On May 3, the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations held a hearing entitled, “Sexual Exploitation of Children Over the Internet: What Parents, Kids and Congress Need to Know About Child Predators.” This was the third in a series to examine sexual exploitation of children over the Internet; the previous hearings were held on April 4 and April 6 (see The Source, 4/7/06).
Emphasizing that “there is not a more important issue on our plate,” Subcommittee Chair Ed Whitfield (R-KY) described fighting child pornography on the Internet as a “daunting challenge.” He said that, during the first hearing, the scope of the industry exploiting children on the Internet became clear; during the second hearing, the subcommittee heard testimony on what lawmakers are doing to combat these crimes. Noting that this “is not an easy task,” Rep.Whitfield expressed his concern that there “does not seem to be any national strategy in place.”
Rep. Diana DeGette (D-CO) stressed the need for Internet service providers (ISPs) to maintain subscriber Internet provider addresses for one year, since law enforcement agencies often can trace a child pornography offender through his ISP. She gave an account of an investigator who had tracked down an offender after discovering his Internet provider address only to find that the ISP had destroyed his records. Rep. DeGette said that this would not lead to an invasion of privacy rights since a warrant would be needed to obtain the information.
Masha Allen, a victim of Internet child pornography, recounted her story of sexual exploitation and abuse. Born in Russia in 1992, Masha was placed in an orphanage after her mother tried to kill her. At the age of 5, she was adopted by a Pittsburgh businessman and pedophile, Mr. Matthew Mancuso. Masha explained, “I lived with Matthew for five years. The whole time he starved and molested me. The whole time he took a lot of pictures of me. I didn’t know until later that he was putting my pictures on the Internet to trade and maybe sell to other pedophiles. I was rescued when the FBI discovered that Matthew had a lot of child pornography on his computer. They came to raid his house. They didn’t know I would be there.” Masha was put into foster care after the rescue and was adopted in 2004 by Ms. Faith Allen.
Masha said that none of the adoption agencies used by Mr. Mancuso checked his background, nor did they visit her after she had been adopted. She also asserted that when she went public with her ordeal, “all the adoption agencies, not just Matthew’s, tried to cover up the story.” Masha told the subcommittee that having her pictures on the Internet is more upsetting than the physical abuse she endured from Mr. Mancuso. She said, “Usually when a kid is hurt and the abuser goes to prison, the abuse is over. But because Matthew put my pictures on the Internet, the abuse is still going on.”
CNN journalist and former Georgia state prosecutor Nancy Grace stated, “The threat of Internet child predators is like no other. Some studies put numbers of child Internet victims at one in five young Internet users.” Ms. Grace noted that Masha’s case “highlights so many grievous failings of the legal system, ranging from illegal foreign adoptions and what can go so horribly wrong, to undetected full-blown child molestation that went undetected by teachers, friends, and neighbors from Masha’s age five to age ten.” She called upon Congress to pass legislation that “will not only crack down upon, but help stop ongoing child sex predators.”
Testifying for the Department of Justice, Assistant Attorney General Alice Fisher stated that child pornography “images grow even more explicit and vulgar by the day, and involve younger and younger children with some even depicting the molestation and penetration of babies and infants.” Ms. Fisher noted that “total federal prosecutions of child pornography and abuse cases rose 358 percent” between FY1995 and FY2005, and that “the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section (CEOS) within the Department’s Criminal Division increased its caseload, including child pornography cases and investigations by more than 400 percent over three years.” She also detailed “Project Safe Childhood,” an initiative designed to improve law enforcement coordination and to “provide a national framework for effectively pursuing the local leads that result from large national operations,” and the Innocence Lost Initiative, which focuses on domestic child prostitution. In addition to these efforts, she said, the Department of Justice has a new legislative proposal that would increase “penalties for failing to report the presence of child pornography,” and prohibit “hiding innocuous terms in a website’s code.”
Assuring the subcommittee that “at any one time, the FBI has more than 2,400 active child sexual exploitation investigations,” FBI Cyber Division Chief Raul Roldan said that the “primary focus” is on “organized groups involved in commercial child sexual abuse websites.” Mr. Roldan described the investigative process used for a typical case, highlighting the role of the Computer Analysis and Research Teams in forensic analysis, and the importance of credit card numbers in identifying the buyer of Internet child pornography. Noting that “every illegal website investigation will have a minimum of thousands, and sometimes hundreds of thousands of customers,” he said, “there are numerous hurdles to overcome.” Mr. Roldan added that the FBI uses a separate technique to identify perpetrators as they exchange exploitation images. “Immediately thereafter,” he explained,” we can obtain search warrants, and have the authorities go in and seize evidence in as little as a one-week time period.”
