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In the spring of 1999, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) complained to the US Postal Service (which polices the Internet in the US) that Landslide's Keyz service was providing access to child porn sites.

NCMEC's complaints were accurate and in May 1999 Dallas Detective Steven Nelson began a covert investigation. During the summer, he bought 12 subscriptions in a false name. After getting his passwords, he hooked his computer up to a simple spider program called Web Buddy. He filled his drive with the contents of each site, at least to the extent that the links worked. Then, with the assistance of Postal Inspector Michael Mead, Nelson prepared to raid Landslide. This was Operation Avalanche.

On 8 September 1999, the Feds hit Landslide's offices at Seaman Street, Fort Worth. They seized two Sun computers and everything digital in sight. Initially released on bail and bullish, the Reedys protested their innocence and carried on trading in adult porn. They hadn't been supplying child images themselves, they said, but had only provided a portal to other sites. The actual suppliers - the child porn webmasters - were beyond the reach of the USPIS, in south east Asia, Russia or its republics. When Landslide closed, they took their sick trade elsewhere. They were never apprehended, whereas the Reedys were convicted of 89 offences of possession and distribution of images of children. Eight months later, a Texas court sentenced Reedy to 1,335 years of imprisonment - 15 years consecutive imprisonment for each image and video that Nelson had grabbed with his Web Buddy software (although the sentence

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was later reduced to 180 years).

A matter of record

On examining the Landslide computers, the USPIS found that Landslide had kept a record of hundreds of thousands of transactions in its databases. There were also gateway links to 5,700 websites around the world. Of the 390,000 subscription transactions, 35,000 related to the US itself. The rest were spread around the world, including 26,462 transactions with 7,272 individuals in the UK. Landslide only operated one SQL database, so subscribers to the adult verification service were lumped in with those who had paid for or requested Keyz sites, of whatever kind.

With Reedy incarcerated, the US cops set about sharing the data they had found. The names of subscribers to every site were sorted by country and sent out through Interpol. Each package contained details about Landslide that suggested that all those identified were to be treated as suspect child abusers.

The US government approached its citizens differently from Britain. Instead of branding every name on the list as a paedophile, officials carefully profiled and investigated selected individuals against whom there was fresh evidence of making indecent images of children or of actual abuse. In respect of the 35,000 US records, only 144 houses were searched and 100 people charged with the trafficking of child pornography through the mail and via the Internet.

When the USPIS packets reached Britain, the National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS) launched Operation Ore, a large, costly, high-profile police operation and Britain's biggest ever computer crime case. Fraud, even murder cases, had sometimes to take second place to the tide of potential child porn filth to be checked.

Except, all too often, it wasn't. After days or weeks of imaging hard disks, enduring home videos, and scrolling through recovered images and fragments, there might be nothing. Or, after all that work, they might find images of a few girls in a porn trove of thousands of pictures, whom a court might think under rather than over 16. Perhaps some deleted thumbnails of actual children that had been delivered, unknown to the user, as pop-ups from a malicious page they chanced to visit.