Thousands of Americans have been cited in pornography charges under federal antiterror investigations called Operation Predator and Operation Falcon, says the Dayton Daily News. A year ago, ICE unveiled Operation Predator, a global crackdown “not directly” involving counter-terrorism, but bent on attacking crimes against children, said Jamie Zuieback of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) branch. “It evolved out of our mission to find and deport illegal aliens, particularly those with criminal records,” Zuieback said, adding more than half of all suspects have been foreign citizens.
Evidence gathered during Operation Falcon is a list of more than 100,000 credit-card transactions by people who purchased child pornography through companies in Belarus, a small eastern European country formerly part of the Soviet Union, and a company in Fort Lauderdale. Officials of Belarus-based Regpay face money-laundering and Internet porn charges in foreign courts. Eric Chase, a California attorney representing several suspects, asserted that disdain for use of the federal antiterror agency in pron cases riles some agents. “They don’t want to be doing this. It’s (Attorney General) John Ashcroft,” he said.
Link: http://www.daytondailynews.com/events/content/localnews/daily/0728pornfolo.html