Read Hackers on Steroids Online
Authors: Oisín Sweeney
Tags: #True Crime, #Hacking, #Retail, #Computers & Technology, #Nonfiction
Here’s a message he posted on January 14th 2011:
Knob Knobson
ANY LONDON MOM'S AND DAD'S WILLING TO SHARE THEIR DAUGHTERS WITH ME?? I'm friendly, trustworthy, kind and attentive. Private message me if interested. Also looking for girls with their own mind to contact me for meeting up for adult fun together, any age. Have a great day!! xx
The next day he messaged one of the women from the group with this:
Knob Knobson
Sounds good enjoy!!! I'm working and then home relaxing, i need some rest after a long week. I saw a cute 3-4yr old yesterday.....came in with her Mom, and while Mom wasn't watching i was groping myself so the girl could see.......i was on my own for a while so it was all good, then while Mom was looking for books in a corner i got my cock out and masturbated in view of the girl but she didn't see me, i was hoping she would turn around and look.........but i came anyway!! She had a great face. Just thought you'd like to know!! lol
Despite all this, and despite being found with 50 child porn images and six child porn videos on his computer, the judge at his trial, Judge Alistair McCreath, decided that a jail sentence would only make Wareham ‘worse’ and so decided to spare him jail, giving him a suspended eight-month sentence instead.
Well done, Judge McCreath - that’ll learn him. And others too.
The contrast between the sentence handed out to Jerry Cannon and that handed out to Richard Wareham – as in many other cases - shows that America is, in the main, way ahead of Britain - and indeed it seems much of the world - when it comes to how seriously these predators are dealt with. I could hardly speak with anger once I learned of Wareham’s ‘sentence.’ I wonder how cops who have to risk their very sanity in viewing the images these fuckers create and trade among themselves feel when ‘sentences’ such as that handed out to Wareham are the end result of all the psychologically damaging work which they have to undertake.
Another arrest was made and charges brought in March 2011 of an airport worker from the USA who had used on Facebook the names ‘Tom Gibbons’ and ‘Tom Gibson’ with which to distribute and collect images of child pornography. He was also familiar to us in the group and I had made a number of reports to the American policeman about him, although the report of his arrest cites a tip from the Delaware County District Attorney's Office as having sparked off the investigation into him. Either way, it wasn’t from Facebook, who once again had banned a large number of his profiles. So far his case has not come to court. His real name is something close to his Internet pseudonyms.
John Wilson, from Greenbush, Maine, and 23 when he was arrested in February 2011 was regularly, perhaps daily, being banned from Facebook for posting ‘softcore’ child pornography during my time reporting on him and his like. After his arrest, the police said they believed him to have gone through 15 profiles, but I would estimate the real number to be far higher than that. He would use the aliases ‘John Robert,’ ‘John Lemay,’ ‘John Howarth,’ ‘John Carter’ and probably a whole lot of other ones too to make profiles on Facebook with ‘softcore’ child pornography pics on display, along with invitations to contact him so as to swap the harder stuff. Sometimes he would just use his own name and picture with which to advertise for fellow child porn swappers. No one is saying that this lot are either sane or smart.
In this case it was tips from both members of the public and Facebook that led to the police investigation into him. Which may appear fair enough, but I do wonder how long it took for Facebook to report him? Something tells me it wasn’t after the first profile was brought to their attention. At any rate, still not exactly a great score for the social network so far. Wilson was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in February 2012.
John Huitema, 39, and known on Facebook as ‘Ben Wwantsit,’ Barry Wwantit,’ and ‘Ben Barry’ was another one who we were able to get arrested, and thank Christ we were too. This one thing made my whole stupid adventure into the darkness worthwhile for Huitema had been sexually abusing a two-year-old girl and posting onto Facebook the images of it, much to the delight of his friends on the social network. ‘Very nice baby’ posted one of them underneath one photograph of the abuse. Another comment read: ‘nice one I know men who pay for a baby.’
His ‘Ben Barry’ profile had been banned just before he became ‘Ben Wwantsit.’ I have a screencap of the outside of this same profile that shows his friend list and the profile picture. Among his friends on show are ‘Lovell Kids,’ along with some who have images of prepubescent girls as profile pictures. ‘Ben’s’ profile picture is even more chilling in the context, as it is of him with his face close beside the very same toddler whom he was abusing, his eyes staring straight at her. On his next profile, when he became ‘Ben Wwantsit,’ he was posting pictures of himself abusing the little girl as he changed her nappy.
When I was told this by some of the women who had been keeping an eye on him, I forwarded this directly on to the ITN person whom I had contacted, who then put me in touch with a Ceop (British anti-child porn squad) officer. Him, I then sent this info on to, along with all the personal info that the women in the group had managed to lure out of ‘Ben’ about himself, and on either that same day or the next the cops had come through the door of Huitema’s Glasgow home and taken him into custody. This was in January 2011 and even though we suspected that he had been arrested because of his sudden disappearance (of course the cops never shared much with me on these things, nor would I expect them to), it wasn’t until May that year that we got confirmation of it after some news reports were published of his appearance in court to plead guilty.
Jesus but it felt good knowing that we got that fucker arrested. I really felt then that I had been a cog in a paedo-killing machine, that everything had been worth it. Whatever other shit and madness of mind this all has brought on me, being a part of that is a shining bright light in the darkness that can never go out. Seeing how the processes worked and knowing how our work led to his arrest was overwhelming. Magic out of that horror. Maybe that was wrong to feel such joy considering what he had done and what horrors lay behind those feelings of joy, but still an all it felt great knowing that we had all worked together to help put him behind bars and have that child rescued from his clutches, and from the clutches of his evil Facebook friends who were whooping with delight and encouraging him to do more as he posted up the images of the abuse. We all dreaded to think what else he would have inflicted on that baby were it not for us.
Unfortunately, but I suppose not too surprisingly, the sentence he received – four-and-a-half-years and afterwards deportation back to his native Holland - was an insult to the severity of his crimes, which also included the possession of 7,269 indecent images of children. Nevertheless, the child was saved from any further horror at his hands and hopefully the memory of it all has been lost to her.
If Facebook had gotten an investigation going earlier though, when he was ‘Barry Wwantit’ and ‘Ben Barry’ and before he became ‘Ben Wwantsit,’ could the abuse of the toddler have been stopped before it happened? The images he posted onto his ‘Ben Wwantsit’ profile may have been the first time that he abused the girl, or they may not have been. I don’t know. But he certainly could have been stopped earlier had Facebook kicked up a racket about a paedophile on its site who was using a profile picture of himself with his face next to a two-year-old girl. For as they banned his ‘Ben Barry’ profile, they certainly can’t claim not to have seen this.
Facebook says that it reports the paedophiles on its site to the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), an American anti-paedophile charity (and the same one as Cyber Tipline) which itself reports then to US law enforcement any illegal activity it finds in what is reported to it. So why was information from NCMEC not cited in any of those cases about paedophiles who had spent long months freely going through Facebook account after Facebook account? Someone is not doing their job right here, and – going by their previous behaviour - I know which particular entity I believe it to be. And NCMEC itself may say that Facebook is reporting to them all the paedophile profiles it bans on its site – and there certainly are a small number of cases of American paedophiles being arrested because of reports Facebook made to NCMEC - but how does the organisation know that the social network is reporting every single one of those profiles? Did it report to them all those of Paolo Ghelardini, John Huitema, and Robert Hull? And if so, how were those paedophiles allowed to go on abusing the children they were openly boasting of molesting or getting ready to molest? (I have been given a screencap of a page from one of Hull’s old banned profiles: it is a full page of non-pornographic pictures of a very young girl and it seems clear by what he was saying about her that this was the girl whom he was abusing).
There were many, many more of those entities who were quite openly trading child pornography at that paedophiles’ party then and who still may be doing it to this day. And even if some or all of those 55 suspects arrested as part of the investigation initiated by New Zealand were a part of the main Facebook ring, then that is still only a relatively small number of the total amount of offenders. This is not the fault of the anti-paedophile police themselves; they do their best in what is probably the hardest job in the world, something that cannot be done for the reason of money alone. There just needs to be more of them doing that job is all, but resources are always ‘stretched.’ And no wonder, the United States alone is estimated to lose some $42 billion annually in a ludicrous police ‘war’ against a relatively harmless green plant the smoking of which some people gain some small pleasure from. Most other governments in the world, in what is nothing less than a case of mass, global insanity, also invest large stockpiles of treasure and human resources into this same absurd little spin on the magic roundabout of ‘crime-fighting,’ resources that if instead deployed into waging what one US politician once called ‘the real war on terror we should be fighting’ could do so much better. But then again, the world has always been stupid and hardly a world worth fighting for, except that some of the evils in it are indeed worth fighting against. Be nice if the rulers of the world could someday know just exactly what those evils are. If personal freedoms were not legislated against and the money and time spent on such absurdities were instead spent on fighting child abuse, the changes would be phenomenal.
In March 2011, the announcement by Facebook that it was employing a Microsoft-developed technology called ‘PhotoDNA’ to identify and block known child pornography images being posted onto its site was met in some media circles with much fanfare, as if it were the end of child porn on the site. The program is meant to automatically find the unique digital fingerprints of known child porn images from a huge police database and either block them from coming onto the site in the first place, or quickly delete them once they have. How successful this has been can be gauged by referring to the WND.com article cited earlier in this chapter and which came out a full 14 months after this technology was deployed by the company, and it seems that all that has to be done to bypass it is to crop off a certain amount of the image or else alter it in another way. It also does not seem to work with video, nor does it stop paedophiles posting links up. Not that it would stop ‘people’ like John Huitema uploading material which they are making themselves anyway. But what is available to view on Facebook – and Twitter, and MSN Messenger, and socialgo.com, and grou.ps, and just about any other large user-generated and interactive social website like them – is only a symptom of a sick world that tolerates the likes of a Richard Wareham getting a smack on the wrist in court, or a Shane Pattison with his desires to take and murder small children being allowed out to walk the streets again after only a few years in jail. Paedophiles are known to have been openly networking with each other on the Internet from as long ago as the late 1980s, using a long-established user-made forum system called Usenet. How organised and cocky they now are is perhaps best illustrated by this: I have learned from one of the Anonymous report groups that the offenders on Facebook now have what is called ‘Pedo Hour,’ in which some will post up their worst images for collection by others at a set hour every day and then take them down afterwards.
Mankind would rather keep fighting in its endless litany of global civil wars that lead only on to other cycles of endless wars (because ethnic and national hatreds feel really, really good) than really wage a much-needed but less exciting worldwide ‘war’ against demons like Paolo Ghelardini, who let us remember walked the earth as a very active paedophile for years before that creature’s arrest. Just about everyone hates paedos - of that there is no doubt - but still an all, they get caught and get let out to do it again and again, and indeed have become so empowered by the relative lack of action against them by society that they now openly organise to trade their evil material. Dear god, there are even pro-paedophilia campaigners out there in the world openly preaching the message of child abuse. Why aren’t they instead all living in petrifying states of fear? Because the whole subject is too messy, the details are too disgusting, because they know that the world doesn’t really want to notice them and their workings (of which they are not ashamed in the slightest), another obscenity like First World poverty and Third World famine which is tutted about but mostly left as it is. The horror that makes people turn away and quickly forget is the paedophile’s greatest weapon in allowing their world to continue to flourish.