ST. CHARLES TOWNSHIP – Robert Dore, an attorney with years of experience prosecuting internet crimes against children, came out of retirement to join the Kane County State’s Attorney’s Office to work on child exploitation and child porn cases.

Speaking at her April monthly briefing Tuesday, Kane County State’s Attorney Jamie Mosser said Dore’s experience and connections to state and federal agencies in the prosecution of child sex abuse and child pornography are invaluable to the office.

“That’s something that I think we’ve been lacking in our office for some time. We haven’t really had the partnerships with the Attorney General’s Office,” Mosser said. “We had them years ago. And I know that we just haven’t had it recently. And frankly, we haven’t been resourced to our police departments in the way that I think we can.”

Dore who was a prosecutor in DuPage County and for the last 13 years, was chief of the felony trial division in Kendall County. He retired in 2019 and was doing civil work when she reached out to him, Mosser said.

“Because he really is a true prosecutor, and a true leader and frankly, somebody who I knew Kane County could benefit from, I had started to talk to him about the potential of coming back,” Mosser said.

That is when Mosser also reached out to Kane County Sheriff Ron Hain about Dore’s experience with the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force.

Dore began in Kane County March 1, she said.

“Jamie was very strong in trying to pull me back out of retirement,” Dore said. “Once I started working on behalf of families and children who were exploited, it became a real passion for me. I was trained at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.”

The agency serves as a national clearinghouse for missing and sexually exploited children but also help to identify children in child pornography.

“The children exploited in the films, the images and in many cases, it segues into children who are reported missing, they end up getting into the sex trade, it’s terrible,” Dore said. “The National Center works with state and local, federal and international – Interpol – agencies, because many of these videos that are being shared on the internet are coming from Europe, Eastern Europe bloc countries and other countries that don’t have the resources either to search for the children or search for the source of where they’re coming from.”

The National Center has also established a cyber tip hotline for the public electronic service providers to report suspected child pornography, Dore said.

Each image or video has an electronic version of its own fingerprint or DNA, Dore said – about 15 to 20 characters long with letters and numbers.

So it is the same with each image or video of an exploited child, and its identifier is known as a hash value, Dore said.

“The internet service providers and the electronic service providers don’t want their platforms being used for the dissemination or sharing of these type of files,” Dore said.

“So they’ve worked with the National Center in creating a clearinghouse and a mechanism to report suspected child pornography on their platforms,” Dore said. “It’s called a cyber tip hotline. For instance, Verizon or Comcast – I mean, you name it – even down to these new sites that you and I probably don’t use – like TikTok – or some of the other ones the kids are using.”

If these operators recognize or suspect that some of these images or videos contain suspected child pornography or exploitation material, they report it to the National Center, he said.

The National Center will look at the area it was reported to have taken place and will send it to that state, as each state has an Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, Dore said.

Illinois’ task force is run through the Attorney General’s Office.

The task force will seek an internet protocol address or ip address, and forward that information to local law enforcement, such as to a sheriff’s office. Investigators will determine whether additional law enforcement or resources are needed, such as search warrants or subpoenas, Dore said.

“And look for someone who is actually disseminating these images or these videos,” Dore said. “As you can imagine during the shelter in place over the last year, the numbers have increased astronomically.”

In 2017, there were nearly 10.2 million reports of child exploitation, he said.

In 2019, there were nearly 17 million such reports to the cyber tip, he said.

In 2020, nearly 22 million reports to the cyber tip hotline, he said.

“My job, based on my experience, is to work with our partner law enforcement agencies here in the county, through our office, to further investigate these type of cyber tip reports, these hotline reports,” Dore said. “And ultimately ... prosecute individuals who are disseminating or sharing this type of material. We don’t want that material out there.”

Mosser said in 2018, Kane County charged eight of these cases; 12 in 2019; 10 in 2020; and so far this year, three were charged.

“There’s probably a lot more than that,” Mosser said. “I’d love to believe that Kane County doesn’t have a significant amount of people who are disseminating or possessing child pornography, but part of that is we need to work with our police departments to make sure we are identifying and prosecuting these cases aggressively.”

Dore said in 2019, in a county five times smaller than Kane, he prosecuted 36 cases, three times the number Kane reported.

“And that was because of our partnership with the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force and the National Center,” Dore said.

“I was working with the FBI, Homeland Security – we had quite a few cases,” Dore said. “And I can’t imagine there should be that low a number of cases (in Kane), we just need to partner more with our police departments and see if we can allocate some resources so that we can try to prevent some dissemination of some of these images and some of these videos that seems to be pretty prevalent everywhere else.”