After 2003 Operation Ore came under closer scrutiny, with police forces in the UK being criticised for their handling of the operation. The most common criticism was that they failed to determine whether or not the owners of credit cards in Landslide's database actually accessed any sites containing child porn, unlike in the US where it was determined in advance whether or not credit card subscribers had purchased child porn. Investigative journalist Duncan Campbell exposed these flaws in a series of articles in 2005 and 2007.[12][13][14]
It was a serious error that UK police received no information on the scale of the credit card fraud which had occurred within the Landslide business. Many of the charges at the Landslide affiliated sites were made using stolen credit card information, and the police arrested the real owners of the credit cards, not the actual viewers. Plus, thousands of credit card charges were made where there was no access to a site, or access to only a dummy site. When the police finally checked, they found 54,348 occurrences of stolen credit card information in the Landslide database. The British police failed to provide this information to the defendants, and in some cases implied that they had checked and found no evidence of credit card fraud when no such check had been done. Because of the nature of the charges, children were removed from homes immediately. In the two years it took the police to determine that thousands had been falsely accused, over one hundred children had been removed from their homes and denied any unsupervised time with their fathers.[15] The arrests also led to an estimated 33 suicides by 2007.[3]
One man was charged when the sole "suspicious" image in his possession was of young-looking — but adult — actress Melissa-Ashley.[16] Also arrested were Massive Attack's Robert Del Naja (later cleared[5]) and The Who's guitarist Pete Townshend, who was cautioned by the police after acknowledging a credit card access to the Landslide website. However, Duncan Campbell later stated in PC Pro magazine that their credit card charges and IP addresses were traced through the Landslide site, and both were found to have accessed sites which had nothing to do with child pornography.[17] The actor and writer Chris Langham was among those convicted.[18]
Independent investigators later obtained both the database records and video of the Landslide raid. When this information was presented in a UK court, Michael Mead of the United States Postal Service contradicted his US testimony under oath regarding several details relating to the investigation. As a result of the errors exposed in the cases, a number of people arrested in Operation Ore filed a group action law suit in 2006 against the detectives behind Operation Ore, alleging false arrest.[19]
After Campbell's articles appeared, the independent computer expert Jim Bates who analyzed the hard drives was charged and convicted of four counts of making false statements and one count of perjury regarding his qualifications [20] and barred from appearing as an expert witness. Bates's judgement has been called into question on a number of other matters.[21] Bates was later arrested for possession of indecent images during his Operation Ore investigations.[22] However, the search of Bates home was ruled as unlawful, as the Police had applied for the search warrant using the wrong section of PACE, and the Police were unable to examine any of the material seized from his house.[23][24][25]
CEOP and particularly its Chief Executive, Jim Gamble, were accused of using vague terms which do not have a recognised meaning within either child protection or law enforcement when they defended the operation.[26]
On 6 December 2010, senior Court of Appeal judges rejected the appeal of Anthony O’Shea, stating that they were "entirely confident that the appellant was rightly convicted".[27] The judgement states in relation to the appellant's assertions regarding the claim that his IP address had been disguised: “These suggestions are fanciful in the extreme. The appellant’s theory (for it is no more than such) that he [Mr O’Shea] was the victim of the machinations of a fraudulent webmaster is, in our view, pure speculation.”[28][29] Jim Bates, an expert witness and critic of Operation Ore, was criticised for misleading comments during the hearing.[29] The appeal had been considered to be a landmark case where success could have led to many of the other convictions achieved as a result of Ore being overturned.[22]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ore
