The technology making peer-to-peer file sharing of child pornography prevalent on the Internet has law enforcement using long-distance leads to make arrests, says the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Milwaukee-area cases have resulted, for example, from investigation in Madison, Cincinnati, Portland, Or., and Springfield, Il. A recent raid on a home in Luxemburg was the culmination of an investigation begun in Atlanta when an agent with the FBI’s Safe Child Task Force visited an Internet chat room where people trade stories about incest and sex with children.
“What people need to understand is that there is an increasing demand out there for new images, which are basically sexual assaults of children caught on film, and that’s why we’re as busy as we are,” said Kevin St. John of the state Justice Department. One Internet server featuring child porn offered 2,751 files constituting 1.22 gigabytes in 34 directories. The server’s stats showed that it had been visited by people from 26 countries who made 13,659 downloads in exchange for 4,212 uploads.