March 15, 2006 | Sex & Society

Identify theft victims accused of child porn

It's often said that alleged criminals are innocent until proven guilty. That is, of course, unless they're accused of peddling child pornography. In that case, they're guilty until proven innocent, as shown recently by an international investigation of online child porn that has uncovered false accusations against a slew of innocent people.

According to Canada's CBC News, hundreds of men and women have been wrongly implicated in child porn scandals in recent years when, in fact, they themselves were victims. Perhaps they fell prey to credit card fraud and identity theft. Or maybe they legally purchased adult porn from websites with indirect child-porn connections. Either way, CBC News reports, these men and women faced tarnished reputations, ruined marriages and lost jobs due to the false charges made against them.

Canadian police launched a worldwide investigation into child pornography on the Internet in 1999 when a Texas-based website called Landslide Productions was caught selling access to child porn; its database contained more than 100,000 names -- many of them Canadian -- and credit card information from consumers worldwide.

What resulted was Project Snowball, an operation that had Canadian police creating fake child-porn websites to lure suspects into purchasing illegal images and videos. And while Canadian police insist that they haven't charged innocent people with crimes as part of Project Snowball, around the world law enforcement agencies have raided homes and offices simply because their owner's name appeared in Landslide Productions' database, often due to instances of identity theft.

Irish lawyer Paul Lambert says that international prosecutors have largely ignored the possibility for computer fraud or malicious uploading and downloading in many Project Snowball cases.

"Things like whether somebody else has access to a computer; things like malicious access to computers, malicious uploading and downloading," he told CBC News. "These are all issues which, strangely, were wholly ignored by the prosecution, and particularly prosecution [information technology] experts in their examination of the evidence they gathered."

Police in the United States used the Landslide database to create a sting operation that busted approximately 200 people for allegedly agreeing to buy child porn.

Meanwhile, in the UK almost 40 people accused of purchasing child porn have committed suicide in the past six years; six people in Australia and at least one in Canada have done likewise. While crimes against children must always be pursued to the fullest extent of the law, overzealous prosecutions have destroyed too many innocent lives.

• Global child porn probe led to false accusations [cbc.ca]