[Barry Crimmins can be contacted at BarCrim@aol.com] Testimony of Barry F. Crimmins Hearing on Child Pornography on the Internet 24 July 1995 Senate Judiciary Committee 104th United States Congress Table of Contents I. Summary of Testimony . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 II. Testimony of Barry F. Crimmins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 III. Attachments A. America Online (AOL) Room Chart. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 B. Correspondence Between Barry Crimmins and AOL. . . . . 9 C. Questions from Barry Crimmins to AOL. . . . . . . . . . . . 14 D. AOL's Response to Questions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 E. Member Room Titles Found on AOL. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Summary of Testimony Barry F. Crimmins There is a major crime wave taking place on America's computers. The proliferation of child pornography trafficking has created an anonymous "Pedophile Superstore." As a result, the de facto decriminalization of child pornography is taking place. The demand for child pornography is also a demand for innocent children to be abused. Child pornography is not protected speech. It is crime evidence. The on-line service "America OnLine" (AOL) has become an integral link in a network of child pornography traffickers. It cannot claim that it is not aware of this. If AOL just put a percentage of the effort it makes to spin-doctor away its culpability for these problems into solving them, inexpensive and effective solutions could be found. AOL has been unresponsive and arrogant when approached in a good-faith effort to solve these problems. This testimony is the result of over six months of research. It documents something the American people need to know: not only are their children unsafe on America Online, their children are unsafe because of it. Testimony Before the Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing on Child Pornography on the Internet 24 July, 1995 Barry F. Crimmins Mr. Chairman, members of the Committee: Thank you for this opportunity to use my first amendment right to speak out today about some very dangerous criminal activity that is proliferating unabated via computer throughout our nation. My name is Barry Crimmins. I am a writer and a children's rights and safety activist residing in Lakewood, Ohio. I am also an adult survivor of childhood sexual abuse. Since this is a public hearing, I hasten to add that my abuse was not perpetrated by a member of my family. Last September, I purchased a new computer with a modem in order to communicate "on-line." I joined the service America OnLine (AOL) because I wanted to be able to quickly access and computerize information that was of interest to me. Among the services available on AOL is something called the "People Connection." People Connection is a three-tiered structure. The first two tiers or areas are accessible to anyone using the service unless the parental control software is utilized to limit a child's access. These tiers are the "public" or AOL-sponsored rooms and the "member" rooms created by the users of the service. A room is a place where someone who has signed-on can meet and interact live with others by exchanging typed messages that appear in a large window or screen that everyone else in the room can read and respond to. These rooms are listed on a scroll and a user may browse the list, select a room to enter, and join a discussion or debate with other members. The third tier consists of private rooms. These are not publicly listed and are often used to rendezvous with other members without providing the rest of AOL's members access to the private electronic gathering. For several months, I did not discover the member rooms until I was informed that there was a regular meeting of Abuse Survivors in this area. Before I could find the Abuse Survivors' room on the member scroll, I came upon numerous atrocious rooms. Many were obviously created by, and for, pedophiles. There were rooms promoting rape, incest, the exchange of child pornography, hate crimes, and every possible, and in some cases impossible, sexual activity. If one could imagine it, it was there. The first time I found the Abuse Survivors' room, it was located between a room called "DadsNDaughtrs" and another entitled "lilboypix." I discovered that people enter these rooms and mainly communicate by "Instant (or private) Message" with other people who are in the room (there is a constantly updated roster of who is in the room available at the push of a button). It is in these private messages that most of the trading of graphic image files or "GIFs" (Computerized transmittable photographs) is negotiated. It is, however, not unusual for people to just send unsolicited GIFs to everyone in the room on the "good faith" that they will have similar files returned to them. The rooms that I have investigated have been almost exclusively child pornography exchanges, but I have followed some of the traders of such material into adult porn rooms where they continued to solicit and exchange child pornography. When AOL closes one of the particularly egregious rooms, they often suggest that the participants re-create the room as a "private room." This, for all intents and purposes, says "you may continue to conduct your illegal activity on our service, just do it in private." My first response was to turn to the "service" and demand that they take immediate action to prohibit such activities. After several weeks of communicating my outrage to them, it became clear that for whatever reason, AOL was not going to do anything to remedy the situation. Since then, I have sought the assistance of various local, state, and federal authorities. As I write this, much of the investigative work I have done is in the hands of said authorities. I hope this will result in the arrests of numerous traffickers in child pornography. I also hope that it establishes that AOL has had a great deal of prior knowledge as to how its service is being misused, and therefore, AOL facilitates and profiteers on these dastardly crimes. It is not hyperbolic to state that AOL is the key link in a network of child pornography traffickers that has grown exponentially over the last several months. Child pornography is easily accessed on AOL. Working both under my own name and undercover (often with a profile that clearly stated I was 12 years old), I have been sent over a thousand pornographic photographs of children via AOL. I have seen every possible type of sexual degradation of children, from toddlers to teens. I have forwarded all of this material to both AOL and the proper authorities. AOL does not suggest that such files be forwarded to anyone but its Terms of Service department (which may, in and of itself, be a crime). If AOL has not sent every single file of child pornography it has received to the authorities, then AOL has committed felonies. Because if this is the case, AOL is a receiver of child pornography. At one point a particularly sick individual sent me (in my guise as a 12-year-old) so much child pornography that it took eight and a half hours to download it. AOL did not even e-mail me back to acknowledge receipt of it. I wrote and asked for a credit to my account for the time it took me to gather this astonishing amount of crime evidence. AOL did not respond to this either. Ten weeks later this criminal was still on-line and actively exchanging child pornography in AOL's member rooms. Much of the controversy surrounding the problems of online pedophiles centers on "parental controls." This issue completely disregards a serious reality: in many cases the parents themselves are the perpetrators of these crimes. AOL constantly has rooms entitled "family fun," "Nudist families," "Incest is best," "Have hot stepdaughter," and so on. In these rooms, child pornography is exchanged, and incest is discussed and celebrated. Many of the photos that are exchanged are purportedly of people's own children. So, the myth that parents should be the sole entity that should protect children on-line, or anywhere else, is once again exploded. This committee also is concerned with children being enabled to access pornography on-line. Children accessing pornography is most serious when it is used by pedophiles to arouse their curiosity. Once they gain the child's attention, he or she is much more vulnerable to exploitation by a pedophile. The worst possibility is that pedophiles will use the childrens' curiosity and vulnerability to gain physical access to them so that they might sexually and/or physically abuse these children. It is extremely probable that a number of missing children have disappeared because of such contacts. In my investigation, many pedophiles, believing that I was a 12-year-old, attempted to woo me in this fashion. But, of even more dire (quantitative) consequence is the easy access adults now have to child pornography. The development and growth of the Internet and on-line service providers has enabled exploiters of children to distribute child pornography to the masses. Computers and modems have created an anonymous "Pedophile Superstore." The law of supply and demand is kicking in. The increased demand for child pornography directly translates into an increased number of sexually abused children. You cannot have child pornography without abused children. People, who may have never acted on such impulses before, are emboldened when they see that there are so many other individuals who have similar interests. What has recently taken place is nothing short of the de facto decriminalization of child pornography. As a result, countless innocents are being abused and having their lives destroyed. This is a full-scale emergency and if the well-being and safety of any group other than children were threatened, we would never hear the end of it. Nor, should we. Unfortunately, for the exact same reason that children are the victims of these crimes, children are not being heard. They are weak, economically powerless, and generally not taken seriously. What is needed right now is funding to create a task force of computer and legal experts to enforce Zero Tolerance for Child Pornography. As early as 1983, use of computer networking for pedophiles was being advocated in the North American Man Boy Love Association Journal. The pedophiles have a huge head start. People need to see their neighbors (who have participated in these criminal acts) taken away, jailed, and stigmatized as "perverts." If this is done in a public, no-nonsense manner, it should seriously reverse the crisis that is destroying countless innocent children. This crackdown must also include serious punitive measures against companies like AOL. The profit must be removed from "looking the other way." If AOL put a fraction of the effort into dealing with this problem that they put into spin doctoring their culpability, things would improve rapidly. Kids cannot hire lobbyists and publicists with the profits derived from their exploitation to influence you. It galls me to think that I have paid AOL more than enough money to pay for the appearance of their attorney here today. In the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's excellent report: "Child Molesters: A Behavioral Analysis," the gravity of trafficking child pornography is addressed when the author aptly summates, "Any individual, however, who collects or distributes child pornography actually perpetuates the sexual abuse or exploitation of the child portrayed. It is no different than the circulation of sexually explicit pictures taken by a rapist of his victim during the rape. Such collectors of child pornography are, in essence, child molesters." This report is a must-read for all interested in this problem and is an accurate checklist of the types of perpetrators I have encountered on AOL. I have met encounter many child pornography traffickers on AOL who were touting their first amendment right to possess and exchange whatever material they care to. These people are deluding themselves if they think child pornography is protected speech. It is not. It is crime evidence. Response to AOL's Corporate Alibis AOL has consistently claimed that most of th ese problems are occurring in private e-mails. And therefore they are helpless to do anything about it, without violating the rights of all members. The actual transfer of illegal materials takes place via e-mail, but the genesis of these transactions is easily traced to publicly accessible member rooms. Without these rooms, the perpetrators of these crimes would be unable to network with other faceless criminals. AOL maintains that it could never police the problem, but it would be simple and relatively inexpensive to have all member-created rooms cleared by properly trained staffers. Under AOL's present system, only easily fooled software stands between a pedophile and the creation of an egregious room. A slight misspelling and the most brazen of rooms is on-line and in business. AOL frequently claims that there are minimal problems on its service because all members are required to understand and conform to its Terms of Service (TOS). I doubt that these compli-cated rules are read or understood by members. Terms of Service contains strict guidelines for on-line conduct. For example, profanity, harassment, and the exchange of illegal files are all TOS violations. If AOL enforced these rules, their service would be a much safer and genuinely "family friendly" place. But since these rules are not enforced, AOL is an unsafe place for many people. AOL maintains that only a small percentage of its members are involved in illegal activities. This is probably true. However, it would be interesting to determine what percentage of its income is derived from such persons. It takes a lot of time to up and download Graphic Image Files (GIFs). This results in very high AOL bills for the traders of such files. Time and again, AOL has told me that as soon as they close one room, another opens. Exactly. Under the current system there is always somewhere for child pornography traffickers and pedophiles to go. This problem would be easily solved with the use of live staff members to approve or disap-prove of rooms. But this, of course, would mean there would no longer always be another egregious room opening. The expense of hiring a few more staffers would be a pittance to such a going concern (AOL added 500,000 customers between Christmas 1994 and early March of 1995). Additional staffing would be a minimal expense, unless AOL is including in its cost the loss of a "small percentage of customers" who just happen to have inordinately high monthly bills. America Online is a publicly owned business. There are stockholders to whom the management is accountable. If I were one of those stockholders, I would seriously question the vision and judgment of those currently in power. They are conducting business in a very questionable fashion. They have a thriving and dynamic company with unlimited potential to be a valuable asset to the American people. Unfortunately, their current business practices do not indicate that the company's future is necessarily rosy. The customer is not always right at AOL, as a matter of fact, the customer is generally ignored or dismissed with an impenetrable bureaucracy and treated as if they are impertinent and a petty bother in the process. Time constraints preclude me from including much of the printed documentation of my correspondence with AOL in this oral testimony. But I have made copies of some of the more telling exchanges for distribution to the committee and the press. In particular I ask that you review the 17 questions in Attachment C. that I sent to AOL's media relations director Pam McGraw and the woefully inadequate response I received from her (Attachment D.). Also, I have included a list of several dozen of the rooms about which I have complained to AOL. Their very titles provide a brief, yet shocking, illumination of the depravity that is publicly exhibited on a daily basis on AOL's member room scroll. I would also be happy to make this material available to other on-line services, including the new Microsoft Net, as a template of what not to do. In closing, I am here to tell the American people that not only are their children unsafe on AOL, their children are unsafe because of it.