A Liberty Township man has admitted to distributing images of child
pornography over the Internet, according to a criminal complaint filed on
Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Indiana.
The complaint names Brian A. Reider—born in 1960—with a listed address in
the Liberty Farms Mobile Home Park at 76 E. U.S. Highway 6.
The complaint stems from an undercover investigation which began eight
months ago, FBI Special Agent Alan George stated in a probable cause
affidavit accompanying the complaint. On Sept. 17, 2010, FBI Special Agent
Barry Couch, working with the Cyber Crimes Task Force in Rochester, N.Y.,
launched a peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing program, “queried his network of
‘friends’ on the network,” and began to “browse” the shared directories
belonging to a person whose username the FBI has “withheld for investigative
purposes,” George stated.
Those shared directories contained “over 10,000 files totaling 25GB of
data,” George stated, and Couch found among them images of child
pornography.
“Using P2P software to trade files is very private because the only
individuals who know, or will ever know, that a trade occurred are the
sender and receiver of the files,” George noted in his affidavit. “Thus, in
order to catch people trading illegal files using P2P programs, law
enforcement must participate in the trade.”
A subpoena was subsequently served on the username’s Internet provider and
the IP address was traced to Reider’s billing address in the Liberty Farms
Mobile Home Park, George stated. On Tuesday, a search warrant was executed
at Reider’s residence, an external hard drive was found “inside a closed
HVAC vent wrapped in a shirt,” an internal hard drive was found “inside an
empty plastic VHS tape case,” and 41 DVDs were found “inside a locked box
inside the same HVAC vent,” George stated.
The external hard drive found in the HVAC vent contained “hundreds of videos
and images depicting minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct” while at
least three of the 10 DVDs found in the vent similarly contained images of
child pornography, George stated.
“Reider admitted that he used his USER profile on that P2P program to
download child pornography and that he made child pornography available to
other users to download using that program as well,” George stated.
Reider also admitted, when asked about an ongoing investigation in Illinois
into his alleged molestation of a 12-year-old boy, that he had sexual
contact with the boy and took photographs of the 12-year-old. “Reider stated
that he met the child while BMX biking and later communicated with the child
via the ‘MySpace’ social networking site,” George stated.
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