CONGRESS HEARS EXPERT TESTIMONY ON THE MAGNITUDE OF CHILD PORNOGRAPHY TRAFFICKING IN THE UNITED STATES The following testimony was given by Special Agent Flint Waters of the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation before the U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary, October 17, 2007. Waters is the primary architect of the ICAC Data Network, the information-sharing network now emerging as the nerve center for U.S. law enforcement in its fight against online child pornography and child enticement. Waters is widely-respected as the foremost authority in the U.S. on the full magnitude of the child exploitation crisis, and this is the most detailed testimony ever heard by Congress on this issue. Warning: this testimony includes graphic descriptions of child sexual abuse. TESTIMONY OF Special Agent Flint Waters Lead Agent for the Wyoming Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force WYOMING DIVISION OF CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION OFFICE OF THE ATTORNEY GENERAL for the UNITED STATES HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY "Sex Crimes and the Internet" October 17, 2007 Chairman Conyers, Ranking Member Smith, members of the Committee, thank you for the opportunity to testify before you today on the subject of Internet child sex crimes. I am Flint Waters, Special Agent with the Wyoming State Division of Criminal Investigation. Our Department operates one of 46 regional Internet Crimes Against Children?or ?ICAC?? Task Forces throughout the United States, which are supported by a grant through the U.S. Department of Justice?s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP). The ICAC Task Forces bring together federal, state and local law enforcement agencies to focus on investigation, education and prevention matters related to the exploitation of children by means of the Internet. I am here today to testify not on behalf of the entire ICAC network; there are others who can do that. I am here today as a result of my work on the front lines investigating these cases and building the ICAC Data Network. The ICAC Data Network is, in many ways, the high-tech nerve center for the work we do nationally to find online predators and locate their victims. The True Nature of Child Pornography I?d like to begin by taking a minute to explain to you what child pornography really is. Many people, when they think about child pornography, imagine photographs of naked teens or babies in the bathtub. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The photographs and movies being traded on the Internet today are extremely graphic and brutal crime scene images, depicting the most horrifying moments in the life of a child. Let me share with you some of the material we see every day: Imagine the movie of the four year old girl being sodomized on a bed. As her attacker tries to force her to comply with his wishes you can hear her as she pleads for him to stop. Screams of "No, NO, NO!" play over the computer speakers as the movie depicts this child trying to free herself, unsuccessfully from her attacker. How about the movie of the toddler on the changing table. The video zooms in as her diaper is removed and an unknown adult male penetrates the child. From the video it is obvious that this is frequent activity for this little girl. In many videos the offender films as they sneak into a child's bedroom and abuse the children under lights from the camera. We can only imagine that the child's mother must be asleep unaware, somewhere else in the house. In a recent case an offender filmed himself drugging the juice boxes of neighborhood children before tricking them into drinking the mix. The offender would then film himself as he sexually abused the unconscious children. Through the interdiction of his trading in child pornography investigators found numerous local victims. When you do this work, there are certain pictures that stay with you, that you cannot get out of your mind. For me, one of those pictures is of a young girl, about six or seven. She is nude and has been tied to a chair. The chair has fallen over. This child is being sexually assaulted by a dog. Tears are streaming up her face. To my knowledge, that little girl has not yet been identified. My goal every day is to find and rescue that little innocent girl, and to stop that predator from hurting other children like her. A 2005 Study funded by Congress through the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (1) shows what those of us on the front lines know too well. Of those individuals arrested for possession of child pornography: -83% had images of children 6-12 years old -39% had images of children 3-5 years old -19% had images of infants and toddlers The study also described what we see in these photos and movies: -80% had images showing sexual penetration of a child -21% had images of children subjected to bondage, torture or other sadistic acts -Just 1% of those possessing these images restricted their collections to simple photos of naked children. This is what we investigate every day. This is not about obscenity or even pornography. These are movies and images capturing and forever memorializing the complete destruction of innocence. The Full Magnitude of the Crisis From our vantage point in Wyoming we are just beginning to measure the magnitude of child exploitation. Our cooperative network focuses primarily not on the large international and commercial rings, but on the mass of trafficking right here in the U.S. and the predators that scour the Internet every day looking for more U.S. victims. To understand the sheer magnitude of the trafficking, it is necessary to know what the Internet has done to facilitate child exploitation. The Internet has linked together hundreds of thousands of pedophiles, possibly millions worldwide. The danger is not that they form an online community. The danger is that they form an online economy that barters in the lives of children. The true product they seek, child sexual abuse imagery, can only be produced one way: through the sexual assault of children. So in the Internet age, demand for child pornography images in California or Europe can now result in the rape of a child in Texas, Florida or Michigan. In one case investigated in Wyoming an offender was so fixated on manufacturing child sexual abuse images he arranged to abduct two girls. One on the east coast, one in Wyoming. When he came to Cheyenne to pick up the Wyoming girl he was arrested. During the interview after his arrest he talked about his plans to make his fortune selling child pornography. His recorded interview includes his boasting about his business plan and how he would profit. When asked about his intentions with the Wyoming girl he said he was going to use her to make the movies and then sell her or leave her in the mountains to "be eaten by a bear or a lion or she wouldn't survive.?" (2) Unfortunately the twelve year old Wyoming girl he targeted was actually me. When he traveled to Cheyenne to meet this "little girl" he found things were not as he had hoped. We are seeing an exploding demand for images of child sexual abuse. Let me give you just a few indicators from the ICAC Data Network: -Recently, investigators using our systems searched for computers actively engaged in the distribution of child pornography via just one method: peer-to-peer file sharing. We searched for sadistic images, where the victims were especially young and where individuals were reported to be online offering the files to others. In just a single day, we found individuals actively engaged in trafficking from over 4,500 unique locations in the United States alone. You can see that this is a very small subset, a minimum indicator of the problem. (Image 1) -Using the same narrow search criteria, we logged individuals trafficking in these images through peer-to-peer file sharing from over 49,000 unique locations within the U.S. during August 2007. (Image 2) -How much bigger is the full magnitude of the problem? Our lowest estimate is that there are well over 350,000 (3) individuals trading images depicting the rape and sexual abuse of children within the United States alone. -Over the last thirty-six months we have seen a steady increase in this activity, even though many agencies are aggressively pursuing these offenders in one manner or another. (Figure 1) For clarification that is hundreds of thousands of perpetrators in the United States alone and these numbers are climbing. Lack of Resources The good news is that we know how to find these predators. Most are just a subpoena away from arrest and prosecution. And finding them will lead us to thousands of child victims. Some are victims of child exploitation. Others are victims of sexual predators who also happen to be committing child pornography crimes. Either way, these investigations have and will continue to lead us to their doorstep--and to rescue children from harm. Take a recent case from the western United States. Through our operations an offender was found to be trading child sexual abuse images on the P2P networks. When he was confronted law enforcement found the perpetrator to be a respiratory therapist at a children's hospital. He admitted targeting the weak, the unconscious, children there for hospice care. When asked how many children he had victimized he looked out at the falling snow and asked, "How many snowflakes are there." The 2005 study I cited earlier found that 55% of those arrested for "simple possession" of child pornography had either sexually assaulted a child or attempted to entice a child online. Another federal study found the percentage to be much higher. That means that following the trail back through the Internet to interdict these criminals is the single best way we have of rescuing otherwise unidentified children and preventing future child sexual assault. Chairman Conyers, members of the committee, the bad news is that while my task force and the ICAC network can tell you how to interdict tens of thousands of sexual predators tomorrow, the vast majority of these leads will never be investigated. In fact, less than 2% of the crimes we know about are investigated, due to sheer lack of resources. Most of these victims will never be rescued. I am here today to testify about what many of my law enforcement colleagues are not free to come here and tell you. We are overwhelmed. We are under-funded. We are drowning in a tidal wave of tragedy and we don?t have the resources we need to save these children. Law enforcement efforts to pursue these offenders to include the ICAC program, the FBI?s Innocent Images National Initiative, ICE?s Cyber Crimes Center and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service are all desperately under-funded. From where I stand, these are human rights workers who need and deserve our support. The price we pay for coming up short will be measured in children lost. There are times in our line of work when you find yourself staring into the eyes of the children in these movies and apologizing. You apologize to the child because you just can't find them. You can't rescue them. There are not enough people or resources to help. On behalf of those victims, I thank you for doing everything in your power to help us fight this human rights crisis. Footnotes 1 Child-Pornography Possessors Arrested in Internet-Related Crimes: Findings From the National Juvenile Online Victimization Study 2005 Janis Wolak, David Finkelhor, and Kimberly J. Mitchell 2 United States vs. Todd Noble Interview transcription between Todd Noble and Special Agent Waters November 1, 2003 FW: What other options did you have to get rid of her besides selling her to the bikers? TN: Dropping her off on the side of the road. That's- FW: What else? (Pause) TN: I-take her in the mountains and leave her. I--the only really options that I-even knew about. FW: Where did you talk about taking her in the mountains and leaving her at? You did specify. (Pause) TN: I don't think so. I don't know. (Item removed) FW: What do you think would have happened to her if you took her to the mountains and left her? TN: She'd probably be eaten by a bear or a lion or she wouldn't survive. FW: You feel like law enforcement has treated you well today? TN: Yeah. 3 Examining a single client application for just one Peer to Peer file sharing network reveals over 350,000 unique serial numbers identified as child pornography traders. This application represents 66% of the clients used on this network to trade child pornography. These serial numbers are provided to all members of the public in this trading community by the client software as a manner to programmatically locate each other during the exchange of material. Law enforcement makes note of the numbers only in situations where the other party has publicly advertised child sexual abuse material for trade.       ProtectPAC  |  100 FRIENDS  |  LINK to US  |  EMAIL LIST  |  MISSION  |  AGENDA  |  CAMPAIGNS   JOIN & GIVE  |  MEMBER NEWS  |  ADVISORY BOARD  |  SUPPORTERS  |  ARTICLES  |  CONTACT  |  HOME   PROTECT  -  ProtectPAC 46 Haywood Street, Suite 315, Asheville, NC 28801 phone: (828) 350-9350  -  email: info@protect.org       ©2002-2006 The National Association to PROTECT Children.  All rights reserved. PROTECT is a national membership association structured as an IRS social welfare organization, or 501(c)(4).