Uncover - S24 E3: Operation Artemis | "Hunting Warhead"

Episode Date: February 4, 2024

After the arrest of Canadian Benjamin Faulkner, Taskforce Argos has to learn how to become Warhead on Child’s Play, before its users realize that the site has been compromised. But time is running out — and very difficult moral decisions will have to be made. For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcastnews/hunting-warehead-transcripts-listen-1.5346693

In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news, so I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with Season 3 of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy.

On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. The following episode contains difficult subject matter. Listener discretion is advised. When they were arrested, Polk and Faulkner, where were you all? Were you and the team inside a room listening to the arrest? I mean, how did it work? No, I mean, there was no remote monitoring or anything like that.

That's Paul Griffiths, one of the investigators with Task Force Argos. We were kept in fairly constant touch over the course of the whole weekend. Griffiths is based in Brisbane, Australia. He works for the Queensland Police Service. Time zones obviously present something of a challenge. He and the rest of Task Force Argos were waiting for the news of Warhead's arrest. By the time we knew that they were at the address in the US, then it was getting into the evening here.

Waiting for information that might help launch the next phase of the operation. Yeah, I would say it was within the first hour after the arrest that we had at least one password that allowed us to get into the site. Warhead, the Canadian Benjamin Faulkner, soon gave up all the passwords necessary to access his abuse site, Child's Play. But access alone wasn't enough. They had security measures in place that would, they thought, prevent law enforcement taking

over their accounts. It was one thing to have an account password and have access to the site, but to get yourself into a position where you could securely post as them was a bigger challenge that almost undid us. It almost undid you? Yeah, we almost didn't get ourselves into a situation where we could do that. Overcoming the hidden security measures took time, which was an issue because Warhead had often posted on Child's Play several times a day.

So if the forum didn't hear from him soon, its million-plus members would figure out that something was off. They might delete their accounts and disappear, only to surface later as another anonymous user on another encrypted site. Griffiths wanted to keep them on the site and in his crosshairs. The operation depended on it. This operation, does it have some kind of name? It's got various names, to be honest, depending on which country you're in. So what do you call it?

Here in Queensland, it's Artemis. Artemis? Yeah. Why is that? We don't have reasons for operation names here. They're just a generic name that's given. I think it's something from Greek mythology, actually. In Greek mythology, Artemis was a goddess.

She was associated with the moon, with chastity, childbirth, nature. But Artemis? Artemis was also the goddess of the hunt. So random or not, it's fitting. Because even though Ben Faulkner and Patrick Fawlty had been arrested, the real hunt

had only just begun. I'm Damon Fairless, and this is Hunting Warhead. When people think of the word child pornography, they might think of a 13-year-old teenager in a skimpy bathing suit who could almost pass for 16 or 18 or 20. That's not what this is. That's investigative journalist Julian Scher. We're talking about infants.

We're talking about schoolchildren being forced to endure some of the worst forms of systematic sexual abuse. Julian literally wrote the book on the rise of internet child abuse, as well as the type of police work Paul Griffiths and his colleagues around the world do every day. His book is called One Child at a Time. Child pornography is just the wrong term. This is child abuse.

These are crime scene photos. What people don't realize is how different this is from every other crime. In almost every case, they know where the crime took place. People don't realize how different this is from every other crime. In almost every case, they know where the crime took place. They almost always know who the victim is. And often, the bad guy leaves obvious evidence. When it comes to child abuse online, police have a much harder job. They have a photo. A little four-year-old sitting naked on a bed. They don't

know who she is. They don't know where she is. And they certainly don't know who's doing the abuse. And they have this mad race around the world to try to find her. race around the world to try to find her. It's like investigating a missing persons case without really knowing who's missing. So the priority for police is not catching the offenders. It's rescuing the children because there's a life at stake. Because there's a life at stake. So do we have any measures of how prevalent child pornography is? The largest center in the world that monitors this is in Washington, D.C.

It's the National Center for Exploited and Missing Children, NCMEC. In 1998, the center started its Cyber Tipline, a way of gathering together all reported cases of online child abuse and passing them on to the appropriate law enforcement agencies. In its first few years, the Tipline got about 10,000 reports a year. But that's been growing exponentially. In 2017 alone, it received 9.6 million reports. In 2018, the total number of cases was about 43 million. And by all accounts, that's just the tip of the iceberg.

All we know is that it's growing, it's exploding, and it's a volcano of abuse that's out there. of abuse that's out there. About half of child abuse imagery depicts kids under the age of 10. And nearly a third of it involves rape and torture. When police first began trying to rescue these children, they had a lot of catching up to do. You know, a lot of the pedophiles and convicted child sex offenders, like Benjamin Faulkner, are techies, security consultants, IT specialists.

And if they weren't, it was their hobby and they had basements full of technical equipment and wizardry. Cops were cops. You know, they may have come from homicide. You know, a few had technical skills, but they had to ramp up. That's where the international network really kicked in because just as pedophiles would share the latest encryption software and the latest camera equipment and other stuff, well, the police would do the same thing.

And so one of the things that I find really intriguing is that they've got this real world network, the set of relationships between these different agencies in Europe, here in North America and Australia. Can you tell me about the nature of that relationship between the different agencies? Yeah, it's really something that's very special. Because if you think about it, by definition, police are territorial, right? Their mandate is to protect and serve the people of the city who pay their taxes and hire them and run them. The problem is online child abuse, by definition, is borderless. So the police had to come up with ways where they could fight a borderless crime by breaking down the very borders that are built into the police mandate and to the police budget.

So one of the things that meant is they had to go to their bosses and say, we need more money because we're going to rescue children around the world. And that commitment had to be made. Second, they had to set up some formal structure. They had to find quick ways of being able to share images. So when a picture of a little girl is found by the Toronto police, they could immediately figure out ways to work with the FBI and the UK police and eventually locate her in North Carolina. Interpol set up coordinating bodies. There were international databases so that pictures found in Canada, in the US and Australia could be shared, matched, correlated. And then finally, and in many ways, most importantly, were the personal relationships that developed. So Paul Griffiths used to be in the UK and had a huge reputation as one of the best

hunters of clues in the photographs. He would work closely with the Canadians. When he moved down to Australia, he stayed in touch with the Canadians and the French and the Germans. So you have this important network built on trust and sharing and competence. And so just like the online pedophile community had its hidden network of, you know, secret handshakes and codes, so did the police. And it has just grown stronger and stronger over the years. years. I first met Paul Griffiths when he was working in the UK. He had been an officer in Manchester, England, tackling sex crimes. And he began to realize how the internet had radically changed things. I think it was back in 1990, about 84% of his unit's cases were with adult obscenity, and only about 3% dealt with child abuse. By 2000, it had been

completely reversed. 87% of their cases involved children. So Griffiths decided to devote his career and really his life to this. So he begins to work with online child images. And he told me a story of one incident that really changed things. There was a complaint in Manchester, England, against a man and they made the arrest and they found that the man had abused a girl who was about eight or nine years old. When they made the arrest, Griffiths and his colleagues realized that they had seen her photos in collections on the web. They just had never connected her with abuse that was really going on almost around the corner from the police station.

So it was a kind of epiphany for Griffiths because he said, well, wait a minute. Instead of waiting to arrest some sexual offender and then hoping that will lead to the rescue of children, what if we look at these pictures as potential clues to try to find out who the offenders are and rescue the kids proactively? So he had to set out to figure out ways to hunt for these clues. I remember talking with him. He would explain how, for example, in one picture,

he would see some computer boxes on some gray steel shelves in the background, and he would zoom in and read the barcode and then contact the company to figure out where the shipment had been sent. In another photo, there was a TV commercial in the background for a chocolate bar, and he was able to figure out where and when that ad, that specific ad, had run. I've seen him put together a photo of a suspected offender from a glimmer of an eye here, a reflection in a mirror there.

It's the passion of somebody putting together a jigsaw puzzle, but knowing that if he can put the pieces together, there might be a little child somewhere that he could rescue. In 2009, Griffiths moved from the UK to Australia to join Task Force Argos. There are several agencies around the world that are entirely devoted to the rescuing of children, and specifically children who are victims of online child abuse. Toronto has an internationally famous squad. The RCMP has some units. The FBI has a dedicated unit. Interpol has an international cooperating body. Task Force Argos has earned quite deservedly a reputation for being one of the best, for being leaders, for being bold

and innovative and even aggressive. And now, thanks to Homeland Security's work in Virginia, Argos was close to gaining access to the largest child abuse site on the dark web. The first few hours after these guys were taken, they were quite intense. Could you tell us about that? Yeah, so we knew that the operation was happening. Inspector Paul Griffiths. We knew that the arrest was imminent and of course we were on standby waiting for any information that would come out of that.

I don't think we were entirely surprised when it sounded as if there was some amount of cooperation forthcoming from, I think, Faulkner first, in terms of access to accounts and access to passwords and things like that. It's very rare that anything like this would run 100% smoothly. Just because Task Force Argos had all of Warhead's passwords, it didn't mean that they had full control of Child's Play. And they needed full control for what they planned next. First, they'd have to secure the server that hosted the site, which meant moving it to Australia.

We would normally choose to move the server because we'd want it in a situation where we had full control over it, and we'd also want it within our jurisdiction if we were going to operate it. The original Child's Play server was somewhere in Europe. Hulken and Einar are pretty sure it was in Germany. Argos isn't willing to say one way or another. What we do know is that Argos had the support of their European colleagues, which would allow them to take over the site

and transfer it to an Australian server. But there was another problem. So there was a third admin, so it was another guy who we knew that had the same amount of access to the servers and the sites. Warhead and Crazy Monk, Faulkner and Fawlty, were Child's Play's main administrators. But there were others, including a user named Deadpool, who had the same kind of high-level access to the site. At this point, the police didn't yet know who Deadpool was, and so they couldn't arrest him.

Meaning, they had to tread carefully. was and so they couldn't arrest them, meaning they had to tread carefully. So you can't just close the site down, you can't just pick it up and move it, you can't do any of those things without alerting this other guy and potentially other people as well. So what you don't have is full control. So you need some amount of social engineering there to explain why you're going to move the server and what you're going to do exactly when you move it. And if you're not careful, just as easily as you could kick them out, they could kick you out as well. As if this wasn't tricky enough, there was one final challenge. Benjamin Faulkner had developed a protocol for precisely this kind of situation, to ensure the site couldn't be taken over by an undercover unit.

Something he called a canary. Håkon explains. He told the community, the rest of the users on Shoutsplay, that every month, at the beginning of every month, Warhead, the administrator, would post a message where he would share some information about the status of this forum. And if he didn't, if this message wasn't posted, the community was to assume that Child's Play was being compromised or being taken over by the police or someone else. The challenge for Argos was that Homeland Security had arrested Faulkner on Monday, October 3rd,

and Warhead was expected to post to Canary the next day, which put Task Force Argos under even more pressure. We also knew that other people would expect us to post something in that secure manner that we weren't yet in a position to do. So Paul Griffiths worked around the clock, poring over Warhead's posts, studying his spelling errors, his punctuation, mastering his style,

his linguistic quirks, even his sense of humor. Four days after Faulkner's arrest, Griffiths brings Warhead back online. He posts the canary. It reads, Phew, what a month that was. A month of my life that I won't get back. Although technically, most of the really screwed up shit happened in October, not September, hence my late foray into this month.

Sorry again about the late arrival, but I did ask the staff team to step in and cover for me in my enforced absences. I'm not sure that any of the other users knew categorically what had happened. I think one or two had very strong suspicions and they, some of them chose at least to raise their suspicions. And of course, that then makes other members of the community a little bit jittery. So Paul Griffiths hands over the reins of the undercover operation to his colleagues. One of the big jobs then for the undercover guys is to quieten those rumours down and so you know as if you've not got a hard enough job a running the site b conversing with all the people you've got to

converse with and being that guy online you've then also got to sweep up after yourself and make sure that the damage is limited as much as possible. By the end of October, Child's Play had been successfully transferred to a server in Australia. There were some suspicions initially, but now the majority of the site's users believe Child's Play is safe and secure. And so Task Force Argos is right where it wants to be. On the hunt. Task Force Argos is right where it wants to be. On the hunt.

In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news. So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with season three of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Geoff is. I don't even know if I like that guy.

On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. What have you been doing on the site these months in regards to child's play? Monitoring the activities on the site, trying to identify new material and trying to identify people who are either producers or are close to the production of the material. And then trying to do what we can to identify who they are or who the children in the images are, basically. After months of watching from the sidelines, Haakon and his colleagues are finally granted a second interview with Task Force Argos in August of 2017. At this point, Paul Griffiths and the rest of the unit have been running Child's Play undercover for 10 months. My area of expertise, if you like, is the analysis of the images and investigating the producers of those images and identifying the victims. It goes without saying that this involves looking at a lot of pictures of children being abused.

I've been working in this area for 22 years now. I usually say if one human being's done it to another human being, then I've seen a photograph or a video of it happening. Have you ever cried? No. Close. But no. a gweld ffotograff neu fideo o'r peth yn digwydd. A ydych chi erioed wedi coed? Nid. Yn debyg.

Nid. Ond nid. Pan oedd hynny? Heddiw. Heddiw. Mae'n dechrau bod ychydig o'r peth yn de-sensitio i it, I suppose, but I think the main motivator for the staff who work in victim identification is that they know that they can do some good, basically.

They can achieve a result by examining that image, examining that video, looking at the associated information about it, and actually finding the child and removing them from a harmful situation. As we heard earlier, Griffiths is a pioneer in the field of victim ID and he's still one of the world's best. It's just that I remember things as photographs. So when I think about an event or when I think about something that I did, I can see that in my mind. am ddod o hyd i'r digwyddiad neu beth bynnag y gwna i, gallaf weld hynny yn fy mhen.

Ac fe wnes i ddod yn ddewr yn gynharach pan oeddwn yn gwneud y gwaith hwn, gallaf storio'r ddewr fel ddewr, ac gallaf gofio bodwn wedi'i weld yn gynharach. Felly hyd yn oed nawr, lle rydyn ni'n siarad am miliwn o ddewr yn gyd-dreiddiol, gallaf dweud wrthych chi, yn dda, mae gen i wedi gweld hynny yn gynharach, gallaf dweud wrthych chi pan oeddwn i'n ei weld yn gyntaf, I can very often just look at an image and tell you, you know, yes that I've seen it before. I could probably tell you when I first saw it. I can probably tell you where it was seized from. Yeah, we have great databases that allow us to find these things, but occasionally I find that I'm quicker than the database and I can actually find where it is before the database finds it.

This is something that's helped him with past cases. We were dealing with an investigation where we'd been looking for this guy for a while. He was running a darknet site, and we knew he was an abuser. He was one of the higher end in terms of the level of abuse in his images. There was bondage, and there was torture in the images. And when you look at the images and you analyse them for all sorts of clues,

looking for information that might help, I noticed this guy had a particular mark on his body that was faint but identifiable. And I would say a week, two, three, four weeks later, I was looking at a video and it was a video I'd seen 100 and more times previously. And I thought, wait a minute, this guy looks like he's got the same kind of mark. That mark was on the guy's penis. And when I looked closely at it,

I realized it was clearly the same mark in the same location, and it was the same guy. Griffiths cross-referenced the two sets of images, which eventually led to the man's arrest. Identifying and rescuing kids is Task Force Argos' primary objective. And running Child's Play as an undercover operation, as Warhead, was a means to that end. It's not something I feel particularly comfortable with, actually. Putting yourself in the shoes of those people, especially when you know the mindset that they have

and the sexual attraction to children that they have. It's quite a testing piece of work. It's not something everyone can do and it's quite challenging. You've also got to get yourself into their mind a little bit and you've got to think the way that they think. And it's a fairly uncomfortable way to think, to be honest. But it is vital to what Argos does. So along with specialists in victim ID, guys like Griffiths, Argos has several experienced undercover investigators.

It's an awful lot of effort, an awful lot of work. To become somebody online is not just a case of becoming them on the site, but you've also got to be aware of how they interact off the site with other members of the site maybe, or with other people that they know in the community. So for instance, when you're talking about an individual ar y safle gyda'r aelodau eraill o'r safle neu gyda phobl eraill y maen nhw'n ei wybod yn y cymuned. Felly, er enghraifft, pan fyddwch yn siarad am un unigolyn sy'n chi'n ei wybod sydd wedi ysgrifennu ar gyfer gweithredu a chyfweliad antiforensig, yna rydych chi'n gwybod bod pobl yn mynd i fynd ato i'w hyn am gyngor ar gyfer gweithredu cyfrifiadol a chyfweliad antiforensig.

Ac wrth gwrs, mae hynny'n balans anodd yno oherwydd mae'n rhaid i chi roi'ch hun yn ymlaen fel y mae'n gwybod yn llawer, ond yna dydwch chi ddim am roi gwybodaeth i bobl up balance there because you need to kind of put yourself across as knowing as much as he knows, but then you don't want to give people information that are then going to make them harder to catch, harder to find, harder to prosecute at the end of the day. So, you know, it sounds almost trivial, but you've got to understand the mindset of the person that you're being. But this raises a big question, one that's relevant to all undercover operations. What ethical boundaries might you cross? If you're a police officer pretending to be an online child abuser, how far should you go?

And how do you know when you've gone too far? Håkon and Einar had been monitoring activity on Child's Play since Argos had taken it over. Warhead was no longer as present on the site, but his canary messages were still being posted like clockwork. Task Force Argos, they were the ones who had to post these canary messages every month. And we were obviously interested and curious to see what they posted. And we find it interesting that the police actually are posting child abuse images. I mean, they are spreading something that they are trying to combat.

As warhead, Ben Faulkner had designed his canaries in a way he thought was fail-safe. A way that would prove to other users that he was still in control of child's play. They had to have two images of child abuse attached to this message, because they thought that this is something the police can't do. Faulkner was right. Sort of. In many jurisdictions, police don't have the authority to post child abuse images, at least not that easily. But Argos is an exception. I think collectively within this unit,

we've been working for so long that we've identified the fact that legislation needs to keep up with the way that offenders are using technology. That's John Rouse, the other guy Hulken met at the burger bar on his first trip to Brisbane. He's the officer in charge of Task Force Argos, as well as the unit's founder. its founder. So we've been very much on the front foot in talking to prosecutors, the Attorney General's office and the government about the challenges that we're facing to successfully prosecute these people. And we've been fortunate that not just from within our organisation in the Queensland Police Service, but across government, there's been support and an ear to help us do our job. I've been in the unit now for 17 years.

Some of the other guys have been here the same amount of time. So we've seen the internet evolve into what it is today from fax modems and bulletin boards back in the 90s. And we recognise that we were deficient in legislation in the early 2000s. And in fact, we didn't have legislation that really clearly criminalised the images of children being sexually abused. Progressively over the years, we've consistently sought new laws to help. So, for example, when you're dealing with a network of offenders like we are in this board, we now have a legislative provision that criminalises the fact that they network. It criminalises the fact that they're using Tor to hide their IP addresses.

It criminalises if they share information about how to defeat law enforcement. All of those things are criminal offences here in Queensland, and that's way ahead of any country that I've heard of. We have the power to demand their passwords or they commit a criminal offense. And that's the kind of tools you need to be able to do your job. And that job sometimes entails breaking the law in order to enforce it. We have a management board with a judge sitting on it, and that judge gives us authority to commit certain ranges of criminal activity. So our legislation allows us to assume the identities

of both children and offenders. It allows us to infiltrate and take over networks like this. It allows us to, in instances where it's required, to share child exploitation material to keep your membership. If you don't do it, well, immediately you're detected as a police officer. It's similar to how undercover officers can sell or buy drugs when they're going after a drug cartel. You're doing the same thing that the criminals do to achieve the objective of dismantling and destroying a criminal network. We're not producing child exploitation material. They're the ones that are producing it. They're the ones that are circulating it around the world. We're taking

it and under certain rules, we are using it, if it can possibly, it's the only way I can put it, for good. I can't fix what happened to the child in that picture, but I can use the fact that that picture's been circulating in the globe for the last 10, 15, 20 years for some good to stop the further abuse of a child. Posting child abuse images as an undercover cop was considered unorthodox. Even Paul Griffiths was unsure about it at first.

When I came to Australia, it was something that I wasn't entirely sure about, but it becomes obvious when you start to work in the area and you start to look at that as a tactic. It becomes obvious how it should be used and why it should be used, basically. I hope that any child who'd been abused would understand that law enforcement are trying to catch as many of those abusers as they can and identify as many as the victims as possible.

And I hope that they would support us in our attempts to do that. The simple fact is that if we close the site down, it would reappear within days in another guise and someone else would be running the site. That's unfortunately what happened. It's a compelling argument. But Håkon, watching from afar, had some reservations.

And he wasn't the only one. So this is where it gets hard, right? Because law enforcement may tell themselves a story that we'll be able to free a child if we either commit these crimes or allow other people to commit these other crimes. This is Carissa Hessek. She's a law professor at the University of North Carolina and an expert in child pornography law. They don't know that they'll actually be able to free a child, right? So what they should probably be weighing in that balance is, you know, the probability that they'll free a child with the certainty of what they're doing now. Another problem, though, is

when should these undercover investigations end? So, you know, back when we had undercover agents who had infiltrated the Italian mafia they had these sort of unspoken rules right they'd never let a murder go ahead they'd sort of set limits for when they had to wrap up the investigation because they couldn't let that particular crime go forward and if the site is being used to facilitate the actual abuse of children, and law enforcement is continuing to run it, then I have real questions about their ability to strike this balance. And it suggests to me that maybe some independent oversight is needed.

It wasn't the first time Argos had run this kind of operation. Police operation netted not only the Australian head of a global online pedophile ring, but also... In 2014, the unit had taken over another dark website, a forum called The Love Zone. It was involved in the abuse of hundreds, possibly thousands, of children around the world. They identified a high-level administrator, a 32-year-old Australian youth worker who was later charged with abusing at least seven kids in his care. He was arrested, and Argos took over his account

and eventually the site's server. They ran the love zone for six months, identifying hundreds of members around the world before shutting the site down. There are many good reasons for why the police should run this undercover operation. I see that. And I understand that. What concerned Håkon was that it wasn't clear, at least it wasn't then, just how many kids these kinds of operations rescued.

He worried that maybe the ends didn't entirely justify the means. For instance, I mean, one thing is that the police were sharing images in this canary message. They were also writing things in these messages that I find rather disturbing. For instance, there's this canary message from the beginning of January 2017, where the police officer acting as warhead, he writes, I hope that some of you were able to give a special present to the little ones in your lives and spend some time with them.

It's a great time of year to snuggle up near a fire and make some memories. For me, this sentence, it's a great time of year to snuggle up near a fire and make some memories, what the hell? It's almost like you're encouraging the users to abuse children. Here's my question back to you. Did we create the board? Did we create the environment that they're using? No, we didn't. We didn't make it. They made it.

So what we've done is we've infiltrated it, we've taken it over, and we're now going to destroy it. But during that period, we're going to identify as many children and as many of those people that built that temple that they worship at, we're going to take them down. What I find interesting is, I mean, there's sort of this... What's the name of the discovery sphere? Explorers? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

There's sort of these explorers or cartographers into this unknown territory, which is these online communities. They want to know as much about these communities as possible so that no one else will be able to know anything about these communities, because their goal is to burn the community down. So it's like, if no one ever knows what Paul is talking about

when he's describing his work, he has succeeded. It's interesting to hear you describe him as an explorer or cartographer because really that's what you and particularly Einar were doing on your own, right? You were your own expedition into this dark territory. Did you feel a kind of professional kinship in a way with the police? Because you guys were both kind of exploring the same territory. Did you feel a sense of commonality with what they were doing? Yeah, I did so.

So I guess I'm not clear on what point did you know they were going to shut down the website and finish their operation. Were they in contact with you? No, we didn't know. They had told us, you know, we'll let you know in a couple of weeks beforehand when we're going to shut down Shouseplay. So that we would be able to prepare our publication of the story. But I think it was in the middle of September, Einar came to me and said, they shut down the site two days ago.

This was September 2017, almost a year after Benjamin Faulkner and Patrick Fawlty had been arrested. Argos had been running Child's Play for 11 months. So after they had shut down the website without telling us, we started preparing the article. But Håkon wasn't able to get all the information he felt was important to the story. I was surprised because we asked John and Paul and task force Argos many times, can you give us any numbers? You know, how many children do you think it will be possible to save in this operation? How many producers or abusers, as we would call them, do you think it's possible to arrest?

And they refused to give us any number because they said, we fear that numbers will be used as a weapon by the media. You could interpret it that they thought if we give this low number, if we allow this low number to be published, then people can use it as an argument for, you know, is it really worth running a website, child abuse website for 11 months just to save these few kids? child abuse website for 11 months just to save these few kids. But I mean, if it's possible to save one child by running a child abuse website for 11 months, isn't it worth it? Is it? Håkon also points out that another reason Argos may have been reluctant

is that pinning down these numbers is actually quite complicated. The users, producers, and victims are all scattered across the world. Operation Artemis involved police forces from about a dozen countries. Once Argos passed evidence on to their international colleagues, it wasn't easy to keep track of the results. One arrest leads to more evidence, which leads to more arrests. And so it's a never-ending chain of investigations. Not to mention the fact that these investigations, they just take a long time. So Hulken drafts the story. He writes about Einar finding the site's IP address,

stumbling on Operation Artemis, discovering that Warhead was Benjamin Faulkner. And he voices his concerns about Argos running the site for as long as they did, as well as his concerns about them posting child abuse material. I contacted John and Paul and said, you know, these are the quotes that I want to use because we had been working so close with them. I let them see the article.

I don't always do that, but because we'd been very close for almost a year, I thought that would be the right thing to do. And they were surprised. Are you really going to publish the article now? They told me at that time that they had thought that we would wait, that we would delay our publishing until Fawlty and Faulkner were sentenced. John and Paul said, we want you to wait.

And they also reacted quite negatively to the article. They thought we were being too critical towards what they had done. So they didn't like that. And John told me that if you are going forward to publish this, we can't stop you. But then there will be no more contact. VG published the story in October 2017. I haven't heard from him since.

Almost. Ten months later, in August 2018, Håkon heard from Task Force Argos, in a roundabout sort of way, through a press release. It reads, 1,254 criminal charges. The press release also pointed out that the evidence Argos gathered led to over 300 new police cases around the world.

So after this is published, you continue to work on this stuff. And in fact, you continue to do research on this story. I guess most importantly, you've been in touch with Ben Faulkner. Yeah, that was one thing I felt lacking in our reporting because we mostly wrote about the police and the police operation and the criticism towards the methods

that the police were using. But I think it's important to try to understand is the right word. I mean, it's not like you want to understand why Fawlty and Faulkner did what they did, but you have to... Analyze, maybe? Yeah, you have to analyze why they did it. So that's why I contacted Fawlty and Faulkner. Because by being able to understand how they become what they are, we can help others. How does someone like Benjamin Faulkner transform himself into something like Warhead?

into something like Warhead? It's a crucial question to ask because no matter how many sites the police can infiltrate and shut down, no matter how many kids they save and abusers they arrest, the harm's already been done. To prevent that harm from ever happening, you have to understand its inception.

And so, like Hawken, I've written to Benjamin Faulkner, asking if he'd be willing to talk. I've also made calls to the people who know him best. His closest friends and his family. You think, oh, you know, you see all this stuff on TV, you watch True Crime, like, nobody's going to groom me. I'll never be groomed.

I mean, nobody's safe. Nobody's truly safe. I'm Chris Oak. And me, Damon Fairless. Thank you. Original music by Olivia Pasquarelli. The senior producer of CBC Podcasts is Tanya Springer, and our executive producer is Arif Noorani. Hunting Warhead is a co-production of CBC Podcasts and the Norwegian newspaper VG. Coming up on Hunting Warhead. It's kind of out of the blue. He says, hey, what's up? I want to come down and see you and the kiddos.

Is that your little one? That's my oldest, and there he is crouching behind her. Huh. So, you're at home? You're here? Typical day. And, um, my phone rings. And this gentleman says,

I'm with Homeland Security and I'm headed to your house right now.