The heading is a digital address, the type of instruction and translation which now rules just about everything we use, moves us, informs us or comforts us. Digital media comes as DVD’s, or Digital Versatile discs, which can hold a complete film plus a multi-track soundtrack, as CD-roms or as the Hard drives of millions of computers in use worldwide. They also exist as flash drives, compact solid-state items which can be carried between two fingers. Their uses are many and varied, most are used by ordinary people in ordinary homes, and a few are used for a darker, more sinister purpose than originally envisaged by their inventors.
My own computers are filled with digital images of my family, my relatives and some friends. These images are of happy times, freezing memories within those innumerable ‘ones’ and ‘zero’s’ which can be seen by those I have authorised with a password; the photographs of my first grandson’s first days and of his christening, of a cousin’s daughter’s wedding; happy times and memories dear to me. I also hold those pictures, along with digitised images of earlier photographs, on back-up hard drives and in Google’s Picasa website, and pleased I am to have this instant memory folder at my disposal!
But there are some images which the owners wish fervently they had not accessed and stored, and there are digital memories of those accessions, and that is what I write about today! Early in 2003, a single arrest of a computer expert in America gave rise to a treasure trove of information, credit card numbers, addresses, names, of people who had paid to access and download child pornography, and over 6500 names from this twisted haul were British. The arrests were co-ordinated under the title Operation Ore, and over 1,300 were interviewed in the first batch. Now when you make a purchase on a credit card, your record is electronically stapled forever, and if your purchase can be tracked to an online paedophile site, your life is literally over. So far thirty-five men, arrested but not convicted, have committed suicide. Your wife, if married, will certainly divorce you, for who wishes to allow a pervert access to children? You will be fired from your job; you, if convicted, will have to sign the Sex Offenders Register, and you will be shunned from all society, and you shall have deserved everything which happens to you! Or do you?
A solicitor received instructions for the defence of a small number of men who had been caught up in this trawl by the police, and all swore that, while they had visited ‘legal’ adult pornography sites on the Internet, and had all given credit card details to buy and download films, but again vehemently denied any access to child pornography! A computer expert checked the data from America, and found that certain numbers occurred on certain child porn sites at the same time on three continents, a physical impossibility. The credit cards, and the backing identities, had been stolen and were used to ramp up charges, whilst never actually visiting the site.
The expert himself was raided by the police, and sample charges laid of ‘conspiracy to obtain indecent images of children’ were only dismissed after a judge fould that those images had been made during the course of his work; the search was also found to be illegal, and all the equipment had to be returned. If the solicitor is successful with a specimen case to the Appeal Court, the police will have to apologise to men wrongly convicted. It will be unfortunately a little late for the ruined lives, the trashed reputations and especially for those who killed themselves in the face of ‘overwhelming evidence’!
