http://www.guardian.co.uk/crime/article/0,,2106177,00.html

Undercover police smash paedophile ring posting live abuse online

Sandra Laville, crime correspondent
Tuesday June 19, 2007
The Guardian


Thirty-one children and babies who were repeatedly abused live for an internet chatroom have been rescued from homes in the UK and abroad following the biggest international investigation so far into an online paedophile ring.

Officers from Britain's Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre worked for 10 months with detectives from 35 other countries to identify and rescue the children, who were being abused and filmed live for the thousands of members of the chatroom. More than 15 of the children and babies were found in Britain and handed over to the care of social services.

The international inquiry, in which specialist detectives with experience in counter-terrorism posed as paedophiles online, led yesterday to the jailing of Timothy David Martyn Cox, the British "godfather" of the paedophile ring.
Cox, 27, who lived at his parents' farmhouse in Buxhall, Suffolk, used the pseudonym Son of God to run the chatroom Kids the Light of Our Lives, a forum on which paedophiles shared live images of the abuse of children.

Cox, who ran the operation from a computer in his bedroom, was given an indeterminate jail sentence at Ipswich crown court yesterday after admitting nine offences relating to the possession and distribution of indecent images of children. Judge Peter Thompson said Cox would stay in prison until experts decided it was safe to release him.

A second British mastermind, Gordon McIntosh, 32, was also identified and arrested at his home in Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, during the investigation. McIntosh, who took over the running of the chatroom after Cox's arrest in September, will be sentenced on June 29 after pleading guilty to 27 charges of making, possessing and distributing indecent images and films. Police said among 392 indecent film files in McIntosh's possession were videos of babies being raped.

More than 700 chatroom members, including 200 in Britain, are still being investigated. Among those already in prison are a 32-year-old from Stockport, Greater Manchester, who was jailed for a minimum of seven years last week after admitting child rape, and Graham Conridge, 60, a music teacher from Bedford who posed online as a teenage boy to persuade girls to strip and perform indecent acts in front of webcams. He was jailed for 32 months in April.

Jim Gamble, the chief executive of the online protection centre, said yesterday paedophiles had earned their place in the chatroom by proving they could procure and circulate images of serious abuse.

"From the apparent safety of his home, Cox spent hours each day planning, promoting and encouraging the abuse of innocent young victims," Mr Gamble said. "He provided a service to hundreds of like-minded individuals."

Cox lived with his father David, an accountant, mother Mavis and sister Louise at their farmhouse, where the family ran a microbrewery.

A single man with no children, he was a member in 2005 of an online paedophile chatroom known as Kiddypics, which was run by Raymond Weller, an American, who called himself God. When Weller was arrested at his home in Tennessee in March 2006, Cox took over as host of a new chatroom, identifying his links to Weller by calling himself Son of God.

But in August last year, officers from Toronto police identified a Briton as the new chatroom host and tipped off British investigators, who began an undercover operation with colleagues from Canada, America and Australia. They identified Cox and moved to arrest him at his home in September last year while he was online. As he was led away officers assumed his identity in the chatroom, posting a message on the site saying: "Son of God has gone for his tea and will be back in 30 minutes" to avoid arousing suspicions.

Over 10 days, officers posed as Cox to gather evidence on the thousands of members of the peer-to-peer website. Detectives found 75,960 indecent and explicit images on the computer in Cox's bedroom and evidence that he had supplied 11,491 images to other chatroom members.

Detective Sergeant Carl Fisher, of Suffolk police, said: "He showed no remorse when he was arrested. Our officers spent three months viewing the images and categorising them and they were the worst things we have ever seen."

The sting

When officers sat at Timothy Cox's computer and began communicating with members of his chatroom, they discovered 70 men were queueing to view an image of live abuse which was being circulated at the time.

Only minutes earlier, Cox had been led away in handcuffs and the detectives were assuming his online identity - Son of God - to gather evidence on the chatroom members.

Without circulating or procuring any images of abuse themselves, the officers spent 10 days "chatting" with hundreds of paedophiles from across the world. They encouraged members to talk about the abuse they were carrying out, the images they were procuring and circulating and what other abuse they had planned. As each man communicated in the chatroom his details were copied and sent to specialist online codebreakers for him to be identified.

Prospective members gained entry to the chatroom by impressing Cox and his lieutenants with the images they were able to procure.

Unlike many paedophile rings online, the abuse was carried out in real time and placed live online. It was the knowledge that so many children and babies were at risk that prompted officers to move quickly.

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In many cases I have a problem with capital punishment,
but then somethin like this comes up...and I gotta believe
there's a wall somewhere waiting for these guys to line up
in front of.

I'm still anti-death-penalty, innocent people get convicted, releasing a corpse gives no benefit. Life without parole is fine as long as proper appeals are available if new evidence or tests arise. To me the purpose is to protect society, not seek revenge. If there is a value to the death penalty it's deterrant, in that case it needs to be public and ugly, not what we now have.

I think the death penalty is the correct punishment for some, like Ted Bundy and his ilk, who took so many lives, and who cannot be allowed to live in open society. He proved himself not worth the expense of keeping him alive. He had no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

These pedophiles should be stripped of all assets and jailed for the rest of their lives.

The incalcuable damage done to persons who suffer through sexual abuse of any kind deserves just punishment.

Execution is more expensive than keeping them alive for a century. I believe we need mandatory procedures for new evidence (or new forensic methods) when they could prove the innocence (or at least challenge a conviction) for anyone in prison for a serious crime.

On very serious crimes (yes, this qualifies) life without parole is justified, since they almost always deplete all of their assets in defense and appeals that part seems to be a non-issue. Assuming punishment is the goal I fail to see how execution is worse than life without parole, if execution actually has a deterrent effect (people can quote studies in both directions) we're doing it wrong, it would have more impact if it was public and at least appeared painful.