This can only go wrong, and it has in the past. Do you guys know about Operation Ore? It is a case study of how things can get out of hand and go wrong with the hysteria around child pornography. 4,283 homes were searched, 3,744 arrests were made and some 33 suspects committed suicide because of the investigation.

Operation Ore was a British investigation that stemmed from a US investigation called Operation Avalanche. Remember AVS sites? Back in the late 90s a lot of porn sites required adult verification by way of credit card in order to access the site. One of those sites was keyz.com.

keyz.com was the AVN provider for tens of thousands of porn sites. keyz would handle the AVN procedure and then forward the user onto the porn host with a secure token. keyz would take a 30% cut of the small fee and the porn provider would get the rest.

The US Postal Inspector received a complaint about a website on the Internet that was hosting child porn. The postal inspector engaged Microsoft to help them in tracking down the site, and the company allocated engineers who were volunteering on their own time as part of a charity contribution effort. The Microsoft engineers found that the child porn site in question was hosted in Indonesia, and there was nothing they could do about taking it down, but they noticed that it was using the keyz.com AVN service to verify users and to charge them for access.

keyz.com were based in Fort Worth, Texas, so they were within a jurisdiction that the US Postal Inspector could investigate. The Postal Inspectors office thus teamed up with the local Dallas Police Department and together with Microsoft they investigated keyz.com.

keyz.com was a product from a company called Landslide Inc. which was run by a husband and wife team based in the local area. The servers were collocated in a local facility. The postal inspectors office, Dallas PD and Microsoft presented everything they knew about keyz.com to the local DoD office and received search warrants for all the servers and the offices and homes of everybody associated with keyz.com/Landslide Inc.

The raids turned up internal evidence that the team at Landslide knew that some of their affiliates were dealing with child pornography, but the husband and wife refused to plead guilty (in exchange for 5 years in prison) on the basis that they were in ready contact with the local FBI office reporting affiliate sites they found that breached US laws. After a long and drawn out court case, the husband received life in prison (100+ years on appeal, IIRC) and the wife a similar long sentence, all for dealing in child pornography.

The authorities wrapped up all the server evidence they could find, customer data, access logs, etc. and prepared more indicments for the users of the service. It was ruled in an early court case that a name in a database alone was not enough to convict a user in the USA on child pornography charges. The Dallas PD then setup entrapment schemes using the old keyz.com database, where with the servers under their control they would live monitor users based in the USA accessing child pornography and only then arrest them. Around 100 people were arrested and sent to trial based on that investigation.

When all was done in the USA the investigators took all the data they had and sent it to their colleagues in the UK. This is where things went really wrong.

Apparently the UK did not have the same stringent evidence requirements as the USA for child pornography charges. What the UK operation did (this is Operation Ore) was to take the entire database - customers and IP addresses, and pull out anybody who was in the UK into a list. This included IP addresses from access logs that simply viewed advertisements for the keyz.com AVS system. It also included IP addresses in the logs for non-child porn sites. This is how the UK police found themselves in possession of over 7,000 names of 'suspected' child pornographers.

Since understand the technical details of how this system was setup we can see where it went wrong. Instead of targeting the individual site that was serving child porn, they instead gathered every single IP address and customer record that had accessed any of the AVS ads or any of the AVS affiliates.

In early 2002 over 4000 homes were raided in the UK as part of Operation Ore, all based on this flimsy US evidence. It destroyed lives all around the country. In only a very very few cases were the arrests and charges backed up with actual child pornography evidence. Celebrities were caught up, teachers, scientists, doctors, you name it.

33 people who had been charged or arrested committed suicide in the time after the raids. It was only found out a few years later, after a lawsuit was filed by victims, that the data obtained from the USA was not only too broad, but also contained a large number of stolen credit cards (there have been a handful of verified cases now of suicides where the accused had his credit card stolen). A lot of the cases were only settled in late 2008. Many of them are still ongoing, as thousands of falsely accused have had to live their lives under the shadow of being an accused or charged child pornographer.

In the civil trial on of the experts from the USA ended up testifying that the UK police mishandled the data. The worse cases were those where an IP address that had visited nothing more than a banner ad advertising the keyz.com site on another website were raided, arrested and accused.

We shouldn't forget what happen in this case. There is an important lesson in it for everybody. Child pornography is such a sensitive and provocative issue that at times even the highest civil offices set aside their legal obligations in order to pursuit accused child pornographers. If some of the most sophisticated law enforcement in the world can get it wrong with all the resources, subpoenas, warrants and wiretapping equipment they have on hand then it isn't hard to imagine that a vigilante group of hackers on the Internet could also get it wrong.

More info:

+ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ore

+ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Avalanche_(child_porn...

+ "Operation Ore Exposed" - PCPRO - http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/74690/operation-ore-exposed/...

+ "Sex, Lies and No Videotape" (Part 2 of above, PC PRO) - http://ore-exposed.obu-investigators.com/PC%20Pro%20article%... (1MB PDF)