The FBI Released the below
report:
The creator and lead
administrator of what was believed to be the world’s largest child pornography
website—with more than 150,000 users around the world—was sentenced this week
to 30 years in prison.
Steven W. Chase, 58, of
Naples, Florida, created a website called Playpen in August 2014 on the Tor
network, an open network on the Internet where users can communicate
anonymously through “hidden service” websites—where criminal activity is not
uncommon. Chase ran the Playpen website, where members uploaded and viewed tens
of thousands of postings of young victims, indexed by age, sex, and the type of
sexual activity involved.
The case—and the thousands of
follow-up investigations it has launched—is unprecedented in its scope and
reach, FBI officials said. It represents the Bureau’s most successful effort to
date against users of Tor’s hidden service sites. And it has opened new avenues
for international cooperation in efforts to prosecute child abusers around the
world.
“We were only able to pull it
off with a lot of support from our international partners and field offices,”
said Special Agent Dan Alfin, who investigated the case as part of the Bureau’s
Violent Crimes Against Children section.
The case opened shortly after
Steven Chase launched Playpen in the summer of 2014. The FBI, which has
numerous investigations involving the dark web, quickly became aware of the
site, but “given the nature of how Tor hidden services work, there was not much
we could do about it,” Alfin recalled.
That is, until December 2014,
when Chase slipped up and revealed Playpen’s unique IP address—a location in
the U.S. The gaffe was noticed by a foreign law enforcement agency, which
notified the FBI.
“From that point we took
normal investigative steps—seized a copy of the website, served search warrants
for e-mail accounts, followed the money—and everything led back to Steven
Chase,” said Alfin. Chase was sentenced Monday in North Carolina in connection
with engaging in a child exploitation enterprise and multiple child pornography
charges. His sentencing follows those of two co-defendants who were also
administrators on the website—Michael Fluckiger, 46, of Indiana, and David
Browning, 47, of Kentucky—who were each given 20-year prison terms earlier this
year.
Arresting Playpen’s
administrators, however, was only the beginning. In January 2015, the FBI, in
partnership with the Department of Justice Child Exploitation and Obscenity
Section, launched Operation Pacifier—an effort to go after Playpen’s thousands
of members. Using a court-approved network investigative technique, agents
uncovered IP addresses and other information that helped locate and identify
users. Investigators sent more than 1,000 leads to FBI field offices around the
country and thousands more to overseas partners, Alfin said.
Arrests and other enforcement
actions have occurred in countries far and near. Europol, the European Union's
agency for law enforcement cooperation, reported arrests, along with Israel,
Turkey, Peru, Malaysia, Chile, and the Ukraine. International agencies critical
to the investigation included CNCPO Polizia Postale e Comunicazioni of Italian
State Police, the United Kingdom’s National Crime Agency, and New Zealand's
Department of Internal Affairs.
Even some countries where law
enforcement cooperation has been historically limited were, in this case,
especially helpful in pursuing the FBI’s leads on former users and contributors
to Chase’s Playpen site.
“Members of his enterprise who
were raping children, who were producing child pornography all around the
world—those cases continue to be indicted and prosecuted,” Alfin said.
In addition to taking down
the website, the ongoing investigation, as of May 4, 2017, has produced the following
results:
At least 350 U.S.-based
individuals arrested
25 producers of child
pornography prosecuted
51 hands-on abusers
prosecuted
55 American children
successfully identified or rescued
548 international arrests,
with 296 sexually abused children identified or rescued.
The Playpen site has been
down for more than two years. But similar sites continue to operate and
proliferate on the dark web.
“It’s ongoing and we continue
to address the threat to the best of our abilities,” said Alfin. “It’s the same
with any criminal violation: As they get smarter, we adapt, we find them. It’s
a cat-and-mouse game, except it’s not a game. Kids are being abused, and it’s
our job to stop that.”
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