Hackers on Steroids (20 page)

‘Taking the knot’ is a euphemism for the unthinkable act of a human person being in full sexual intercourse with an animal. This takes on even more horrific connotations when used in relation to paedophilia, and I have indeed observed on some of their profiles this phrase in relation to children. One anti-paedophile activist told me of one female paedophile (oh yes, like Vanessa George they do exist) who had been promising a select number of the other paedos on her Facebook friend list that she was going to let them watch her via cam sexually abuse her children with dogs. ‘Hussyfan’ is another code word, the meaning of which is child pornography specifically involving girls. ‘Jimmy Hussyfan’ was the handle of one particularly vile Facebook paedophile active around the beginning of the time I was reporting them to the cops. This one claimed to be abusing his very young children. ‘LS Magazine’ is often listed as an interest, and that refers to a major so-called ‘softcore’ child pornography business which operated in the Ukraine from 2001 until it was smashed by the Ukrainian police in 2004. This magazine and the colossal amount of child pornography it regularly and quite professionally produced of young girls in various naked and semi-naked poses is legend among paedophiles. Other ‘likes’ and interests that they will display on their profiles are more self-explanatory, such as ‘8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13’ or variations on such to denote what age range raises their interest; and terms which take on extremely sinister overtones when put in the context of paedophilia like ‘Playing with daddy,’ ‘Daddy’s little girl,’ ‘Spanking children,’ ‘Little girl lover,’ and ‘Little boy lover.’ Some will just dispense with the pleasantries altogether and list things like ‘Sadistic torture of children’ as an interest, something that I once seen displayed as one of their likes.

Facebook claims, and has claimed so for a long time, that many of these terms are banned on the site and that groups, pages, and profiles cannot be made using them, and that users cannot find each other by searching for them. Certainly during my time reporting on the paedos on the site the terms were to be found everywhere, even when Facebook was claiming that its filters were blocking them out. They were also still to be easily found in May 2012 when WND.com done their investigation. I don’t care to look to see if they still can be found but even if the filters have now become successful in blocking the terms from being used, things like that can always easily be gotten around anyway by substituting numbers for letters, along with other such similarly imaginative endeavours.

Talking of terms … I know that some anti-paedophile activists dislike very much the use of the term ‘child porn’ as they feel that it somewhat normalises what is a horrible crime against children by possibly putting it into the same category as forms of consenting porn. I disagree. The word ‘pornography’ in this context simply refers to material - specifically photographic or video material - that is designed to stimulate the sexual desires of its users. The word has nothing whatsoever to do with whether the people involved are consenting or not. No dictionary definition of the word will be found to say that the people depicted in pornography must be consenting, and pornography can be used to describe anything so depicted with the aim of stimulating the sexual desires. Even material things like cars can be photographed in such a way as to appear pornographic to those with a sexual interest in cars (and such people do exist). Consent has absolutely nothing to do with it. And while those who wish to refer to such material only as ‘child sex abuse images’ are totally correct in describing them as such, the term ‘child pornography’ is its own horror and perfectly describes what it refers to: that is innocent children being forced into recorded sexual acts or poses. So it is a term that I will use without apology.

Symbols are also employed by paedophiles who want to subtly distinguish themselves to others in the know. These can be worn on things like rings and necklaces, or displayed on Web profiles. A dark blue triangle drawn in a spiral shape stands for ‘Boy lover’ and is the symbol used by some predators whose interests lie mainly in boys around the age of 12 or slightly older. Its brother symbol is a more roundish spiral triangle, drawn in light blue and stands for ‘Little boy lover.’ A light pink spiral heart means ‘Girl lover,’ while a butterfly light pink on one wing and light blue on the other symbolises a sexual interest in children of both sexes. All of these symbols together can be seen in the second photographic section of this book.

‘Pedobear,’ a 4Chan meme of a teddy bear mascot who has a sexual interest in children and that apparently began its life as an attempt to mock paedophiles is something which gets put about the Internet a lot by 4Chan fans as an in-joke, but it is also something which I have witnessed real paedophiles using to mark themselves out with. Indeed, Scotland’s Daily Record once carried a photograph of convicted paedophile David Logan wearing a Pedobear t-shirt while standing beside a ‘Beware children’ sign. Any non-paedos still wanting to flash this mascot around do so at their own peril.

One Facebook paedophile in particular became in my mind Satan itself. This is Paolo Ghelardini, in his late 60s and an Italian resident in Romania. If somehow one devil could stand out among all the rest of the devils of hell as the very meaning of evil it is this one, this nightmare in a physical human form. More than all of the rest he was the one who could really chill my bones such was the utter evil manifest in him. My hair stood on end reading some of the sinister things that he wrote. This devil claimed to have been producing child pornography in Holland from as long ago as the 1970s and alleged a close friendship with Joop Wilhelmus, a notorious and thankfully now long-deceased Dutch child pornographer. According to Ghelardini his ‘regretted big friend’ was slain by a ‘bastard Catholic.’ ‘I was one of his photographers and scientist for Super8 movies!’ claimed Ghelardini. ‘My glory, my dream! This is freedom, this is civilisation!’

While on Facebook, he would call himself either ‘Paolo Constantino’ or else ‘Paolo Constantinescu,’ but he was easily linked by members of our group to his real identity as always he would use real photographs of himself as his profile pictures and would speak freely about his work as an illustrator for Italian comics (he had also worked on a children’s book about Jesus Christ).

‘She is one of my best lilmodels! Now she is 10 yo, but she began to do sex since 2 ys! She likes so much analsex and piss!’

‘
[name removed]
my model! She began sex at only 4 years! Now she is 17, a real slut nymphomaniac!’

Those are some of the other things he talked freely of.

Paolo Ghelardini also liked to philosophise about paedophilia:

Real life, real sex is Paganism like the ancient Greece and Rome! We are lost the original eden! I am old, you young and braveheart…go on for me too in the battle for sex freedom, in the name of God! In the name of Awakening of Love!

Another paedophile in the ring posted onto Facebook:

Ambra Angioline
call my master Paolo Constantino. He likes to show you when he rapes young girls (and very little too) on the mirror…

This post was liked by one ‘Paolo Constantino.’

One of his most chilling moments was when he posted a photograph he had taken of a little girl of about nine in an orange swimsuit peddling past the front window of his house in the city of Constanta, Romania. Underneath the picture he had written: ‘Outside my window! …. ! Lonely wolf is ready to catch her … !’

Lonely wolf was himself captured by the Romanian police in the spring of 2011 and eventually that October was sentenced to 12 years of prison on child pornography charges, and was ordered to be deported back to Italy once released. True to his boasts on Facebook to own thousands of photographs and videos of children being sexually molested, the police found in his possession approximately 9,500 photos along with 1000 videos that by his own admission contained images of bestiality, sado-masochism, and necrophilia all involving children. One Romanian newspaper report says that he admitted that his favourites were videos involving babies under the age of one. It was also said by the police that during the period April to June 2010 he had himself taken pornographic images of minors which he had then distributed onto the Web. Before his arrest he had been talking on Facebook of his plans to adopt a five-year-old orphan girl. He could be getting close to 80 years of age when released from his sentence in a Romanian jail, assuming that he serves all of it. It would be nice to think though that he’d die just before completing that sentence before going on to the eternal prison.

To me and the others in the group, seeing Ghelardini arrested was a top priority. Indeed I and one or two others almost begged various police agencies to get something done about him. It seems in the end, though – although this is not absolutely clear - that it was a report which Facebook itself made to the authorities which led to his eventual arrest. This may seem at first glance to be something that shows the social network in a positive light but let us look at it a little closer. The reports in the Romanian press state that Ghelardini went through 19 different Facebook accounts beginning from January 2010 until May 2011. This means that Facebook had known about his activities long, long before they ever decided to file a report to the police about him (if indeed they ever did). They had been banning his profiles, so clearly they had seen what was contained on them. (The fact that he was eventually known by the police to have went through 19 accounts on Facebook is because once they opened an investigation into him they would have been able to get Facebook to retrieve that data from its servers, not because the company itself was reporting to them every profile he ever had as soon as they discovered them).

In fact this is Ghelardini himself in the December of 2010 confirming that Facebook had just banned one of his other accounts:

My alter-ego Paul Constatin banned! Ahahah!! I don‘t care a rap!  Problem is for my friends not for me because I have an arkiv with + of 10.000 pthc pics and 1000 vids! My mails no one, neither God, can delete! Fuck asshole Facebook ad idiots snakes fake friends!

If Facebook had denounced him to the police earlier could they have saved some poor children from further abuse?  For police are more likely to prioritise complaints from them than they are from the likes of me. But we already know from the police themselves of Facebook’s history of simply banning the accounts of child pornography traders on its site without bothering to tell the cops about them. In August of 2010, Australian police revealed that Facebook repeatedly and over time failed to tell the authorities of a worldwide child porn swapping ring which was operating on its site in the first half of that year. That ring, which by police estimates had dozens of members, was led by 45-year-old repeat offender Ian Green from England, now serving (or possibly by now, released early from) a paltry four year sentence for his leading role in sharing around 100,000 images of child pornography, some of which he had produced himself. Paedophiles from America, South Africa, Switzerland, Germany, Canada, and Australia were also involved, and indeed one Australian suspect told police that he had sent up to 10 different messages to Facebook warning them of the ring, all of which were ignored. Whether that was just the false pleadings of one captured paedophile hoping for mitigation or not is a moot point as what is beyond all doubt is that Facebook were indeed aware that dozens of paedophiles were being invited by one ringleader into numerous private groups in which to share images of children being sexually exploited and tortured, and that the company responded by merely deleting those groups and the accounts of the paedos themselves, which police later revealed were being replaced within hours anyway by new groups and profiles operated by the same individuals. Two children in Britain were being actively sexually abused by members of this same ring, and may have carried on being so had not the Australian police discovered what was going on and began an investigation that eventually led to their rescue.

A statement released by Neil Gaughan, the director of the Australian Federal Police, said: ‘We are aware that Facebook knew of the existence of these pages and even went so far as to remove the profiles,’ and that: ‘Facebook deactivated the online accounts of the initial suspects but there were indications that within hours the groups were re-forming again.’ He went on to confirm that at no time did Facebook think that a large paedophile ring operating on its site was important enough to inform the police of. To try and mitigate the public relations damage caused by this, Facebook head of security Joe Sullivan made the disingenuous statement that the website ‘immediately took action once alerted to the offensive activity and was working with police.’ If he’d been more honest he would have said that the only action which the website had taken when first it was aware of the offensive activity was to uselessly close down the accounts of the offenders. It was only when the police contacted Facebook to inform them that they knew as to what was going on that they began cooperating with the cops and taking the ‘action’ Mr Sullivan was no doubt referring to. Mr Sullivan then went on to claim that Facebook would report illegal content quicker to the Australian police in the future. This was in August of 2010 but by the March of 2011 Australian police had cause to complain that by deleting far too quickly the profiles of the paedophiles they report to the police before the police have actually had time to look at them, Facebook was making it difficult to investigate the child pornography networks which operate on its site. Once deleted, the profiles and groups can only then be accessed by police forces outside of the United States, where Facebook is headquartered, by jumping through all sorts of legal hoops to get Facebook to respond. The company responded to this complaint by stating that it would not change its policy and was going to just keep on deleting the profiles of offenders rather than giving the police outside of America the time to investigate them that they need to have.