Report: Pentagon Declined to Probe Hundreds of Child Porn Purchases

Report: Pentagon Declined to Probe Hundreds of Child Porn Purchases



The Defense Department investigated only a small percentage out of hundreds of alleged cases of Pentagon employees using government computers to purchase child pornography, according to a Yahoo! News investigation published Friday.

The cases came to light during a 2006 Immigration and Customs Enforcement probe, called Project Flicker, into the use of credit cards and PayPal to buy sexual images of children online. The investigation turned up the names of more than 5,000 individuals who made the porn purchases -- some of whom were civilian and military employees of the Defense Department, including a few with the highest available security clearance.

The Upshot blog reported that ICE turned over to the Pentagon more than 250 names of people who provided military e-mail addresses or physical addresses with Army or fleet ZIP codes when they purchased the illicit images.

Defense Department records show the Pentagon investigated "only a handful of the cases," according to reporter John Cook:

"..DCIS investigators identified 264 Defense employees or contractors who had purchased child pornography online. Astonishingly, nine of those had "Top Secret Sensitive Compartmentalized Information" security clearances, meaning they had access to the nation's most sensitive secrets. All told, 76 of the individuals had Secret or higher clearances. But DCIS investigated only 52 of the suspects, and just 10 were ever charged with viewing or purchasing child pornography. Without greater public disclosure of how these cases wound down, it's impossible to know how or whether any of the names listed in the Project Flicker papers came in for additional scrutiny. It's conceivable that some of them were picked up by local law enforcement, but it seems likely that most of the people flagged by the investigation did not have their military careers disrupted in the context of the DCIS inquiry."

Of those 264 individuals, 212 were not investigated at all.

Read The Upshot's full report here.