DAYTON, Ohio (AP) — Reports of online child pornography to Ohio law enforcement agencies have increased dramatically in recent years, raising concerns that there aren’t enough resources to combat the problem, a Dayton Daily News investigation found.
Efforts to stem this tide have led to arrests of prominent local men including Greg Ramey, former child psychologist at Dayton Children’s Hospital, and former Oakwood police chief Alex Bebris.
Other local men charged in the past year include four arrested more than once. One has been convicted three times. A Warren County man went to prison in November for possession of “probably the most horrifying child pornography that we’ve ever seen,” the county prosecutor said.
The Dayton Daily News investigated how officials are protecting children from becoming victims. The newspaper found:
— Experts say online materials depicting the sexual abuse of children are increasing in both quantity and extremity. Reports of online child exploitation to the Ohio Internet Crimes Against Children task force have increased from 649 in 2009 to 7,496 last year.
— As reports increased, national arrest numbers have stayed relatively flat. Some lawmakers say the agencies on the front lines need more resources.
— Defense attorneys for the accused — including both Bebris and Ramey — claim investigative methods violated their clients’ rights.
— Experts say offenders found using child pornography can be helped with treatment, though repeat offenders highlight how stubborn the pathology can be.
Last year, there were more than 16.9 million reports to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s cyber tipline; this included 69.1 million images, videos and other files related to child sexual exploitation. Most reports were traced to activity overseas, but about 180,000 of them were from the United States.
“There are more cases than law enforcement can potentially work,” said John Shehan, vice president of the agency’s division of exploited children.
Most reports came from electronic service providers required by federal law to report such images they become aware of on their systems. Facebook alone made 15.9 million reports last year.
These reports are disseminated to law enforcement agencies such as Internet Crimes Against Children task forces across the country. These task forces were involved in Bebris and Ramey’s cases, among others locally.
Ohio’s ICAC task force is based at the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office. It partners with federal and local law enforcement across the state.
Carl Sullivan, director of prosecution for Ohio ICAC, said he thinks tips are increasing because the technology used to find the material is improving. “I don’t think it’s going to slow down any time soon,” he said.
Sullivan said they have noticed a trend of more people progressing from downloading and sharing files on peer-to-peer sites to using messaging apps to contact children and solicit images from them or try to meet them.“Now we get a lot of the chat conversations — a lot of ‘travelers,’ we call them,” he said.
An Ohio ICAC sting in the Cleveland area last year resulted in the arrest of 28 people.
Defense attorneys for Bebris are challenging ICAC’s methods as unconstitutional. Ramey’s attorney is also questioning whether the investigation amounts to an invasion of privacy.
“That could be one of the questions we’ll be asking ourselves and asking the courts to look into: what relationship these various task forces have with email providers to obtain private information from people’s personal emails. These are questions that might come up in this case,” said Ramey attorney Jon Paul Rion.
Rion said a 2018 U.S. Supreme Court ruling requiring police to get a search warrant from a cellphone company before accessing location information might have ramifications for how law enforcement gets information from email providers.
“When the Supreme Court indicates that your location given by your phone is private information that the government cannot request from third parties without a warrant, we would submit that one’s content of one’s own email may be subject to more of an expectation of privacy than your location in a public place,” he said.
Sullivan, with Ohio ICAC, said courts have consistently held that once you transmit something from your computer, you no longer have an expectation of privacy.
Rion has also argued that the images in Ramey’s case are not pornographic, and Ramey didn’t create them or share them with anyone else. The 145-count indictment against Ramey alleges he possessed images of minors “in a state of nudity” and “obscene material” involving minors.
An indictment is an accusation that prosecutors must prove in court before someone is considered guilty.
Bebris moved to Wisconsin in 2017 after stepping down as police chief in Oakwood. Court records say Facebook in September 2018 reported to the cyber tipline that one of its users had sent child-porn images using its messenger system.
The tips were passed to the Wisconsin ICAC, which tracked the IP address to Bebris’ home in Neenah, Wisconsin. Bebris is now facing federal charges of possession and distribution of child pornography.
Bebris’ attorneys argue that Facebook was acting as an agent of the government in monitoring his messages and reporting their content, therefore law enforcement violated his constitutional rights against unlawful search and seizure.
“Given the widespread perception that data on Facebook remains private and Facebook’s messages to its users that the user’s privacy is highly valued, it is unreasonable to expect individuals to know that the contents of their private messages on Facebook are not truly private, but rather that Facebook is continuously searching and analyzing the data and sending certain data on to the government,” wrote attorney Jason Luczak in a Feb. 3 filing.
Attorneys for Facebook and federal prosecutors are arguing that Facebook’s actions were not on behalf of the government but done because it has a business interest in keeping illegal content of its platform, and posting or sharing such material violates its terms of service.
Facebook, along with other companies, uses a program called PhotoDNA to trawl its platform for inappropriate images and videos. The software creates a unique digital signature of every picture, then compares it to the digital signatures of pictures in a database of previously identified illegal images.
If the program flags a photo, it is viewed by a Facebook employee who can then make a report to the cyber tipline if necessary.
“(It’s done) in the same way companies are scanning to make sure someone doesn’t have malware of viruses,” Shehan said. “Child sex abuse material is illegal. It’s even worse than a malware or a virus.”
A report released last year by several groups including Google and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children argues that the “exponential” proliferation of online child pornography has reached a “breaking point.”
It calls for the adoption of more advanced technology to move away from using fingerprint-based detection systems and manually reviewing photos to more sophisticated programs that can analyze photos and videos for likely illegal activity.
“Absent new protections, society will be unable to adequately protect victims of child sexual abuse,” the report concludes.
In addition to updated methods, some are pushing for these efforts to get more funding. A U.S. House of Representatives Appropriations subcommittee is considering providing $105 million to NCMEC. Cleveland-area congressman Anthony Gonzalez testified before the committee last week.
“While law enforcement agencies have expressed concerns about being understaffed and underfunded, evolving technologies have provided new tools to shield predators such as encryption techniques and anonymous platforms like the dark web,” said U.S. Rep. Gonzalez, R-Rocky River.
There were 9,649 arrests made by the 61 ICAC task forces across the country last year. That number is an increase from the 9,100 the previous year, but down from 10,378 in 2017.
Ohio ICAC gets about $500,000 a year from the federal government, matched by local funds. Ohio lawmakers last year budgeted another $1 million to support the task force over the next two years.
“I’m eager to see what we’re able to do with it,” Sullivan said of the increased funds. “We’re hoping we can start keeping up with everything and get our arrests numbers higher and our indictments.”
Meanwhile, recent criminal cases against local men have shocked people who have spent decades adjudicating such cases.
Three Warren County men were indicted the same day in May 2019 in unrelated cases, one of which included what county Prosecutor David Fornshell called the “single worst video that we’ve ever had in this office.”
The cases involved evidence discovered in two days in January 2019 with help from ICAC task forces.
Fornshell said Dalton Moorhead had a video of a 12- to 18-month-old girl “being bound, beaten, raped and tortured. It’s horrific.”
Moorhead’s attorney said his client was a victim of child abuse, and struggled with the impulses that resulted in his crimes. He was sentenced to three years in prison.
Just the year before, another man was sentenced to life in prison plus 10 years for producing pornographic images of himself abusing an infant and a toddler.
“Your depraved and evil actions against the minors … is the worst that I have seen in my 27 years on the bench,” U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Rose said, later adding, “I cannot fathom your release back into society. I could not rest a moment if I knew you at some point would be free to go back into the community and re-offend.”
Ronald DeLong, a local specialist in treating sex offenders, said child-pornography offenses involve a broad range of classifications.
“It can start off with regular porn, it can progress over a period of time. As the material doesn’t excite them as much, they can blur lines for a while toward things more deviant or more taboo,” he said. “When you start crossing boundaries to illegality, there are pathologies involved in that.”
He said the addiction can be a substitute for other things missing in the user’s life. And pornography is more available and normalized now than ever before.
Many offenders never cross the line to hurting children, he said, and can be helped with mental health treatment and help understanding that their actions create a demand that is filled at the expense of innocent children.
If someone does cross the line to producing or profiting off the images, however, “now you’re dealing with a very high-risk person.”
Brendan Eardly of Troy is scheduled for a sentencing hearing this week for the third time on charges related to sexual material involving minors.
Eardly pleaded guilty in November to federal charges that he enticed at least seven boys to create child pornography. He also pleaded guilty to committing the crime as a registered sex offender. He faces at least 25 years in prison.
Eardly was a registered sex offender because in 2004 he pleaded guilty in Miami County Common Pleas Court to pandering sexually oriented materials involving a minor. He was sentenced to seven years in prison.
Eardly was previously sentenced to 18 months in prison for a 1998 case when he was convicted of felony charges of disseminating materials harmful to juveniles, according to Miami County court records.
Dayton Daily News coverage of Eardly’s 2004 sentencing quoted his defense attorney Robert Huffman Jr. saying, “Mr. Eardly has fought this demon for many years.”
Eardly wept and asked the judge for probation and treatment instead of prison. “I’ve been there, and there’s no help there for me,” he said. “I tried to stop and ask for help, but it was too late.”
Last month, Tyler Ulm was sentenced to 60 years in prison for producing child pornography and sexually abusing children ages 2 and 3. The 25-year-old committed the crimes while registered as a sex offender because of a juvenile conviction.
Christopher Hall, 20, was sentenced to community control and treatment in Greene County Common Pleas Court last month in connection with charges related to child pornography. Hall was previously charged with a similar offense as a juvenile, according to news reports.
Carl Geisel, 50, was sentenced to 8 years in prison last year after he was convicted of looking at child pornography at work. He was convicted of the same crime in 2007 and spent two years in prison.“
Some may think of viewing child sexual abuse materials as a victimless crime,” said Shehan with the National Center for Exploited and Missing Children.
But this couldn’t be farther from the truth, he said. Children were abused to create those images for the viewer, and as those pictures stay online and are circulated time and again, the damage is repeated for a lifetime.
“Every time those images are redistributed online,” he said, “there is a child who is likely an adult who is suffering because people are seeing that.”
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