There has been some recent discussion in Telecom Digest of police methods and their intentional or unintentional deficiencies. The story linked to here is pretty interesting in that regard and I'm surprised that there hasn't been any corresponding mention in the digest already. Although it affects quite a few people here in Britain, there must be many more in a similar situation in the USA and other countries.
Following the bust, lists of customers and their credit card details were passed to various police forces for followup, including UK police. A considerable number of people here, including some well-known names, were questioned about accessing child p*rn. There have been some prosecutions and a number of suicides. It always seemed odd to me that there were that many people interested in child p*rn.
The article linked to here reveals that before the bust, Landslide had discovered a high level of credit card fraud involving their site. Individual site operators were using lists of stolen card numbers to sign up batches of people to their own sites, obviously with the intention of disappearing with the 65% before the sh*t hit the fan. Landslide logs show that a lot of the supposed customers never actually visited the sites to view the p*rn they had bought access to.
It looks like Landslide was already effectively out of business before the bust due to the massive level of chargebacks from the banks.
What is most alarming (but not surprising) is the way that the police, prosecutors and presumably even many of the defence lawyers overlooked the fact that this fraud was happening meaning that the Landslide customer lists were not worth the disk platters they were stored on.
Steve Hayes, South Wales, UK