Fifty persons have been arrested in connection with an internet child predators sting, the Orange County Sheriff’s office said.
Dubbed “Operation SpiderWeb,” the internet was used to locate and identify persons who used the web to sexually exploit children and travel to meet minors to engage in sexual activity.
Investigators said, the defendants came from as far north as Duval and as far south as Palm Beach County.
The Sheriff’s Office plans to release details and video of “Operation SpiderWeb” tomorrow, November 1, at a news briefing.
What people do not understand is that these operations are entrapment no matter what. Forget about made up evidence, inducement, and persuasion because that is only one form of entrapment (subjective entrapment). This is nothing more than objective entrapment which is being ignored because these stings are making a lot of money and the public is being lied to and made to think that these people are actually searching the internet for minors to have sex with. Therefore, we get the common response that these men should “rot in prison” or some other similar nonsense. This article states:
… the internet was used to locate and identify persons who used the web to sexually exploit children and travel to meet minors to engage in sexual activity.
which is nothing more than a lie! How can a child predator be targetted on adult web sites where minors are not suppose to be? How stupid do they think the general public is? This is insulting!
There are two prongs to the objective entrapment defense:
1. The police are interrupting ongoing crime.
2. The police are using means reasonably tailored to intercept that crime.
The first prong of the test obviously fails because law enforcement does not have probable cause to conduct these stings, they just randomly conduct them. Also, there are no statistics to prove that this kind of activity is as bad as they say other than the ones that have been created by performing the stings in the first place. The second prong of the test obviously fails too because the stings are being conducted on ADULT web sites and that’s why most (if not all) of the people arrested in these stings seem like average, law abiding citizens. How many actual child predators do they really expect to catch by placing ads in the adult section of Craigslist where people are looking for sex with other adults? Detective Phil Graves lied in an interview and said that these people admitted to engaging in this type of activity before. I am sure that these people have used Craigslist to search for sex but not sex with minors. Furthermore, the constitutional rights of all of us are being abandoned over the false congressional intent of protecting minors because it is illegal for law enforcement to create crime and prevent the occurrence of anything. This amounts to nothing more than virtue testing and is illegal.
Lusby v State So 2d 611 1987
We do not condone general forrays into the population at large by government agents to question at random the citizenry of this country to test their law abiding nature, i.e., virtue testing.
It does not matter if these guys are showing up with the intentions of having sex with a minor because before they ran into police they did not intend to do it and the police are the ones that encouraged them. In another article:
Detective Phil Graves says this should be a wake-up call for parents. “I can guarantee you I can sign onto the net any hour of the day and get a case very very quickly. There’s not a time of day I wouldn’t make a case in a few seconds. That’s the problem that parents really need to understand.”
http://www.myfoxorlando.com/dpp/news/local/110111-50-arrested-in-operation-spiderweb
This is nothing more than a lie because there is no problem. This is a publicity stunt to make money and keep us scared so the government can continue to violate our rights enumerated in the Constitution, namely freedom of speech. It is not illegal to talk about having sex with a minor especially when either the “minor” or the “parent of the minor” are encouraging you to do it. It might sound kind of bad but it is true. What also might sound kind of bad is that even if someone showed up to the house with a semi full of condoms and sex toys, these stings are still illegal. The US Supreme Court has already stated that law enforcement are here to punish real crime and not try to see what kind of crime they can create by talking people into doing something they did not set out to do BEFORE interacting with government officials.
Out of all the stings that have been conducted, I have only seen a couple of sex offenders and even fewer people that owned child pornography. I am not talking about a small group of people either. I.e. nobody in this sting owned child porn or was a registered sex offender. However, even if there were a couple of people fitting this profile they would still be innocent because predisposition is irrelevant in this situation and that is why law enforcement are lying by saying that they “caught them in the act of preying on children”.
Here is a mathematical analysis to prove this sting (and all that are like it) was illegal.
50 People in three days.
Internet statistics for Florida from http://www.internetworldstats.com/unitedstates.htm
FL – 18,732,783 population (2010) – State Area: 53,927 square miles
State Capital City: Tallahassee – population 159,012 (2006)
14,764,418 Internet users as of June/10, 78.8% of the population, per IWS.
7,839,520 Facebook users on August 31/10, 41.8% penetration rate.
9,370,620 Facebook users on March 31/11, 50.0% penetration rate.
This sting was not performed on Facebook so that leaves about 14,764,418 – 7,839,520 = 6,924,898 people.
This number will be slightly different for 2011 and I will ignore the one arrest from Facebook since one arrest out of 50 is only 2%.
Not all of these people are on the internet all the time, only 28% of people search the internet for fun daily. http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0921860.html
.28 * 6,924,898 = 1,938,971 people
The Craigslist statistics for October are (http://craigslist.twtstudios.com/webalizer/usage_201110.html):
Daily Statistics for October 2011
Since I don’t know what specific days each person was arrested on I can only do a spread (from the 25 to the 27).
Day Hits Files Pages Visits Sites KBytes
25 55 2.07% 48 2.47% 46 2.21% 44 5.51% 15 4.13% 417 0.50%
26 71 2.67% 59 3.04% 51 2.44% 51 6.39% 19 5.23% 557 0.67%
27 96 3.61% 81 4.17% 76 3.64% 46 5.76% 29 7.99% 897 1.08%
31 99 3.73% 78 4.01% 71 3.40% 55 6.89% 15 4.13% 513 0.62%
50 People in three days is about 16 people a day (16*3=48 which accounts for error in my favor and the one Facebook arrest that I ignored).
10/25/2011
16 people /44 visits = .36 (36%)
.36* 1,938,971 people = 705,080 PEOPLE!
10/26/2011
16 people /51 visits = .31 (31%)
.31* 1,938,971 people = 608,305 PEOPLE!
10/27/2011
16 people /46 visits = .35 (35%)
.35* 1,938,971 people = 674,424 PEOPLE!
Now for Halloween:
16 people/55 visits = .29 (29%)
.29* 1,938,971 people = 562,301 PEOPLE!
Using the maximum visits and average to get a range to account for error:
Maximum visits = 63
16 people /63 visits = .25 (25%)
.25* 1,938,971 people = 484,742 PEOPLE!
Average visits = 25
16 people /25 visits = .64 (64%)
.64* 1,938,971 people = 1,240,941 PEOPLE!
There is no way that these high percentages represent the number of people that are actually preying on children over the internet. There is no way that these percentages represent the number of teenagers online trying to have a sexual encounter with an adult or their parents trying to “pimp them out”. Furthermore, (as stated earlier) these stings are being performed on ADULT web sites which should be a HUGE red flag. “Law enforcement” officials need to get real, do their job, and get a life instead of making one by taking other peoples’! Sex related internet crimes are only around one percent of the internet population! Up to 93% of child molestation cases occur because of people the victims know and not strangers on the internet. Also, 87% of all internet related sex crimes have to do with child pornography. Furthermore, 43% of the people that solicited undercover officers are dual offenders which means that 57% are first time offenders due to undercover operations. However, some of the dual offenders are only classified as dual offenders because they “solicited” two police officers at the same time. Therefore, they are creating crime and using virtue testing to do it. A jury, and certainly a judge, can deduce that conclusion from this analysis. I don’t care what the subject matter is, entrapment is entrapment and if your daughter is on the internet acting like a tramp, it’s your fault. Finally, research studies have proven that grown men are more attracted to teenagers and will be extremely tempted to pursue someone offering free sex given the right environment, encouragement, and consent whether or not they actually intend on having sex when put in the actual situation.
Visit the blogs at http://floridascandal.blogspot.com for more supporting case law and help put a stop to this madness. Do not just sit back and say that it’s wrong, do something about it. These people being arrested are not statistics; they are Americans just like us.