Thousands who dread a knock at the door

The clock is ticking down to the moment when Operation Ore also comes knocking at their door.

It could be months, or even years, before it is their turn to be caught in one of Britain’s biggest police operations, but eventually detectives will call to ask why their credit card details were given to the operator of a child pornography web site.

Of those who receive the visit from police, less than 5 per cent will have a previous criminal conviction, 99.9 per cent of the suspects will be men and the majority will work in professional, white-collar jobs.

Two senior Labour politicians, a famous television presenter and another rock star are understood to be on the list of those who may have accessed the "pay-per-view" website based in the US.

Among the 1,300 suspected paedophiles arrested so far in Operation Ore, 50 have been police officers, scores of teachers, doctors and care workers involved in the inquiry as well as members of the church and judiciary.

In the view of one leading campaigner against internet child pornography, the operation is transforming the entire criminal justice system in the United Kingdom. "The scale of the offending is shocking and this is all just from one internet site", said John Carr, of the Children’s Charities’ Coalition for Internet Safety.

"There are so many cases that we are in danger of the probation system, child protection and criminal justice system being overwhelmed."

Mr Carr added: "This huge number of offenders has profound implications for policy-makers. It is clear that this is not a small and isolated activity by a few social misfits.

"We have to change the way we think about this issue. Children need to know that it is not just the dirty old man in the raincoat at the school gates who poses a danger."

Operation Ore was launched in 2001 after police were notified by the US Postal Inspection Agency of the results of its own investigation into internet child pornography.

The agency had cracked a massive commercial pornography operation run by a Texas computer consultant, Thomas Reedy, which had 250,000 subscribers over three continents and was earning him about 1 million a month.

Reedy was jailed for 1,335 years in August 2001 but the work to unravel his business was only just beginning. Detectives found he had set up a sophisticated network of internet sites which had a "gateway" operated in Texas but were mainly based in Russia and Indonesia.

Internet users who arrived at the "Landslide" site were presented with a screen saying: "child porn click here". Those who entered the site were presented with 5,700 sites of child pornography, with titles including Cyber Lolita and Child Rape, and featuring indecent images of children as young as five.

The operation run by Reedy and his wife Janice, who was also jailed, attracted subscribers by persuading them that they could not be identified as using the site. However, US detectives on Operation Avalanche managed to crack a code which scrambled the credit card numbers of subscribers and were presented with the details of about 75,000 of Reedy’s customers worldwide.

A total of 7,200 subscribers were found to be based in the UK and their details were passed on to relevant police forces. Police in Scotland are known to be dealing with 700 cases.

The scale of the operation has alarmed forces across Britain and the Association of Chief Police Officers has called on the government to release emergency funds of 2 million to deal with the backlog of cases.

It was announced last month that the Home Office had agreed to allocate an extra 500,000 to support further action under the operation.

The money is to be used to provide extra training in computer forensics for officers across the country and to buy more equipment for analysing computers which have been seized.

The Home Office has instructed forces to prioritise the more serious cases, targeting those known to be working with children or in the criminal justice system.

Because of the possibility of credit card theft and cloning, discovery of a person’s details on Reedy’s list of customers is not sufficient for a prosecution. For each case in Operation Ore to go to court, detectives are required to find evidence on the suspect’s computer hard disc drive that they have accessed the child porn websites.

Before deciding to bring charges, officers also need to examine computer records to see if the pornographic images were stumbled across by accident or if the internet user deliberately sought out child pornography.

Ray Wyre, a criminologist and the UK’s leading expert on child sex crimes, said: "It is the hard drive that shows whether someone like Pete Townshend is lying. If the police don’t have the hard drive then they can’t prosecute."

Mr Wyre believes the massive publicity given to Operation Ore, and the slow progress made by detectives dealing with all the cases, could lead to hundreds of paedophiles escaping charges simply by destroying their computers.

"I would expect many of them will get rid of the evidence," he added. "It seems extraordinary that the police are alerting everyone who may be under investigation."

Many campaigners believe Operation Ore has exposed only part of the problem of child pornography on the internet and are urging legislation to clamp down on internet service providers that allow images of child abuse to pass into UK homes.

Some research suggests that up to two-thirds of internet users will access pornography at some stage and although only a small proportion of them will use credit cards to pay for child pornography, the distinction between legal and illegal sites is not always clear.

"Some of the most targeted pornographic sites on the internet are teenage sex sites, which feature women who are over 18 but are pretending to be schoolgirls,"Mr Wyre added.

"It is perfectly legal and there are thousands of people accessing these sites but no-one is doing anything about that."