The Monroe County District Attorney’s Office on Thursday arrested Owen McCaffrey, 62, of Effort, on three third-degree felony charges in connection with an ongoing child pornography case using the Internet between 2007 and the present.

McCaffrey was arraigned before Magisterial District Judge Colleen Mancuso of Brodheadsville and committed to the Monroe County Correctional Facility in Snydersville in lieu of $50,000 bail. His preliminary hearing, also in front of Judge Mancuso, is scheduled for 10 a.m. Jan. 22.Officials said the man is charged with two counts of sexual abuse of children, one relating to distribution of child pornography and the other for possession of the same, and one count of criminal use of a communication facility.According to an affidavit of probable cause filed by Detective Brian Webbe, a police officer in the Monroe County District Attorney’s Office assigned to perform undercover Internet Crimes Against Children investigations, on Oct. 30 of last year, he was conducting an online Internet investigation to identify people possessing and sharing child pornography using the BitTorrent peer-to-peer file sharing network, an open source network that permits users to share files directly from one another’s computers through the use of publicly available software.Webbe said he located a computer on the network that was a potential download candidate for at least one file of investigative arrest and made direct connection to the suspect computer, downloading 957 image files of child pornography that were present on the computer and actively being shared.The affidavit states the files depicted nude female children between the ages of approximately 8 and 15 engaged in lewd exhibition of the genitals, including numerous photographs where the focus of the photograph was the genitals.Of the files, 446 of them depicted children 13 years of age or younger, and the remaining 511 files depicted children 14 years of age and older, Webbe said. The officer’s complaint states the photographs depicted the juveniles in various unfavorable positions designed to exhibit parts of their bodies.Webbe said he secured a subpoena to pursue the investigation, which revealed PenTeleData owned the suspect’s computer IP address, at which time the company identified McCaffrey as the subscriber.On Jan. 7 at 8:50 a.m., a search warrant was served at McCaffrey’s residence at 1230 Grand Mesa Drive in the Sierra View development in Chestnuthill Township, where police located a laptop computer that had the presence of a BitTorrent network on it. Webbe said he also located numerous photographs and videos of scantily clad young female children in sexually suggestive poses.Police said McCaffrey admitted to having downloaded child pornography numerous times between 2007 and several weeks before his arrest, and sharing it with other users.In addition to detectives from the DA’s office, the search warrant was executed by troopers from the Pennsylvania State Police.