Snared in a worldwide web of child porn

One of the region’s latest convicted sex offenders is an 80-year-old Gig Harbor man. He is described as a devoted grandfather, generous blood donor – and collector of child pornography.

Another is a 69-year-old Olympia gynecologist who lost his medical practice when investigators closed in on his collection of more than 8,000 images of child porn. He’s undoubtedly done a lot of good in his long career; he now faces six-and-a-half-years in prison.

Elsewhere in the country, prosecutors, teachers, at least one judge, a former ACLU state president and any number of other seemingly respectable people have been convicted in recent months of possessing child pornography downloaded from the Internet.

A few years ago, Pierce County’s last sheriff, Mark French, was caught and pleaded guilty.

The Web has had an extraordinary impact since it came into its own in the 1990s. It has put unlimited information at fingertips of computer users and vastly expanded the universe of sales and other transactions. Unfortunately, it has also expanded the reach of all forms of pornography, including the most vicious smut imaginable – images of children forced into often sadistic sexual acts.

Many of the “ordinary” citizens being caught with such images today might never have run into them without the Internet. Before the Web, you had to seek out obscenity, taking obvious risks, ordering illegal materials by mail, sneaking into seamy “adult” shops.

Now it can all be done with seeming anonymity via a home computer. Internet pornography is relatively inexpensive and can be easily shared. Buyers can download photographs and videos purveyed by criminal rings operating in Russia and other distant places. The entire world has become a single porn market.

Child porn and other outlawed material generally won’t come up with a random mouse click. But someone who’s curious or compulsive enough can find their way to the chat rooms or networks where the most depraved images are traded. Both French and the Gig Harbor man appear to have stumbled almost casually into their downloads. Do enough surfing, and you’ll run into almost anything on the Web.

The perception of risk-free purchases is pure illusion, of course. As the arrests demonstrate, investigators have become quite adept at tracing online pornography purchases.

As some people are learning the hard way, it’s foolish to engage in any transactions on the Internet you wouldn’t want the FBI or your local detectives to get wind of. As far as child porn goes, the Web is one big globalized sting operation.

It’s a shame otherwise upstanding citizens have squandered their reputations downloading this poison. It’s a far greater shame that they’ve helped create a market in which children are robbed of their innocence, then bought and sold.