A Mowbray man was caught in possession of child pornography after an FBI investigation of a specialist website led to a tip-off to the Australian Federal Police in 2015.
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Crown prosecutor Jane Ansell told the Supreme Court in Launceston that the website Playpen was dedicated to accessing and exchanging child exploitation material.
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Playpen is located on a network, known as Tor, which disguises the true internet protocol addresses of users through the use of a special browser.
"In February 2015, the FBI identified the physical location of servers hosting Playpen inside the United States," she said.
"The FBI executed a search warrant and seized control of Playpen.
"The FBI conducted live monitoring of Playpen and used an investigative technique to reveal the true IP addresses of individual users."
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Ms Ansell said that on March 2, 2015, Jesse Elijah Hall's IP address ice123456 was identified.
It found Hall had accessed the network seven times over the 11-day period from February 23 to March 4 on his laptop identified as kill masterJ.
He added information "Watch out Playpen newbie here" to the personal text tab of the site.
"The accused accessed 669 threads [conversations], 23 different forums within Playpen site while it was under the control of the FBI," Ms Ansell said.
"The total time logged was 22 hours and 40 minutes."
The child exploitation material accessed included threads (conversations) with names such as Girls HC, Jailbait-Girl, Toddlers, Voyeur, Preteen-Girl and Panties, nylons spandex.
Australian Federal Police reviewed the material accessed by the accused ice123456.
Ms Ansell said the material predominantly depicted about 30 different female victims aged between toddler and mid-teen.
"The range of activity depicted included sexually suggestive poses to penetrative acts with adults, predominantly adult males," she said.
On November 23, police executed a search warrant at Mowbray where Hall was and seized two laptops and two hard disk drives.
Ms Ansell said that there were thousands of deleted images which were not included in the indictment because they did not fit the definition of "possessed".
Video files depicted 20 different female victims ranging from four to five-years-old to early teen.
In an interview with police, Hall said he was just curious.
Ms Ansell said the man had no prior convictions.
Hall pleaded guilty to one count of using a carriage service to access child exploitation material under the Commonwealth Criminal Code and three counts of possession of child exploitation material of the Tasmanian Criminal Code between February 23 and March 4, 2015.
Defence counsel Mark Doyle made an application for a disputed facts hearing before sentencing.
Justice Robert Pearce adjourned the hearing until June 26.
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