Internet predators challenging agents

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Eric Szatkowski is a Wisconsin Justice Department special agent, but on that Sunday afternoon he entered an online chat room as a 14-year-old boy.

He claimed he was into weightlifting, AC/DC and muscle magazines. Then he waited.

Within hours, screen name Paul2u sent a message: “Hi. u realy 14?”

Over the past decade, agents and computer experts have gone after hundreds of people such as Paul2u who solicit sex from kids or trade child pornography online. Police efforts around the country were all the rage with the media in the early 2000s, reaching a crescendo with Dateline NBC’s “To Catch A Predator” series.

Despite the publicity then and now, the bad guys haven’t gone away. They’ve quietly multiplied. Trading child porn online and grooming underage targets in chat rooms has exploded nationwide. With arrests more than quadrupling in 10 years, Wisconsin’s agents and analysts feel overwhelmed.

“I don’t think we’ve made significant progress at all,” Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen said. “Our community leaders don’t even know how bad the problem is. The general population has no idea.”

The Internet was just gaining traction when an online child porn arrest was made by Wisconsin’s Justice Department in 1995. The next year saw six arrests. The year after that, 13. By then agency officials realized what the future held, said Mike Myszewski, administrator of department’s Criminal Investigation unit.

Using $300,000 in federal seed money, he set up one of the first units to combat Internet crimes against children. Today about 60 such task forces exist nationwide.

Szatkowski, a homicide investigator with years of undercover experience, was an early volunteer for the group, which focused at first on “travelers,” people like Paul2u who solicit sex from children online and arrange meetings with them. The unit made 18 arrests the first year, 36 in 2000 and 24 in 2001.

The numbers from units across the country were so encouraging that federal officials thought they could eradicate chat room solicitation within three years, Myszewski said.

Then computers and Internet connections got cheap. More people could afford to go online. The bad guys got smarter, too. They wanted to talk to the person on the other end of the modem and see photographs. “To Catch a Predator” only made them more cautious, Szatkowski said. Wisconsin arrests dropped, from 24 in 2001 to 17 in 2002 to 11 in 2003.

Meanwhile, online child porn became more sophisticated. New peer-to-peer file sharing software enabled porn purveyors to send photographs and videos directly to one another’s computers in seconds, anywhere in the world.

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s cyber tip line took 85,301 reports of child porn and 8,787 reports of online enticement last year. Investigations of Internet crimes against children resulted in 3,000 arrests nationwide in 2008, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

The statistics show how an entire generation has moved online, seeking reinforcement from others with the same abhorrent sexual tastes, said Michelle Collins, executive director of the missing children center’s exploited child division.

Most disturbing is the correlation between child porn and enticement, said Wisconsin forensic computer analyst Dave Matthews. Viewing leads to doing, he said.

“They’re grooming themselves,” Matthews said.

On a recent winter morning, agent Jenniffer Price was working 43 cases, all stacked neatly on her Madison office desk.

“We simply don’t have enough cops on the street to do the work that needs to be done,” Price said. “We’ve got so many offenders out there. I just see the balloon getting bigger and bigger and bigger.”