A Vienna man is charged with distributing dozens of sexually explicit videos and photographs of young girls over the Internet. Authorities said 43-year-old Mike D. Latham has been wanted on child pornography charges since February. He was taken into custody after a traffic incident in late April in Syracuse, N.Y., and a grand jury indicted him late last week on charges of distributing and receiving child pornography.
Court documents say a computer forensic examination of Latham’s computers uncovered more than 120 child pornography movie files and more than two dozen explicit photographs.
No lawyer was listed for him in court records on Friday.
Latham, a long-haul trucker, was detected when an FBI officer was reviewing a list of IP addresses that had been recorded as sharing child pornography on a peer-to-peer file-sharing network in Virginia.
The FBI found that the IP address was being used to share dozens of “child notable files” — those suspected of being child pornography.
The files included sexually explicit videos of young girls, according to court documents. In one video, the documents say, a pre-teen girl can be heard yelling in pain. That video was more than an hour long, court records say, and several other videos lasted nearly an hour.
Authorities traced that IP addresses to Latham’s Vienna home, where FBI agents executed a search warrant in October.
Latham spoke to agents at that time, and said he used one of his computers to view adult and child pornography, according to court documents. He said that he searched for media files of girls ages 12 to 16 and that he preferred videos to images.
The agents seized his computers and forensic testing on them was completed in November. Several files revealed young girls law enforcement officials had identified as victims in other investigations.
child pornography cases have surged in the region. In the Eastern District of Virginia, where Latham is charged, cases jumped 373 percent between 1999 and 2009, when 71 cases were prosecuted, according to Bureau of Justice Statistics data.
Project Safe Childhood, a 2006 Justice Department initiative, has placed prosecutors who target child-exploitation offenses in each federal judicial district. In Maryland, federal prosecutors said Friday that 50 cases involving sexual exploitation of child were charged last year, and the office has added two new lawyers to focus on crimes against children.
