

 MR. KRAWAWECZ. No. 

 MR. STUPAK. Where do you decide what would be proper and 

improper website, what guidelines do you have? 

 MR. KRAWAWECZ. You know, content, we use the U.S. law to 

dictate what content is legal and is not legal. We made sure-- 

 MR. STUPAK. Well, is there a prohibition to have violent rapes 

amongst adults on websites? 

 MR. KRAWAWECZ. We never had any of that type of contact. 

 MR. STUPAK. The point I am trying to get at, in child pornography 

they said, well, that is sort of throwing gas on the fire. Remember that 

conversation we were talking about? So why wouldn’t yours be any 

different? Why would you have adult websites that may or may not 

depict that? 
164

 MR. KRAWAWECZ. I am not sure I understand the question exactly. 

The websites that we had were similar to subscribing to Playboy, for 

example, that type of material. We never--there-- 

 MR. STUPAK. Nothing more graphic depictions than that? 

 MR. KRAWAWECZ. No, there are very nitched categories of content 

that is I guess more violent more along the terms of what you are talking 

about, but that is nothing that we ever got into or put up on any websites 

that we had. 

 MR. STUPAK. Okay. The point I am trying to make for people if you 

show young children and that may provoke improper sexual contact why 

wouldn’t your websites do the same thing? 

 MR. KRAWAWECZ. I don’t believe that someone is subscribing to an 

issue of Playboy has more or less of a tendency to be involved in any 

kind of violent or aggressive behavior. 

 MR. STUPAK. You said you store now for 30 days? 

 MR. KRAWAWECZ. No. Currently we keep the content for about 7 

to 14 days unless we have an order to preserve the content for longer. If 

we get subpoenas for websites sometimes the terms on there dictate that 

we retain that material for 30, 60, 90 days, depending on the length of the 

investigation. 

 MR. STUPAK. There have been some proposals to maintain it for a 

year automatically with or without a warrant. Would you be in favor of 

that? 

 MR. KRAWAWECZ. To maintain the actual website content? 

 MR. STUPAK. Correct. Website content. 

 MR. KRAWAWECZ. A year might be a little long. It really depends 

on every website varies in size. What we did on this most recent issue 

was put a copy of that website on DVD and archive it, which is also a 

possibility. 

 MR. STUPAK. So you could do that then? 

 MR. KRAWAWECZ. Yeah. It would be something that we would 

definitely be open to if there were some guidelines for maintaining that 

data for a specific period of time. I don’t think it is a bad idea at all. 

 MR. STUPAK. Ms. Jones, any reason why if we do legislation to 

compel data retention, is there any reason why Web hosting sites should 

be treated differently than ISPs? 

 MS. JONES. No, I don’t think so. To your earlier point, I listened 

with interest to the testimony last week about data retention. I think it 

would be very helpful for hosting providers and Internet service 

providers both to have some kind of a requirement to maintain data, 

particularly customer data, not the content so much because we 

automatically produce the content when we find it. But to retain this 

customer data that is helpful to them because then they don’t have to 
165

jump through this additional hoop of getting me a document preservation 

letter or an NSL or some other form of subpoena or document. I just 

automatically know I am required to maintain that for X number of days 

or months or years or whatever it is. So I think that would be helpful, 

and I think it would be productive to helping law enforcement who needs 

all the help they can get on this. 

 MR. STUPAK. Well, I guess I am going to have to cut off my 

questions. We got 20 seconds left. 

 MRS. BLACKBURN. [Presiding] All right. Ms. Jones, thank you, and 

thank you all for hanging in here with us as we go to votes. We had an 

unexpected vote called, and I know that it is a little bit disconcerting. 

Ms. Jones, I really wanted to come to you primarily, and thank you for 

your testimony about GoDaddy and the registrars and the websites and 

the domain registration. And I want to ask you in the earlier questioning 

with the first panel, we talked a little bit about credit cards. 

 MS. JONES. Yes, ma’am. 

 MRS. BLACKBURN. And the use of credit cards. And Dr. Salter’s 

testimony on one of the ways to really aggressively go after this would 

be cutting off the use of credit cards. And I was noticing in yesterday’s 

Wall Street Journal there is also, and you may have seen this, about fines 

that are being put in place, additional fines for companies that are not 

adhering to the fraud protection elements that are there. I would like to 

hear from you what your advice to us would be on addressing the credit 

card situation for access to these child pornography sites. 

 MS. JONES. Well, first of all, I was very enthusiastic when I read and 

heard some of the testimony from the financial institutions panel that you 

had a couple of weeks ago, or last week, because they are seeing fewer 

incidents of applications for merchant accounts for child pornographers 

than I thought that they would be, but I think the best advice is they have 

to continue a stringent due diligence process in both issuing merchant 

accounts and relationships with acquirers, but also the alternative forms 

of payment like, for example, putting money into an online account and 

just debiting it as you go along or PayPal or gold or Western Union or 

those sorts of things. 

 They seem to be much more effective in eliminating the money trail 

because, for example, at GoDaddy we have a 24-hour, 7-day a week 

fraud department that checks credit card transactions. Any of the 

transactions that are coming out of the known areas of offensive 

behavior, we review. So if we know you are a guy that buys this kind of 

stuff, we eliminate your transaction, but that is with credit cards because 

those are easy for us to track. If it is cash, it is a much more difficult 

situation so I guess the point I am trying to make is the focus, I think, 

needs to be on those alternative forms and determining how we can get 
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those people to cooperate and have a relationship with ISPs, domain 

registrars, hosting providers, and all the people that enable the content to 

be put on the Internet in the first place. 

 And I don’t see why they wouldn’t support it. I mean this subject 

matters seems to be non-controversial. Nobody thinks it is a bad idea to 

stop these guys from getting on the Internet. 

 MRS. BLACKBURN. Okay. On the website names and on registering 

a domain name, and you may have answered some of the questions about 

complaints that you get on domain names while I was gone to vote, but 

with companies like yours when they are registering domain names that 

would lend you to believe something is a pornographic site, what kind of 

action can you take on the front end? 

 MS. JONES. Well, we can certainly monitor for particular words or 

particular combinations of words. 

 MRS. BLACKBURN. Do you have a unit that does that? 

 MS. JONES. With a registration once every 3 seconds or less it is 

very difficult for us to do that particularly on any kind of ongoing basis 

with human intervention, but we can and do monitor certain words. The 

trouble comes in somebody registering CongresswomanBlackburn.com 

and leaving that domain dormant for some period of time, and then after 

60 or 90 or 120 days attaching a website to it. That is where the real bad 

behavior comes because the domain name may have offensive words in 

it, but if there is no content associated with that domain name, if it is just 

sitting in a database somewhere there is nothing improper about it. It 

isn’t resolved to a website. It is not generating any revenue for the 

person. It is just a random domain name sitting there. That is where the 

real problem comes in and that is where it is really important to us to 

have these reports from third parties. It is very helpful to us to get those 

reports. 

 MRS. BLACKBURN. So it is not always the gateway or the site itself, 

it is the portals that you can enter from that site? 

 MS. JONES. Yes, ma’am. 

 MRS. BLACKBURN. Mr. Krwawecz, am I saying it properly? 

 MR. KRAWAWECZ. Yes. 

 MRS. BLACKBURN. For Blue Gravity, any thought on either the 

credit cards or the domain registry? 

 MR. KRAWAWECZ. I agree with Ms. Jones as far as the credit card 

processing. I think the companies like Visa and MasterCard have the 

resources to be able to monitor the merchants that are processing 

transactions, the websites that are associated with it, where the money is 

going and being able to shut down or discontinue processing transactions 

for sites that are promoting child pornography. As far as the domain 

registration, one of the things that I had discussed earlier in the week was 
167

there is a fine line between registering a domain related to supporting 

rape victims and then a domain that is promoting rape and being able to 

distinguish which website or domain name is being used for legitimate 

purposes versus someone who is trying to promote child pornography or 

rape or something that is criminal of offensive. 

 MRS. BLACKBURN. Okay. Ms. Jones, in the testimony that you have 

given, you talked about the investigation on the child modeling sites. 

Did you elaborate on that during questioning? 

 MS. JONES. I did not. 

 MRS. BLACKBURN. Would you please do that for the record and 

then that is going to be my last question. Just give a little bit more of the 

background of the investigation. 

 MS. JONES. Okay. Typically, we get notices from their parties or 

employees who suspect child modeling sites are on the Internet. We 

conduct an investigation similar to what we do for child pornography. 

Our abuse department would go view the site, would determine that there 

were inappropriate images. Depending on whether or not there are links 

to or relationships with actual child pornography, we would either report 

actually to law enforcement or just to the National Center, the domain 

names, the websites, and the registrant information for the child 

modeling sites, but under any circumstances when we find these, we do 

take them down because they are clearly exploiting children, and I think 

the gentleman from the New York Times demonstrated some of those 

shocking behaviors that they are obviously forcing these children to 

engage in. So the investigation is maybe a little bit simpler than it would 

be with child pornography because the analysis doesn’t have to be as 

careful because the images are typically of children with clothing on. 

 But we do take them very seriously, and over the last probably 4 to 6 

months we have seen a huge rise in the number of these sites, so we are 

very concerned about those. 

 MRS. BLACKBURN. And your investigation led to the awareness of 

over 200 sites, am I correct? 

 MS. JONES. In the last 12 months we have investigated 780 unique 

customers. That equates to thousands of domain names. The one 

example I gave was one customer who had over 200 domain names. One 

guy had 200 websites so that is 200 different children that he had active 

modeling sites on. And they are all the same format, the same content, 

the same type of--generally the same type of behavior but it is every kind 

of child you could possibly want to look at. 

 MRS. BLACKBURN. And then your company, do you follow this 

through with law enforcement to be sure those sites come down and then 

do you continue if a person is known to set up these sites to prohibit from 

registering new domain names for them? 
168

 MS. JONES. Yes. What we do is we report to law enforcement and 

to the National Center, and we eliminate all of the content and domain 

names in that customer’s account. We can also block that credit card 

from ever using our system again. They could always come back as a 

different name or a different credit card, but, yes, we take all of the steps 

and to the point of sometimes even blocking the IP address from which 

those transactions originated from accessing our system. 

 MRS. BLACKBURN. Thank you so much. I thank both of you for 

your patience and for your testimony, and for working with us on the 

hearing. As you are aware, this is part of a series of hearings that we are 

doing as we review this entire process and work on the online child 

pornography issue. And at this time, I will thank you all for your 

testimony and adjourn the hearing. 

 [Whereupon, at 1:35 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.] 

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