by Steven James
+++
Francis played the video for the FBI agent.
The footage was only twenty-nine seconds long and simply panned across a plaid couch that had four white, expressionless masks lying on it. Then four arms reached in, picked up the masks one by one, lifted them out of view, and the video cut off.
“Play it again,” the agent told him.
Francis did.
“Again.”
This time when it was about halfway through, Agent Bowers reached over and tapped the spacebar to pause the video.
He pointed to something off to the side of the couch in the corner of the frame. “Can you zoom in on this here?”
Francis brought it up, then cleaned up the image, which was mostly obscured by the couch. “That looks like it might be part of a child’s backpack, one for school.”
“Yes, it does. Is there anything else you can do to enhance it?”
“Let me see what I can do.”
+++
While Edlemore worked on the image, he mumbled something about pixelation and vignetting and image degradation, but I wasn’t really following. Instead I was surfing on my phone, reviewing the case files of the four missing children and looking for something.
If my memory served me right, that was the same style backpack D’Nesh Mujeeb Agarwai had been carrying on the way home from school when he was taken four months ago.
I found a press photo.
Yes.
Just as I thought. His parents had posted a photograph of a similar pack to help people during the search for their son.
Edlemore finished and leaned back.
It matched. The backpack in the video matched D’Nesh Mujeeb Agarwai’s.
In fact there, on the back of it, I could just barely make out three initials. It’d been monogramed D.M.A., just like D’Nesh’s pack had been.
“When was this video shot?” I asked Edlemore. “Is there any way to tell?”
“Normally, there would be a time stamp, yes, from codes embedded in the file, but this one has been scrubbed. There’s software out there that can take care of that for you. It’s really not that hard to do.”
“What about location? Is there a geotag of any kind? Can you tell who posted it or where it was uploaded from?”
“I checked the IP address before you came. It was posted from the public Wi-Fi at a coffee shop. Someone put it on YouTube from an account that’s no longer active. The upload date was deleted, but it was up and then down a couple months ago. It resurfaced. That’s when it came to us.”
He told me the name of the account and the coffee shop and I took note of them. Without a time frame we had little to work from, but if we could decipher a specific time, maybe we could check the place’s security camera footage.
+++
Francis wasn’t sure what to think.
He’d seen this video at least a dozen times already, had studied it, had thought he’d scrutinized it as closely as anyone could, but this agent had just noticed something that he’d missed entirely, even with all those viewings.
He felt like he’d let the FBI down and wondered how many other things he might have missed over the years, how many other children he might have helped, if only he’d been more attentive, if only—
“Alright.” Agent Bowers drew him out of his thoughts. “I’m going to need you to send this to our lab so they can analyze it too. What initially caught your attention about it in the first place?”
“If you enhance the pixelation you can see the faint outline of letters in the background. It’s like a digital watermark underneath the image.”
“Show me.”
Francis worked for a moment to get the resolution sharp enough. Then the two letters appeared: FT.
“Final Territory,” he said.
“Possibly.” Agent Bowers found an office chair at a nearby unoccupied workstation and brought it over, then took a seat. “What do you know about the Final Territory?”
“Nothing really. It gets referenced here and there, but I never thought it was real. Detective Cavanaugh asked me about it. Whoever’s behind it has been able to keep it a secret.”
“Even from you.”
“Well . . . yes.”
“Detective Cavanaugh told me you know what you’re doing, that you’re good at your job. Is that true?”
“I mean . . .”
Tell him you are. He needs to trust you.
No, it would seem like I’m bragging!
But thankfully, Agent Bowers dropped it. “Okay, well, I trust what he said. Mr. Edlemore, I want you to give me a crash course on searching for online predators. Pretend I know nothing about this. Take me through what it is you do here.”
25
“Well,” Francis told him, “most digital file trading and distribution is done through p2p servers.”
“What’s p2p?”
“Oh, sorry. Peer-to-peer.”
“Gotcha.”
“So, that’s like when you would have one computer talking with another. Software allows you to share video, pictures, et cetera.”
“Right.”
“Well, when people want to distribute child pornography, they might set up a server that basically transmits the files to the world—but they’re trying to send them out to their consumers while also trying to hide them from law enforcement.”
“Which presents a challenge.”
“Yes, so they’ll rename the images, or maybe embed them into other files. Then there are file-sharing sites—the most famous one over the years has been the Pirate Bay—but they don’t host the files, they just index the links.”
+++
Honestly, the piracy issue has always baffled me. People who would never walk into a store and simply help themselves to the merchandise before walking out again, somehow manage to rationalize doing so when it comes to stealing people’s intellectual property off the shelves of the Internet.
Through those file-sharing sites, hundreds of millions of people regularly, illegally download movies, songs, video games, software, and other copyrighted material.
With the warnings about piracy everywhere, it’s hard to cut people slack by granting that they might be ignorant of the law. More than eighty percent of people with an Internet connection do it—break international law willfully, unashamedly, repeatedly, somehow justifying it in their own minds in ways I still haven’t been able to grasp.
“But,” Edlemore said, drawing my attention back to our conversation, “it’s really not smart to go through p2p networks if you’re distributing child pornography. It’s just too easy for law enforcement to see your activity.”
“So it’s better to use Tor.”
“You know about it?”
“A little. From what I understand it’s called ‘The onion router’ because you can keep peeling away layers and never reach the core. Is that it?”
“Pretty much, yes. And there are added levels of encryption and anonymity at every layer. It was developed by the government, but now almost everyone who uses it is trying to avoid being caught by the government.”
I asked the obvious question, “What’s the purpose of it, then? Why can’t it just be shut down?”
“Well, the argument goes that it’s important for people in countries controlled by regimes that are politically oppressive to be able to communicate to the outside world. Also, it helps whistleblowers have the ability to anonymously reach journalists.”
“But with the proliferation of social media, wouldn’t you say that that’s not so much an issue anymore?”
“In some instances they use Tor to access Krazle or to blog. But yes, some people have pointed that out, that Tor is becoming less and less essential for the purpose it was designed for.”
“And it’s also called the Dark Web?”
“Tor is a large part of the Dark Web. For most purposes you can just refer to them interchangeably.”
“I heard on the news that the Pentagon is working on a program called Memex that could make it obsolete. Could eliminate anonymity.”
“From what I understand that’s still in beta.” He told me the Dark Web was also referred to as the Darknet and was a tiny part of the Deep Web, or Deepnet, which was much larger than the Surface Web. “You need a special browser to use it,” he said. “Basically, it’s the black market for the Internet. Human trafficking, credit card scams, drugs, guns, mercenaries, assassins—a psychopath’s playground.”
+++
Francis waited for a reaction. The phrase “psychopath’s playground” had come from a coworker of his who’d resigned six months ago and Francis hoped the FBI agent wouldn’t think he was showing off or being overly dramatic by using it, but he liked it, thought it was accurate and appropriate, and had wanted to use it someday.
“There are a lot of sick people on there,” Francis added. “A lot of bad people.”
“And a lot of porn. Tor has the most hard-core, illicit porn.”
Francis nodded. “A quarter of all search engine queries have to do with porn on the Internet as a whole, but over eighty percent of all the traffic on Tor is to child porn sites. That’s something Tor advocates don’t like to bring up. There’s a lot of p2p porn out there that’s easily accessible on the Surface Web, but if you want to see someone raping a six-month-old baby, then you’re most likely going to find that on the Darknet.”
+++
A cold shiver slid through me.
Edlemore hadn’t made the comment about the sexual molestation of the baby crassly or offhandedly, and I understood that dealing with that type of material was all part of his daily routine, but when I heard his words I honestly felt like I’d been punched in the gut.
I took a moment to regroup, then asked, “Alright, so how does Tor work?”
“All communication is routed through randomly accessed computers all over the world, with encryption at each level. Once you’re on there, you have to assume that everyone you’re communicating with is conducting activity that they don’t want other people to find out about—whether that’s the authorities or the government they might be trying to hide from.”
As I listened to Edlemore explain how to navigate through Tor, I was also taking note of his desk.
No pictures of family or friends or pets. No knickknacks. No fan boy Star Wars action figures. Nothing to signify that a unique individual worked here. Just some nondescript office supplies, a half-filled in-box and a full out-box, a computer monitor, and a keyboard.
The only nongeneric thing was a sturdy, well-loved coffee mug from St. Stephen’s Research Hospital.
I wondered what kind of personal life you would be able to have when you worked a job like this. It would be difficult, no question about that.
Even tougher than your job?
Yeah.
Probably.
It would take a certain type of person to do this long-term, that much was for certain.
Either someone who’s immune to the images—or someone who’s addicted to them.
“Alright.” I had an idea. “You mentioned tracing this back to the coffee shop’s free Wi-Fi. So you can track IP addresses or p2p servers?”
“Yes.”
“Show me.”
He clicked on a map of this part of the city, then explained that red lights would illuminate routers or IP addresses where images or videos of child pornography had been downloaded.
Block by block, street after street, it lit up—an intricate, ever-widening, quickly spreading web.
Neighborhood after neighborhood, taking over Manhattan.
He zoomed out as the city became a blur of crimson.
With all the deviance I’d seen in this job, not too many things surprised me anymore, but now I was left speechless. I’d known that the problem was widespread, but I had no idea it was so pervasive.
It was what we would call a target-rich opportunity for law enforcement.
Actually, it was too rich.
There were simply too many consumers of child pornography to arrest them all. It would overwhelm the justice system, especially when you started looking at the exchange of sexually explicit material among minors through mobile devices, sexting, and so on.
The floodgates had been opened.
There was no closing them again.
Already, the United States has the highest percentage of incarceration for its populace of any country on the globe. I couldn’t imagine what our prisons would look like if we were to crack down on consumers of child pornography.
But we couldn’t just turn our back to the problem either.
Instead, it made sense that we would look for the people producing and distributing the images, for those who were actually molesting children, for those who were actively grooming them for sex.
I asked Edlemore, “Can you show me how it works, surfing the Darknet?”
He shook his head. “They don’t want to chance that we would get entangled in any illegal activity, so we’re not allowed to go on Tor here at work.”
“Okay, so your job is, what, specifically?”
“I evaluate the images that are reported to us. I screen, identify, catalog, and report illicit images. We’ve created a database with all known images and videos of child pornography—at least from our member countries. There are over seven hundred million. But hopefully more countries will sign on at the summit and donor development banquet next Wednesday.”
He took some time demonstrating the workings of the database. We searched for any references to “Aurora’s birthday,” but nothing came up.
When he mentioned, somewhat offhandedly, that p2p sharing could also be done through video gaming systems if you knew what you were doing, I thought again of Stewart’s missing Xbox console and decided it might be useful to investigate any online gaming communities he was involved in. Maybe there was a game platform where they shared the file of Aurora’s birthday.
Edlemore showed me around the facility, then introduced me to his boss, a peppy woman in her early forties whose convivial personality reminded me somewhat of a border collie.
She was explaining to me about their mission to help stop child molestation and exploitation when the president of the ICSC, Alejandro Gomez, swept into the room.
+++
Francis had always been impressed by the ICSC’s president’s charisma. It was evident from the first moment you met him.
He didn’t know Mr. Gomez’s entire background, but he did know that even though he was Hispanic, he’d grown up in Atlanta. He spoke Spanish and three other languages fluently, but when he spoke English he sounded like a true Southern gentleman.
He was a bit of a chameleon, able to make people of just about any race or religion feel comfortable being around him.
Alejandro appealed to the common concern that spanned borders and cultures and religions—protecting the future by protecting children.
Rather than rattle off statistics about how many kids are abused each year or the percentage of them who end up abusing others themselves one day, he was a storyteller at heart and was able to sift through the data and tell the accounts of one or two children to make the point about so many hundreds of thousands of them who were exploited worldwide.
+++
+++
Alejandro looked like he was in his early sixties and appeared distinguished in his impeccably tailored suit and with his slightly graying hair lightly parted on the side.
When he spoke, it didn’t seem like shtick or a sales pitch, but like he genuinely believed in what they were doing here. And, by the end, so did I.
“I understand that you’re having a fundraiser?” I said.
“Although we have a public mandate from the countries we work with, we’re a private organization and we depend on our donors to keep our heads above water.” He reached into his pocket and drew out a pair of invitations. “I’d be honored to have you and a guest join us.”
“I can’t accept favors. Part of the job.”
“As a private citizen, then?”
“Let me think about it. I’ll let you know.”
“Of course.”
He thanked me for my work and I thanked him for his, then he disappeared into his office.
Before leaving the facility, I asked Edlemore to sweep every file in their database for any others that might contain masks—either partials or fulls—and for any images of D’Nesh Mujeeb Agarwai.
He informed me that he’d tried the mask part earlier, but since it required writing up new algorithms, it was difficult and he hadn’t gotten anywhere with it. However, he told me he would give it another shot.
Then I gave him the link to the site that D’Nesh’s parents had set up. It contained dozens of photos of their son in different situations so that a computer analyst could construct a three-dimensional rendering of his face to make it more likely that they could locate pictures of him online.
Edlemore promised he would find out whatever he could and get back to me.
It was almost one o’clock when I got to the car.
I had two texts waiting for me.
One was from Christie telling me that she’d had a chance to speak to Jodie and had tried to encourage her. “Seemed to help.”
“Great,” I texted back.
The second was from Tobin asking me to give him a call, which I did.
He explained that he wasn’t going to be able to come in at all today. “My mother, she’s in a nursing home. She’s not doing well. It’s a three-hour drive from the city. I didn’t want to leave, but they’re saying they don’t even know if she’s going to make it through the weekend. I needed to come. I’m here with her now. She’s resting. Sleeping. I’m not sure where things are going to go from here.”
“Man, I’m sorry about that. Is there anything I can do for you?”