U.S. web site shutdown linked to Brandon child porn case

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 09/11/2023 (668 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A Brandon man’s online sexual abuse of an American girl ultimately led to the shutdown of U.S.-based video chat website Omegle this week.

The Winnipeg-based Canadian Centre for Child Protection issued a statement Thursday saying it is “extremely relieved.”

“Omegle was the perfect storm for online sexual violence against children and youth. The site regularly paired children with adult strangers, lacked any meaningful age verification or moderation and continually exposed kids to sexual content,” the statement reads, in part.

“Our staff have seen hundreds of videos showing the Omegle wordmark, captured and shared by offenders, of children as young as eight years old who were aggressively manipulated and coerced by adult men into performing live sex acts on camera. Other incidents involved individuals sharing child sexual abuse material through the live video feed.”

Signy Arnason, associate executive director of the Winnipeg centre, said “it’s absolutely shameful” the site was allowed to continue operating for so long, after so many children were harmed on its platform.

That the web site’s founder made the decision to shut down while facing legal action instead of being ordered by authorities is “quite chilling.”

“Our concern is that without the proper regulatory framework in place, and we’re seeing it on the dark web where offenders are actually talking about now what’s going to come in and replace Omegle, so it feels like we’re playing whack-a-mole,” Arnason said.

The United Kingdom has passed online safety legislation that requires web platforms to prove they are mitigating the risk on their sites and there’s been similar legal movement in other countries, Arnason said.

“We’re definitely starting to see some movement,” she said. “It’s not happening quickly enough in our view, because this has been going on for decades.”

Faced with a multimillion-dollar U.S. lawsuit, Omegle’s founder decided to disable the anonymous, randomized video chat feature and close the site, according to an online statement.

“The stress and expense of this fight — coupled with the existing stress and expense of operating Omegle, and fighting its misuse — are simply too much. Operating Omegle is no longer sustainable, financially nor psychologically. Frankly, I don’t want to have a heart attack in my 30s,” Leif K. Brooks wrote in the lengthy statement which frames him and the web site as victims.

The product liability lawsuit against Omegle was launched in 2021, on behalf of a young woman who reported she spent years in “sexual servitude,” after being paired with an adult man in Brandon for an anonymous Omegle video chat when she was 11.

The civil suit went after the online service, arguing it should be held liable for pairing children with adults for video chats that included online sex acts.

The Brandon man was sentenced to 8 1/2 years in prison in December 2021, after he pleaded guilty to distributing child pornography and luring. He admitted sharing sexual images of children on a peer-to-peer network.

When police searched his computer, they found thousands of pornographic images, including seven folders in which he saved sexual images of youth, some of them taken from video chats. He had installed software that took automatic screenshots of the video chats.

katie.may@winnipegfreepress.com