August 2010 Archives

Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania is a coal-mining town along the Susquehanna River, in the Wyoming Valley. A town of about 40,000 people, it is the county seat for Luzerne, in the northeast part of the state.

It is also the epicenter of one of the most scandalous stories about the justice system in the country, involving allegations of bribery and kickbacks to judges from the operation of private juvenile detention facilities. Its implications for juvenile justice will likely set the tone for reforms for the next several years.

Excerpts from this article tell it all:

On Jan. 12, a devastating earthquake toppled Haiti’s capital and set off an international adoption bonanza in which some safeguards meant to protect children were ignored.

Leading the way was the Obama administration, which responded to the crisis, and to the pleas of prospective adoptive parents and the lawmakers assisting them, by lifting visa requirements for children in the process of being adopted by Americans.

Although initially planned as a short-term, small-scale evacuation, the rescue effort quickly evolved into a baby lift unlike anything since the Vietnam War. It went on for months; fell briefly under the cloud of scandal involving 10 Baptist missionaries who improperly took custody of 33 children; ignited tensions between the United States and child protection organizations; and swept up about 1,150 Haitian children, more than were adopted by American families in the previous three years, according to interviews with government officials, adoption agencies and child advocacy groups.

Under a sparingly used immigration program, called humanitarian parole, adoptions were expedited regardless of whether children were in peril, and without the screening required to make sure they had not been improperly separated from their relatives or placed in homes that could not adequately care for them.

Some Haitian orphanages were nearly emptied, even though they had not been affected by the quake or licensed to handle adoptions. Children were released without legal documents showing they were orphans and without regard for evidence suggesting fraud. In at least one case, two siblings were evacuated even though American authorities had determined through DNA tests that the man who had given them to an orphanage was not a relative.

In other cases, children were given to families who had not been screened or to families who no longer wanted them.

The results are playing out across the country. At least 12 children, brought here without being formally matched with new families, have spent months in a Pennsylvania juvenile care center while Red Cross officials try to determine their fate. An unknown number of children whose prospective parents have backed out of their adoptions are in foster care. While the authorities said they knew of only a handful of such cases, adoption agents said they had heard about as many as 20, including that of an 8-year-old girl who was bounced from an orphanage in Haiti to a home in Ithaca, N.Y., to a juvenile care center in Queens after the psychologist who had petitioned to adopt her decided she could not raise a young child.

Dozens of children, approaching the age of 16 or older, are too old to win legal permanent status as adoptees, prompting lawmakers in Congress to consider raising the age limit to 18.

Meanwhile, other children face years of legal limbo because they have arrived with so little proof of who they are, how they got here and why they have been placed for adoption that state courts are balking at completing their adoptions.

All I can say is THANK GOD for the white man adopting all them colored babies. The white man's burden sure hasn't gotten any easier after all these years. When will the world finally understand.

Read the entire article here one the New York Times website.

Yesterday, Attorney General Eric Holder announced the release of DOJ's National Strategy for Child Exploitation Prevention and Interdiction. The Report provides the first-ever comprehensive threat assessment of the dangers facing children from child pornography, online enticement, child sex tourism, commercial sexual exploitation and sexual exploitation in Indian Country, and outlines a blueprint to strengthen the fight against these crimes.

As part of the overall strategy, the U.S. Marshals Service is launching a nationwide operation targeting the top 500 most dangerous, non-compliant sex offenders in the nation. DOJ also created 38 additional Assistant U.S. Attorney positions to devote to child exploitation cases.

According to the Report, since FY 2006, DOJ has filed 8,464 Project Safe Childhood cases against 8,637 defendants. These cases include prosecutions of online enticement of children to engage in sexual activity, interstate transportation of children to engage in sexual activity, production, distribution and possession of child pornography and other offenses.

DOJ outlined four distinct threats concerning child pornography:

1. research indicates child pornography poses a danger to both the victims and other children;
2. indicators suggest a significant increase in the proliferation of child pornography;
3. child pornographers are becoming more sophisticated in the production and distribution of materials;
4. organized crime syndicates are involved in the child pornography trade.

From 2005 through 2009, U.S. Attorneys prosecuted 8,352 child pornography cases, and in most instances, the offenders used digital technologies and the Internet to produce, view, store, advertise, or distribute child pornography. Unfortunately, the number of images and computers used to store and distribute child sex abuse images has increased exponentially.

Two programs are currently used by law enforcement agencies to identify IP addresses and catalog images. Since 2006 these two programs have identified over 20 million different IP addresses offering child pornography files (pictures, videos) on a Peer-to-Peer file-sharing network. Approximately 50% of these are located in the United States. Although a vast majority of these IP addresses had just one presumed child pornography image, over 60,000 had between 10 to 99 images, and 860 had between 100 and 299 images.

Further, the programs have identified 290,000 unique images representing some of the “worst” (movies and photographs of the most violent assaults, with the youngest victims) of the child sex abuse images.

It should come as no surprise that the vast majority of identified child pornography victims (69% in one data set) were abused/exploited by people familiar to the children. These people included parents, other relatives, neighbors, family, friends, babysitters, coaches, and guardians’ partners; only a small fraction of victims (4%) were victimized by individuals with whom the child had no relationship.

In terms of content, 21 percent of child pornography offenders had images that depicted violence such as bondage, rape or torture and most of these images involved children who were gagged, bound, blindfolded, or otherwise enduring sadistic sex.

Of greatest concern is the finding that organized criminal groups are becoming more prevalent in child exploitation investigations. Such groups include commercial enterprises that produce and distribute child pornography material for profit as well as non-commercial enterprises that produce and distribute child pornography images not for material gain, but to fuel the group members’ common sexual interest in minors.

The Report outlines an impressive list of resources DOJ utilizes to combat child pornography. The involvement of one powerful non-governmental organization, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children [NCMEC], remains central to the Department's efforts. As advocates for victims of child pornography, we have long believed, and continue to believe, that the detection, investigation and prosecution of child pornography offenses is solely a government responsibility. No private organization or entity, no matter how well-meaning or well-funded, should have any official or unofficial role in this essential governmental mission.

For far too long, technology industry lobbyists have thwarted any effort to reign-in an online world which is seemingly beyond any regulation or oversight. According to the DOJ Report, "the lack of Internet regulation has restricted law enforcement investigations and assisted offenders in committing child pornography offenses" and "the lack of Internet Service Provider regulations, including but not limited to, reporting child pornography, responding to law enforcement inquiries, and retaining customer IP addresses, IP logs, and other subscriber information, have hampered law enforcement investigations."

One serious impediment to timely effective law enforcement investigations is that "there is no federal statute or regulation requiring providers to keep user IP information for any length of time, or at all. Some U.S. providers only keep the information for a few days. In a 2009 survey of 100 U.S. Internet crimes investigators, 61 percent of the investigators reported that they had had investigations detrimentally affected because data was not retained; and 47 percent reported that they had had to end an investigation because data was not retained."

If businesses need to keep basic information about gun sales, then Internet service providers should be required to keep some basic information about pedophiles on their networks.

The government's last attempt to require retention of this information, the Internet Stopping Adults Facilitating the Exploitation of Today's Youth Act of 2007 (SAFETY), was widely opposed by lobbyists representing AOL, Verizon Communications Inc., Comcast Corp., AT&T, Microsoft, and Yahoo [the U.S. Internet Service Provider Association].

Groups like NCMEC, which is funded with millions of dollars by tech industry giants such as CA, Google, Microsoft, AOL, Qwest, Sprint, MasterCard, Yahoo, Adobe and ATT, should not be involved in any aspect of the federal oversight, investigation and supervision of the high technology industry which has knowingly facilitated the worldwide distribution of child pornography and ongoing exploitation of children.

Whether it's Harvard Law School's high tech sell out [Cyber Conflict of Interest - Harvard Law School's Berkman Center Calls Online Threats to Children Overblown] or the tech industry co-opting the regulators through technology grants and feigned cooperation, following the money in Washington is a sure way to uncover the many conflicts of interest which prevent real reform to protect victims of child pornography and online exploitation.

The tech industry already enjoys almost limitless protection from liability for third party content posted or transmitted on their networks. The least they can do is support legislation which helps law enforcement track down the bad guys.