HOW ONLINE STUPIDITY CAN GET YOU IN BIG BIG TROUBLE!

REVENGE OF THE SPAM
Gregory Steven Hart lives behind black metal gates in a house full of computers, elegant sculptures and expensive liquor that he never drinks.

Three days after Christmas, Deputy Sheriff Russell Hemmendinger hauled Hart to jail. The charges were driving with a suspended license and resisting arrest. The deputy took him down in the driveway of his $367,000 Lutz home, in front of his pregnant wife and neighbors.

Hart posted bail and went home and got to work. Within 24 hours, the first concerned citizen e-mailed the Pasco County Sheriff's Office.

From: tom and ray

To: dtobin@pascosheriff.org

Subject: Is Officer R. Hemmendinger Gay?

Has Officer R. Hemmendinger ever had sex with a boy that's under the age of 16?

*****

Hart is 43, a database developer for a massive health care corporation called Baxter International. He has a clean record, aside from nearly two dozen traffic tickets - mostly for speeding and running red lights - in the past decade. These led to the license suspension, which led Hemmendinger to his doorstep.

Hemmendinger is 31, married, a Pasco deputy for three years. His record is spotless. Citizens have written the agency to commend him for good work.

Hart claims that during the arrest Hemmendinger "started screaming and yelling hysterically at me ... like a lunatic." He returned from jail and began digging. He says his research convinced him that Hemmendinger was a homosexual pedophile.

A reporter pressed him for evidence.

"I can't go into detail," he said.

Did he report the supposed transgression to the Sheriff's Office?

No. He says couldn't trust them to investigate.

Hart had another idea. He has his own software company, Database Engineers, as well as a computer armed with a program called Atomic Mail Sender and a list of addresses known to accept spam.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands of e-mails screamed into cyberspace:

Who is Pasco Sherriff Officer R. Hemmendinger?

How is he a suspect as a child molester?

Is he homosexual?

Does he have sex with boys under the age of 16? Regularly?

Contact the Pasco County Public Information Director ...

Demand to accept ONLY the truth!

*****

One of these e-mails reached Pasco Deputy Eric Pfenninger, who alerted Hemmendinger, who reeled with disbelief. The e-mail led to two sites, Hemmendinger.net and Hemmendinger.org, at least one of which advertised an upcoming gay dating service called Hemmendinger Homosexual Haven.

Hemmendinger plugged the name into an online service that lists the owners of Web domains. The answer came back: Database Engineers Inc. The sole officer was Gregory Hart.

Hemmendinger notified his superiors and denied the allegations. Meanwhile, the Public Information Office took more than a dozen phone calls and nearly 70 e-mails from citizens.

The public-information officers told the citizens it appeared to be the work of a malcontent bent on vengeance. The agency did not conduct an internal-affairs investigation. Public Information Director Kevin Doll said there was no evidence with which to start one.

On Jan. 12, Hemmendinger filed a lawsuit accusing Hart of defaming his good name. The suit is pending in circuit court. Libel experts say Hemmendinger may have a strong case.

Here are two of Hart's defenses:

1. "I haven't made a statement. I asked a question."

Jurors may see through that, said Dale Herbeck, who teaches communication law at Boston College. "This is kind of like asking, 'When did you stop beating your wife?' "

2. He didn't personally send the e-mails - his corporation did.

"Nonsense", said Clark Furlow, who teaches corporation law at Stetson University College of Law.

"If I'm driving a car and I run you down in the street, I'm liable. The fact that I'm driving for a company doesn't change anything."

ORIGINAL

How Married, Middle-Class Predators Prey on Others

This story talks about vulnerable teenagers - but all you'd have to do is replace 'teenagers' with disabled or divorced or lonely or vulnerable or trusting ADULTS - and the modus operandi and result would be EXACTLY the same - EOPC

By Mark Williams-Thomas

Somewhere out there, as you read this, a man sits hunched over his computer, his brow furrowed in concentration as he taps away at his keyboard.

But he's not booking cinema tickets or tracing his family tree or doing any of the things that have made the internet such a valuable tool of modern life.

No, the sickening truth is that he's pretending to be a 13-year-old girl and he's in one of those internet chatrooms so beloved of our teenagers.

Using modern text-speak to pass muster as a teenager, he taps out an innocent-sounding question, the sort one teenage girl might ask another.

'Hve u gt a boyfriend - lol?' 'No,' replies the very real 12-year-old, giggling as she types.

Back comes the reply: 'Wd u like one?' The trap is about to be set.

The man, of course, is a paedophile; one of the most feared and loathed figures in today's society. But the girl, sitting at her computer in the comfort and supposed safety of her own bedroom. . . well, she could be my daughter, your daughter or anyone's daughter.

As a father, I know it's important not to overstate the danger our girls are in but, as a former policeman and professional child protection consultant, I also know the paedophile threat is out there. It's very real, it's very nasty indeed and the connection between those internet chats and images of paedophilia are all too common.

I've spent the past 18 months shadowing the officers of Scotland Yard's Paedophile Unit and, despite being a former detective with more than 12 years of experience in child protection, I've been horrified by what I've seen.

It's not just the appalling nature of the photographic images that so alarms me; it's the number of them. Barely a decade ago, we thought it was bad enough that there were a few thousand of these images being passed around paedophile rings. Now there are literally millions.

It's become not just a worldwide problem, but a worldwide business, too, with organised crime gangs increasingly keen to muscle in on the lucrative trade for this truly disgusting material.

What you have to remember is that for each and every one of those images, a child has been coerced, assaulted and badly hurt. Many will have been raped and, in a few tragic cases, the victim may even have been killed. That's the reality of modern paedophilia.

Despite the horrific nature of these crimes, the problem seems to get worse every year.

As Detective Chief Inspector Nick Stevens, who heads the unit, puts it, he could have three times the staff he has and still be struggling to cope with the demand for their services.

The big question, of course, is who is looking at these appalling images and then going on, in far too many cases, to plan and commit their own assaults on children?

What my time at the Paedophile Unit has revealed is that the days when a lazy stereotype of a paedophile - a male, middle-aged loner, often still living with his parents - are long over.

Yes, child protection officers do still come across the sad and dangerous individuals who could be described in that way, but increasingly they are arresting a new breed of paedophile.

Often married and with children themselves, they can be well-educated and highly successful in their field.

Passing them in the street - and it could easily be your street - you wouldn't give them a second glance. But despite often having no criminal record, they pose every bit as serious a threat to our children as the more readily identifiable 'dirty old men' of the past.

'In the past couple of years we've arrested magistrates, lawyers, company directors, police officers, people in the media,' DCI Stevens tells me. Chillingly, it seems paedophiles and offenders really do now come from all walks of life.
Webcam

Take Andrew Lintern, for instance, one of the men I saw being arrested, who had travelled to London from Hertfordshire in the hope of having sex with a 13-year-old girl.

He was 55, married, highly qualified as a scientist working in IT, professional and, it later emerged, an Oxford graduate.

And yet when officers from the Paedophile Unit raided his home, they found nearly 20,000 indecent images, including video-clips of a 17-month-old baby being assaulted.

Lintern later confessed that the man assaulting the baby in the videoclips was, in fact, himself - an admission that no doubt contributed to him being ordered to be detained indefinitely when he came before Southwark Crown Court earlier this year.

What's brought about this change in both the number of paedophile and the backgrounds they come from, of course, is the internet.

Twenty years ago, a predatory paedophile would have had to loiter around parks, funfairs and swimming pools to gain access to children, where his suspicious behaviour - in full public view - would often have raised the alarm before he could cause any real harm.

But computers and the internet have brought an end to all that. Now a paedophile can be chatting to a vulnerable young teenager - even watching her on a webcam - after just a few clicks of his mouse.

The internet has become famous for bringing people together - relatives, old school friends, prospective husbands and wives - but it also has a dark side, and it doesn't come much darker than bringing a paedophile and his victim together.

That's what happened when Andrew Lintern logged onto an internet chatroom pretending to be a nine-year-old girl and began a conversation with 'Jessie', whom he believed was a 13-year old-girl.

Only, just as the nine-year-old girl wasn't who she said she was, nor was Jessie. In fact, she was John Taylor, a middle-aged detective and a Covert Internet Investigator (CII) with the Paedophile Unit.

'Thousands in the UK have looked at child pornography'
To catch the new breed of paedophile, you see, has required a new form of policing and Scotland Yard's Paedophile Unit has led the world with its pro-active approach.

Since 2005, it's been using officers posing as young girls in internet chatrooms and on social networking sites to draw these paedophiles out into the open.

The idea is not to entrap them (which would be against the law), but simply to communicate with them long enough for them to break the law, either by engaging in sexual grooming, sending indecent images to a minor or by encouraging them to commit an indecent act.

Often, it is the investigation which follows the suspect's arrest on one of these charges that unearths evidence of even more serious crimes.

Such is the burden of proof that Paedophile Unit investigators are able to assemble that, more often than not, the defendants plead guilty.

Having worked alongside them for so many months, I am hugely impressed with their professional commitment and their determination to secure a conviction on the most serious charge they can.

After the excitement of a successful arrest, this, they say, is where the real work begins.

As one of the detectives told me: 'You've got to get their mobile phones examined, their computers examined, their cameras examined and look at every single image. Multiply that by the number of prisoners and it's a phenomenal amount of work.'

It's a meticulous and time-consuming approach, but it works.

Take Dean Hardy, a Kent businessman who, following a tip off from Europol, the European law enforcement agency, had been arrested for downloading child pornography from the internet.

Convinced but, as yet, unable to prove Hardy had also been assaulting children, his home was searched and a camera memory stick found which revealed pictures of an adult male's hand abusing a young Asian girl.

Proving the hand in the picture was Hardy's required something that had never been done before - a side-by-side photographic comparison and enough points of proven similarity to convince the Crown Prosecution Service, in the first instance, to take the higher charge of sexual assault to court and, in due course, for a jury to find him guilty.

In the end, however, the level of evidence so painstakingly assembled by the Paedophile Unit detectives was so great that Hardy pleaded guilty. He was sentenced to six years in prison earlier this year.

So how many paedophiles are there out there, trawling the net for underage girls? The truth is that not even Nick Stevens, head of the Paedophile Unit, knows. 'I believe there are thousands of people in the UK who have looked at child pornography.' What he doesn't know is what proportion go on and try to make contact online with a child and then meet them.

All I can add, having watched the Paedophile Unit at work and worked myself in the same field, is that we under-estimate the scale of the problem at our peril. The internet has opened a door, and I believe that many men have already stepped through it and more will follow.

The statistic that keeps coming back to me is that of 300 men arrested by the Paedophile Unit since 2005, most had no previous convictions.

To put it another way, if John Taylor hadn't pretended to be 'Jessie', Andrew Lintern, a man we now know had been abusing children for a decade, would still be out there.

What can be done about this growing evil? Well, a number of things. Scotland Yard's Paedophile Unit has led the world with its approach to catching paedophiles, and I'd like to see other enforcement agencies around the world following their example. But I'd also like police forces everywhere to remember that this is a crime with a victim as well as a perpetrator.

If we're clever and fortunate, we can send that perpetrator to prison for a very long time, but there's a danger that we forget the often terrifying ordeal his victims may have experienced. They need our help and, at the moment, they're not always getting it.

I'd also like to see internet service providers and those hosting chatrooms and social networking sites to be held responsible for the content they carry. Some sites need to closed down entirely; others need to be far more effectively moderated.

original article here

L.I. Postal Worker Sent Explicit Photos to “Girl”

by Timothy Bolger

A Garden City (Long Island, USA) postal employee was arrested as he arrived to work Wednesday for sending sexually explicit photos of himself to an undercover detective posing as a 14-year-old girl, Nassau prosecutors said.

Michael Tinghitella, 49, of Mineola, was charged with four counts of attempted endangering the welfare of a child and faces up to a year in jail, if convicted, according to Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice. He pleaded not guilty at his arraignment Wednesday at First District Court in Hempstead and was released on $3,000 bail.

On four separate occasions Tinghitella sent the undercover detective in Massillon, Ohio, who was pretending to be a girl named Brittany, explicit photos and a video of himself, the district attorney said. Tinghitella sent the material from his home computer via an America Online screen name, Rice added.

“The goal of my online predator unit is to pull these predators out from behind their anonymous computer screens and put them in jail where they belong,” Rice said in a statement. “We want to make sure that these individuals find a police detective online before they find one of our children.”

A spokesperson for the United States Postal Service’s Office of Inspector General (USPSOIG), who worked on the case with the district attorney’s investigators and police in Ohio, said it is up to Tinghitella’s supervisors to determine what action will be taken regarding his employment. The case could have been handled federally, as well.

“This particular case was better served at the state level,” said Rafael Medina, spokesman for the New York field office of the USPSOIG.

Tinghitella’s attorney, William Sandback, said his client has a lot of seniority at the post office. “He’s been there 26 years,” he said.

Tinghitella is due back in court on Oct. 14.

original article here

THE BLOG OF A PEDOPHILE WHO PREYS ON THE MOMS FIRST!

Parents' Ire Grows at Pedophile's Blog
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

The search for the self-described pedophile in the large-brimmed black hat commences nearly every day here, with findings posted on chat rooms frequented by mothers.
He was spotted at a fair in Santa Clarita. He recently emerged from the Social Security office on Olympic Boulevard. He tapped away on a computer at the library in Mar Vista. Warnings have gone out. Signs have been posted.

And yet unlike convicted sex offenders, who are required to stay away from places that cater to children, in this case the police can do next to nothing, because this man, Jack McClellan, who has had Web sites detailing how and where he likes to troll for children, appears to be doing nothing illegal.

But his mere presence in Los Angeles -- coupled with Mr. McClellan’s commitment to exhibitionistic blogging about his thoughts on little girls -- has set parents on edge. One group of mothers, whose members by and large have never met before, will soon band together in a coffee shop to hammer out plans to push lawmakers in Sacramento to legislate Mr. McClellan out of business.

"Just the idea that this person could get away with what he was doing and no one could press charges has made me angry," said Jane Thompson, a stay-at-home mother in East Los Angeles who recently read Mr. McClellan's comments about a festival in her neighborhood in which he seemed to be describing her child.

Ms. Thompson is part of a movement to make it illegal to post images of children of any type on Web sites with sexual content or themes. "It became what I call a minor obsession of mine for the next six weeks," she said, "to get to know his crowd and the things they talk about."

Two months ago, Mr. McClellan said, he was more or less run out of Washington State, where he lived off and on with his parents, after the news media there and various Web sites drew attention to his activities, making him worry about his safety and that of his family. He had been posting nonsexual pictures of children on a Web site intended to promote the acceptance of pedophiles, and to direct other pedophiles to events and places where children tended to gather.

So he moved to Los Angeles, where he was born, to try to live a Southern California version of his former life. The climate was one draw, said Mr. McClellan in an interview near this reporter's office last week. But also "there are so many world-class children's attractions here, Disneyland, festivals and whatnot."

Mr. McClellan has refrained from posting pictures of children on his Web site, which was shut down by its host several weeks ago but which he intends to start again, he said, with a Dutch host. On the site, he has described fairs, festivals and other spots that he hits at least three days a week, all to the fury of parents.

It is both his actions and inactions that vex law enforcement officials here, who, while suggesting that they keep an eye on Mr. McClellan when they can, say they have no legal recourse against him.

"If you look at things he has posted, he clearly is a pedophile," said Lt. Thomas Sirkel, who works in the Special Victim' Unit of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

"Has he acted on it? I can't say," Lieutenant Sirkel said. "But I've been in this business for 20 years, and I have never seen one who has not."

Mr. McClellan, who is 45, refers to himself as a pedophile, but says he has never actually sexually touched a child, simply "embraced them in a nonsexual way, mostly in Latin American countries." He says he has never been convicted of a sex crime, and law enforcement officials in Los Angeles say they know of no convictions.

A check of available public records yielded no criminal history for Mr. McClellan, including under another name he said he used. Mr. McClellan, who said he was adopted, said he changed his name to that of his birth mother several years ago.

Lieutenant Sirkel would not say whether his department had Mr. McClellan under surveillance.

"Why should I tell him about our tactics?" Lieutenant Sirkel said. But he added: "I'd like to know where he is at, what he is doing and watch him awhile. I think he is possibly a dangerous man. In my opinion, he is a threat to children in this community, and people in the community are real concerned about him."

Two Web-based groups, Peachhead, which caters largely to mothers on the West Side of Los Angeles, and Booby Brigade, its counterpart across town, have been abuzz with chatter about "Jack" sightings, and some parents have taken to posting photos of him in parks, downloaded from the Web.

"This one really angered people," said Linda Perry, who runs Peachhead, referring to Mr. McClellan.

Mr. McClellan has been somewhat elusive. He lives largely in his car, he said, although he says he occasionally rents rooms. Asked how he makes a living, he would say only that he lives off of "public assistance, the kind where you're not allowed to work."

The parental reactions somewhat mirror those in the novel and film "Little Children," in which a community becomes enraged at the notion of a convicted sex offender living in their midst, and chase him down at every turn. Although Mr. McClellan is not similarly pursued, parents who recognize him at events often scream at him, he said, and he fears for his safety enough that he would not meet a reporter in a public place.

Law enforcement officials have clearly taken notice -- one mother posted on PeachheadFamilies.com about her husband, a location scout for films, being asked to leave a park where he was using his camera. Mothers from Pasadena to Marina del Rey will soon gather to discuss possible legislative options, Ms. Thompson said.

Theirs will most likely be a difficult road. While posting pictures of children in sexual situations is a felony, posting them fully clothed in everyday situations is not, even in the context of sexualizing them by proxy, so to speak, First Amendment scholars said. Further, while inciting others to commit crimes can be illegal, it is unclear whether giving people links to children's book fairs is criminal.

"It is an interesting case," said Eugene Volokh, a law professor and First Amendment expert at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Professor Volokh cited a federal statute that bars the posting of bomb-making information on the Web, and suggested that a similar statute banning information that helps people find children to molest could be enacted, perhaps. But simply providing information about where children gather was not likely to constitute such a crime, he said.

In terms of children's images, he said: "The general rule is pictures of people in public are free for people to publish. Now if it is without permission and the person is a child and he suggests the children are sexual targets, you can imagine a court saying this is a new First Amendment exception. But it would be an uphill battle."

So for now, then, many Angelenos will continue to track and record Mr. McClellan's every move. Ms. Perry of Peachhead noted that the city was full of convicted child molesters.

"At least we know who he is and what he looks like," she said.

Alain Delaquérière contributed reporting from New York.