More than 250 Department of Defense (DoD) employees are said to have signed up for child pornography sites using their government e-mail addresses and physical military addresses. The Pentagon has reopened an investigation into this case.
The Defense Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS) started looking into the problem in 2007 after officials at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Bureau told them about it. But at the beginning of 2008, it quietly stopped the investigations, saying it didn’t have enough money.
James Burch, who is the deputy inspector general for investigations at the DoD, said in a statement released on Wednesday that he has asked the DCIS to look at each case again and make sure that the right action is taken against people if the circumstances call for it.
When criminal charges won’t be filed, he said, the relevant information will be sent to the leaders of the relevant DoD organizations so they can take the right administrative steps.
Gary Comerford, who is in charge of public affairs at the DoD Office of the Inspector General, said that Wednesday’s decision was made because the Pentagon has been asked over and over again to reopen the investigations. He didn’t say more, though.
Project Flicker was the name of the ICE operation that led to the whole DCIS investigation. The operation began in 2006 and looked into a group of criminals in another country that ran 18 commercial child pornography websites.
As part of the investigation, ICE made a list of more than 5,000 U.S. citizens who had signed up for the Web sites that were being looked into. Several of the people on that list had signed up for these sites with dot-mil email addresses and Army PO Box addresses.
After that, the DCIS found that 264 people with ties to the DoD had signed up for child porn sites under investigation. Documents about the investigation that are on the site of the DoD inspector general show that 9 of these people had the highest level of security clearance, which gave them access to some of the nation’s most sensitive secrets.
The documents also show that 13 of the people had top secret clearance, 8 had NATO secret security clearance, and 42 had secret security clearance.
The Upshot, a Yahoo news blog that broke the story first, said that the list included a National Security Agency contractor, someone who worked in the office of Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and a manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
The DCIS did follow-up investigations on 52 people. Some of them pleaded guilty to charges related to child porn and got different prison terms. But in January 2008, it stopped looking into the rest of the people on the list.
“Due to the short-term nature of this project and the need to focus more resources on other DCIS investigative priorities, this project is closed as ‘finished,'” the DCIS said.
In a story in The Upshot, a source who didn’t want to be named said that the DCIS focused its first investigations on people with top-secret clearances and people who worked at military installations because they might be easy to blackmail.
But it stopped the investigations because it didn’t have enough money to check out everyone on the list who had Secret or Top Secret clearances.
