The case
When the special Child Pornography unit of the Swedish police knocked on the door of a suspect at dawn on 16 January 2001, he was already online. He confessed immediately, as did several others in coordinated raids across the country that same morning. Within hours, the largest internet-based child pornography ring uncovered in Sweden to that point was exposed.
Operation Save the Children, as the police called it, was built largely on information provided to the Save the Children Hotline.
How the ring operated
The 53 individuals involved had created a closed online community resembling a password-access private club. Members posted images and film clips into categorized archives, and used a chat room and message site as real-time bulletin boards where they met at pre-arranged times. They used only nicknames and anonymous email addresses.
A technical oversight by the group allowed an outside investigator to follow members' exchanges from the inside. It was described as being like a dinner-party conversation with an invisible onlooker able to see and hear everything.
How VisualRoute helped
VisualRoute was the program that helped trace the individual ISPs used by the members. Its ability to identify the geographical location of routers and servers provided highly valuable information for identifying the source of network intrusions and internet abusers.
Using VisualRoute, police were able to run traceroutes to the IP addresses of the suspected offenders, yielding the geographical location of each suspect and the internet networks being used. The whois information in VisualRoute provided contact information that further aided the investigation.
The outcome
Over a period of several weeks, network traffic between the group's members was logged and registered. Profiles of the group, its members, and their real identities began to clarify. The material gathered, including VisualRoute's tracking information, was delivered to the public prosecutor, who immediately authorized searches. In mid-January, raids were carried out simultaneously in seven different places.
Featured in Law and Order magazine, December 2002.