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A few years ago the UK police carried out Operation Ore. It was a major operation targeting online child pornography. Some 7,272 British residents were added to a police database of people who paid to view child porn online. 4,283 homes were searched, 3,744 people were arrested, 1,451 were convicted. It was a major blow against pedophiles.

Or at least, that was the theory.

The US had a similar operation, Operation Avalanche. They assembled 35,000 entries in their database. Curiously, though, they only charged 100. If the US police could only justify prosecuting less than 1% of their suspects, how could the UK police be arresting more than half of theirs?

The answer is that many of the UK cases are based entirely on use of credit cards to sign up for suspected child porn web sites. Unfortunately, many of the credit cards were stolen. Oh, and many of the web sites contained only legal material. Minor details to the UK police.

The problem comes from the fact that many small porn sites use online transaction processors to handle their credit card transactions, rather than setting up their own merchant accounts. In particular, a company called Landslide in Texas provided credit card subscription services to a large network of affiliate porn sites.

It’s estimated that up to half the money Landslide collected actually ended up in the hands of a ring of Indonesian credit card scammers operating the familiar “small charge” fraud. Also (ab)using the service was a Brazilian hacker who “signed up” more than 3,000 stolen credit card numbers.

Before long, Landslide found itself on the receiving end of thousands of chargebacks from irate credit card owners. The company went bankrupt. Clearly the owner had been a victim of fraud just as the credit card holders had. That wasn’t a good enough excuse for federal prosecutors, though; he ended up in federal prison serving a 180 year sentence.

Meanwhile, UK police were swooping on houses, smashing down doors, seizing computer equipment, and arresting thousands of people on the basis that their credit card numbers had been found on Landslide’s hard drives. Never mind the massive amount of fraud that had pulled Landslide under; never mind whether the affiliate site the credit card holder had supposedly paid to see was legal or not. The police reasoning was apparently: At least one affiliate site held child porn; Landslide membership theoretically allowed users access to all the affiliate sites; John Doe’s credit card was used to sign up via Landslide; therefore John Doe signed up to view child porn.

The problem with the hysteria around child pornography and pedophilia is that if you’re accused, your life can be ruined even if you’re innocent. Plenty of employers will fire anyone as soon as they’re accused. The alleged pedophile finds himself jobless, with all his computer equipment seized by police, who have no obligation ever to return it.

For example, consider the case of naval officer Commodore David White. He was suspended from the navy, who feared that the case would hit the newspapers. It did anyway, but not in the way they expected—the commodore committed suicide by drowning. It turned out that he was totally innocent.

So far, 39 people have committed suicide as a definite result of Operation Ore. The true number may be higher, as not everyone leaves a suicide note. Maybe a few of the dead were guilty, but I’d place bets that the majority were innocent.

A web site has been set up covering the unraveling of Operation Ore. The police must realize things are starting to look bad for them, as they have apparently pressured Google to remove the site from searches. Another web site has information about the forensic investigation of Landslide’s computers. Journalist Duncan Campbell has been acting as an expert witness in some of the defence cases, and has written about Operation Ore in The Guardian. A recent Slashdot article has some first hand experience in the comments.

Update 2007-04-26: More from the Guardian and from Ross Anderson.

It’s been a bumper month for Transparent Society demonstrations.

• Michael Richards went into a racist tirade. He played Kramer on Seinfeld, but I’m guessing he won’t be doing any NAACP benefits now. Perhaps they could invite him to the Comedy Central Roast of Whoopi Goldberg.

  Allegedly he had ranted about Jews previously, but nobody had heard about it because nobody had had a camera handy.

• A Muslim student was repeatedly tasered by a campus cop with a history of police brutality and suspensions. The interesting thing about this one was how many assholes on the net tried to defend the cop.

  The facts, according to the dozen or more witnesses, are: The kid had the legal right to be in the library, he just didn’t have his student ID card with him. He was asked to leave, and had packed up his stuff and was already leaving when the cops showed up. He didn’t yell anything at them until one of them grabbed him as he was trying to leave. At that point, they tasered him. He hadn’t attempted to attack anyone, hadn’t threatened anyone, and was totally unarmed.

  Now, I think it’s pretty hard to justify that first tasering, but let’s for a moment entertain the remote possibility that the cops were in the right there. The problem is that as he was lying screaming on the floor, they tasered him again. They ordered him to get up, and (perhaps because all his muscles were in spasm) he didn’t get up, so they tasered him some more, and so on.

• Some US troops in Iraq videoed themselves tormenting Iraqi kids by making them chase their truck in the hope of getting some fresh water. Inevitably, the video hit YouTube.

• UK police are to get helmet-mounted video cameras which record up to 12 hours of video. This is a great idea, the only caveat I have is that the police should be required to keep the camera on when they’re working.

Of course, not so positive is the news that the UK police are setting up a precrime department called the Homicide Prevention Unit. I’m not sure whether precognitive mutants are involved.

According to The Independent, UK police are being told that they can’t use words like “homosexual” and “bisexual”, because those are medical terms “used to criminalize lesbians, gay men and bisexuals in the nineteenth century”.

Which makes me wonder—just what the hell am I supposed to say instead of “bisexual”, in order to be politically correct? (This is a serious question.)