How to catch an online predator

N TRYING to catch creeps who prey on children, Detective Michele Deery has stalked through cyberspace as many different people.

She's been a 14-year-old girl and a 55-year-old man. Recently, she posed as the mother of two adolescent daughters who was willing to turn her fictitious children over for sex with a stranger. The man was arrested when he arrived for a rendezvous at a diner. "I like my work," Detective Deery says. "It's important work."

She is one of two undercover online investigators attached to the Internet Crimes Against Children unit in Delaware County, Pennsylvania. Child pornography has exploded on the internet and the Delaware County taskforce has scored notable successes, making high-profile arrests of men who seek to commit terrible crimes.

Yet the ICAC, like similar units around the US, is challenged by evolving defence tactics and the ever-changing nature of the digital age.

Pornographic images that once would have been easily discovered on a computer's hard drive can now be hidden on zip drives shaped like pens or watches, or even folded inside a video game. And criminals are getting smarter about covering up their online fingerprints.

Detective Deery says that despite how it looks on TV, where predators seem to hypnotically follow their desire through the front door and into the glare of news camera lights, catching these people is not so simple. Men who troll the internet watch TV too and have no hesitation in asking: "Are you a cop?"

If you want a potential child abuser to believe you are a teenage girl, Detective Deery says, you have to know what teenage girls are interested in: the latest Harry Potter novel, the songs of Hilary Duff. The job is hard for another reason. It requires the detective to regularly view harrowing photos and films.

"The children seem to be getting younger, the videos are more violent," Detective Deery says. "Sometimes you just have to get up and leave."

Some men journey great distances to meet a girl or boy they have contacted online. Police call them "travellers". What they travel for is a sexual encounter.

There seems to be no shortage of men willing to put their family, reputation and freedom at risk, Detective Deery says. When she logs on to a sex-themed chat room, she's quickly contacted by five or six men. She can sign on at 7.30am and find the same people at the same site when she returns at 10.30pm.

Some will ask her for a photo - they get a picture of a young-looking police officer. Others want to talk on the phone.

Detective Deery must chat in a way that doesn't constitute entrapment - she must never make a suggestion of sexual contact. She's surprised at how often the men mention NBC's popular TV program, To Catch a Predator. And how readily they concede to wrongdoing.

"They talk about it with me," she says. "They acknowledge the fact that what they're doing is illegal. They'll even mention the show."

The Delaware County taskforce works with 32 affiliated agencies across the state of Pennsylvania passing on hundreds of "cybertips" that come from the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children.

Since 2000, the Delaware County unit has been involved in 3308 investigations, making hundreds of referrals to other jurisdictions and 385 arrests on its own. It has arrested 45 accused travellers.

In 2004, 47-year-old Walter Himmelreich arrived at a local restaurant expecting to meet a woman and her two daughters, aged seven and 11. He had spent months corresponding with the "mother", telling Detective Deery the specific sexual acts he wanted to perform on the girls.

He was charged with numerous offences, including attempted rape. Images and videos found on his home computer led to other charges. Last year, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

"We're always asked what these guys look like," says Delaware County District Attorney Michael Green. "In grade school, it was the guy in a dark trench coat handing candy to children. Today, we can't tell you. It's every walk of life, every personality."

In the mid-1980s, federal officials say, the trafficking of child pornography was nearly eradicated. Producing photos was difficult and costly and buying the images was risky. Today, the opposite is true. The internet allows pictures and movies to be copied and sent at the touch of a button. Likewise, a website can quickly appear, disappear and reappear under a new name. And investigators face challenges from a defence bar that has learned to attack procedural issues concerning how internet-related arrests are made.

"Law enforcement is challenged," says Lieutenant David Peifer, Delaware County's ICAC supervisor. The task is not just catching predators and sending them to prison, he says. It's keeping track of them when they come out. "History shows that they don't stop," he says. "They're just going to be more covert."