[A]n Ascutney man pleaded guilty to one count of possession of child pornography and was sentenced to 45 months in prison after Google sent a tip to law enforcement two years ago about suspicious images on his accounts.
Jason Bonds, 43, was sentenced in Burlington’s U.S. District Court on Monday and is expected to be charged and sentenced on separate state charges of lewd and lascivious conduct involving a child on Tuesday.
Federal law requires that all electronic communication providers report child exploitation when they see. Google has used its digital gaze to tip off law enforcement on a number of child pornography users over the years.
The internet giant actively scans the photos that pass through Gmail accounts to see if they match the digital fingerprint of child pornography, and patrols its “cloud” platform Google Drive for possible illegal images.
Scott Labor, a special agent for Department of Homeland Security Investigations, wrote in the affidavit on Bonds that Google sent a “Cybertip” to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children about suspected child pornography discovered on its “platform” in April 2016.
An investigation into the Google account, under the name “ravenblackbirdjay,” along with the Internet Protocol (IP) address, found that it belonged to a Comcast Cable Communications customer in Ascutney, according to the affidavit.
In the summer of 2016, Google responded to a Vermont state search warrant requesting information on the account by providing a photo of the person associated with it, which was later positively identified to be Bonds, according to court documents.
Google also provided investigators with images depicting child pornography from Bonds’ Gmail account, Labor wrote in the affidavit. Law enforcement officers visited the Ascutney address in December of 2016, and found that Bond’s parents lived at the residence, but that Bonds no longer lived there and had moved to Westminster, court documents said.
After officers asked Bond’s mother to reach him by phone, he agreed to meet with police officers. During the ensuring conversation with Brattleboro police, Bonds told them he would often go to online video chat rooms to talk with 12- to 13-year-olds and would view photos of naked children, but he said he would become “scared” while viewing them, according to the affidavit.
Investigators then searched his personal computer and found approximately 1,300 images of child pornography, with the majority of photos of children ranging from infant to 6 years old, and some depicting “sadistic and masochistic” acts, according to a statement from state prosecutors.
Bonds told police that he had he viewed child pornography “probably hundreds or thousands of times,” Labor wrote.
At the time of the interviews with police, Bonds was living with his girlfriend, her 8-year-old son, and 6-year-old daughter, the affidavit said.
Bonds told law enforcement he had never physically done anything inappropriate with a minor, but a representative of Children Advocacy Center interviewed a female child who said that Bonds had sexually assaulted her while “her mother was watching TV downstairs,” Labor wrote.
On May 22, 2018, Bonds pleaded guilty to lewd and lascivious conduct involving that child in Vermont state court. The guilty plea in the state case was a condition of his plea agreement with federal authorities, according to the district court statement.
In the federal case, Judge William Sessions also ordered Bonds to serve a five-year term of supervised release and to pay a $100 special assessment.
