They caught the Son of God red-handed, in his pyjamas, while presiding over the most heinous online paedophile ring the police have yet uncovered. In his final moments of freedom, Timothy David Martyn Cox would have felt untouchable. Obsessed with being caught, Cox, 27, had only to press a button and his chat-room of child abusers would vanish without trace. Then, one morning last September, armed police burst through his bedroom window. As Cox spun round, officers forced him to the floor of his parents’ farmhouse in rural Suffolk. The largest international investigation of its kind had snared its precocious ringleader. Those tasked with examining the evidence inside his computer would soon require counselling. Tired of trading in pictures of abuse, Cox had created a worldwide nexus of actual abusers. Babies as young as two months were raped live via webcam before a global audience.It was the first time British police had managed to break into a peer-to-peer paedophile chat-room. Finally they had infiltrated the murkiest environs of the web, in many ways the darkest corner of society itself. But how many more chat-rooms like Cox’s exist? Hundreds, police warn, are operating that have yet to be tracked down. Detectives believe that the proliferation of child abuse sites has created more paedophiles than they would otherwise expect. The popularity of Cox’s site confirms the demand. In the three months that officers monitored his network, hundreds of new members joined. With an internet that is forever evolving, its secrets increasingly harder to unearth, keeping abreast of the mutating tactics of online paedophiles presents a daunting challenge. Demand for images of abuse through file-sharing technology is growing so fast that investigators are embroiled in a continual, desperate hunt to track down victims.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,,2163408,00.html