Hackers on Steroids (21 page)

Delete, delete, delete is all that Facebook seems to want to do about the psychopaths and the child molesters which use its site. Delete, delete, delete and keep them off for a few hours or less until they bother themselves to make new accounts and begin the cycle all over again. No wonder they find the website so attractive to them. Children are being sexually abused by Facebook users and the images being put up on the site but what is most important to Facebook is having these images deleted for a few hours at a time, even more important to them than having the police look at them. Delete a few billion dollars off its worth for being a paedophile’s paradise and they’ll soon find a better way to deal with things.

Facebook want to be able to say that they are practicing a zero-tolerance policy on child pornography and that profiles of offenders will be deleted straight away once they become aware of them (of course never mentioning that all of these same offenders in question are just simply making new accounts and getting back on with it). They clearly have no respect for the needs of the people who are actually working to try and convict the abusers of children; they just have decided among themselves that being able to say that they have a policy of instant deletion of the accounts of child pornography swappers is the best thing for their public image. Or in the words of Grant Edwards, the Australian police officer who raised the subject, ‘Facebook is brand-protecting.’ To this giant corporation
image is everything.

Image is indeed everything and when Fox News in the October of 2010 confronted two top Facebook executives with evidence of the rampant child pornography swapping that is taking place daily on its site, truth seemed to take a backseat to image. The two executives – company spokesman Simon Axten along with Joe Sullivan – were shown how freely and openly the child pornography was being traded on Facebook. According to the Foxnews.com report Sullivan was ‘dumbfounded, unaware of and unable to explain the extremely graphic content on the site.’ This from the report:

Then, when asked to click on the profile of any of the group’s members, the executives were ushered into a subculture dedicated to using Facebook to traffic child pornography and to target and interact with children.

At this point, there was silence for nearly a full minute, except for the sound of furious, rapid typing. Axten and Sullivan sounded stunned, unable to explain why this happened and how their filters could have failed.

Which is funny, because as we know, Paolo Ghelardini had been using the website to openly share his child sex abuse materials with other paedophiles from the January of 2010, and Facebook had certainly been aware of his presence as they had been banning his accounts. This was confirmed to me by two separate women who had been reporting the paedophiles – including Ghelardini – to Facebook itself from June of that year. One of them even let me see email discussions from that summer of 2010 which prove that Ghelardini was active on Facebook and had gone through a number of profiles on the website. So if Facebook were aware of that one paedophile and had saw even one of his profiles – and all evidence says that indeed they most certainly had – then they had also saw that he was linked into a disturbingly large number of other paedophiles also sharing child sex abuse images on Facebook. These same women also told me that many of the other paedophiles they observed in that same network were regularly coming and going with new accounts after having had their previous ones banned.

‘How many were involved then at that time in the same web Ghelardini was a part of?’ I emailed one of these women.

‘There were/are thousands, I couldn't say how many only that when you find one you will find unlimited numbers,’ was the reply.

So either Joe Sullivan was straight-out lying when he said that he was unaware in October 2010 of the large and public child porn swapping network on Facebook – and so saving having to answer difficult questions about why he and his team hadn’t been able to stop it - or else the rest of the Facebook security and administration teams had somehow forgotten to mention to their boss the trifling matter of a thousands strong international network of paedophiles on the site openly trading in highly illegal material involving children. Which one of these scenarios seems more likely to be true?

Also in October of 2010, the New Zealand Department of Internal Affairs began what turned into a huge international police operation aimed at a child pornography trading ring existing on Facebook. By May 2012 this was reported to have netted 55 suspects in numerous countries, and led to the rescue of 12 children from their abusers. According to the NZ Department of Internal Affairs, when they contacted Facebook at the beginning of that operation in October the company claimed that it was unaware of the extent of the child porn trading on its website. But how could Facebook have been unaware of this at two different points in October when on at least one of those occasions they had been made aware of it? When the New Zealand authorities made them aware of it that month had they already forgotten about whenever Fox News had contacted them to tell them about it? Or maybe it was the New Zealanders that contacted them first about it and that when Fox News got to speak to them regarding the issue the whole thing had just slipped their minds?

Image was everything for the Catholic Church too, and look how that has turned out.

Apart from all the child pornography trading and being a meeting place for the planet’s paedophiles, the Facebook system of ridiculously easy, unchecked signups is also enabling sexual predators to actively prey on the children who use the site. In the anti-paedo activist group I was a part of we made up fake profiles with child’s art and interests on view so as to appear as children ourselves, this to ensnare the paedophiles with and get them to talk to us, with the conversations then being forwarded on to the cops. The paedophiles, though, in a horrible reversal of this, are themselves posing as children but to ensnare real children with for the purposes of grooming them for sexual exploitation.

It would appear that this is a popular tactic for paedophiles on the site. Since the beginning of this year of 2012 I have been twice-weekly searching through Google News for any news items about paedos who have been caught using fake identities on Facebook with which to sexually groom children with, and so far, as of late November, I have found media relating to 51 different arrests or court cases this year alone involving over one thousand children being targeted on Facebook by paedophiles who have made up fake identities so as to prey on them for either naked photographs and videos of themselves, or for actual real life meetings. Bear in mind that these are only the cases of which I am aware of that have come to court this year in the English-speaking world alone, and that the total number of paedophiles on the site using fake accounts with which to groom children is likely to be drastically higher.

The modus operandi here of the paedophile is most usually to pose as either a teenage boy (sometimes as a celebrity teen like the singer Justin Bieber, whose identity it seems is a popular choice for the predators to assume); a teenage girl or a sexy older woman such as a porn star; or as a talent scout for a modelling agency, and then befriend children on the site and try to scam them into sending out pornographic images of themselves. Sometimes they will even try and incite them into meeting with them, and sometimes in that they are successful. A number of the cases have seen a single predator victimise hundreds of children via the use of false identities. Christopher Gunn, 31 and of Montgomery, Alabama, pleaded guilty in August of this year to using false identities on Facebook and elsewhere to scam and coerce hundreds of girls aged 9 to 16 from all over the world into sending him pornographic images of themselves. Gunn used numerous identities on Facebook alone to groom the children with, including ‘Tyler Mielke,’ ‘Jason Lempke,’ and ‘C.J. Harper;’ along with a number of others (including posing as Justin Bieber). He played what was called the ‘New kid ruse,’ pretending to the girls whom he targeted on the site to be a boy who had just moved into their area and who was seeking new friends. Once he established contact with them he would lure them into intimate conversations and get them to divulge personal details about themselves such as their bra size and any sexual experiences they may have had. Any that did divulge those secrets to him he would then threaten that he would paste those details everywhere unless they sent him pornographic images of themselves, or appeared on webcam touching themselves for him. This went on from 2009 until his eventual arrest in 2012.

34-year-old Jamy Church of Sulphur, Louisiana, was sentenced this April to 24 years in prison for posing on Facebook as numerous teenage girls and getting boys aged from 13 to 16 to send to those fake profiles videos of themselves masturbating. He was known to have victimised over 50 different boys in this way in a two year period. Shiraz Nariman, 42 and from Toronto, used Facebook, MSN Messenger, and a local social networking site to pose as a teenage boy to get young girls to send him pornographic videos of themselves. Mark Arthur, 31 and from Stockton, England, was jailed for six years at Teeside Crown Court this May for using eight different false identities on Facebook to lure children into meetings and into sending him pornographic images of themselves. Also in May, 25-year-old New York state teacher Timothy Bek got 30 years for using on Facebook the alias Sarah Grayson, a supposed 16-year-old girl, to incite numerous young teenage boys – some of whom he knew from school – into sending him nude photos and videos of themselves. One of the boys he induced into having sexual contact with an animal. And so the list goes on and on, and has been going on for a long time now. One case from 2010 that I discovered is that of 29-year-old Michael Williams from Cornwall, England, who was sentenced to four years prison time for operating at least eight different false identities on Facebook, MSN Messenger, and Bebo, and using them to entice hundreds of children into either providing him with pornographic material of themselves or into meeting with him. He admitted to grooming 460 victims in this way, but police believe that the real number may be close to 1000. As far back as 2007, when Facebook was still in its relative infancy with a ‘mere’ 42 million active accounts, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced that his office was conducting an investigation into how paedophile predators were using the site to groom children with. 

I myself - while posing as a child - have experience of being ‘groomed’ by Facebook’s paedophiles. All you have to do is to enter a page where they hang out and talk together, announce yourself as being an 11-year-old and they will pounce on you like hungry lions onto a wildebeest. Dozens of them will be crawling all over you within a short period of time, sending you messages and trying to entice you into getting them off. That’s how stupid, insane, and utterly deluded they are: believing in the first place that an 11-year-old girl really would be hanging out on Facebook pages dedicated to dirty old men discussing how ‘sexy’ 11-year-old girls are. One in particular I can recall well, he called himself ‘John Dalton’ and claimed that when he wasn’t busy being a firefighter and a professional bodybuilder he was a scout for a modelling agency which was seeking younger girls. He asked me about my stats, about what I was wearing, and if I liked to wear nighties. He told me that he needed me to measure myself for him to see if I was good material for the ‘modelling agency,’ then out of the blue he sent me a picture of what was very obviously a porn star’s penis and became very verbally lurid with it. At that I terminated the conversation but he soon came back posing as a 10-year-old ballerina who was ‘good friends’ with the ‘big and strong’ ‘John Dalton,’ who would, this little ballerina informed me, ‘take good care of me’ and not let anyone ever harm me should only I send him naked pictures of myself. What I did send were these two conversations on to the American policeman with whom I had established contact.

All that will come over to an adult as a somewhat lame and maybe even laughable attempt at grooming, but to a vulnerable and innocent child the falseness of it all may not have been so apparent. In August this year, one Indiana mother told a local news channel about how a paedophile using the obviously fake name of ‘Dustin Bieger’ (you can see what he done there) had contacted her 10-year-old daughter on Facebook and convinced her that he was the young teenage boy in the profile picture which he was using. When the mother got suspicious and checked her daughter’s messages she discovered that the ‘boy’ was asking very funny questions for a child, not the least of which was, ‘Do you like older men?’, along with questioning the child as to whether she had ever touched a penis. The girl was very taken with this ‘Dustin’ and they had even set up a time and place at which they would meet, a meeting that was luckily enough prevented from happening because of the timely intervention of the mother. One activist has compared Facebook to ‘like having a school with 200 million kids in it and you’re not patrolling the halls or the washrooms to make sure no predators get in.’ Paedos must not be able to believe their luck at social networking sites. I have witnessed with my own eyes paedophiles on the site who were posing as children – as many in the open child porn web do – with real children on their friend lists. I have seen them collect pictures of children from the site and post them - along with the child’s personal details - onto paedo groups where they can be discussed and drooled over. Perhaps it would be harder for paedophiles to steal information and photographs if the Facebook profiles of under 16s were automatically locked down to all but the people on their friend lists; but that still brings us back to the problem of fake accounts.