Tony Zirkle for Congress

Visitor #46522

Child Pornography

After the successful "Blue Orchid" operation that shut down one Russian-U.S. child porn ring in 2001, the U.S. Customs Office gave a press conference where they stated that we now have about 100,000 Web sites linked in some way to child pornography.

As a prosecutor, I attended a week-long seminar on cyber stalking crime and the sexual exploitation of children on the internet. When we conducted chat room investigations, I posed as a 15-year old from Penn High. It took only minutes before two guys were trying to meet me. We have never made life so easy for pedophiles.

I had never seen child porn in my life, and I still thought it was somewhat rare, until one day when a lady walked into my prosecutor's office and told me that she was suicidal because her husband was downloading it and showing it to her kids. I immediately obtained a search warrant from a judge, and to my surprise, I learned that this material is all over the internet with virtually every .com permutation of names for children. I also learned that filters will never work. "Boys" is often spelled "boyz" and with 5,000 plus languages, no filter can effectively stop it.

Therefore, I am proposing a cost-effective solution that will work. We have thousands of police officers and prosecutors working second jobs checking ids at bars and waiting on tables. Let us give them something more to do that is more in line with their training. I will introduce legislation that will create thousands of "private attorney generals" across this nation. They will investigate, subpoena and civilly forfeit the proceeds and assets of the child porn industry on their own time, and when they are successful, they can keep 1/3 of the proceeds for their time and efforts. As an additional incentive, I will propose that their student loans be placed in deferment and that proceeds can be used to pay down their principle balances. No one should be able to market child exploitation and profit from that activity.