VisualRoute Aides 'Save the Children' Operation to Smash Child-Porno Ring

When the special Child Pornography unit of the Swedish police knocked on his door at dawn on 16 January 2001, the suspect was already online. He confessed immediately, as did several others in a number of coordinated raids across the country that same morning. Within hours, the biggest Internet-based child pornography ring in Sweden to date was uncovered.

Operation Save the Children, as the police called it, built largely on information from the Save the Children Hotline. The details will take time to unravel but the apprehended suspects can expect to be charged with possession, dissemination, and perhaps even production of child pornography. Within the space of only a few years, the Internet has come to be a vital part of our lives. Six of ten Swedish households log on every day to a global network with enormous tides of information washing back and forth.

The Net knows no boundaries, neither in space nor time, making it a mirror of our world, with gigantic resources of knowledge and a historically unique potential for direct communication between people. The Internet's resources are in fact the basic foundation for the growth of the Information Society. But just as in the real world, in the digital one, there are extensive slum areas. With the difference that you can get there in seconds - in practice, at the click of a mouse. And the Net is the perfect meeting place for people with similar interests. There are hundreds of thousands of free services and the opportunity to adopt identities other than your own. You can also insulate yourself, and exist on the Net without being visible.

That is what the 53 persons involved in the ring had discovered. By creating a 'Net community' - similar to a password-access private club or association - the members could post hundreds of photographs and film clips in a number of categorized archives. The men constructed a message site and a chat room, which were in effect real-time bulletin boards where they could meet at pre-arranged times to discuss pictures and fantasies and exchange images. The members used only nicknames and anonymous e-mail addresses. There had been traffic for some time when an accidental tip-off reached the Save the Children Hotline. A technical oversight by the group allowed an intruder to follow the members' exchanges from the inside. It was described as being like a dinner party conversation with an invisible onlooker able to see and hear everything.

VisualRoute was the program that helped trace the individual ISPs used by the members. VisualRoute's unique ability to identify the geographical location of routers and servers provides highly valuable information to help identify the source of network intrusions and Internet abusers. Using VisualRoute, police were able to run traceroutes to the IP addresses of the suspected offenders, yielding the geographical location of the suspect and Internet networks being used. The `whois' information in VisualRoute provided contact information that also aided the investigation. Over a period of several weeks, Net traffic between the group's members was logged and registered. Pictures and films were downloaded to CD-ROMs, and supplementary information was gathered, such as where, when and how the members' e-mail addresses had been used on the Internet outside their Net community. Little by little, profiles of the group, its members and their real identities, began to clarify.

Had the group not made its vital mistake, the police would never have been able to take action; the 'entry ticket' to the group was the contribution of a specified number of pictures and films. Under Swedish law, that kind of 'sting' operation would be "provocation of crime" and as such, illegal. Only a day or so before the turn of the year 2001, there was a final summation of the case involving the police and the Save the Children Hotline staff. Afterwards, the material gathered, including VisualRoute's tracking information, was delivered to the public prosecutor, who immediately authorized searches of the ring members' homes. In mid-January, raids were carried out simultaneously in seven different places.

Featured in Law and Order magazine, December 2002.