Vienna man charged with distributing child porn

A Vienna man is charged with distributing dozens of sexuallyexplicit videos and photographs of young girls over the Internet.

Authorities said 43-year-old Mike D. Latham has been wanted onchild pornography charges since February. He was taken into custodyafter a traffic incident in late April in Syracuse, N.Y., and agrand jury indicted him late last week on charges of distributingand receiving child pornography.

Court documents say a forensic examination of Lathams computersuncovered more than 120 child pornography movie files and more thantwo 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 wasreviewing a list of IP addresses that had been recorded as sharingchild pornography on a peer-to-peer file-sharing network inVirginia.

The FBI found that the IP address was being used to share dozensof 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, apreteen girl can be heard yelling in pain. That video was more thanan hour long, court records say, and several other videos lastednearly an hour.

Authorities traced that IP addresses to Lathams Vienna home,where FBI agents executed a search warrant in October.

Latham spoke to agents at that time, and said he used one of hiscomputers to view adult and child pornography, according to courtdocuments. He said that he searched for media files of girls ages 12to 16 and that he preferred videos to images.

The agents seized his computers and forensic testing on them wascompleted in November. Several files revealed young girls lawenforcement officials had identified as victims in otherinvestigations.

Child pornography cases have surged in the region. In the EasternDistrict of Virginia, where Latham is charged, cases jumped 373percent between 1999 and 2009, when 71 cases were prosecuted,according to Bureau of Justice Statistics data.

Project Safe Childhood, a 2006 Justice Department initiative, hasplaced prosecutors who target child-exploitation offenses in eachfederal judicial district. In Maryland, federal prosecutors saidFriday that 50 cases involving sexual exploitation of child werecharged last year, and the office has added two new lawyers to focuson crimes against children.

ebabay@washingtonexaminer.com