The Murder Sheet released a new episode this week, a discussion with two members of LE who head up Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) investigations in their metropolitan jurisdictions. Since the "anthony shots" ask was linked to the Delphi tipline by the ISP, I think it's informative to hear what ICAC experts have to say about the type of people who commit that type of crime, so I'd recommend listening to the episode whether or not you think KAK in particular is involved.
Some interesting things they mentioned that could apply to why the CSAM investigation against KAK took so long -
ICAC crimes are more prolific than most people could ever guess. Departments could work non-stop 24/7 and still not have enough time to work all the cases that are out there. LE prioritizes "producers" of child exploitation materials over people who are "only" trading it. Their top priority is people creating it with, or having access to, a live child.
These investigations produce so much data that it's almost impossible for investigators and prosecutors to get a handle on all of it, and it takes a really long time to extract the data - they mentioned that it's particularly challenging when more than one device is involved. Just thinking about how many devices KAK had...
After all the recoverable data is extracted, the investigations are typically very prolonged. Investigators have to follow each thread of data to individual victims and individual charges.
For prosecutors, this type of case can be more difficult to prosecute - there is a need to get things "right." One investigator said, "We work harder to disprove our case than we do to prove our case" before taking it to trial.
Then there was an interesting discussion of motivations of ICAC offenders. Evidently it's not that typical for people who engage in this type of internet crime to then cross over to "hands on" crime (in the opinion of the LE they interviewed). Offenders usually had very complex multifactorial reasons for why they look at the material that they do, and not all of these reasons were sexual. Most of the offenders when interviewed engaged in "minimizing" their crimes; others used "some other guy did it" type of defenses. "My friend had my phone" is evidently a very common excuse. However, the LE on the podcast said that "some other guy did it" is usually very easily disproved by the forensic evidence on the devices.
They did talk a bit about interviewing ICAC offenders and how the interview can go differently depending on how much information the investigators already have. They said that an in depth confession is usually rare among this type of criminal. They usually only give out what they are asked about and so it can be just the tip of the iceberg.
I actually only listened to part of the episode so far so there's much more of interest that potentially pertains to Delphi, you can listen here:
Murder Sheet
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