Crime & Safety

Internet Crime Team Arrests Gilroy Man for Child Pornography

Michael Lester Spencer, 42, was arrested at his home Tuesday morning on suspicion of possessing child pornography via peer-to-peer file sharing.

 

Police arrested Michael Lester Spencer, 42, at his Gilroy home Tuesday morning on suspicion of possessing child pornography online.

Six officers from The Silicon Valley division of the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, accompanied by five Gilroy Police officers, served a search warrant to Spencer’s home, located on the 700 block of Gettysburg Way, around 6:30 a.m., San Jose Police Sgt. and Task Force Commander Greg Lombardo said. 

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A detective from the task force, which solely targets suspects involved in the sharing of child porn depicting prepubescent children, identified Spencer as a suspect. A multi-week investigation of Spencer ensued and ultimately lead to his Tuesday arrest, Lombardo said.  

[Spencer] could of been investigated much longer than that—it could have been for years—but we just targeted him in the last few weeks,” he said. 

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Spencer, an IT professional, was allegedly downloading pornographic images of children through peer-to-peer file sharing, or P2P. P2P file sharing allows users to search and download media files, like music, videos and images, from other computers for free, Lombardo said. 

“[Spencer] was sharing child porn, but they do it in kind of an anonymous manner,” he said. “They make it available on the Internet.”

When detectives find someone sharing child porn, they make contact with the individual by downloading the porn from them. This allows detectives to confirm that the suspect is actually sharing the porn, and gives them the probable cause needed to obtain a search warrant.

“[Spencer] didn’t know he was sharing with the police department,” Lombardo said. “It’s, in a sense, like a undercover operation where he shared with police.”

Spencer is currently being held at the Santa Clara County Jail in San Jose on $25,000 bail. He’ll be arraigned Friday if he isn’t released or bailed out beforehand, in which case his first court date would be in a of couple weeks. 

If convicted, Spencer faces up to one year in jail and is looking at Megan’s Law registration for the rest of his life.

Combating Child Pornography

Lombardo said the sharing of child pornography is “essentially sharing crime-scene photos” because it involves the victimization of children. 

“We want to stop child exploitation—that’s one of our missions,” he said. “These are images of children being victimized, abused, raped. We don’t want them to continue to victimize that child.”

The prosecution of people involved in the online sharing of child porn can also work to prevent a viewer from becoming a child molester, because a large percentage of people who look at child porn progress to molesting children their self, Lombardo said.

Detectives don’t have any information leading them to believe Spencer was molesting someone, but will investigate it because it’s standard protocol with every child porn investigation. 

The Task Force

The San Jose Police Department works collaboratively with the Silicon Valley Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, which is “responsible for investigating cases of web-facilitated child pornography and cases of child sexual exploitation or abuse that results from contact over the Internet or other computer services,” its website states. 

The Silicon Valley branch covers the entire Bay Area and is the lead agency for the entire task force, comprised of 61 Internet-crime teams from across the country. The entire task force works together to combat child pornography and works with local police departments to serve warrants to suspects residing in specific municipal jurisdictions. 

“It’s that collaborative effort that makes all this possible,” Lombardo said. “We wouldn’t be able to do it on our own.” 

Task forces receive funding from the United States Department of Justice, while the Silicon Valley branch receives state funding for things like forensic equipment and a forensic van. Recently, funding allowed Silicon Valley task force members to purchase a bunch of laptops so their investigators could “go online and catch these guys,” Lombardo said. 

Task Force Makes Over 40 Arrests in 2012 

The task force has made between 45 and 55 arrests in 2012 so far, Lombardo said. 

“Over the last six-to-eight months we’ve done a number of high-profile sweeps in the entire Bay Area,” he said. “One time we did 11 search warrants in one day.”

Lombardo said task force members go to houses expecting to find both child porn and the suspect. In some cases, the suspect is away and is arrested later. In a few cases, such as a wealthy CEO, task force members have learned that the suspect left the country and an arrest warrant was issued.

“We’ve caught plenty of different people—you’d be surprised,” Lombardo said. “One month we caught a deacon at a church, the month before that it was a teacher at a high school.” 

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