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When will we know whether Operation Ore was a success?

Charles Arthur

The Guardian, Thursday 17 May 2007
According to Jim Gamble, former head of the National Crime Squad who oversaw the crackdown on suspected paedophiles, "very soon". That is, once the operation (which started with 7,000-odd names from the database of the US porn portal Landslide) has been "wrapped up", the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre which he now heads will release statistics on how effective it has been.

So how soon is "very soon"? Though we asked him this question multiple times, Gamble declined to put any timescale on it. He says, though, that 140 children have been "rescued" in the UK "in cases where we have found evidence of actual ongoing abuse".

Gamble also stands by his remarks, made in January to the House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology, and again last week in a BBC Investigation programme about Operation Ore, that "we never prosecute someone simply on the basis of their credit card being used [on Landslide]".

This might seem to be contradicted by the example of a doctor tried in Hull in 2004, where the police found no incriminating pictures or emails on his machine. There were, however, credit card transactions in the doctor's name via the Landslide site, and the doctor was tried for "incitement" - that is, inciting Landslide to provide child pornography. (Whether it arrived or not is immaterial to the charge of incitement: if you ask someone in the street for a wrap of heroin, you're inciting them to commit the crime of supplying.)

The judge instructed the jury to acquit the doctor, given the plain evidence that the credit card had been used fraudulently in the US, raising the obvious possibility that the Landslide entry was the work of a hacker.

Does that disprove Gamble's statement? Not necessarily. Landslide's database contained names, email addresses, billing addresses, usernames, passwords and often telephone numbers. Expert witnesses defending Ore "incitement" cases (where no incriminating evidence has been found) say thousands of those had been stolen from legitimate sites and used to generate cash for associated site owners (Operation Ore flawed by fraud, April 19). But "credit card details" might mean just the card number, name and billing address. Might a username, email address or password be enough to spark an incitement prosecution?

We asked CEOP if Gamble could clarify what "credit card details" means. It declined to elucidate. "To the best of our knowledge, no one was prosecuted on the basis of credit card details alone,"it repeated.