Hackers on Steroids (23 page)

‘I can’t really comment on this gentleman's opinions. I can say that we take fake accounts and trolling very seriously indeed and we take a number of proactive measures to both prevent fake accounts being set up and monitoring pages which are likely to be at risk. We use both our highly trained and global user operations team and advanced technology solutions to prevent and remove fake and troll accounts,’ was the drone-like reply to a detailed report in which I, anticipating such a response, had in the first place called bullshit (in a very civil way) on all the corporate crap spewed out there.

So not even in a one-to-one contact with that MP’s assistant could Facebook acknowledge in a human way the very real problems which it has been consistently failing to properly address. Instead, its roboworker just automatically reached for the PR booklet so as to find and then regurgitate an automated response to the concerned party. Asked then to speak to me directly, the spokeswoman refused and, rather unsurprisingly, sent word to me that any concerns I may have about content on Facebook could all be best allayed if only I would use the report button. Because the report button is the fucking answer to everything. I only wish that there were a report button which I could use to report Facebook to someone and have its account closed down. I found myself, not for the first nor last time, wanting to rip Mark Zuckerberg’s throat open and vomit into it every stinking, horrible thing that I had witnessed on Facebook.

In September 2011, media in Ireland, Britain, and further afield was abuzz with the news that the father of a 12-year-old girl from Belfast was suing Facebook for failing to keep his daughter, who was in care, off the website, where, says the father, she had been approached by numerous older men seeking sex with her on a number of accounts which she had opened. This case attracted no small amount of attention, with some commentators speculating that if the suit were successful and Facebook were found to be failing in its duty to keep underage children off the site then it could possibly lead to it being blocked by the British government. The spotlight then being shone on Facebook got even brighter when because of the high-profile nature of the case hundreds of others complainants from around the UK soon joined in the same action, which was being handled by Derry City solicitor Hilary Carmichael.

Said Ms Carmichael: ‘It's not just one child who is in danger from paedophiles on Facebook, thousands of children are in danger. Something must be done to protect them. We want Facebook to sit up and take notice.’

But just one month after the announcement of the case that very possibly could have cost Facebook dearly, and in what could be said to be very strange timing indeed in relation to someone who was taking on the world’s 9th most powerful person and one of its richest, Hilary Carmichael was suspended by the Law Society, the body which regulates lawyers in Northern Ireland, over non-payment of tax. In December that year her business was put up for sale by that same body, and by the next April she had been declared bankrupt because of it all, something which she said had left her unable to practice law ever again.

‘I simply could not pay all of my tax bill,’ said Ms Carmichael to the Belfast Telegraph. ‘There were a lot of bills to be paid and given a bit of time I could have paid my bill. The Inland Revenue were happy to give me time but as for the Law Society, they were having none of it.’ The lawsuit against Facebook was never heard of again. If you were an even slightly sceptical person you might begin to suspect that someone within the Law Society was suddenly able to afford to buy themselves a really nice new sports car that year. (And this is the same Facebook than hundreds of millions of people willingly submit all their personal information to.)

Because Facebook really don’t react well to criticism as to how they deal with the monsters on its site. They don’t read these bad reports and think to themselves: ‘How best can we improve on this?’ They read them and think: ‘How best can I shut this prick up?’ When Lydia Cacho, a highly respected and quite famous anti-paedophile activist and journalist from Mexico, dared in October 2011 to very publicly attack Facebook for not doing enough to combat child pornography trading on its site, she was able to report that the company reacted, not by trying to do better, but by closing down her own personal Facebook page. So they’ll stand for paedos running loose like wild beasts on their site, but by god they won’t stand for criticism about it.

If this book gets noticed, I fully expect them to exert much more energy into attacking me and its contents, probably in sneaky, underhand ways, than they will in trying to fix the very real problems that it hopefully will raise. Honestly though, I would love that because I’d just go and write another book about the whole matter. And I’d love for them to drag me into court too so I could prove the case against them. That would be a dream.

So let me just say it out straight: Facebook is failing abysmally to stop the child pornography trading going on openly on its site; it is failing abysmally to prevent paedophiles using fake profiles on its site with which to groom large numbers of children for sexual exploitation; and, probably most egregiously of all, it has not been – despite its false claims to the contrary – working anywhere near as closely as it could be with the police forces of the world to help them tackle the paedos who have nested within its digital walls. They certainly do claim that they are doing all they can to help the police in this. The cold, hard evidence says otherwise.

Oh they will help to some degree when asked to, but the business is far more interested in just deleting the profiles of the child porn swappers than in actually going out of its way to make sure that those offenders are brought to the attention of the proper authorities. Which is kind of like trying to treat cancer with sticky plasters and then still calling yourself a serious doctor.  Raymond Bechard, an American author and a campaigner against child pornography on Facebook, has said in the media that an FBI agent told him that Facebook can take up to eight months to respond to requests about users posting child porn onto the site. One of the police officers I was myself in contact with said plainly that Facebook aren’t reporting it to them, they are just deleting the profiles.

And to prove that Facebook are shirking their responsibilities, let me cite a number of cases of paedophiles who have used the site to distribute and collect child sex abuse images and who have ended up in court for such. Many of these individuals were ones that I was aware of during my time reporting on them. We’ve already dealt with Paolo Ghelardini and how he went through 19 different accounts before Facebook thought him a serious enough character to bother reporting to the cops (if indeed they did at all), but these are some of his associates in that very same web from that time, and so as Facebook was banning Ghelardini’s profiles they certainly knew that this web existed.

Let’s start with Shane Pattison, from the town of Marshall in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. 22 when he was jailed in August 2012 for five years after pleading guilty to the largest number of child pornography charges ever brought in Canada. On Facebook he called himself ‘Shane Ispedo’ and a screencap taken by an activist of his profile in November 2010 shows 167 individuals on the friend list of an account that leaves no doubt as to what its owner is all about. The profile picture is of a girl of about five, while a quotation on display goes: ‘old enough to pee old enough for me.’ His short bio reads ‘i am a man into all things young looking to meet people into young love to have fun open minded love kids.’

The court heard that from October 2009 to November 2010 he had been distributing videos and images of extreme child abuse, including the torture and rape of babies only a few months of age, to hundreds of contacts using Hotmail, peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, and Facebook. He had also had online conversations with some of these contacts about fantasies they shared about the torture, mutilation, and murder of small children.

Despite being in the same paedophile web as Ghelardini, Pattison was only brought to the attention of the Canadian cops because of an already existing investigation into child pornography distribution that they were running. Lucky too that those cops noticed him and didn’t wait until Facebook bothered to tell them of his existence, as Pattison’s arrest led them to Robert Hull from Idaho, then aged 35. Hull had been sexually molesting a four-year-old girl he had been babysitting and had sent a video of the abuse to Pattison. He is now serving 15 years for the abuse along with distribution of the images he took of it; and his arrest in turn led police to the house of another offender, an unnamed 41-year-old from the city of Prince George, Canada, who was abusing his seven-year-old daughter and sharing the images with Hull.

Hull, too, was a member of the same open child porn swapping web as Ghelardini, and like Paolo Ghelardini he also had experienced the loss of numerous accounts and yet had escaped being reported to the police by Facebook for his activities. Hull’s victim was identified and Hull himself arrested in December 2010, the month after Pattison’s arrest. He had though been active on Facebook for some months before that, and screencaps taken by some activists then capture the different profiles he had went through. Like a fair number of the paedos to be found on the Internet, Hull made no attempts to hide his identity and in the various profiles screencapped throughout November 2010 by an activist it can be seen that he used his real name, and sometimes his real photograph - along with advertising his likes as ‘PTHC’ and ‘R@y Gold,’ among others.

The court documents of Hull’s case relay part of an email exchange between him and Pattison that took place between November 6th 2010 and November 10th 2010 and which had the title ‘Facebook.’ Disturbing as this conversation is, I will reproduce it - first of all to show that they had made contact on Facebook at least from that time, and secondly to show just what kinds of creatures are being allowed to network with each other on the world’s greatest social networking site.

Hull:
Can tact
[sic]
me at ********@208867****@mms.att.net please. This is my mobile e-mail address.

Pattison:
Ok.

Hull:
Have you ever seen a 6 month old get fisted?

Pattison:
ya loved it and would love to see it again.

Hull:
Did you get my mobile email?

Pattison:
ya

Hull
:
I need to have some fun ;-)

Pattison:
me to found a girl i am going to kidnap rape torture before killing

Hull:
How old is the girl you found?

Pattison:
5yo

Hull:
Get any pictures like you promised?

Pattison:
have not yet they have not been around

Hull:
How badly did you destroy her little body?

Pattison:
really bad

Hull:
Did you get any pics?

Pattison:
nope when I went back all that was left was her bloody shit and piss filled panties

Fortunately, it was found that Pattison had apparently been lying about carrying out actual physical abuse, although it was discovered that he had been actively searching for babysitting jobs at the time of his arrest. But with Hull, the abuse was very real. Could it have been stopped earlier had Facebook done all that it could have instead of just closing down his profiles?

Jerry L Cannon was a church pastor from Kentucky and 63 when he was sentenced to 17 ½ years in July 2011 for distributing and receiving on Facebook child pornography. This one was well known to me and I had reported to my American law enforcement contact a fair few of his profiles, but it was a report to the police by a resident of the city of Fairhope, Alabama, that started off an FBI investigation into him, and – glaringly - not a report from Facebook which, the court at his sentencing heard, had banned 13 of his profiles over time.

Richard Wareham, also known on Facebook as ‘Knob Knobson’ and ‘Knobby Knobson,’ was one who the group I was a part of was responsible for getting arrested. 52 years of age, Wareham was before his arrest a librarian at Paddington Children’s Library, London. Information collected on him and an image of his disgusting saggy self masturbating his mouse-like penis that he had sent to a lady from the group who Wareham thought a child led to his arrest after I made some reports to the police. ‘Knobson,’ as I still think of him as, was particularly active in that Facebook ring, and particularly repulsive even compared to the rest of his evil little friends. He is also another who went through a number of profiles on the system.