International child-porn bust

"Nearly 2,400 suspects from 77 countries allegedly paid to view videos depicting [child] sexual abuse online," the Associated Press reported. Within 24 hours of receiving a heads-up about some of the videos an Austrian network administrator who'd stumbled upon them in a routine scan, "investigators recorded more than 8,000 hits from 2,361 computer addresses" in all those countries, including the US. The lead investigator said his team believes "the videos were shot in Eastern Europe and uploaded to the Web from Britain. A link to the videos was posted on a Russian Web site, which is no longer in operation, and hosted on a server in Austria. Some of the material was free, but the Russian site charged $89 for access for a 'members only' section." The article points out that, even with the size of this group, finding this activity is needle-in-a-haystack work.