Talk:Operation Ore/Archive 1

NPOV dispute

 * Are any particular parts a particular problem? As far as I can see the only thing missing is a section on the successes of the operation, to balance the article with the section on "controversy and injustices". This would require someone with more detailed knowledge of the case than me to work on it though. Jdcooper 13:39, 8 September 2005 (UTC)

General comprehensibility

 * The "Origins" section of the article is very unclear for someone who doesn't already know about the case. All the information about the postman, how is that relevant? What actually happened? I'm adding a context tag to this article, because it needs clearer explanation. Jdcooper 13:45, 8 September 2005 (UTC)

Making this article balanced.
That is really difficult, yes some suspects were guilty and maybe some children were saved from any further abuse or future abuse. But in order to get those few, thousands got hit for dodgy credit card transactions on the Landslide database. The fact is, more children have been put in danger by Operation Ore than been saved, thousands of chldren have been subjected to emotional and psychological abuse by the very system that is suppose to protect them.

Just to escape from what successes Operation Ore had, the facts clearly point out that every search and arrest made, was illegal. Also, so many lies have been told about Operation Ore, its hard to find what is true reporting, or hyped up media propaganda to create public hysteria.

Balance
It would be very helpful indeed, if someone was to arbitrate over the contents of this section of wikepedia, particulary as it involves contentious territory. As a researcher of this territory, and what is uncovered tends to conflict with the official statements, it clearly requires someone with the necessary skills and independance to mediate between what are likely to be highly conflicting accounts of what Operation Ore was.

To answer the postman issue, it will seem strange to many, as the media in general, attributed Operation Avalanche, the US operation which spawned Operation Ore, to the FBI. The FBI had been called in twice by Landslide in relation to illicit websites using the Landslide payment systems, however the investigations were not hostile and were shelved.

USPIS, the US Postal Inspection Service, quite independantly started an undercover investigation into Landslide, and at one time their website carried an article correcting the fact that the operation had been credited to the FBI. Although the FBI were involved, the investigation was initially USPIS with assistance from Dallas police.

I don't know who put up the bulk of the article, I would like to contribute indirectly to content, but as the research evidences issues that run in such contention with the public story, both in the US and the UK, it does require a moderator in order to ensure accuracy, neutrallity and appropriate definition are reflected in the content. Any volunteers from outside the UK?

As I found myself adding an entry to this section only for it to be altered by what I was advised was the National Crime Squad (who ran Operation Ore), it would perhaps be appropriate to 'scrub' this entry entirely until such time as someone steps forward to mediate between what are highly conflicting versions of what Operation Ore was.

Moved from main page
The following content has been moved from the main page until such a time as it is made NPOV. This would require as least some opposing viewpoint (i.e. That Operation Ore is allright, it saved a million orphans from depraved sexual abuse and handed out apple pie afterwards.) The content below is POV not because it's wrong, that would be something else. I'm also not saying the content below is factually correct. Anyway... brenneman (t) (c) 01:20, 9 September 2005 (UTC)

Controversy
Operation Ore has also been called a modern day witch-hunt (labelled as such by Pete Townshend himself), a 21st century inquisition and the 'largest miscarriage of justice in UK history'. Detractors of the course of justice taken in regard to Operation Ore cite incidents of faulty intelligence, identity theft, accidental click-through caches, and unsolicited spam as major factors that lead to some people being falsely accused.

On June 21 2005 an article appeared in PC Pro which revealed that many of the alleged offenders were innocent.

“The most critical computer evidence produced in Operation Ore, I have found, was flawed,” says Duncan Campbell, an expert witness in the defence of Operation Ore suspects. “The mistakes meant huge quantities of police, technical and social work resources were misdirected to some futile and ill-founded investigations. But the worse result was damage to innocent lives, and the welfare of families and children.”

The article also claimed that prosecutions have centred on what's been claimed in court to be the front page of an adult website, which prosecutors said was dominated by a direct link to child pornography. New evidence revealed in the PC Pro article shows that many subscribers could not have accessed the alleged child porn page, while US officials had only seen a link to a child porn site on one occasion.

On 31/08/2005, two complaints containing serious criminal allegations against the conduct of senior operatives of the National Crime Squad in relation to Operation Ore were upheld on appeal at the Independant Police Complaints Commission.

Child Porn Banner
Operation Ore was launched with considerable fanfare in UK media and BBC broadcasts showed police computers showing a 'click here child porn' banner, and a video capture of this part of the page was used in Operation Ore trials in court.

The inference was clearly, that visitors to the Landslide website, knew that child pornography was being offered. This issue is a point of contention. A public archive in San Francisco captures websites around the Internet and therefore provides an evidential resource. The screen shot used in UK courts was a blow up of what matched the bottom of the Landslide AVS page.


 * "archived version"

The archived version shows that the banner location is is way down the bottom of the AVS page, and the banner does not appear as this was part of a third party rotating banner system controlled via another domain.

AVS vs KEYZ
The assertion was that avs was adult, but those who had used the Landslide keyz payment system were suspected of downloading child pornography. This provides further contentions, as unlike AVS where a range of websites can be accessed for a single payment, keyz was a per site payment system, there was no menu of websites, and there was evidence the 'click here' banner wasn't present on keyz.

Again this is an issue that can be explored on the public archives via the wayback machine in San Francisco. Users could go to a keyz menu, however, this did not provide site access. The menu allowed subscribers to check their account status, however, the menu would have been principally used for webmasters to set up keyz accounts.

Keyz subscriptions
Any keyz or avs signups, recorded the referring site in the client data. It was therefore possible to discern which web sites the Landslide data had charged credit cards against. As again, the archives and other caches on the Internet confirm, the majority of web sites were entirely lawful. This is another point of contention.

Jim Gamble, now deputy director general of the National Crime Squad said to a government enquiry in 1999 towards 7,000 people in the UK sat at their computers and accessed child abuse websites As only a minority of the websites contained underage imagery, and the bulk of it did not involve child abuse, this point is in contention.
 * "APIG source"

Trevor Pearce, now director general of the National Crime Squad, said to the government ''This operation started when, in 2001, the details of 7,272 British suspects who had accessed child abuse images on a US website with their credit cards were passed to UK authorities. Operation ORE subsequently became the largest ever single investigation into online activity of this nature.''
 * "NCS to parliament"

7,272 was the total number of credit card identities, which became 6,500 traceable identities. However, to suggest the entire list of subscriptions, to what was mainly an adult payment gateway used by legitimate sites, represented suspects, is a point of contention.

Public safety
That National Crime Squad alleged that the Landslide subscriber list represented a list of people who were a danger to children, and stated the list was broken up to classify the risk whereby people with responsibility or access to children were the most dangerous.

Firstly, the presumption that those who had illicit imagery represent a threat to children, particularly in the context of Landslide, is not supported by any credible research, and this very point was made in answer to this very question in parliament.

Secondly, as previously asserted, there was no evidence to suggest that most Landslide subscribers had ever seen contentious age imagery.

Operation Ore in Scotland is complete, and not a single Landslide subscriber was charged with child abuse. It has been stated that people have been charged in other parts of the UK, however the number has not been stated, and if it was stated, it would be necessary to qualify if these were Landslide subscribers, as images were investigated and that is of course quite a seperate issue.

Witch-hunt
The information used, and particularly the emotive and leading nature of the terms used, created a frenzy and a full blown 21st century witch-hunt ensued.

The IWF (Internet Watch Foundation) is a reporting mechanism that works with the police in relation to websites reported as hosting contentious age imagery.

You will notice in the IWF news, 'Operation Ore, a worldwide hunt for online perverts', 'hunted down', 'brought to justice'. These are far from neutral terms. A pedophile refers to people that are attracted to young children. That is a mental state and as such is not a crime. Further, the law currently in the UK, classifies any imagery deemed to be under 18 and indecent in a court as illegal, the classification applied is therefore not just emotive and misleading, it is false.


 * "no respite in hunt for paedophiles"

Incitement
When the Landslide subscriber data related to one of the 12 websites (out of an estimated 5,700)where the police had evidence the sites were illegal, despite no imagery of these sites being evidence from forensic examinations, people were charged with incitement. The Landslide subscriber record was used as the main evidence, though banners and imagery in relation to the sites were shown to the juries. 12% of the credit cards involved were reported stolen before Operation Ore had even started, and only a minority of fraud is actually reported. A month before Landslide was raided, by USPIS, Dallas Police, the FBI and Microsoft, the company had ceased charging anyone, as the merchant account had been terminated through excessive chargebacks, highly indicative of credit card fraud. AVS systems were rife with credit card fraud, and Landslide had been investigated for such fraud.

transfer
I fully concur. I had hoped some posting would pull an auditor into play. I don't know how it is resolved when there are two conflicting versions of events, and the official story is in contention.

There are a considerable number of additional points of considerable significance in contention, however, it is perhaps appropriate to pause, until if an when, these contentions can be arbitrated. I am not remotely an author, nor do I have any wikepedia expertise. I have taken a former hint to include sources that information can be verified on both sides of the contention.

If these are issues that can be resolved, I would be grateful for help.

Oh, and please sign your edits using, thanks. brenneman (t) (c) 01:20, 9 September 2005 (UTC)

Pete Townshend
Was he actually arrested? This entry makes him sound guilty but his wiki page (Pete Townshend) tells a different story, should this entry here be reworded? SkaTroma 19:32, 9 December 2005 (UTC)


 * Just look at it this way, no matter what he did or his intentions, if he wasn't rich as a mint he'd be sitting in prison right now. --DanielCD 16:29, 30 December 2005 (UTC)


 * well that is probably true, but doesnt resolve the question about the wording of the article. SkaTroma 01:14, 5 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Townshend was arrested. See news story linked at the end. Townshend admitted guilt and was cautioned. lmno 14:17, 18 February 2006 (UTC)

Despite appearances to the contrary given by the article on him, Pete Townshend was arrested and cautioned for sexual offences against children. He was offered and - presumably after legal advice - accepted a police caution, which - whilst apparently an alien concept to US citizens - is a formal admission of guilt, accepted as such by the police, courts, probation service, social services, etc. Townshend is currently a "registered sex offender" (which is shorthand for "subject to the notification requirements of Part 2 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003". The "fact" that Townshend accessed child pornography sites "for research" is (possibly) relevant to the biographical section of Townshend (which has been almost totally whitewashed of any reference to Townshend's criminal behaviour, whilst Gary Glitter, who committed the same offence(s) is listed in Category:Convicted child sex offenders) but it is utterly irrelevant to an article on Operation Ore. How encyclopaedic and unbiased/neutral is Wikipedia? Wiki-is-truth 06:39, 31 December 2006 (UTC)


 * It's utterly irrelevant? Townshend was caught up in the operation because he was doing research on the subject; the story was widely covered in news and print media, perhaps event to as great an extent than the entire operation iteself, due to his stature as a public figure.  Almost every article you'll find on Operation Ore on, say, the BBC World News web site mentions Townshend, and the specific fact that he viewed a child porn web site for research purposes is brought up over and over again as an integral part of the subject.  Here is one example; note the characterisation here: "Operation Ore has given police direct leads on 250,000 suspected internet paedophiles worldwide, including The Who's Pete Townshend, who insists he was merely researching the subject." Same with CNN.  This fact has also been present in this Wikipedia article for quite a long time, and its inclusion has not been disputed until you showed up.


 * Given that you're brand-new at editing the encyclopedia, and you seem to be editing the encyclopedia for the single purpose of stirring up this issue of Pete Townshend and Operation Ore, I'll give you some slack for not understanding how Wikipedia works, or what information is deemed to be worthy of inclusion. But as someone who's been here a long time and has many thousands of edits to their name, I assure you that this is the kind of information that belongs here. Please review Neutral point of view and Verifiability, two cornerstones of Wikipedia's content policies to help you further understand.  Also, if you want to be taken seriously, don't write stuff like this. Nobody around here wants to work with an editor whose first order of business is to insult the project.


 * Leave the information in the article. It belongs here.  It's part of the story and it's part of the reporting of the story as it unfolded.  -/- Warren 07:56, 31 December 2006 (UTC)