Man guilty of porn distribution
Author: Barbara Brown, The Hamilton Spectator
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The unpleasant task of viewing the child-porn images fell to Ontario Court Justice Marjoh Agro.

Assistant Crown attorney Wendy Rose placed the laptop on the judge's dais and asked her to watch a five-minute video clip of a young girl being sexually abused and grossly exploited by an unknown adult male.

Hamilton police copied the video, along with 51 other files downloaded from the Internet, after executing a search warrant in August 2007 at a York Boulevard residence. Many of the files found on the man's personal computer showed girls aged five to 10 in sexual acts with male pedophiles.

A child-exploitation investigator with Toronto Police's sex crime unit had been tracking the man on the Internet for about a month. Using sophisticated police software, the officer was able to infiltrate a file-sharing network and to identify him as a member with child-pornography images stored on his computer.

The officer cross-referenced the numerically identified images to a police database containing 18,000 known child-pornography files. Police were able to identify a specific Internet Protocol (IP address) that led them to a local cable company, which provided them with the subscriber's name and address.

Christopher Pollock, 33, pleaded guilty yesterday to making child pornography available to the public through a file-sharing network.

Rose said the officer accessed the file-sharing network July 12, 2007, and browsed a share folder associated with Pollock. The folder had 14 known child-pornography files.

The judge remanded Pollock out of custody for sentencing May 9.

bbrown@thespec.com

905-526-3494

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