An Iowa woman arrested this week is charged in connection with a worldwide crackdown on distributors of child pornography. Thirty-six-year-old Lisa Winebrenner of Osceola was arrested Tuesday and accused of hosting an Internet forum where people distributed images of children being molested. Tim Counts with ICE, the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, says their agents worked with local officers to round up more than two-dozen people in the U.S.
In this case he says investigators think they were distributing “child molestation on demand.” Instead of selling videotapes or e-mailing photos, the investigators charge people were committing acts of child molestation and streaming the video live to viewers as it happened. Patrons would request certain acts be performed, and “get it on demand,” what Counts describes as “pretty sick stuff.”
So far in the U.S. there’ve been thirteen defendants charged with possession, receipt, distribution, and manufacture of pornography, and antoher fourteen have been arrested in other countries including Canada, Australia and Great Britain. He says it was a widespread child-porn ring, and the investigators believe the Iowa woman was one of the major players.
The woman who went by the screen name “Humble Duchess,” whose actual name was Lisa Winebrenner, allegedly was an administrator for the Internet chat room in which actual live images of child molestation were being transmitted to members. The acts were performed by other people somewhere else, he says, and Winebrenner’s accused just of being host of the site that distributed those images.
According to the indictment, Winebrenner was administrator of the chat room, not manufacturing the pornography herself but making sure people in there were not law-enforcement officers. “Unfortunately for her, she was wrong,” Counts points out. She’s also charged with destroying computer files and evidence that would prove her involvement.
Customs laws frequently bring their agents into contact with child pornographers since the illegal material’s being transferred across state and international boundaries — and they think this was an international child-pornography ring.
One thing the investigators have been finding is an increase in so-called “homegrown” child pornography, that is, self-produced material. At one time, 85-percent of child porn on the Internet involved “known victims,” a few children whose images were circulated over and over again. But that’s starting to change.
Announcing the arrests yesterday at a news conference in Chicago, the nation’s attorney general Alberto Gonzales called the images “the worst imaginable forms of child pornography.” He said they’d identified seven children used in the child-porn ring, one of them a baby younger than a year-and-a-half old.