But this is just one disturbing issue; U.S. law-enforcement agencies are buckling under the pressure of investigating and bringing to justice
all types
of internet crime-related offenses. Funding for police is not infinite, nor is manpower. The policing system is creaking, even falling apart, because a large part of these valuable resources is now being diverted to combat well-organized internet crime and lesser offenses sparked off by the easy access to the web for the criminally inclined.
Right across Europe and in many parts of Asia, we find a mirror of America’s law-enforcement problems, with most
countries now admitting almost total defeat in their efforts to curb internet-related crime or closing down sites displaying illegal material. The constant problem is that, as soon as a site is shut down, it reopens under a different domain name. As soon as a problem is located and stopped in one place, it re-emerges somewhere else—often in a more virulent strain—and the perpetrators do not even have to leave their desks to achieve it. In the absence of border controls—cyberspace is by its nature very difficult to police internationally—web-based criminality has become a cyber pandemic.
This is the dilemma now faced by the United States, the U.K. and other nations. It is a difficulty compounded in many countries by different interpretations and applications of civil and criminal law and, in the U.S., by jurisdictional complications in law enforcement and by civil liberty laws that differ from state to state.
Yet there have been remarkable successes by the multinational task forces set up to catch both those who set up and those who visit child sex sites, and these are down to following the money trails, nearly always by identifying credit-card transactions. But any legislation agreed between the United States and the U.K. can only apply to sites set up in these countries. And even this is set to be further undermined in the U.K. as it is due to cede to Brussels much of its own ability to make law and dispense justice, rendering Anglo-American plans to get tough on internet crime all but meaningless.
One major area of crime where the internet’s rapid spread has become a highly effective tool is the people-trafficking industry. According to BBC Channel Four′s docudrama
Sex Traffic
, over 50,000 women are sold into the U.S. sex-trafficking trade each year, and most of the complex logistics are handled
using the internet. Trafficking as a whole is growing to such an extent that experts estimate that anywhere from 700,000 to four million persons are now being traded annually throughout the world.
The “Brides for Sale” business and similar internet scams cost Western males in excess of £4 million a year, and on the subject of this trade George M. Nutwell III, Regional Security Officer in the U.S. State Department at the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, has written to the authors, “Ukraine has recently experienced a burgeoning crop of escort services and ‘marriage brokers’ plying their trade on the internet. Your readers are cautioned against falling into the new Ukrainian ‘Love Trap.’”
A single scam against an Englishman netted a Russian internet dating agency around $11,000—the staggering, if not obscene equivalent of 25 years’ wages for the average Russian citizen. By Western standards, this would be about $500,000. However, the flip side of the coin must not be ignored, for there are hundreds of web pages of advice on how to sensibly approach the task of finding a foreign bride on the internet. Many authorities say that if those seeking a wife are so dumb that they cannot find this advice, or choose to ignore it, they deserve all they get.
We are, as a global society, standing on the edge of the cyber abyss, and it is not a matter of if, but simply when, a crazed maniac DVDs a snuff murder and puts it on the web. In fact, this horrifying reality is already upon us, with obscene, yet professionally shot, footage having been sent down the pipe of the beheadings of Englishman Ken Bigley and U.S. citizens Daniel Pearl, Eugene Armstrong, Jack Kensley, Nicolas Berg and Paul Johnson, among others, as well as horrendous images of the decapitation and shooting dead of a group of Nepalese workers.
Best known among the crazed maniacs responsible for displaying such atrocities is Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who uses the internet as a powerful propaganda tool and a means to recruit followers.
Anyone who has viewed these terrifying images cannot fail to be sickened, yet accessing them via any search engine takes moments, and the authors have learned that scores of school children in their early teens have viewed them and boasted to their friends, who in turn have logged on to the sites.
However, the decision as to whether to ban these sites is left to the discretion of the ISPs (internet service providers) and, while a few have made them impossible to view, others make them viewable within seconds.
People being executed, victims of the most horrific homicides, train suicides and many more obscenities—all are readily available to those whose lives are apparently empty of compassion for their fellows, those with little else on their minds but human suffering, and whose minds are readily seeded with images of the worst depravities being committed in the world today.
This book is not just about the offenders who commit internet crime. It also focuses on the web industry, revealing the most shocking facts about who actually sponsors the hosting of porn and crime on the internet.
When you study the facts in these pages, the worldwide web will never seem the same again. For we turn the spotlight on the real pimps and you will learn that the internet as we know it today would implode if funds from the porn producers dried up.
So, while governments may attempt to outlaw and eradicate websites showing violence and hardcore pornography, ultimately it falls to the morality of the ISPs to decide what is
hosted and what is not, and it’s here that we find the biggest problem of all.
One of the world’s biggest internet companies, Digex, has Microsoft as its largest customer; its second largest customer is the sex industry. The internet industry will not admit to the pervasiveness of pornography on the internet because it profits enormously from pornography in all of its extreme forms.
As an exhibitor at an adult entertainment trade exhibition said, “The whole internet is being driven by the adult industry. If all this [products at an online prostitution industry trade show] were made illegal tomorrow, the internet would go back to being a bunch of scientists discussing geek stuff in email.”
It may require a Herculean effort, but an international code of conduct is needed to police the internet, with search engines being required to conform rigorously to the agreed standards. It is far easier to close down an international search engine than to nitpick away at individual sites—a time-consuming, costly and ultimately unrewarding exercise.
In truth, the authors are very mindful of the flip side of the coin: these undesirable sites would not exist if millions of visitors did not frequent them and graze on their contents. And because it’s a two-way street, these surfers must share responsibility for the sites’ existence.
The Internet Watch Foundation says that the world wants the web and so now we have to live with all of its consequences, like them or not. The genie is out of the bottle and flying about our heads wherever we are on the planet.
One of the few safeguards—and a feeble one it is—is that most pornographic sites contain warnings about their content and the decision as to whether or not to enter them is left to the individual.
The authors’ research for this book confirms that a large number of people have become addicted to various types of internet sites and that corresponding types of crime are rising rapidly as a consequence. It proves too that those who harbor thoughts and fantasies of committing such crimes find encouragement and support by logging on.
In the course of this investigation into the internet’s grip on the criminal world, and by extension on the lives of all of us, we enter many chilling true-crime nightmares.
Christopher Berry-Dee, 2006
Armin Meiwes: Internet Cannibal
“It was passable, but a little tough; it would have been better braised… and the wine, a Riesling, was not at all correct, too sweet, lacking body, next time, perhaps, a Pomeral.”
—ARMIN MEIWES ON EATING HIS VICTIM′S PENIS
“There are several hundred people with cannibalistic tendencies in Germany alone, and many thousands around the world. Cannibalism has always been around, but the internet reinforces the phenomenon. You can be in contact with the whole world and do this anonymously.”
—RUDOLF EGG, CRIMINOLOGIST
The internet has highlighted that there are at least one million people who harbor sexualized cannibalistic fantasies. Discussion forums and user groups exist for the exchange of pictures and stories of such fantasies. Users of these services fantasize
about eating, or being eaten, by members of their sexually preferred gender. This cannibalistic inclination, known as paraphilia, is one of the most extreme and popular sexual fetishes.
Today cannibals can shop on the internet for someone to consume. And, to judge from the following case, there is no shortage of websites to titillate people who are eager to be killed and eaten.
But one thing is sure: over the coming years there will be no shortage of people for flesh-eating killers to feed on. The cannibal cult followers themselves operate under disguised names or completely phony identities in the darkest crevices of cyberspace. People such as Laura, who pleads her bona fides in poor English. “Please don’t tell me I’m sick,” she writes. “It is just a fantasy, but the realism of it turns me on so much.” Or Robert, who cuts very much to the chase: “I already have a young, pretty, slightly plump married woman from Iowa offering herself to be eaten.”
Most of these people are doubtless fantasists, sexual deviants or plain old fruit bats, but their messages are nonetheless ice-cold chilling, because one of these modern-day would-be cannibals and his willing victim have now stepped out of cyberspace, evolving before our eyes from the virtual into the visceral.
It may be hard to digest, but it appears we live in a time of cannibals. The question is, how can such savagery exist in a supposedly sophisticated world?
When Armin Meiwes, a shy, fair-haired man who lived with his mother, went sailing with his army buddies, he would always make pasta. “He didn’t eat much himself,” remembered Heribert Brinkman, who organized the trips. Meiwes, it seemed, had an appetite for something different, but it was not until March 2001 that dinner was finally served to his satisfaction.
In the tiny central German village of Rotenburg, in the centuries-old farmhouse bequeathed to him by his mother, Meiwes often sat at the kitchen table and dined on steak with pepper sauce, potatoes, sprouts and a glass of red wine. It is not known what the wine was, but eventually the meat would be from a two- rather than a four-legged source.
While Mrs. Meiwes was alive, Armin was restrained. Her son was the apple of her eye, and she dominated his very core, so that his fantasies remained just that. Her death in 1999 released the sick side of his soul, which then found the nurture it needed on the internet. But Meiwes was apparently no serial killer. Unlike the American Jeffrey Dahmer, who killed 17 men and ate parts of them, or Andrei Chikatilo, who murdered and gorged on as many as 50 men and women in Russia, Meiwes was in search of not so much a victim as a collaborator, a fellow chef who would provide the principal ingredient.
And into that role stepped 43-year-old Bernd-Jurgen Brandes.
This computer software designer from Berlin had a predilection that was not to everyone’s taste: he paid male prostitutes to whip him until he bled. Now, on Sunday, March 11, 2001, he relaxed in the large, comfortable chair offered to him by Meiwes and sipped from a tumbler of cognac. A contented half-smile played across his host’s lips, for this was the moment Armin had been waiting for. He had prepared meticulously for what was now, finally, starting to unfold.
Brandes had written his will and had it notarized. The bulk of his estate, including a sprawling, luxury penthouse apartment, along with a small fortune in computer equipment, had been bequeathed to Rene, his blithely unaware male partner. And he had sold most of his belongings, including an expensive
sports car. He wouldn’t be requiring these material trappings where he was going.
His wish was to be butchered, cooked and eaten.
Something else Rene could not have suspected was that, when Bernd had informed his bosses at Siemens that he was taking the Friday off “to attend to some personal matters” he would not be coming back.
With several thousand dollars in cash and his passport tucked inside his jacket, Bernd traveled 185 miles from Berlin to the farmhouse near Kassel where he now sat with his drink. His pulse raced, while the warm cognac slowly dulled his senses. He smiled contentedly, knowing he had been very methodical indeed.
Armin Meiwes, the gentleman whom he had first met through the internet some months before and who now stood beaming broadly in front of him, had been methodical too. Calling himself “Frankie,” he had patiently posted more than 80 notices on a gay internet chat room with cannibalism as its central theme, waiting calmly for just the right individual to reply. When Bernd, who styled himself “Cator,” finally answered, both men quickly realized that their mutual fantasy would become something much more. After all, it is without question that both parties knew what the other wanted, and this was confirmed in a video recording that captured every sickening moment.
Meiwes had been fishing—trawling might be a more apt term—and on cannibal fetish websites he had encountered a handful of willing participants who took the bait, swam into the net by visiting his home to admire his newly constructed cage and slaughter room, then allowed him to draw lines on their bodies to illustrate the choicest cuts and even let themselves be suspended upside down by a chain and pulley.