From USA Today:

Police put net out for online predators

Arrest of federal official reflects increasingly aggressive pursuit

By Mimi Hall and Janet Kornblum
USA TODAY 

WASHINGTON — The arrest Wednesday of a Homeland Security Department spokesman charged with trying to seduce someone he thought was a teenage girl online was the product of increasingly aggressive policing of sex crimes on the Internet, according to police and children's advocates.

“This whole problem has exploded with the advent of the Internet, and law enforcement is more aggressive with these crimes than they ever have been before,” says Ernie Allen of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.

From police and sheriff's departments — such as the one in Polk County, Fla., that filed 23 felony charges against Brian Doyle — to the Justice Department, officials have dramatically increased funding and staffing to try to keep the latest teen hangout, the Internet, safe from child predators.

Teens have been online for years, talking with one another in chat rooms, through e-mail and via instant messaging, and writing blogs. But the trend has skyrocketed with the popularity of sites such as MySpace.com, where teens post detailed profiles, often divulging personal information and posting sexy pictures. The profiles are mostly intended for their friends to see, but police say predators troll the sites looking for kids they can meet.

Los Angeles detective Paul Bishop says that his unit posted MySpace profiles in which detectives posed as 14-year-old girls and were “inundated” with e-mails from older men.

“Our sexual exploitation of children is booming exponentially because of Internet access,” Bishop says.

At the Justice Department, funding for the 7-year-old Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) program increased from $2.4 million in 1998 to $14.5 million this year. There are 45 affiliated task forces across the country. ICAC-related arrests tripled from 564 in 2003 to 1,597 in 2005.

Politicians are paying more attention, too. The House of Representatives is holding hearings on sexual exploitation of children this week.

It's unknown whether the increase in arrests means more teens are being victimized or just that more predators are being caught. “The data has not been collected,” says Nancy Willard, who runs the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use. “The best gut-level assessment is that this activity is increasing exponentially with the increased activity of teens in online social networking.”

But if the Internet is bringing more predatory behavior, “the good news is that this case also illustrates what a boon the Internet is to law enforcement as well, because here they got somebody who obviously had predilections in this direction,” says David Finkelhor of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire. “You can potentially catch people at the very early stages before they actually abuse a child.”

Doyle, 55, was arrested Tuesday night after the detective he had been e-mailing and phoning called him at work to say she had a Web camera. The Polk County sheriff's office said Doyle had asked her to get one to send him pictures of her, and he told her he would view them when he got home. He was online with her when police knocked on his door.

“The long arm of the law can reach anyone, anywhere, any time, who tries to harm our youth,” Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd says.

Spokeswoman Carrie Rodgers says the sheriff's department's computer crime detectives pose as teens. Doyle “chose us. He initiated the conversation,” she says. “This is how we catch predators.”

The allegations against Doyle stunned officials at the Department of Homeland Security and across Washington, where Doyle worked for 26 years as a journalist at Time magazine before taking a job with the government in 2001. He was the No. 4 spokesperson at Homeland Security.

Republican Rep. Pete King of New York said he will launch an investigation of the department's hiring policies and security clearance practices.

Allen says people shouldn't be surprised that sexual predators are among them. One in five kids ages 10-17 will be sexually solicited online, and one in 33 will be aggressively solicited by someone who tries to arrange a meeting, he says.

“Unfortunately it's something that's very much a part of our society and culture today, and the people who are doing these things don't match society's stereotypes,” he says. “They are doctors, lawyers, corporate executives, public officials, police and schoolteachers. There's a mind-set of what a child molester looks like, but these people look just like everyone else.”