New Hampshire investigators admit they got lucky in detecting school bus driver John Allen Wright's sex abuse of children. A woman visiting a friend near Wright's Milton home unwittingly latched onto his wireless Internet connection and found sexually graphic images.
But getting the evidence to convict him of abusing the disabled children he drove and taping the abuse on a hidden camera required nearly 100 hours of computer examination by New Hampshire's Internet Crimes Against Children unit.
The number of such units continues to grow as Internet use expands and criminals and their computers grow more sophisticated. The number of child pornography complaints the New Hampshire unit received in 2011 rose to 178 from 116 the year before.
Wright was convicted and sentenced this year to 160 years in prison.