Operation Avalanche (child Pornography Investigation) - Landslide Investigation

Landslide Investigation

In April 1999, in Texas the United States Postal Inspection Service received an internal complaint through postal inspector Robert Adams. Adams had received a tip from Ronnie Miller, an acquaintance in Saint Paul, Minnesota, who provided information about a website advertising child pornography. The image in question was being sourced from a website in Indonesia, which presented the question as to whether the USPIS could legally investigate and prosecute it.

In early 1999, The United States Postal Inspection Service engaged the Dallas Police Department to further investigate whether the image from Indonesia could be prosecuted. As a part of a nationwide initiative funded by the Office of Justice Program’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), The United States Department of Justice had announced a grant from the Internet Crimes Against Children Taskforce Program to the Dallas Police Department on 10 January 1998. The purpose of the ICAC was to investigate and prosecute Internet crimes against children.

The court transcriptions from the case against Landslide Productions revealed that the Dallas Police Department had formed a relationship with The Microsoft Corporation after the software maker had encouraged its technical employees to volunteer their time to better the community in which they lived. After having confirmed that prosecution would be difficult because the image in question was indeed being sourced from Indonesia, the Dallas Police Department asked its local Microsoft volunteers to assist in investigating the image. Using Web Buddy, a computer program designed to display Internet traffic on geographic maps, the volunteers helped the Dallas Police Department to verify that Internet traffic related to Ronnie Miller's complaint was passing through the routers of Ft. Worth, Texas-based Landslide Productions.

An adult classified section of the Landslide website allegedly included postings offering to trade Landslide owned Keyz passwords, and illegal child pornography sites were found to be using the Keyz payment system. The U.S. Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) and Dallas Police presented their findings to Terri Moore, an assistant district attorney in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area, and received warrants to search the Landslide business offices and the Reedy home. In August 1999, forty-five to fifty U.S. law enforcement officials from a number of agencies conducted a raid on the Landslide business offices in Fort Worth, Texas owned and operated by Thomas and Janice Reedy.

The raid of Reedy's nearby Fort Worth residence resulted in confiscation a home computer where computer expert Dane Heiskel uncovered business emails confirming his knowledge of customers using Reedy's payment system to access child pornography. Sexually explicit images of underaged children were also found on this computer.

Police seized the assets and records of Landslide, and arrested Thomas and Janice Reedy. Prosecutors offered Thomas Reedy a twenty year prison term and Janice Reedy a five-year term if they would plead guilty, but the Reedys refused the plea deal, believing they could not be held legally responsible for the content of third party websites. Reedy maintained that he had attempted to run a legitimate business, writing software to reduce fraud, reporting illegal sites to the FBI and cooperating with the ensuing investigations. According to Reedy, he was told by Special Agent Frank Super to leave the sites in his index for later investigation.

In January 2000 Thomas Reedy was convicted of trafficking in child pornography through testimony from witnesses including Sharon Girling, a UK police officer at SOCA/NCS). Based on a prior police investigation in the UK, Sharon Girling identified victims in the pictures from a website which used the Landslide payment system. Thomas Reedy was sentenced to 1,335 years in prison, a sentence which was reduced to 180 years on appeal.