NOT THE SHARPEST KNIVES IN THE DRAWER: Crusading Blogger Stings DHS Sex Sting
If the Department of Homeland Security wanted to set up a fake Website to lure “sex tourists” it would host the online sting operation itself or, failing that, notify the third-party host that the site wasn’t what it seemed. Right? Well, no. Consequently, MA-based hosting firm Endurance International Group pulled the plug on a year-long operation after a complaint from a blogger specializing in exposing sexual exploitation of children who had unwittingly stumbled upon the “Precious Treasure Holiday Company” Web site. The Smoking Gun reports:
The demise of the web site began in mid-February when an Illinois computer programmer (who is active in online efforts to expose human trafficking and pedophiles) clicked through to the DHS site via an online link. When she landed on the site’s homepage, the woman recalled in an interview, “I was like, ‘Holy crap!’”
She immediately spotted symbols used by pedophiles to indicate “boy lover,” “girl lover,” and “child lover.” Additionally, she recognized that the acronym for the site’s name - “PTHC” - was pedophile shorthand for “preteen hardcore.” During a review of the “amateurish” site, the woman, who asked that she not be identified by name, determined that its source code included a “noindex” directive that kept the site from being crawled and preserved by search engines and the Internet Archive.
The computer programmer also noticed that the “Precious Treasure Holiday Company” site appeared to have been designed using a 2003 version of Microsoft’s FrontPage. In retrospect, she remarked, the use of such outdated software should have tipped her to the fact that the site was a U.S. government production.
The woman notified the Cleveland police and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children’s CyberTipline about the existence of the Web site. She also posed as a potential customer, got a flier detailing services and costs and alerted the hosting company, which promptly suspended the site.
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