900 Suspected Pedophiles Arrested as ‘Darknet’ Child Porn Kingpin Jailed for 30yrs

900 is an awful lot of perverts but keep in mind 'Playpen' had 150,000 disgusting users, and experts suggest there are 750,000 people on the internet searching for child pornography every moment. There is a long way to go to make a serious dent in this atrocity, or even to slow down its growth, but this is a good start.

© Andrey Arkusha / Global Look Press

Nearly 900 members of a global ‘dark web’ pedophile ring sprawling Europe and the Americas have been arrested following a two-year investigation, the FBI and Europol reported after the website’s founder was handed a 30-year jail sentence.

Shedding light on the scope of the operation which is still active, the FBI revealed that in the US alone, 350 arrests were made as part of a wide-ranging investigation into Playpen – a secret website that is being referred to as possibly the biggest child pornography online dump that ever existed.

The arrests and other law enforcement actions related to the investigation were carried out “in countries far and near”, including Turkey, Peru, Chile, Ukraine, Israel and Malaysia, according to the FBI. 

Europe accounts for the major share of arrests and convictions with 368 suspects being charged. A total of 870 arrests were made in connection with the case, according to Europol.

Over 300 children who had suffered sexual abuse at the hands of Playpen members have been identified or rescued.

EU Commissioner for the Security Union, Sir Julian King, said “a hugely significant blow has been struck against one of the most heinous of crimes, arguably the worst of all, thanks to the excellent transnational cooperation of Europol with the FBI and US Department of Justice, as well as other law enforcement agencies around the world.”

Playpen’s founder, Steven W. Chase, 58, was sentenced Monday to 30 years behind bars. The site he set up in August 2014 boasted some 150,000 users worldwide until it was taken down by the FBI following a controversial covert operation.

The agency said it had uncovered the site almost immediately after it had been launched but lacked information to trace the location or identity of the site’s owner as it was rooted in the deep web, meaning the site was only accessible through special software such as Tor.

Tor grants anonymity to its users and thereby is often described as a convenient platform for illicit activities, such as selling weapons, drugs or disseminating pornography.

However, Florida-based Chase inadvertently slipped up, revealing his site’s IP address, providing law enforcement with all the necessary leads.

Two of Chase’s aides, Michael Fluckiger and David Browning, both US citizens – who served as administrators of the site – were each jailed for 20 years.

Through a subsequent operation codenamed Operation Pacifier, the FBI succeeded in tracking down hundreds of the site’s users, sending “more than 1,000 leads” to FBI agents as well as to European authorities.

The FBI has been criticized for what it called a “court-approved network investigative technique” used to unearth information about the suspects. It emerged that the agency, with court approval, seized and ran the pedophile website for 13 days in February 2015.

The FBI’s command of the Playpen site enabled the agency to infect over 8,000 users’ computers with malware and hack them. Notably, the site was said to be more efficient and even experienced a boost in audience numbers with the FBI in charge of its content.

Internet privacy experts found the FBI’s handling of the case highly questionable and contrary to privacy laws.

The privacy of pedophiles cannot be compared in the least to the right of a child to not be sexually abused for the entertainment of sick perverts.

“The warrant here did not identify any particular person to search or seize. Nor did it identify any specific user of the targeted website,” Electronic Frontier Foundation said, calling into question the legality of the FBI’s actions.

However, the head of the European Cybercrime Centre (EC3), Steven Wilson, appeared to defend the controversial practice, saying in a statement that “If we operate with 19th century legal principles then we are unable to effectively tackle crime at the highest level.”

“We need to balance the rights of victims versus the right to privacy,” Wilson argued, praising the cooperation between the US and European law enforcement in the case.

DarkNet Operator, Female Dancer Among Perverts on P&P List Today

Another DarkNet CSA Porn administrator jailed - USA
Pervert sodomizes 4 y/o, 2nd story fm Oregon City in 2 wks - Oregon
18 y/o get 26 yrs for sex with 13 y/o - Texas
Female dance teacher guilty of abusing 6 y/o relative - New York
Father fails to report son's sex abuse of children - Arizona

Child sex abuse site operator jailed for 20 years

 From BBC Technology

Browning helped keep the site running and oversaw day-to-day operations  SVETLANA_ANGELUS

An American man who ran a site that traded images of child sexual abuse has been jailed for 20 years.

David Lynn Browning was the central controller of the Playpen site, which was hosted on the dark web.

Browning will also be subject to a life-time of supervision when he eventually leaves prison.

He is the second key Playpen operator to be jailed. In January another administrator received a similar sentence.

Browning was a senior member of the group that had operated Playpen, said the US Department of Justice (DoJ) in a statement.

Shut down

He had been responsible for the day-to-day running of the site, moderating discussions and managing membership lists.

The DoJ said the members-only website had been run via The Onion Router (Tor) anonymising network.

Tor bounces data requests through lots of different nodes, encrypting at every step to conceal who and where users are.

A long-running FBI operation led to Playpen being shut down in 2015.

Prior to it being closed, the FBI ran the site for two weeks, gathering data on its users.

Playpen is believed to have had about 150,000 members who shared tens of thousands of postings about the sexual abuse of children.

The DoJ said the FBI action had led to the arrest of 51 people connected to the site and to the rescue of 55 children who were being abused.

Browning's co-administrator Steven W Chase, from Florida, who was also arrested as a result of the FBI investigation, is expected to be sentenced soon.

Portland man gets 8 years behind bars for child sex abuse

This is the 2nd awful story out of Oregon City in less than 2 weeks

Associated Press 

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — A Portland man found guilty of sexually abusing a 4-year-old child has been sentenced to more than eight years in prison.

KPTV-TV reports (http://bit.ly/2kQRbeq) that James Edward Zwaschka was sentenced after being convicted of sexual abuse and sodomy charges Wednesday.

Police say the 43-year-old man abused the young victim in Oregon City.

Authorities had been alerted to the abuse in 2015 by the child's family.

Oregon City, OR

Brady Man Gets 26 Years in Prison for
Continuous Sexual Abuse of Child

By Ed Hernandez 

Judge Rob Hoffman, presiding over the 452nd District Court in McCulloch County, heard a plea of guilty from Gary Flores to a lessor charge of Continuous Sexual Abuse of a Child with a victim under the age of 14. Flores was originally  indicted on a charge of Continuous Aggravated Assault of A Child Under 14. Under this charge, he faced a penalty of up to life in prison.

The plea was a continuation of a recessed hearing from a January 27th court date. On that date, several witnesses for the State, including the victim’s parents, were heard.

On Tuesday, the Defense called two witnesses. First on the stand was Dr. Anna Shursen, a registered/certified Sexual Offender Treatment Provider. Giving a detailed outline of her testing and methodology procedures, she described the need for de-registration of low-risk re-offenders. She stated that, in her evaluations of Flores, she had found him to be very low risk for re-offending. With probation and sexual offender treatment, she felt Flores could become a productive member of society.

Taking the stand on his own behalf, Flores detailed his troubled childhood. He said he grew up in a home where both his parents abused drugs and alcohol and that his mother had been arrested and sentenced to three years in prison.

He came to Brady with his father and graduated high school in Brady. In the summer of 2015, he was introduced to the victim’s father who helped him with employment on a horse ranch where Flores helped with the race horses raised there. It was during that summer, when Flores, who was 18, began a sexual relationship with the 13-year-old victim.

In his testimony, the defendant expressed remorse at having betrayed the trust of his benefactor, the church, a church youth group, and the victim. He did attempt to partly shift blame, however. He said that the victim had lied by telling him she was 15, which would still be under the legal age of consent.

In closing, defense attorney Todd Steele asked the court for leniency, stating that when the offense began, “It was two kids; he was 18 [and] she was 13, and they made bad choices.”

Steele went on to say that with probation and treatment his client would face a hard road, but that he could become a useful member of society. Going to prison at age 20 and getting out to be shackled to the chains of a lifetime of registration as a sex offender could, in fact, turn him toward a life of crime.

For the State, Assistant District Attorney Steve Lupton urged the court to proceed with a punishment fitting the crime.

Lupton said, “As an 18 year-old man who urged his victim to keep it a secret, he knew what he was doing was wrong.”

When the dust settled, Judge Hoffman ordered the defendant be incarcerated in the Texas Department of Corrections for a period of 26 years along with a $1,000 fine.

Brady, TX

Binghamton Dance Teacher Found Guilty,

Again, of Child Sex Abuse

By Vince Briga

BINGHAMTON, N.Y. -- A Binghamton dance teacher was found guilty of sexual abuse for a second time Thursday morning in a bench trial.

Samantha Werkheiser, 37, had been accused of abusing a 6-year-old child relative between 2003 and 2007. The victim is now 18 years old.

In testimony in the trial last month., the main dueling point has been the credibility of Werkheiser's accuser.

Werkheiser had previously been found guilty, but that verdict was thrown out on appeal.

Special Prosecutor Tom Jackson called this one of the most difficult cases he's ever handled.

"I can't imagine a more difficult set of facts and for that reason we're very happy with the verdict but the scars that are left on a child through a life of abuse stay,” said Tom Jackson, the special prosecutor.


Werkheiser was initially out on bail but has now been sent to the Broome County Jail. Her sentencing is set for March 10.

Arrests made in connection with

child sexual abuse case

Christian Swank (left) and his father, Brandon Swank (right), were both arrested in connection with alleged incidents of molestation involving two underage victims.

Officials with the Yavapai County Sheriff's Office announced Thursday that two people have been arrested, in connection with incidents of sexual abuse involving minors.

According to a statement, Christian Swank, 18, was arrested on the night of February 2 for five counts of alleged Sexual Conduct with a Minor. Swank's father, 42-year-old Brandon Swank, was arrested Wednesday on a charge of alleged Failure to Report Child Abuse.

According to Sheriff's officials, deputies received information regarding sexual molestation allegations in late January. One of the alleged victims is reportedly under the age of 10, and the other alleged victim is reportedly under the age of 13.

Both alleged victims, according to the statement, are known to Swank, and according to officials, Swank was allegedly involved in sexual activity with each victim, on several occasions in 2015 within Yavapai County.

According to investigators, Swank's father became aware of the sexual abuse incidents that were allegedly committed by Swank in December 2016, and Swank's father allegedly chose not to report the incidents to law enforcement, and allegedly requested that family members also not report the crime.

Swank, according to the statement, is being held at the Camp Verde Detention Center without bond, while Swank's father, who was also booked at the Camp Verde Detention Center, was released on a $3,500 bond on Thursday.

Yavapai Co., AZ

Tor-Hidden Child Sex Abuse Site Administrator Sentenced to 20 Years in Prison

Playpen users were targeted with FBI hacking techniques

CYRUS FARIVAR (US) 

A federal judge in North Carolina has sentenced Michael Fluckiger, a co-administrator of a notorious Tor-hidden child porn site, to 20 years in prison.

I don't think 20 years is anywhere near long enough for these guys. They are not only flat-out evil, but they facilitate evil by hundreds of thousands of others at the expense of children. These three perverts should never be allowed to roam free ever again.

Fluckiger pleaded guilty to running Playpen in December 2015, after being indicted in March 2015. His two fellow admins, David Lynn Browning, of Kentucky, and Steven Chase, of Florida, who were also prosecuted as part of the same case and also have pleaded guilty, have not yet been sentenced.

According to prosecutors, the three men who ran the website are among the over 200 Playpen-related prosecutions nationwide. In order to identify many of the site’s users who were prosecuted, the FBI had to seize and operate the site for 13 days.

While doing so, the FBI deployed a “network investigative technique,” or NIT, which many researchers have described as malware, to force the user’s Tor browser to cough up a true IP address. With that in hand, investigators filed subpoenas with the relevant ISPs, which in turn revealed their true names and billing addresses.

The effort to take down Playpen has raised questions about proper limits on the government’s ability to hack criminal suspects. A small handful of alleged Playpen users have successfully challenged the single warrant used to deploy the NIT against them.

As Vice Motherboard first reported in March 2016, Browning was first identified by a foreign law enforcement agency as part of an investigation into yet another child porn website. His IP address was exposed when those overseas cops provided him a “hyperlink to a streaming video.” The file had been configured to go around his Tor browser, which then exposed his true IP. After realizing it was an American IP address, the foreign agency handed it over to the FBI.

The Justice Department said in a Thursday statement:

According to admissions made in connection with the plea, Fluckiger acted as the co-administrator of a highly-sophisticated global enterprise dedicated to the sexual exploitation of children, organized via a members-only website that operated on the Tor anonymity network, through which he and more than 150,000 other members authored and viewed tens of thousands of postings relating to sexual abuse of children as young as infants and toddlers.

The government also noted that due to the investigation, “at least 48 alleged hands-on abusers have been prosecuted and 49 American children who were subjected to sexual abuse have been successfully identified or rescued.”

Dark Web Child Porn Site Ran ‘Much Better’ with FBI in Charge – Lawyer

The astonishing advance of technology presents some new and challenging problems for police. Police must employ innovative techniques to investigating technology-based crime. The FBI did the right thing in operating Playpen for two weeks while infecting users computers. However, their improvements to the site resulted in astonishing growth which judges might perceive as entrapment. How they can justify improving the site is beyond my imagination, and I fear child-hater Steven Chase will walk because of it.


© Zachary Fagenson / Reuters

Membership on the largest “dark web” child pornography site rose by a third and it ran “much better” while it was operated secretly by the FBI, one defense lawyer in the “Playpen” case has argued, seeking to have the charges dismissed.

After taking control of "Playpen” in February 2015, the FBI continued to operate the child pornography site for two more weeks, seeking to infect users’ computers with malware. Over 4,000 computers worldwide were hacked in this fashion, and 186 people were charged. A defense attorney for one of them is now saying the FBI did a better job of running the site.

Steven Chase, the original administrator of Playpen, is accused of participating in a “child exploitation enterprise.” His attorney is seeking to have the case dismissed due to “outrageous government conduct,” Motherboard reported.

“The FBI distributed child pornography to viewers and downloaders worldwide for nearly two weeks, until at least March 4, 2015, even working to improve the performance of the website beyond its original capability,” wrote Peter Adolf, an assistant federal defender in the Western District of North Carolina, in a motion to dismiss the case filed Monday.

Adolf goes on to quote user comments indicating that “Playpen” performed much better under the FBI’s management, which led to the site becoming even more popular.

“Yes, it is working much better now!” said one user.
“Working FAST today :-)” wrote another.
“It now runs everything very smoothly!” said a third.

“As a result, the number of visitors to Playpen while it was under Government control [increased] from an average of 11,000 weekly visitors to approximately 50,000 per week. During those two weeks, the website’s membership grew by over 30 percent, the number of unique weekly visitors to the site more than quadrupled, and approximately 200 videos, 9,000 images, and 13,000 links to child pornography were posted on the site,” Adolf wrote.

Government improvements resulted in “more users receiving more child pornography faster than they ever did when the website was running ‘illegally’,” the attorney argued. “In essence, the government committed a more serious crime – distribution of child pornography – in order to apprehend defendants committing the less serious crime of accessing and viewing child pornography.”

Although the US Supreme Court has never specified what would qualify as outrageous conduct by the government, Adolf pointed to two previous circuit court cases, dating back to 1984 and 1986, to point out that cases have been dismissed when government agents have supplied or were “intimately involved” in the production of contraband, or when their conduct resulted in injuries to an innocent third party.

Under the government standard for child pornography, a child is victimized each time his or her image is viewed. During its operation of Playpen, the FBI distributed a million illegal images, according to a “conservative estimate” by defense attorneys in other related cases, who filed their own motions Monday.

The FBI has declined to comment on the pending legal proceedings.