Reisterstown Computer Guru Admits To Producing Child Pornography

BALTIMORE, MD — A Reisterstown man has admitted to having sex with minors overseas and producing child pornography so that he could bring it back to Maryland. Authorities said he traveled to the Philippines for the purpose of sexually exploiting minors.

Martin Hall, 56, will spend the next 25 years in federal prison if a judge accepts the plea agreement that he submitted in U.S. District Court in Baltimore on Wednesday. Sentencing is set for October.

The Baltimore County Police Department began the investigation into Hall, which grew into a probe that involved the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, in 2016.

Police noticed Hall requesting pornography online through a file sharing program, officials said; and upon executing a search warrant, Baltimore County Police Department investigators took computer equipment and a digital camera from Hall's home on Meadowseet Court on Sept. 7, 2016, prosecutors reported.

When officials served the warrant, they said the laptop and hard drive were on and accessible; but during the examination, the device became encrypted.

Hall is a computer programming expert who has written textbooks on Java, taught on the subject around the world and run a tech consulting company out of his Reisterstown home. Hall previously taught computer science at Johns Hopkins University and Towson University; and he was a guest lecturer at UMBC, Loyola College, University of Michigan, University of the Philippines and others, according to his biography.

Authorities said that Hall started going to the Philippines to have sex with minors in 2006 and produced child pornography while there. He kept thousands of child pornography files on various devices in his home in Reisterstown and used sophisticated software to keep others from finding them, according to his plea agreement.

By the time he had encrypted the devices as investigators were executing their search warrant, officials said they had already found more than 4,600 files, most of them child pornography. Investigators found a total of 8,000 images depicting child exploitation, according to prosecutors.

The images included sexually explicit pictures Hall had taken of a 14-year-old girl in the Philippines between April and August 2016, officials reported.

Prosecutors said Hall admitted to sexually abusing girls who were as young as 12 years old in the Philippines.

If the plea agreement is accepted, Hall will be sentenced to 25 years in prison, followed by a lifetime of supervised release, and he must pay $125,000 in restitution to his victims.

He will also have to register as a sex offender wherever he lives, works or studies.

U.S. District Judge Ellen L. Hollander has scheduled sentencing for Oct. 12.

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