It is about ID theaft and Simon Bunce’s case will be discussed.

The real scary part is the last paragraph that says,

“The forum will allow a company that believes a particular credit card is being used fraudulently to enter its details into a secure website. Other companies that sign up for the service will be able to view the entries and ensure that the same card and personal details are not used to buy their products or services”

So any old idiot could enter your CC details and then you would get refused credit with out reason or cause, and more than likley it would take you a very long time to find out why….

Whilst paedophillia is a truely abhorent behaviour for the untold damage it does to young, impressionable lives I feel some sympathy to those wretched individuals who have had to expereince unjustice at its very best not only from the nations police forces but from society as well. To those who did it well (colourful language follows)

As well as the evident CC fraud, the police and CPS persisted until very recently in using an evidence pack distributed by Jim Gamble’s NCIS unit. The centrepiece of this evidence was a banner proclaiming ‘Click here for Child porn’ which it was claimed had been the entry route in to the Landsalide Keyz sites, all of which contained child pornography. Duncan Campbell in his original PCPro article has shown this, not only to be false, but that the US police had done a cut and paste job on the banner to make it appear much more prominent than on the original page.

The truth was very,very different. Only 12 of the 300+ (Jum Bates says over 1000) Landslide Keyz sites had been proven to contain child pornography. The contents of the remainder were guessed at by the police and a later NCIS internal review confirmed that at worst only a 100 or so of the sites were likely to contain illegal images on the basis of site name or banner ads etc. Although many of the Keyz sites were fraudulent, there were a couple of very popular legal adult porn sites. One of these, though suspiciously called “Lolitasex” contained only verifiably adult porn - the police never checked and assumed that this contained be child pornography. I would guess that this accounted for quite a number of legitimate signs-ups to Keyz sites.

In fact almost none of those accused would ever have seen the ‘Click here banner’, even those who HAD purchased child pornography. It was not on the main Landslide site as claimed and at the bottom of a long page connected with the Landslide AVS gold service, nothinh whatever to do with Keyz

This mis-information was given to local forces, solicitors, CPS, social services, professional bodies like the GMC (to assess risk to kids) all prior to trial. It was repeated very publicly by Jim Gamble and others and in high profile documentariies.

This would have a very profound effect on anyone facing these accusations and their legal advisors. The police denied any possibility of CC fraud, claimed that signing up to a Keyz site, meant definitely signing up to child pornography and they could show the jury the exact mechanism ‘Click here for Child porn’ to demonstrate that the accused knew eactly what he was getting. Each one of these statements was false, but it was made to all of the agencies noted above, with obvious consequences.

Worse still if the police found a few illegal thumbnails, banners or pop-ups that might have appeared on your system due to an injudicious click, pop-up activity or bulk newsgroup downloading, and coupled with the supposedly watertight Landslide evidence, they appeared to have an unimpeachable case. Jim Gamble appeared on TV and radio to claim that ‘you cannot get these images by accident’ - strange then that the IWF seems to get tens of thousands of such reports every year from members of the public who claim to have done so.

I suspect that within the numbers of those convicted, there are substantial numbers who had a handful of images on their PCs and whilst they may in Gamble’s terms be gulity of an offence are actually victims of a very badly applied law (having not knowingly sought out indecent images), which, at least in the context of Ore has caused far,far more harm to children than it has saved.

On that note it might be worth further enquiry as to how only 109 children were saved, when the Met’s own pre-Ore pickup rates of actual abuse in child porn investigations were double that, and the NCIS prediction was that 33% of those arrested would be actual abusers - the actual figure in Ore was 3% This can only be an estimate because NCIS claimed not to know the figures when asked in an FOI, although Gamble had loudly claimed on Radio 4 just weeks before, that “we know who they all are”.

There should, according to NCIS at the outset, been thousands saved and nearly 2000 accused of hands-on abuse. By their own standards or even by those of previous investigations, Ore was a child protection disaster, hopelessly mis-targetted and tying up valuable technical and social work personell for very long periods, never mind the disasters visited upon many innocent families.

And now, just around the corner we have the same people agitating to include violent pornograpghy and cartoon pornography within their successful’ remit….

Lessons have not been learned.

Hopefully with the end of the Blair era we will see less media-driven policing - and we’ll see evidence-based policy rather than policy-based evidence