The monster next door: Florida law officers struggle to curb dark underworld of child porn
Almost every day, cybercrime detectives scour the internet for monsters.
These law enforcement officers spend countless hours tracking deviant predators who record violent acts against children in ways so unspeakable that most people won’t bring themselves to even read about it in this story, let alone think about it.
The dark underworld of child pornography has exploded to such global proportions that experts no longer refer to it simply as “child pornography” — it’s now called “child sexual abuse imagery.’’
These crimes are among the most difficult to investigate and prosecute because sex criminals use increasingly sophisticated encrypted computer technologies and live on the dark web in order to remain undetected. For investigators, it means law enforcement officers who do this kind of work are subjected to graphic images on almost a daily basis.
South Florida child porn busts often happen under the radar, earning modest headlines, until an arrest goes horribly wrong, which happened on Tuesday in Sunrise, when a suspect opened fire on two FBI agents serving a search warrant. The agents were killed and three others were wounded.
The public, for the most part, doesn’t understand how violent child sex predators have become, said Francey Hakes, a former federal prosecutor who served as the nation’s first national czar for child exploitation and prevention.
“People just don’t want to talk about this and so they don’t know how horrific it is. It’s not just a nude child in a bathtub — it’s a crime scene in which babies and children are being violated and exploited in unspeakable ways.’’
Frank Figliuzzi, the FBI’s former assistant director for counterintelligence, explained that sexual abuse of children crosses all socioeconomic communities, and often involves predators who have no criminal history and who live normal lives on the outside, while simultaneously residing in an alternative deviant community online where their appetite for children is accepted and shared.
“It’s not unusual for them, when confronted with being arrested, that they commit suicide. Their career is over, their reputation is done, it’s the end of the line for them,’’ Figliuzzi said. “Serving any kind of warrant is always dangerous, but with these kinds of high-risk cases, the suspects are being forced to confront their own reality.’’
A key barometer
There’s no nationwide database on cases involving child pornography. The U.S. Department of Justice uses the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) to keep track of tips, but it’s impossible to know how many people are arrested and prosecuted around the country since local arrest statistics for child pornography are not always shared with other agencies.
NCMEC is a clearinghouse for tips, and one barometer of the problem. In 2014, NCMEC’s cyber tipline received just one million reports involving child pornography. By 2019 — five years later — that number had soared to 16.9 million tips involving 69 million images, videos and other files related to child sexual exploitation around the world.
Every day, hundreds of thousands of images of children are being spread to every corner of the internet through social media platforms such as Facebook Messenger, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat. Internet companies such as Google, Microsoft and AOL have joined anti-child-porn coalitions in an effort to combat the epidemic, which is one reason the numbers have skyrocketed.
But child sex abuse imaging crimes are proliferating faster than the internet companies and law enforcement can keep up with them.
“Technology has gotten way ahead of law enforcement and now it is dangerously out of control,’’ said Figliuzzi, who spent part of his career at the Miami office of the FBI.
The South Florida Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, a coalition of law enforcement officers in Broward and Miami-Dade, receives about 4,000-5,000 tips a year. Lt. Andrea Tianga, a supervisor of the task force, said in recent years detectives have had to become more adept at new technologies.
“Today, it’s not just the unsuspecting guy who downloads explicit photos of a 17-year-old who looks 18,’’ Tianga said. “These predators are downloading videos of grown men having sex with prepubescent children, toddlers and even infants. This is not child pornography. This is the recorded sexual torture of children. Our detectives are exposed to these graphic images and videos regularly.’’
In recent years, the FBI has redoubled its efforts to hunt child predators. In South Florida, federal agents have charged teachers, coaches, firefighters, lifeguards and an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official. A person convicted of possession of child pornography can receive anywhere from six years to 30, depending on how the imagery was obtained and distributed.
In 2014, a former Miami firefighter who was convicted of downloading videos of child pornography on his computer was sentenced to 27 years in prison. In 2019, 5,000 images of children being sexually abused were found in two storage units that belonged to a Harvard-educated architect who formerly taught at the University of Miami and Florida International University. He was sentenced to more than six years in federal prison.
Many child victims are recruited over the internet, or they are groomed by people online to share explicit photos and videos of themselves, experts say.
“Many times it begins as a one-on-on situation where an offender begins trading child pornography on line and abuses a child he knows in order to generate material to trade with others so that he can receive new material for himself,’’ Hakes said.
Oftentimes, young people are lured into meeting a child predator they have met online.
“We had a teenage boy who was communicating with someone on Facebook whom he thought was a female. He made arrangements to meet this woman and it turned out to be a male who took advantage of him and took photographs and put them on the internet,’’ said Amanda Altman, CEO of Kristi House, a child advocacy center in Miami that specializes in helping victims of child sexual abuse.
The two agents who were killed Tuesday were veteran investigators who were dedicated to jobs that most people in law enforcement can’t stomach.
The agents, Laura Schwartzenberger and Daniel Alfin, were shot as they arrived at an apartment in Sunrise to serve a search warrant on a child porn suspect before dawn Tuesday. The agents died at the hospital and two other agents were wounded. The gunman, David Lee Huber, 55, then shot and killed himself, authorities said.
Operation Pacifier
Alfin, 31, was a veteran agent who helped lead one of the country’s largest child pornography investigations, Operation Pacifer, which was shut down by the FBI in 2015. It led to over 900 arrests around the world and 300 children were rescued, according to the FBI.
Schwartzenberger, 43, had been working in the Miami FBI’s crimes against children unit for more than six years. She also helped educate students about online safety.
“My colleagues had remarkable things to say about these agents. They represented the best. These people choose to do this difficult work day in and day out, even if they only rescue one child,’’ said Michelle Delaune, CEO of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
Altman, of Kristi House, said children have to be educated about safe computer habits, and the public, including parents, teachers and even neighbors, needs to pay attention to warning signs.
“The community has to be alert. It’s almost cliché, but if people see something, they need to say something,’’ Altman said.
To report a missing or exploited child, or to report sex abuse imagery involving children contact the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children at 1-800-THELOST or email cybertipline.com.
Miami Herald Staff Writer Jay Weaver contributed to this story.
This story was originally published February 5, 2021 at 3:37 PM with the headline "The monster next door: Florida law officers struggle to curb dark underworld of child porn."