Qld: Child abuse at the push of a button

AAP General News (Australia)
12-05-2003
Qld: Child abuse at the push of a button

By Suzanne Klotz

BRISBANE, Dec 5 AAP - They are savvy computer hotshots, but technology isn't their
only obsession.

They share a sickening guilty secret -- their need to prey on young girls and make
video trophies of everything from them innocently at play in the pool or playground, to
having sex with them.

Two computer experts have recently been sentenced in Brisbane courts for horrendous
abuse against young girls which they videotaped and stored on their computers.

Technology -- according to Queensland University of Technology, Head of the School
of Software Engineering and Data Communication, Professor Bill Caelli (Caelli) -- is the
most valuable of tools for the modern-day paedophile.

The disturbing reality, Prof Caelli says, is you don't have to be technologically expert
to use it.

Prof Caelli said the new generation of mobile phones complete with cameras meant photos
could be taken and sent anywhere instantly.

Newly available overseas, but not in Australia yet, is the video phone which can take
a three-minute film.

He said another worrying factor was that children were becoming technologically-expert
younger and had access to a computer with a camera attached which were not expensive.

He said in Britain recently this had led to a case where a paedophile had convinced
a child to take indecent photos of herself and post them on the net, which led to puzzling
legal questions over how to charge the paedophile.

"The future is horrifying -- not only is the technology rapidly changing -- opening
up new opportunities for the paedophiles, but it is also providing challenges to the law,"

he said.

Not only can paedophiles now download porn images from the internet and use chat rooms
to groom young victims, but they also hide their own home sex movies and images on the
computer more effectively than a hard copy photo or video.

This week Queensland Police computer technician, Andrew Mark Hugh Dickeson, was jailed
for 10 years for having sex with an eight-year-old girl and videoing sex romps with her
and her six-year-old sister.

The extent of the abuse would never have been revealed but for Dickeson's computerised
videos which he went to great lengths to disguise, configuring his computers so it was
extremely difficult for police to find the extent of his pornographic files.

He installed password protection and index coding on the relevant files and interspersed
the disturbing images between hours and hours of material showing more harmless footage
of other children taken in everyday life.

They were so well hidden even after police thought they had finished the job a further
image that hadn't been viewed appeared when the recordings were being viewed by lawyers
and investigators.

Prof Caelli said this was using a steganographic technique which simply meant hiding
information inside something else so that no-one knew it was there.

"There is information there, but unless you know what you're looking for you can't
see it," he said.

"In some ways it's better than putting it in a safe, because you can make multiple
copies. Steganography makes widespread distribution easier."

Dickeson, who was part way through an engineering and computing degree, was a disturbing
younger version of Australia's worst paedophile Geoffrey Robert Dobbs.

Four months ago Dobbs, 49, was jailed for life without automatic parole for molesting
or videoing 62 girls aged as young as 12 months over a 30-year period.

However, the real picture is even more horrendous with Dobbs believed to be responsible
for preying on a total of 300 girls, some of them still unidentified but captured in 500
hours of videotape.

Dobbs, described as a computer guru by police, was a long-time Telstra employee who
was a senior computer technician and their designated Y2K expert in Queensland.

He molested 150 girls before he bought his first video recorder in 1985 and started
capturing them on tape.

From the 1990s it was a relatively easy process to convert an analogue recording into
digital pictures on the computer by just plugging the video camera into the back of the
computer.

Dobbs portrayed himself as an upstanding member of the community, when in fact he was
methodically predatory and devious in his all-consuming search for new victims, even going
to schools and filming girls playing on the monkey bars in his lunch breaks.

Some girls he simply secretly filmed at his home or in public places, others he videotaped
as he molested them or had sex with them.

Ironically, Dobbs' secret life only came to light by accident after he left a video
camera with a tape jammed in it for repair in a shop in Melbourne in September 1999.

The tape showed him molesting a girl.

AAP smk/sc/jhm/sjb/de

KEYWORD: NEWSCOPE QLD (AAP NEWS ANALYSIS) FILE PIX

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