Local, state and federal officers spanned out across Georgia on Tuesday, scooping up people who allegedly had been trading child porn on the Internet.
The third such sweep in three years – this one called Operation Innocent Justice – targeted at least 59 people from Kingsland in south Georgia to Cherokee County north of Atlanta and from Villa Rica in west Georgia to Augusta on the state's eastern border. Officers from 27 agencies were making arrests in 36 counties.
Once those warrants have been served, the task force will have taken into custody 95 people, according to John Whitaker, the GBI special agent in charge of the operation.
The task force running Operation Innocent Justice began last October. Since the first of February, and including Tuesday, agents seized 879 “items of digital media,” which includes, computers, external hard drives, compact discs, DVDs and thumb drives. The sweep Tuesday should more than double that number.
The Internet Crimes Against Children task force, created by the U.S. Department of Justice and housed at Georgia Bureau of Investigation headquarters in DeKalb County, uses technology that tracks the "digital fingerprints" of particular "series" of child pornography.
Whitaker said investigators have seen some of these images before and expect to see them again. At the same time, new series are being discovered.
“Only 15 to 20 percent of the images we are seeing are coming from known child porn sites,” Whitaker said. “There are new child porn sites being created throughout the world at any given time. It takes a while after that stuff starts appearing to be able to track down the locations of where those images might have been taken.”
The images are disturbing, he said.
“We’ll see anything from someone trying to insert an object into a 6-month old to children that are being bound and gagged while someone is having sex with them. You’ll see adults on children and children with children and some forms of bestiality. Anything you can think of is out there,” he said.
According to Whitaker, the children in the images are not identified "in a lot of cases," and often the pictures originated overseas.
Since the task force was created in Georgia in 2002, a total of 701 people have been arrested and hundreds of computers seized, Whitaker, said.
But the wholesale sweeps did not start until 2009, when 164 people were arrested in Operation Shattered Innocence. Last year, 162 were arrested in Operation Restore Hope.
Law enforcement officers began serving warrants in Operation Innocent Justice on Tuesday around 6 a.m.
“There’s a huge amount of people out there that are sharing child porn,” Whitaker told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
He said Georgia is among the top five states that are sources of “IP address sharing.”
“This is a drop in the bucket but at least we are going after some of the offenders sharing the most,” Whitaker said.
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