The officers’ nervousness was not due to guilt - it was because their cover had been blown. ‘All of a sudden, I find out that Warhead is the police’ "And Jon, the other guy, he turns completely white and gets real stiff and upright and stern and says, ‘We're not going to discuss this anymore until I know how you have found this information - how you knew it was us.’" " just turns purple and quiet," Høydal recalled. (Evan Aagaard/CBC)Īfter Høydal told them that he knew they were running Childs Play, the two officers suddenly went silent. The dark web can only be navigated through a specialized browser called Tor. Høydal contacted them, which led to an uncomfortable meeting between Høydal and members of the police unit, Paul Griffiths and Jon Rouse, in a Brisbane burger joint. The owner quickly discovered that the server was being leased by a branch of the Queensland Police Service. He told the owner that a major child porn website was stored on their server, and that he wanted to find out who was renting it. It’s then that Stangvik figured out that the Childs Play server was located in Sydney, Australia.Īrmed with this information, Høydal flew down to Sydney to meet with the owner of the hosting facility. The signal was traceable and contained information about the server's IP address.
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But if an image in a user profile originated somewhere on the clear net, Childs Play’s software would reach out and look for it, sending a brief signal from its hiding place on the dark web. A few months in, he made a significant discovery: Like many web sites, Childs Play allowed individuals to upload an image for their user profile. (Natalie Remøe-Hansen/VG)ĭuring the fall of 2016, Stangvik monitored the site and the messages being posted there. Having previously focused on illicit activity on the worldwide web, Oslo-based journalist Håkon Høydal, right, and computer expert Einar Stangvik, left, knew there was much more to be found on the dark web. He identified a few of the most popular sites, but one stood out: Childs Play, which had a million registered user profiles, and was run by someone with the username Warhead. He configured his browser settings so he wouldn’t have to see the images, but could still read the text and comments on these pages. Stangvik created a few different user accounts on a variety of child abuse sites. "It was really a middle finger to our work … you know, just ‘F- you, and you won't be able to find us,’” said Høydal. One user called them losers, and insisted that the dark web was safe for pedophiles. Høydal was reading one of the dark web forums when he saw some users mocking the people who had been identified in his VG story about Norwegian men downloading child porn. But Høydal and Stangvik knew there was much more to be found on the dark web, a space for all manner of illicit activity - including the sale of credit card numbers and drugs - that can only be navigated through a specialized browser called Tor.
Their stories had focused on sites found on the worldwide web, the so-called clear nets. They discovered more than 5,000 files downloaded by about 300 people. They struck up a friendship and eventually collaborated on a year-long project investigating child abuse materials being accessed by Norwegian users. Stangvik had some criticisms of Høydal’s story and contacted the reporter. Listen to the first episode of Hunting Warhead, in which Høydal and Stangvik track down the men behind Childs Play: That metadata would include information about the pictures - file names, when the shot was taken and the GPS coordinates.
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Stangvik had built a system that could monitor different sorts of shady forums for newly posted images and download the metadata from these images.
Oslo-based journalist Håkon Høydal and computer expert Einar Stangvik spent a year on an exposé about Norwegians who visited child pornography web sites.
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