The National Strategy for Child Exploitation Prevention and Interdiction

• The offender communicates with other offenders in online communities about his sexualinterest in children.The presence of any of these factors should alert law enforcement officers to the possibility thatan offender, particularly one with ready access to children, could be a contact offender. Lawenforcement, however, cannot summarily dismiss as a priority target an offender who appearsonly to be possessing images. In many instances, when law enforcement officers execute searchwarrants for a computer and premises of an offender who appears only to be possessing images,evidence of molestation is uncovered. 49An offender who purchases child pornography from a commercial web site, however, is notnecessarily high-risk and may even be an entry-level offender. Paying for child pornography hasnot been shown to be an indicator of risk, and offenders buy child pornography for a variety ofreasons. The fact that an offender resorts to paying for images may or may not signal a relativelack of sophistication. In addition, while some commercial sites have freshly produced sex abuseimages, many simply recycle old images that are otherwise available elsewhere on the Internet.By contrast, some private trading groups 50 have more extreme and new material and membershipin some of these groups is strictly vetted by the offenders operating the groups. Individuals mustactively seek these groups to gain access, create usernames and passwords to gain entry, andoften dedicate significant amounts of time to a particular group to maintain membership.Similarly, an offender using pure P2P technology may signal less of a risk than an offender usinga technology that combines P2P file sharing with the ability to interact with like-mindedoffenders. This is because pure P2P technology only requires a blind search of the network forimages and videos using a search term; it does not require much personal investment or anypersonal contact to acquire images. Of course, these observations are not universal and thosewho trade on basic peer-to-peer can pose the same risk to a child as an offender using anencrypted message board to trade images. Similarly, an offender who does not use encryption orother evasive technologies can always pose the same or greater risk to a child than one who does.49See Appendix A, Operation Joint Hammer.50 See Appendix A, Operation Achilles.28