Rayelan asked me to post this - she sent it with the Subject line, "Reading between the lines". :) I felt, too, that there has to be much more going on than is evident in the words themselves.

I'd expect this is a major 'Faction 2' victory, one involving not just 'porn' but the beginning-of-the-end for an international pedophile operation that may prove to include some very interesting participants.

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Feds Bust 100 in Internet Child Porn Ring

In a crackdown on what might be the
largest commercial child-pornography
ring ever uncovered, federal authorities
have arrested 100 producers, consumers
and distributors of kiddie porn.

The arrests and subsequent indictments were

the result of an ongoing two-year probe by an
alliance of federal, state and local authorities
called "Operation Avalanche," Attorney General John Ashcroft said at a
Washington, D.C., press conference Tuesday morning.

"It started out with shut-down of the largest known commercial
child-porn enterprise in history," he said.

That enterprise was a credit-card verification service, Landslide
Productions, Inc., run by a Ft. Worth, Texas, couple, Thomas and Janice
Reedy. Once the user had paid via credit card, the service would provide
access to Web sites that specialized in child pornography.

Landslide reportedly grossed as much as $1.4 million per month. The
profits came from the monthly fees viewers paid to access child
pornography Web sites - $29.95 per month. With the Reedys keeping 40
percent of the gross, and giving the Web site operators in Russia and
Indonesia the remaining 60 percent, Landslide was able to net more than
$1 million in profits between 1997 and 1999, authorities said.

"The Reedys were living very well," said Chief Postal Inspector Kenneth
Weaver. "They were living in a spacious home, driving in highly priced
automobiles and living a grand lifestyle at the expense of children who
were sexually exploited."

The Reedys were convicted last year on charges that included sexual
exploitation of minors and distribution of child pornography. A federal
judge on Monday sentenced Thomas Reedy, 37, to 89 consecutive terms of
15 years, and his 32-year-old wife, Janice, to 14 years in prison.

Warrants have been issued for the arrest of the Web site operators
overseas.

After the Reedys were brought down, Ashcroft said, "Operation
Avalanche" focused on the 250,000 subscribers to the Reedy's service.
With the help of the postal inspection service, U.S. Customs Service, the
FBI, the Dallas Police Department and some 30 federally funded task
forces, authorities tracked down some of them using electronic and credit
card information.

Then undercover investigators posed as distributors online. When a man
or woman bought child porn, the feds pounced.

"The consumer of child pornography is no less responsible for the
exploitation of children than the producer," Weaver said.

In many cases, buying child porn turned out to be the least of other
horrendous crimes, he said.

In North Carolina, police found that one 36-year-old computer
consultant had a library of videotapes of the sexual abuse of young girls.

"One of those girls was only 4 years old," Weaver said.

The suspect installed a pinhole camera in a smoke detector, connecting it
to a VCR and a computer to record the abuse of the girls, Weaver said.

The man was sentenced to 17 1/2 years in a federal penitentiary, and has
additional state charges pending, he said.

Also among those arrested was James Brooks Radcliff, 53, the former
Sweetwater, Tenn., fire chief who was caught last year with more than
2,600 child porn files on his office computer and on disks he kept there.

Radcliff, married for more than three decades and with no criminal
record, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 41 months in prison, fined
$3,000 and ordered to serve three years of supervised release.

"Operation Avalanche" isn't over, Weaver said.

"The operation will continue to grow. There were thousands of
subscribers to the Web sites," he said. "We took the most egregious
offenders, those who had a clear disposition to violate the law. There will
be many more arrests in this operation."

The Associated Press contributed to this report