Statewide child porn bust nets 18 adults, 14-year-old

One of the largest child porn operation busts in the country swept across Georgia Tuesday, as authorities gathered up computers and arrested a 14-year-old and at least 18 adults who allegedly exchanged hundreds of pornographic pictures and videos of children, some of them toddlers.

“Horrible stuff,” said Vernon Keenan, director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, which coordinated Operation Shattered Innocence. “Young children. Adults having sex with young children.”

GBI spokesman John Bankhead said many of the images have been circulating on the Internet for some time and this investigation may or may not lead to the arrests of those who made the pictures or videos. Some of the child pornographers may have already been arrested in other jurisdictions, he said. The welfare of the children in the pictures was unknown.

Forty-four search warrants were executed from morning until night Tuesday and more are expected today. The names were available in only a few cases.

“This is our first statewide operation of this scale,” Keenan said. “We think this is the largest law enforcement operation [of this kind] in the country.”

In November, Ohio authorities arrested 41 adults and juveniles in that state’s Operation Safety Net.

By Tuesday night, 19 local, state and federal law enforcement officers in Georgia had seized 74 computers.

GBI special agent John Whitaker said it could be some time before charges are brought against everyone involved because of the time it takes to analyze and track information on the computers.

Whitaker, who heads the multijurisdictional Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, said it could take from a day to as long as a week to retrieve information from hard drives.

Still, 19 people were arrested Tuesday.

Those arrested will face either state or federal charges that could bring as much as 20 years in prison and fines of up to $100,000.

A 14-year-old in Forsyth County was charged with sexual exploitation of children, a state charge. The teen’s name was not released because of his age and he was released to his parents’ custody. It was not known how many more juveniles might be involved or arrested.

In downtown Atlanta, Christian Lung made an initial appearance before a U.S. magistrate judge on a federal charge of receiving child pornography. It was unknown where that search was conducted or what was recovered to lead to Lung’s charges.

And the raids continued into the evening.

Cherokee County deputies searched two houses.

“We have been working on this for some time,” said Cherokee Sheriff Roger Garrison. “This is an attempt to rid these people from our community.”

Five cars carrying Cherokee County deputies pulled up around 6:45 p.m. Tuesday at a red split-level house at the end of a Canton cul de sac on Mountain Brook Road.

No one responded to their knocks, so the deputies entered the home after announcing they had a warrant. Deputies later said they were interviewing a juvenile who was in the house, but he was not charged.

At the same time on Ridge Terrace in Loganville, five police officers, two county prosecutors and a GBI technician arrived at a split-level house on Ridge Terrace.

No one was home, so officers found a key and let themselves inside around 6:30 p.m. A woman pulled up about 10 minutes later and then a man and a boy came home.

Police showed her some photographs. The woman was seen crying. A man at that address was later arrested.

The investigation stretched almost the entire length and width of the state —- from Cherokee, Forsyth and Walton counties to Lowndes and Dougherty counties and from Carroll County to Richmond and Chatham counties.

Operation Shattered Innocence began in December after special software traced a number of e-mails containing child pornography.

The software, which is used in several states, assigns a series of numbers to images and if those strings were detected at least five times, those senders and receivers were tagged, according to the GBI’s Whitaker.

Whitaker said one person caught in the investigation had received 600 images. That person was not identified because that warrant most likely will be served today.

The Internet has allowed child pornography to explode, said Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.

“This is child porn. This is not protected speech. This is not victimless crime. There are victims in each of these photographs,” Allen said.

The Georgia investigation, Whitaker said, did not focus on an Internet site but on the “peer to peer” exchange of still and moving images. “Some were as young as toddlers and some as old as 14, 15, 16 years old,” he said.

The 98-agency Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force is funded by a U.S. Department of Justice grant to address the increasing number of children and teens using the Internet, the proliferation of child pornography and heightened online activity by predators searching for underage victims.

Previous investigations have involved an agent or other member of the task force posing as a child or teen and communicating via the Internet with predators. This investigation was a matter of following a trail to the owners through e-mail addresses that were the source or recipient of the pictures.

Staff writers Marcus Garner, Kent Miles and Patrick Fox contributed to his article.