Hackers on Steroids

by Oisín Sweeney

  Facebook spokesperson

  You know child pornography is bad, you just can’t truly comprehend how bad until you’re faced with it yourself.

  It was my old friends the cultural critics who first assaulted my eyes with images of children being sexually abused. Back in March 2010, cyberbullying was being blamed as a cause in the suicide of 17-year-old Alexis Pilkington from New York state. Although her family soon said that they don’t believe it to have been a factor in what led their daughter to take her own life, the extensive media focus on it at the time as a supposed cause in the girl’s death led hordes of ghouls from all corners of the Net to descend on a Facebook tribute page which the girl’s friends had set up in her memory; the page then being filled up with the usual doctored pictures of the young girl along with the standard moronic and sexual remarks. What set it apart from the everyday typical RIP trolling at the start was probably only the extra glee with which the cultural critics went about their work, all on a high celebrating what they thought of as a great victory for their kind in a young life being lost because of - or so they believed - Internet bullying. I could detect a great bounce about them, as if their team had just won the World Cup and they were all in it together, a part of something greater than each one of them alone. To the cultural critics, cyberbullying had truly arrived and they were part of the winning side, even if they hadn’t been on the pitch that day. The millionaire filmmaker was still crowing two years later about the part he played in the trolling. To Paul, that’s as good as life has ever and will ever get for him.

  Apart from that extra little bit of troll happiness, it was as it is every other day on just about every other tribute page that these things come calling on. That was until a pack of trolls arrived armed with dozens of pictures of children being sexually abused and exploited and flooded the page with them, taking what was already an obscene spectacle to the very depths of depravity. It was a reminder that even when you think that things can’t get any worse, they sometimes can. These trolls had come from somewhere else on the Internet - they claimed to be from a rival site to 4Chan by the name of EBaum’s World, so in all likelihood came from 4Chan as 4Chan trolls on raids are known to erroneously claim to be from this site and vice versa - and weren’t the usual suspects to be found in the giant Facebook troll ring that had been busy itself trolling the page for days and revelling in the media attention which that trolling was generating.

  Reactions from the Facebook troll regulars to the child pornography postings went from telling the perpetrators of them to take off the pictures and leave - the reason given not that they were disgusted by the child sex abuse images themselves but only because they were fearful that placing them on the tribute site would attract police attention onto RIP trolling in general - to whoops of joy and cries of ‘Moar cp please!’ One of the regular Facebook trolls, ‘Soveri Ruthliss,’ grunted that it was what the friends of Alexis Pilkington deserved for having a memorial page in the first place. They were to blame.

  The child porn raid lasted only about half an hour, after which the trolls responsible deleted their illegal content and, after staying around a little longer to revel in the shock that they had created, disappeared again into the black nothingness of the cyber wastelands. One person who witnessed the raid - and gave me a running commentary on it through messages on Facebook after I quickly left the scene, distressed - reported it to the FBI, but I can find no evidence of any arrests having ever resulted from it. I myself, having been unfortunate enough to be screencapping the trolling on the page at the time this attack happened, lifted my phone in my hand to dial the police and report it but was too shocked to even go through with that. I was shaking, sobbing; I couldn’t even have brought myself to talk. What had just blasted itself into my mind were images of girls aged around four to nine being forced into ‘erotic’ naked poses and, worst of all, being raped by faceless men. One image in particular, that of a girl aged about four being penetrated by a man’s erect penis, scorched itself into my brain and stayed there with an intensity for days afterwards. I only glanced at these pictures for literally seconds but for the next two days I kept bursting out into a sob at random and at night I kept waking up crying at the confused face of that little girl with her dying eyes as she was desecrated by some demon from hell. You cannot appreciate the full horror of this stuff until you have seen it in all its brutality, in all its realness. This was being faced with the shocking reality of what you have always known was out there but never would in any meaningful way contemplate in your mind. That one image burned in full colour in my brain as if it were a bullet shot into my head and which could not be removed.

  If just viewing images like that for seconds of time is enough to make a grown man have a mini-breakdown and spend the next two days crying at random moments, what does actually living them out as a victim do to someone? That is what really gets me. I often wonder about who that child is and if she has ever been rescued from her abusers. There must have been more than one of them: the man raping her and whoever was taking the photograph. Is she still being abused like this, possibly every day of her life? Will she grow up being abused for years to come or has that photograph made its way into police hands and led to her being identified and rescued? Jesus Christ I hope it has, but then again who knows? Not me. The look on her face I will never forget, it said everything that is wrong in the world on the face of one four-year-old girl. I’ll use the word haunting to describe it and that word is not a cliché in this case. That scene of purest horror will never really leave me.

  On a few other occasions since then I have borne witness to trolls posting child sex abuse images, although it is the exception rather than the rule. As you might imagine, it is not out of a sense of morality that they refrain from ‘the nuclear option’ as one of them has described the placing of such images onto memorial pages, as, as I have already attested to, it is common psycho-trolling practise to sexualise children both living and dead by digitally inserting photographs of them into porno scenes. Such photoshops could rightly be referred to as child pornography but actual child sex abuse captures are only much more rarely used. The reason for this being only the expressed fear of the trolls that the ‘partyvan’ - meaning the police, and derived from the supposed use that FBI agents make of vans to ferry themselves to a suspect’s house - will arrive for them should they distribute ‘actual’ cp. Despite a number of criminal prosecutions to the contrary in America, Britain, and Australia, the general consensus in the troll world is that photoshopped child pornography is not illegal and therefore nothing to worry about.

  I got the impression early on that a sizeable number of those psycho-trolls are just failed paedophiles. It took me until the December of 2010 though to encounter Facebook’s dedicated paedophile ring, and if the RIP trolls are cancer then these bastards are definitely full-blown AIDS.

  It was an online conversation I was having with a fellow moralfag that opened my eyes to the world of online paedophilia. She opined that bad enough as the cultural critics are, I was wasting my time battling them when there was something even worse going on in merry ole Facebook land. Below that message she had added a link to a Facebook profile and told me to click on it. I did. It was a profile that had as its avatar a white background imprinted with rainbow-coloured words reading, ‘I love kiddie porn,’ and on its walls pictures of prepubescent girls being raped, along with links to videos promising the same. All this quite open and viewable to the general public. No attempt was being made to hide this material, it was all sitting there as if it were just something everyday and normal and nothing highly illegal at all. Whoever was operating the account had left a message on the wall asking anyone interested in swapping similar material to private message him (or her, as the case may well have been).

  Once more I got distressed, cried from the shock of seeing those kinds of images. I done a quick check of the paedophile’s friend list, grabbed the profile address of the first person on it - an Australian man who
was, unbelievably, using his real-life account, which he was sharing with family and friends - and then emailed both it and the child pornography distributor’s to an Australian police force.

  I was fucking upset. A person is just not meant to see things like that. Things like that just aren’t meant to be. There are no words that can truly convey the horror of child sex abuse images. Depraved, obscene, demonic, evil, hellish - all of those are just words and concepts, they cannot truly conjure up in your mind the full horror of such brutal scenes. Once again I was shocked to the core and it felt as if my hair was standing on end. Child pornography is evil beyond belief and beyond imagining.

  The woman who had given me the profile address then explained to me that what I had seen then was just one small link in a gigantic Facebook paedophile chain and that she and some others were finding profiles like that and reporting them to the Internet Watch Foundation, the same website I reported those child porn images on 4Chan to. She asked me to help them and for the next two days I thought about this. What I had witnessed had shaken me up badly and the images again were burning into my brain, again causing me mental and emotional disturbance.

  I went back to this woman, we shall call her Lisa, and asked to be allowed into her group. I had an idea that if things were as bad as she said they were that I was going to go to the media and try and get them to do an exposé on the problem.

  Things were as bad as she said they were. In fact, things were worse than I can possibly explain. What I had up until then would have assumed was probably the most secretive and clandestine of all worlds appeared before my very eyes in full colour, shameless and celebratory and parading itself in full public view as if it were a football supporters club filled with noisy and proud fans all wanting the world to know how much they love their team. On one of the world’s most famous brands there lived - and it is clear still to this day lives - a thriving and quite open international network of thousands of paedophiles freely sharing the most grotesque forms of child pornography that there can possibly be. They number among themselves those who produce their own pornographic material featuring children. They share pro-paedophilia philosophy among themselves and they serve as a support network for each other, giving one another approval and advice on the sexual torture of children, babies even. Some of them have networked with each other to share and encourage the fantasies they nurture of taking children and then murdering them. They openly flaunt a paedophile subculture that has its own special words and codes, its own symbols, and its own heroes. If you could dig deep down into the very depths of the pit of perdition you could not find a more nightmarish scene than such a parade of the damned as this. What one of the greatest technological marvels of our lifetimes has given us is a horror that far exceeds anything which could be dreamed up by those who write fictional tales filled with vampires and demons. It has given us - not just on Facebook but on many more other platforms as well - what is the perfect playground for the real monsters that are paedophiles to come together in as a world community and share in each other’s company and knowledge and materials, and a place where they can and do quite easily and quite anonymously groom children for sexual exploitation and abuse.

  And as testified to by ‘Mistry Jung,’ a place where they can all get together and reinforce each other beliefs, a world which they have created for themselves where the paedophile is the normal one and paedophilia the accepted reality. Right here, in the middle of modern civilisation and in full view of everyone who cares to look this is happening. I am not exaggerating here as to the scale of the problem for I have seen the extent of this with my own eyes. I am not trying to whip up hysteria like some tabloid newspaper editor with an agenda. Everything that I am saying here is the very truth. I spent the guts of four months almost daily reporting to the police what I and others were finding on the Web and I can come only to the conclusion that if paedophiles have a dream, then that dream is the Internet as it is today.

  The dirty ‘secret’ that anyone in the world can now view in an instant. For anyone who wants to access it, child pornography is as easily available on the Internet as recipes for baking buns are: each person in the industrialised world is now no more than 30 seconds away from child porn at any time. No more do paedophiles need to scuttle around in the darkness underneath the foundations of the world in order to gratify themselves with images of children being sexually tortured. Whereas before they would have had to have made contact, somehow and in some way, with other secretive paedophiles in order to get their sweaty hands on these images, now all they need to do is set up a Facebook account and join in the fun at the press of a few buttons. Child porn is now something of a global business phenomenon: while the peoples of the world bellow incessantly at each other about gods and oil and history the paedophiles have been busy turning the rape of babies into a multi-billion dollar a year industry, and the rest of the world just doesn’t really want to know about it.

  Yep, that’s right – billions of US dollars, or the equivalent thereof. A United Nations report from 2009 estimated that the global child pornography business could make between 3 to 20 billion American dollars in profit per year, and the colossal amount of images and videos which those huge sums mean are being produced and sold – including on-demand webcam sexual abuse - doesn’t even begin to take into account all those videos and photographs and child sex abuse cam shows which are being made or swapped non-commercially. A European Union commission has estimated that 50,000 new indecent images of children are being released annually onto the Internet’s highways. And, of course, it’s not just on Facebook which the evidence of this demonic business can be witnessed in all its unimaginable horror. Microsoft’s Windows Messenger is crawling with paedophiles who use images of naked children as their profile pictures. Thousands of them on there, easily. Twitter, the micro-blogging service and social network has become notorious for the child pornography trading that openly goes on between the brazen networks of paedophiles which have nested on it.

  The wider Internet, too, is itself awash with child pornography. The exact figures are hard to know but the IWF gave a figure for 2009 of 8,844 websites worldwide that were known to have been set up specifically to host child pornography. American authorities have estimated that 20% of Internet pornography involves children. We’re not talking about stolen photographs of 16-year-old girls in bikinis here: this is hardcore sexual torture of babies, pre-pubescents, and young teenagers that is being traded in. Peer-to-peer file-sharing networks are also being used by the paedophiles to swap images and videos with each other - Christ knows how many videos of child abuse are being uploaded and downloaded in that way daily. And even worse: Who again knows how many emails containing these images and videos are being sent around now that a countless number of paedophiles have been allowed to make contact with each other through the Web.

  I’ve saw some of the worst of these images on their Facebook profiles. Not a lot, but enough, more than enough. A boy of about nine years of age, naked and tied on a torture rack. An actual torture rack of some description. A naked paedophile standing over him, a black executioner’s hood on his head. The boy’s face looked like death, maybe this was all he had ever known in his entire existence on this stinking planet. For one second in time I glimpsed that and almost two years later still the horror of it is there in my mind. A video still of a pig being used to sexually abuse a young girl, the pig’s white corkscrew-shaped penis on her little naked body. I didn’t see her face, from the size of her body I would guess that she was about seven. The video was titled something like, ‘Two sisters have sex with a pig.’ Christ help any police officer who has to view those videos. I would prefer to take a gun and shoot myself in the head with it rather than view one of those videos. People I have talked to have saw photographs of babies being raped.

  Said one anti-paedophile cop, Paul Gillespie of the Toronto Police Child Exploitation unit to a newspaper back in 2003: ‘We regularly seize hundreds of thousands of images involvin
g children as young as babies in diapers in pictures and in full length movies being brutally tortured, raped, sodomized and bleeding. This is the norm. There are now 3 and 4 year-olds in 20 minute movies screaming for daddy to stop.’

  The gates of hell have been unlocked and this is what the results look like. It is hardly being too presumptuous to assume that more and more children are now being sexually abused and more often precisely to feed the insatiable appetite of the snarling beast that is online child pornography. Child sex abusers have always been with us but this is the age of instant gratification for the paedophile, where one or many of them can sit in front of their computers at one end of the world and direct on cam the sexual torture of children at the other end of it, and where the endless demand for more and more videos like ‘Two sisters have sex with a pig’ has helped dig the widest, blackest abyss filled with the screams of children. How could all of this have happened? How could child pornography have become such an open chasm and the paedophiles themselves become so emboldened? Ask a random selection of people as to those they believe to be the worst breed of villain in the world and most of them will answer that it is paedophiles which are that. Ask them again what should be done with them and most again will tell you that they should all be put to death, preferably in horrible and prolonged ways. You’d think that all of the planet’s paedophiles would be deep in hiding, scared to death of a vengeful and ever-watchful world. And clearly a great many of them still are in these times ultra-secret about their desires and activities, but it is the awful truth that increasingly an unbelievable number of them are using the Internet to swap and trade their collections of unspeakable images with each other in the most public of ways. That’s not awful in that they’re not hiding well away from the eyes of the police any more, but awful in that they feel confident enough to come out from underneath their rocks and into the light. Many of these paedophiles have become so proud of their evil that they wear it shamelessly as a badge of honour, they boast and philosophise about it. A shocking percentage of them, and I know this may be hard to believe, will use publicly on Facebook and elsewhere their real names and faces as they uninhibitedly talk of their sexual predilection towards children. Vanessa George was a British nursery worker who in a notorious 2009 case photographed herself abusing 30 different little children in her care for two paedophiles – Colin Blanchard and Angela Allen - whom she met on Facebook. I am wondering if she met them on the easily-found paedophile networks on the site. Because, how else?