Smash hit

The Texan investigators’ claims collapsed further in February this year, when Mead was cross-examined during an Operation Ore case held in Derby. Mead gave evidence by satellite video link. On oath, he admitted he and Nelson had only ever seen the “Click Here Child Porn” button appear once, at the very start of their investigation.

Mead also agreed they had provided British police with a photograph that did not show most of the page they had been looking at. Had they provided a full image, it would have been obvious that it was not, as they told the NCS, the “Landslide front page”. In evidence, Mead accepted the photograph had shown only part of the page. “The child porn link was at the bottom,” he agreed. He was asked: “In June 1999, it is likely that the ‘click here for child porn’ was not on the Landslide’s home page?” “Correct,” he replied.

The 2005 testimony contradicted what was said in sworn statements given to British police in October 2002. But despite these flaws being uncovered in the early part of 2003, Operation Ore accelerated. When police investigators found no evidence on seized computers, they did not assume the user might be innocent or had sought only legal, adult material. They were charged instead with “incitement”. These charges alleged that, simply by making a credit card payment through the internet, the child porn webmasters were encouraged to continue trafficking.

One of the targets was Robert Del Naja, frontman of the group Massive Attack, who was arrested in February 2003. All his computer equipment was seized. The case was dropped barely a month later. After being falsely arrested on child porn charges, Del Naja later described 2003 as the worst year of his life. “When the story was leaked to newspapers the human cost was horrible for me, my friends and family,” he said.

Many arrested Operation Ore suspects who were cleared because there was no evidence also found their names and details leaked to the press. Information about Del Naja was leaked to The Sun before investigations concluded. The same thing happened to Who guitarist Pete Townshend, who later admitted visiting child porn sites as part of a research project. The Sunday Times saw a complete copy of the Landslide British database of 7,200 names in January 2003.

In Britain, none of the 33 dead has been formally cleared, although the record of Operation Ore prosecutions, both successes and failures, suggests some would have been found guilty at trial and some must have been innocent.

And the pattern of investigations, media leaks and publicity preceding investigations that then failed has been repeated in other countries to which Landslide information was sent. In April 2003, at the start of a Canadian investigation, Operation Snowball, Toronto police chief Julian Fantino held a high-profile press conference to announce arrests for child pornography. He publicly listed the names and ages of six men: one was never charged and three others later had all charges withdrawn.

One of those was James LeCraw, the director of a non-profit agency in Toronto providing computers to schools. He was suspended and later lost his job. But five months after the press conference, LeCraw was formally cleared. It was too late. Stigmatised, he killed himself on July 19, 2004.

Even for those never charged, or acquitted before trial, the experiences are so scarring that very few want to talk. An exception is David Stanley, who runs his own computer-programming company in Wales. Like many men, from time to time he signed up for adult images on the net. In the summer of 1999 he saw his credit card details had been used five times in less than three weeks on the Landslide website. He complained quickly and got a refund. He thought no more of it until the police knocked on his door three years later.

Being an Operation Ore suspect was, he said, “a trial of the mind”. “I lost mine at the time. If people are guilty, they can say to themselves, yes, been there, done that. But if you haven’t, then it’s impossible to make sense of what’s happening to your life.” When Stanley proved to police that details he’d given for adult access had been stolen and reused at Landslide to send money to child porn merchants, his innocence was accepted.

The laudable objective of Operation Ore was the protection of vulnerable children from adult abuse and harm. But many fear that mistakes have caused huge quantities of police, technical and social work resources to be misdirected to some futile and ill-founded investigations. Many families as well as accused men have been damaged, sometimes irretrievably, by the nature of the investigations. The claims made by the authorities may need to be weighed against the harm done to innocent lives.

Duncan Campbell has worked as a computer expert in a number of Operation Ore cases. A longer version of this article appears in the current issue of PC Pro