Page 16 - Dallas Vol 5 No 2

PATRICK J. MCLAIN | Criminal Defense
Warning: the FBI Is Getting Aggressive in Creating Crimes
Counsel your clients, as in all criminal investigations, when confronted
by law enforcement with accusations, be courteous, be careful, and be silent.
As a criminal defense attorney in fed- eral and Texas state courts, I have dealt with numerous cases of alle- gations known as “crimes against children,” primarily have to do with the online con- duct of citizens that run afoul of the law. e Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and other federal law enforcement agencies getting aggressive in these cases. e FBI is setting up child porn websites, trading child pornography online through “peer to peer” applications, and posing online as parents who are o ering their children for sex.
ere is a lot of research on the e ects of pornography viewing. A 2011 study of the 400 million web searches between July 2009 and July 2010 revealed that:
• 13% of all the searches were for erotic
ing by a “hidden service” via the application Tor. It was only a er the Playpen site owner revealed his IP address in communications on line that enabled the FBI to track down the page, its owner, and its users.
Today, multiple federal agencies; the Fed- eral Bureau of Investigation, the Immigra- tions and Customs Enforcement Agency, the U.S. Secret Service, and others are now pro-actively and aggressively to nd, entice, and investigate persons they believe are try- ing to entice children, and their guardians, into illicit sexual activity. Such online chat- ting and pornography viewing have all sorts of detrimental e ects identi ed in the social sciences research and discussed by those, such as clergy or counsellors, who care for moral or spiritual welfare of all of us. But one clear danger, the danger of criminal prosecution, jail, and lifetime registration as a sex o ender, is the ever-present likelihood that your clients’ porn viewing will bring them in contact with child pornography of- fered up by federal agents in an e ort to have your client agree to commit a crime against a child.
Counsel your clients, as in all criminal investigations, when confronted by law en- forcement with accusations, be courteous, be careful, and be silent. Make no state- ments whatsoever to those agents and hire the best legal counsel you can nd to protect you against these drastic legal consequences. e time to have this conversation with your clients is before they ever have to exercise this advice, and hopefully before their on- line sur ng gets them into this situation.
PATRICK J. MCLAIN, A RETIRED MARINE CORPS MILITARY JUDGE, HAS BEEN IN THE PRACTICE OF CRIMINAL AND MILI- TARY LAW SINCE 1990. HIS FIRST JURY TRIALS WERE IN THE DESERTS OF SAUDI ARABIA. HE ENDED HIS GOVERNMENT SERVICE AS A FEDERAL PROSECUTOR IN DALLAS, SERV- ING IN THE COMPUTER CRIME AND GENERAL CRIMES SEC- TIONS. PATRICK MCLAIN REPRESENTS CLIENTS IN STATE CRIMINAL MATTERS IN TEXAS, FEDERAL CRIMINAL MAT- TERS THROUGHOUT THE UNITED STATES, AND HE HAS A WORLDWIDE MILITARY LAW PRACTICE. FOR A LISTING OF HIS AWARDS AND RECOGNITION IN GOVERNMENT AND PRI- VATE PRACTICE, AND HIS ACCOMPLISHMENTS, GO TO WWW. PATRICKJMCLAIN.COM.
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content.
e top search term for those searches was “youth.”
Sites that cater to these searches use terms like “barely legal” and “18.”
And a lot of those sites contain images of,
or links to websites that provide, child por- nography.
Playpen was a “darknet” child pornogra- phy website created in August 2014. When the FBI shut down in February 2015, the site had over 215,000 users and hosted 23,000 sexually explicit images and videos of chil- dren as young as toddlers. In its shutdown of that site, operation Paci er, the FBI took it over and continued to serve child pornog- raphy content for two weeks. e FBI used a malware-based network investigative tech- nique to hack into the web browsers of users accessing the site, discovering information that eventually revealed the users’ identities. Operation Paci er led to the arrest of about 900 alleged users of this site.
e FBI stated that it had knowledge about the existence of the website from its beginning, but the FBI was unable to track down the server locations or the site owner. e FBI blamed this issue on Playpen’s host-
ATTORNEY AT LAW MAGAZINE · DALLAS· VOL. 5 NO. 2 16