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Perverted-Justice

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File:Perverted Justice screenshot-5-18-2005.jpg
Screenshot of the Perverted Justice website

Perverted-Justice.com, which also calls itself PeeJ, is a Web site based in Portland, Oregon that publicizes the identities of adults who use Internet chat rooms to solicit minors for sex. The site has around 40 trained adult volunteers who enter chat rooms and pretend to be minors. If an adult wants to meet the "minor" for sex and provides identifying information, the volunteer offers that information to law enforcement, or, failing that, to perverted-justice.com for posting on that site. (The information is also posted at the end of any law enforcement action against the adult, such as a conviction.) Such information often includes the "stung" adult's full name, telephone number, city of residence, and photographic likeness, as well as the transcript of any chats between him and the "minor."

Set up in 2002 by an Oregon man, Phillip John Eide, who uses the pseudonym Xavier Von Erck, the site documents that its online operations have led to the exposure of over 764 people and the convictions of 43 as of January 22, 2006. Eide is also credited with locating a 14-year-old girl who was kidnapped, raped, and tortured by a 47-year-old man she met online.

The site and its operators' methods have been criticized by the U.S. National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), among others. Tina Schwartz, NCMEC director of communication, has said: "It's really not the safest, most effective way to combat this problem ... From what I've seen ... they embarrass the people, but I don't know that complete justice is ever served," (Roanoke Times, 22 January 2005). On the other side, the site has has been publicly thanked by Port Huron police chief William J. Corbett .

Eide, who said he got the idea for the website while watching men attempt to groom young girls in chat rooms in Oregon, says that behind the site is a computer watchdog agency that works closely with law-enforcement agencies. "The media likes to use the term 'vigilante' because it gets attention, but we don't consider ourselves vigilantes. We cultivate cooperation with police and work within the law to get justice, not outside of the law."

Methods

Perverted-justice.com functions by supporting volunteers who act as bait in chat rooms where children and minors can typically be found. The volunteers' public profiles generally have young-sounding usernames and young-looking pictures. The administrators of the site say they don't initiate online contact with the men they pursue, and also refuse to act on tips from Internet users in order to reduce the risk that someone might use the website to take revenge. The administrators also say that their volunteers do not look for targets in adult chatrooms.

File:VonErck.jpg
Phillip John Eide, also known as Xavier Von Erck, owner of Perverted-Justice.com

If a man starts chatting to the volunteer and turns the conversation to sex, the volunteer attempts to persuade the man to divulge personal details, particularly a telephone number, ostensibly needed to verify the man's identity so that a meeting can be arranged.

In the past, around this point the chatlog and details would be published on the site. However, in December 2003, the organization set up its Information First program, in which interested police departments could contact perverted-justice.com, and any "busts" made within that department's jurisdiction would be sent straight to them without being posted to the website. In the beginning of this program, perverted-justice.com would not contact the police first, as officers were skeptical that its information could be used in a court of law.

However, ever since July 2004 when they made their first conviction, the site's operators switched to a policy of cold calling local police with the information they obtained. If a government agency is interested (police, FBI, military CID, etc) then the chatlog and other information is not posted to the site until after a conviction has been reached.

Under both their Information First program and their cold-calling policy, only if the agency is not interested at all does a log appear on the site, on the grounds that, if the government is not interested in pursuing action, then family members and neighbors should be informed. (Logs are also posted after the person has been convicted in a court of law.)

In such cases, using the telephone number, the site's volunteers do a reverse-directory check to obtain the man's name, as well as checking on the Web for any other information they can find about him. They then post his name, address, and photograph if he has supplied one, on the website, as well as the chat log: a record of the conversation he had with the volunteer. In a process called "Follow-up," additional volunteers on the site's forums, operating under rules and restrictions set up by Perverted-justice.com administrators, subsequently contact the man's family, friends, neighbors, and employer to alert them to the website posting. The intent is to warn effected parties about the man's activities and hopefully persuade them to help the man receive counseling. The volunteers in these "Follow-up Forums" number in the thousands.

Volunteers also take part in what the site's operators call "media busts," where men are invited to a house with the promise of a sexual encounter with a minor. When the man arrives, he is greeted by a television news reporter. The site teamed up with Dateline NBC in New York in November 2004 to conduct a large sting operation, or "group media bust," in which Dateline rented a house and wired it with hidden cameras, while volunteers posed as minors in chat rooms, telling men who approached them that they were home alone. "Within hours there were men literally lining up at our door," Dateline reported. In two-and-a-half days, 18 men showed up at the house after making a date with a perverted-justice.com volunteer.

On November 4, 2005, Dateline aired another special which featured the site's volunteers catching child predators. Among the men who responded: an ER doctor, a special education teacher and a rabbi.

A third special was aired on February 3, 2006; in this case, Riverside County, California, sheriff's deputies were contacted ahead of time, and waited outside the house to arrest the men as they left. Fifty such men were arrested over the course of three days near the bait house, located in Mira Loma, California, with 49 of them arrested for felonies. Two men were detained and released pending investigation. Eide says that this was the first group media bust with the full involvement of law enforcement. Also in February 2006, Perverted-justice.com conducted another operation in cooperation with law enforcement, this time in Laguna Beach, California, netting 13 men with criminal charges.

The site offers men who have been exposed the right of reply, allowing them either to defend or apologize for their actions, and posting their responses. The site's operators also occasionally remove information from the site if the target shows, for example, that he is receiving counseling.

All telephone numbers are removed from the site's main pages after two months (though still available on the site's forums), to avoid another case like that of the Milwaukee bank teller, reported by the Associated Press, who received a threatening phone call from a man who had obtained her number from the Web site. The woman had never been online or even owned a computer, and was forced to change her number, which had previously been registered to the subject of a perverted-justice.com sting.

Currently, the site only operates within the United States but plans to expand into Canada.

Convictions

The Web site documents 48 convictions attributed to its sting operations, with 33 of these taking place in 2005. These have led to successful prosecutions in Arkansas, four in California, Colorado, two in Connecticut, Idaho, Illinois, Kansas, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, Nevada, three in New York, two in Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, two in Texas, four in Washington, and two in Wisconsin. Convictions have included disorderly conduct, indecently soliciting a child, attempting to entice a juvenile to travel with intent to engage in sexual act, transporting child pornography, which traveled across state lines via computer and hence are under interstate commerce juristiction, and possession and dissemination of child pornography.

The site has relationships with police agencies around the U.S. and with the military police, who have proceeded with courts-martial on the basis of chat logs.

The site's organizers established their "Information First" police program in December 2003, in which police departments make arrangements to have the chat logs handed to them for follow up before being posted on the perverted-justice.com Web site, in order to safeguard potential prosecutions. The organization has also worked in conjunction with the ChildSeek Network, Counter Pedophilia Investigative Unit, and PoliceWorld.net.

In September 2004, Eide helped locate a 14-year-old girl from Camas, Washington, who had been missing from her foster home for almost two weeks. Local detectives were unable to follow leads on the girl's computer, citing lack of knowledge and resources. The girl's mother believed the computer might hold the key to the girl's location and contacted Eide, who noticed that the girl had logged in several times to her Yahoo! account, only to log out again. Eide was able to obtain the IP address of the computer the girl had logged in from; using this, the Internet Service Provider located the address. When police arrived at the house, they found the girl half-naked and lying in the fetal position, with her hair cut and dyed, in a darkened room containing a video camera and restraining devices. She had met her 47-year-old kidnapper, who was raping her when the police knocked on the door, in a chat room. He was subsequently charged with child rape and unlawful imprisonment.

Criticism

Scott Morrow of Corrupted-Justice.com, a Web site set up to challenge perverted-justice.com, told ABC News there is currently no way to hold Eide or any other administrators, operators, or volunteers at perverted-justice.com accountable for mistakes. "When you're running an organization or running a group of people with the potential to do as much damage to people's lives as this does, I think there also has to be some accountability." Accountability could take the form of legal action against the site or its operators. However, the only known instance of legal action against perverted-justice.com was an application for a restraining order, issuing out of a complaint of harassment, against two volunteers in Minnesota. The judge found the suit entirely without merit for reasons of jurisdictional issues, the matter of unenforceability, and because there was "no reasonable grounds" to believe harassment by Perverted-Justice.com volunteers took place.

Lee Tien, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is quoted as being concerned that Eide's organization could send real predators into hiding . The site's operators respond that this is in fact their goal, to have real predators hide away from the places that children go; they liken the site to putting up a Community Watch sign at a local playground, which could be argued to discourage predators from kidnapping children there. Tien also argued that chat transcripts can be easily doctored. In order to bolster credibility, the organization has implemented a number of safeguards to prevent this from happening, including routing all chats through an encrypted proxy server that mirrors the data. This system has held up in court.

Some law-enforcement agencies have also stated that, while they appreciate the site's mission, they do not agree with some of the operators' and volunteers' practices. In a December 2004 article in the New York Sun, Bradley Russ, the training director for the federal Internet Crimes Against Children Taskforce, which employs about 200 federal agents nationwide, said the tactics of perverted-justice.com sometimes run counter to the task force's standards. For instance, Russ said, by accepting child pornography from their "busts" to bolster a potential legal case, the volunteers are themselves in possession of unlawful images. He said federal authorities have begun considering whether to seize "PeeJ" contributors' computers. "It's a noble effort gone too far," Russ told the newspaper. He also said the site's tactics can make it more difficult for law enforcement to prosecute cases they present because those cases can be considered tainted by entrapment claims.

Eide replies that, "No officer we've worked with has bashed us. No officer who has made an arrest hand-in-hand with Perverted-Justice.com has raised a voice against us." Furthermore, they consider their methods to be far from entrapment, arguing that they initiate nothing, and instead wait for their target to come to them, a claim which has been agreed on by several courts. No case brought to court so far has had any complications with regards to entrapment claims.

As to the reports on child pornography, the site's operators state that when they or their volunteers are sent child pornography, they "immediately report it to the police and without fail." Furthermore, every time this has happened has resulted in a conviction against the one sending the pornography, not against perverted-justice.com, the operators say.

Morrow has also criticized perverted-justice.com as not respecting the legal presumption that all people are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, characterizing their tactics as "vigilantism" and "terrorization".

References

Further reading

Web sites

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