The Kids are Alright? P Townsend arrrested

Janice Brooks · Post by **Janice Brooks** » 13 Jan 2003 1:25 pm

Pete Townshend Arrested
Jan 13, 11:54 AM EST

LONDON (AP) -- Rock star Pete Townshend of The Who has been arrested on suspicion of possessing indecent images of children, police said Monday.

Scotland Yard police headquarters announced that a 57-year-old man had been arrested on suspicion of making and possessing indecent images of children and of incitement to distribute indecent images of children.

Police confirmed off the record that the suspect was Townshend. He has not been charged with a crime.

Townshend, 57, said Saturday he had used an Internet web site advertising child pornography.

He made the admission after a newspaper reported detectives were investigating an unidentified British rock star for downloading child pornography.

Police said they had arrested Townshend under the Protection of Children Act after executing two searches at a business and a home in Richmond, Surrey, the town outside London where he lives. They said they had taken computers from the home and were examining them.

Townshend was being held at a southwest London police station, Scotland Yard said.

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Janice "Busgal" Brooks
ICQ 44729047

Jon Light (deceased) · Post by **Jon Light (deceased)** » 13 Jan 2003 2:27 pm

The least you could do is reprint the whole story including his explanation. I have no idea if he is scum or the victim of over-zealous prosecution but you only printed half of the AP story!!

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Rock star Pete Townshend of The Who has been arrested on suspicion of possessing indecent images of children, police said Monday.

Scotland Yard announced that a 57-year-old man had been arrested on suspicion of making and possessing indecent images of children and of incitement to distribute indecent images of children.

Police, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed the suspect was Townshend. He has not been charged with a crime. Under British law, suspects are not charged immediately upon arrest, and some people are eventually released without charge.

Townshend, 57, said Saturday he had used an Internet Web site advertising child pornography.

He made the admission after a newspaper reported detectives were investigating an unidentified British rock star for downloading child pornography.

Police said they arrested Townshend under the Protection of Children Act after executing two searches at a business and a home in Richmond, Surrey, the town outside London where he lives. They said they took computers from the home and were examining them.

Townshend was being held at a southwest London police station.

Townshend said in his Saturday statement that he was not a pedophile and only used the porn site once while doing research for an autobiography dealing with his own suspected childhood sexual abuse.

Townshend helped form The Who in London in the early 1960s and wrote most of the band's hits. The title character in Townshend's 1969 rock opera "Tommy" -- a deaf, dumb and blind pinball wizard -- is sexually abused by an uncle.

Their parade of hits included "I Can See For Miles," "Pinball Wizard," and "Won't Get Fooled Again."

Earlier Monday, a group of police officers arrived at Townshend's Richmond home, one carrying a plastic crate containing packaging to store potential evidence.

Townshend's arrest came as part of Operation Ore, a crackdown on people who view child pornography on the Internet.

British police have arrested 1,300 suspects as part of the sweep, including a judge, magistrates, dentists, doctors and a deputy school headmaster. Fifty police officers also have been arrested, and eight of them have been charged with offenses.

Operation Ore is the British arm of an FBI-led operation that traced 250,000 suspected pedophiles around the world through credit card details they used to pay for downloading child pornography. The names of British suspects were passed on to police in Britain by U.S. investigators.

Townshend's friend, the model Jerry Hall, said Sunday he was an "avid supporter" of child welfare charities and had spoken at length about the dangers of child pornography on the Internet.

[This message was edited by Jon Light on 13 January 2003 at 02:31 PM.]

John Steele (deceased) · Post by **John Steele (deceased)** » 13 Jan 2003 7:28 pm

That's why I come here. For intelligent discourse.

Maybe I just shouldn't.
-John

Dave Boothroyd · Post by **Dave Boothroyd** » 14 Jan 2003 12:33 am

Nobody who has met Pete Townsend has ever said a bad word about him. He is a tireless worker for several charities, and at present is going through a serious rethink about his life as the result of a severe hearing loss.
A more considered reply would have showed a little humanity, Mr Retcop.
If I may make an assumption based on your pseudonym maybe it is worth mentioning that 500 of the names on the list of 7000 people who aceessed the Pay Paedophile Porn site were members of the Police force. There is a quotation in the Bible about Motes and beams you might care to look up.

Roger Rettig · Post by **Roger Rettig** » 14 Jan 2003 6:03 am

Craig Stock · Post by **Craig Stock** » 14 Jan 2003 6:18 am

I saw Pete with the who this summer at Madison Square Garden, and it was one of the best shows I have ever seen, the man was playing like a 16 year old (That means good

).

What I don't understand is how they can catch people viewing these websites and arrest them, but they can't ever seem to catch the ones running these websites. Seems strange to me.

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Regards, Craig

nick allen · Post by **nick allen** » 14 Jan 2003 6:52 am

Points to note on this subject:
1) Townsend claims that his access to the sites in question was for research purposes
2) He stated that he had spoken to a police officer *at the time* about what he intended to do,and was advised to inform a specific police department - whether he in fact followed this up I'm not sure, but the police have confirmed the initial conversation.
3) He may simply be falling foul of the problem that, whatever his reasons, what he did was (apparently) *technically* illegal, and the legal process will continue its slow and tortuous path, while the tabloid (and other) press has a field day...
Nick

Tim Harr · Post by **Tim Harr** » 14 Jan 2003 8:30 am

"Burn the bum - he ain't country..."

What does country have to do with it? Here we go ---I forgot I was on the COUNTRY STEEL GUITAR FORUM....

Damn..

Jim Cohen · Post by **Jim Cohen** » 14 Jan 2003 9:15 am

I think he meant that he "ain't from this country" right? A little xenophobia goes a long way these days...

(Nah, I'm sure he just forgot the smiley face, that's all)

CrowBear Schmitt · Post by **CrowBear Schmitt** » 14 Jan 2003 9:33 am

English tabloids are ruthless and they sure know how to rake in the ££££

Roger Rettig · Post by **Roger Rettig** » 14 Jan 2003 1:31 pm

Jim

I HOPE he just forgot the 'smiley face'....

The British 'tabloid' press is the worst in the World (and I'm English!) - regardless of the outcome of all this, there'll be an implied connection between paedeophilia and Mr Townshend from now on. I know that there are rags like the 'National Enquirer' here in the US, but nobody takes that nonsesne seriously (do they?) - I'm afraid to say that Britains 'gutter press' accounts for a significant proportion of all 'newspaper' sales in the UK.[This message was edited by Roger Rettig on 14 January 2003 at 01:38 PM.]

Ian Finlay · Post by **Ian Finlay** » 15 Jan 2003 9:37 am

As I'm from England, maybe I can shed some light. The offence he may be being alleged to have committed is probably against the Protection of Children Act. Technically, if anyone in the UK "stores" an "indecent" image of a child that person may be offending. The scope is so broad that if I were to receive an email with such an image as an attachment, and I download it to my PC even without reading or opening it, I may be breaking the law. If I see it, and immediately delete it, I may be "destroying evidence". Basically, damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Townsend has been campaigning against child abuse for at least a year to my knowledge, had at least one friend commit suicide as a result of childhood abuse and personally I don't believe he is morally guilty. Maybe legally, I don't know. Stupid? Probably.

Let's not hang the guy out to dry because some newspaper Barons want to make money.

Ian

Roger Rettig · Post by **Roger Rettig** » 15 Jan 2003 11:49 am

Well put, Ian.

Ricky0ne1 · Post by **Ricky0ne1** » 16 Jan 2003 3:40 am

Ian, Thank You. I suspected a technical trespass of some sort..
The rock throwers never seem to run out of rocks, do they?....

Jerry Brightman · Post by **Jerry Brightman** » 16 Jan 2003 9:55 am

Interesting comments from you folks living in England...If my memory serves me correctly, wasn't Princess Diane killed because some press was chasing here in cars...It really bothers me that should Pete not be guilty,the press will do little to swing any publicity in his favor...and this will be with him for the rest of his life...

Just a thought...

Jerry http://www.slidestation.com [This message was edited by Jerry Brightman on 16 January 2003 at 09:56 AM.]

Gene Jones · Post by **Gene Jones** » 16 Jan 2003 11:41 am

Something to consider.......
What about all of those unsolicited e-mails I recieve, like Britney Spears naked, and see____ do___with a ____, etc! I always delete those e-mails without opening them or the attachment...but what if someday down the line someone looks on my hard drive and they find those.....will I be suspected of or arrested for porn? Something to consider.... www.genejones.com

Roger Rettig · Post by **Roger Rettig** » 16 Jan 2003 12:43 pm

Jerry

My point exactly.

If any sort of retraction IS published, it's tucked away out of sight. The damage is done by then, anyway, for all the good a 'retraction' does.

You're correct on the 'Diana' issue, too. There is such a high premium placed on 'candid' photographs, it's small wonder that they'll go to any lengths to obtain them.

Gene - you make a good point. I can't believe some of the things that find their way into my 'junk mail' folder; the transmission of that stuff should be indictable.

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Roger Rettig

Harry Dietrich · Post by **Harry Dietrich** » 16 Jan 2003 10:18 pm

Gene

You can erase all that junk from your hard drive. Erase your cookies, and your cache, or Temporary Internet files......If you have Norton System Works you can do it with that, if not just click on "Tools" at the top of your screen....then Internet Options, then "Delete Files", then erase "History" and change it to 0 days. That will clean you up.

Tony Prior · Post by **Tony Prior** » 17 Jan 2003 2:33 am

I too have been a WHO fan since they first showed up on the scene, actually before..I actually had some 45's which were pre-USA .

Anyway, the other night I did see a news report that stated that Pete T was one of 300
that were being watched in both the US and England for this particular CHild Porn investigation and that when Pete T was arrrested several others were as well, incuding some Dr's, Child Psycologists, a few lawyers etc. but it appears he was the only famous Internationally known person on the list..so..he wins the media award. Supposedly all were traced by credit card activity to certain websites for a pro-longed period of time. I wish he was not involved, I hate it . But I also don't buy the research thing either..I may have been born in the dark but it wasn't last night...

tp

" I can't Explain it "

Terry Edwards · Post by **Terry Edwards** » 17 Jan 2003 9:12 am

Harry,

It takes more than that to erase the data from your hard drive. You can delete cookies, delete temp files, clear your history, and even FORMAT your hard drive. If they confiscate your computer, guess what? The data can still be retreived! There are some hard drive cleaning applications out that will wipe out all data on your hard drive, however, I don't have a specific name for you. I got my info from a recent news report on this subject and I was quite suprised myself to learn that even reformatting isn't safe! The news report focus was primarily how our adversaries can get useful and sometimes classified info from many of the discarded old hard drives that the govt. gets rid of. A real eye opener!

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Terry Edwards
Fessy D-10; Nash 1000
Martin D-21; Flatiron F-5

Tom Olson · Post by **Tom Olson** » 17 Jan 2003 11:03 am

I would be EXTREMELY surprised if any data at all were still on a hard drive if it were reformatted.

Joerg Hennig · Post by **Joerg Hennig** » 17 Jan 2003 12:22 pm

Not directly related to the topic, but about what Gene said... I receive a lot of those junk e-mails these days and always delete them while still in the mailbox without even letting them get onto my hard drive. But they arrive practically every day, it´s a real nuisance by now. I wonder if there´s a way to just stop receiving them.

Terry Edwards · Post by **Terry Edwards** » 17 Jan 2003 1:05 pm

Tom,
Believe it! Reformatting does not erase data. It only rewrites the header/address for the data rendering the data virtually inaccessible. The data then can be overwritten, however, if it is not overwritten then the data is still there! The commercially available software operating systems and applications we use cannot read the data, however, there are companies that specialize in hard drive recovery that have specialized software that can read it. If you are going to dispose of a hard drive, degauss it or burn it!

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Terry Edwards
Fessy D-10; Nash 1000
Martin D-21; Flatiron F-5

David Pennybaker · Post by **David Pennybaker** » 17 Jan 2003 4:52 pm

From what I've read, even if you use one of those programs that writes all 1's and then all 0's 10 times (gov't standard) to a hard-drive, the Feds can STILL supposedly use some super-duper techniques to re-create what was on the disk BEFORE you did that.

Kinda hard to believe, ain't it? I've heard that if you REALLY want to destroy the evidence, you'd better take the drive apart, and literally shred the darned platters.

Oh, another thing. Even after you erase temporary internet files, history, cookies, etc. Your computer STILL has a record of places you've been in some hidden files. These can't be erased while you're in Windows. You've probably all seen the popup ads for those programs that will "erase all tracks of you internet usage". Those programs will (or should, anyway) get rid of those hidden files for you, too.