January 20, 1999, Il Gazzettino, Venezia: The Network of “Ogres” Unmasked

Smascherata la rete degli <<Orchi>> - Il sito veniva <<Visitato>> anche da veneziani, padovani e trevigiani
The Network of “Ogres” Unmasked - The Site was “visited” even by People from Venice, Padua and Treviso

By Elisio Trevisan

Pedophilia is talked about when there is news that affects people, when minors are unwittingly victimized and, besides their innocence, recover their life.

But pedophilia travels into the houses of our cities, sometimes in our neighbor’s houses. It is a phenomenon that has terrifying dimensions.
A young investigator from Mestre, with a drive for computers, has discovered it. Or, rather, Roberto Capodieci was born a computer wizard and a wizard at the “network of networks”, and then became an investigator: the first, in Europe, to open an investigative agency for online crime.

His latest discovery, navigating on the Internet, was a site for pedophiles around the world. It was located in Japan, but was visited every day by hundreds of people from Venice, Padua and Treviso.

It all began last June, when Roberto Capodieci (who a while back received thanks from Bill Clinton for thwarting an American Internet fraud worth millions) was following the tracks of some presumed pedophiles. “I retraced the address of one site, well hidden in Japan, containing thousands of photos that would turn your blood to ice, showing sex and violence against children and minors, hundreds of messages and the number of connections grew right before your eyes,” tells Capodieci.

But that wasn’t all. “There were also encrypted announcements containing offers of sales and exchanges of various materials, encounters via the Internet, sale of minors for sexual purposes, and various advice and offers on how to drug minors in order to be able to film them.”

The automatic indicator showed that more than a hundred million connections to the site had taken place.

The investigator from Mestre took down the coordinates of the site and advised the Japanese police and the office of online crime of the FBI at the White House. Then he tricked his way back into the network, and set a trap.

With an old system used by hackers (online “saboteurs”) to enter into information systems, he was able to insert into the Japanese site a program that he created - a means of creating a detailed list of the connections - specifying the Internet address of the connected computer (IP address: every working connection to the Internet has an identification number that lets you go and find out who provides access to the Internet, called the Provider, and therefore also the geographic area from which the user is connected), and the date and time of the connection.

In this way, for the period from July to October, Capodieci verified that the site had a worldwide distribution. “There were almost eight hundred thousand contacts established and archived by my program, distributed very equally around the world. Certainly this calculation does not distinguish between the simply curious and that which instead has a more concrete meaning, but just seeing the numbers is very scary. After this the site was closed.”

Closed or only moved to some other part of the world? And how many other sites of this type exist and are visited daily by millions of people? As you can see from the smaller table, Roberto Capodieci has deepened his research and has verified the local connections to the Japanese site, and the data speaks for itself. How many Venetian have looked at only the pornographic photos of minors, and how many, rather, have put into practice the “directions for use”?