44 suspects arrested in Georgia computer child porn sweep; more expected

“This time we’re looking for 89 different targets [people],” Keenan told the AJC.

“We are so early in this operation, we do not know how many [child porn images] we’re going to find on people’s computers. But we know we found a lot of child pornography today.”

For three months agents have been tracking known child porn threads from the GBI’s offices in Cleveland. The sweeps began around daybreak Tuesday.

The images are disturbing, Keenan said.

For example, there are some in which infants are being molested and one in which “the images involve the rape of a 4-year-old male child," the director said.

“[In] previous experiences, some of the offenders have children in the home and they have been manufacturing their own child pornography,” Keenan said. “The child pornography that they are pursuing is known child pornography -- certain files or certain images.”

In another case, Keenan said agents entered a house to find that the same child seen in the pornographic images was actually in the home.

Whitaker said data shows Georgia ranks fifth in the number of “devices” used to transmit or receive child pornography. “We are only getting 2 percent of what’s out there,” he said.

Some warrants were executed last week because there were concerns that children were in the homes where the videos were produced. There have been no arrests in those cases yet because technicians are still examining those computers, Keenan said.

“The warrant is a search warrant for the computer,” the director said. “Sometimes we do not know who is using the computer to collect the child pornography.”

But two of those arrested were Danny Hardin of Hiram and William Noletto of Douglasville. Noletto is in the Paulding County Jail on one court of sexual exploitation of a minor. Hardin is being held on one count of possession of marijuana though investigators found child porn images on his computer.

Another suspect, 46-year-old John Edward Kemker, was arrested at his DeKalb County home on Avon Avenue early Tuesday morning and charged with sexual child exploitation and incest, DeKalb police spokesman Officer Jason Gagnon said.

Cobb County police arrested a juvenile as part of the sting, and early Tuesday evening, Gwinnett County police had a man in custody for questioning, although police declined to identify the man.

Investigators followed "digital fingerprints" that led them to “peer-to-peer” exchanges of child porn. Peer-to-peer networks allow users to retrieve pornographic pictures and videos from the computers of other subscribers, and sometimes subscribers don't even know when someone has copied the images from their hard drives.

Sometimes the images are downloaded or shared by using an unsecured wireless network of a neighbor so the residents at the houses searched may not be aware that their Internet connections were used to disseminate child pornography, Keenan said.

Forty teams were dispatched Tuesday, going to addresses based on when investigations showed the suspects would be home.

The teams were composed of agents from the GBI, FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Secret Service, the U.S. Marshal’s Service and the U.S. Postal Service. There were deputies and officers from 24 local agencies, including some in Cobb, Clayton, Gwinnett, DeKalb, Paulding, Cherokee and Hall counties. Whitaker said some of the cases would be prosecuted in the federal system so the U.S. Attorney’s Offices in all three Georgia districts were part of the operation along with the Georgia Attorney General’s Office.

-- Staff reporter Marcus K. Garner contributed to this story.