Busting child porn has rewards but takes toll on cops

It takes a certain kind of law enforcement officer to make the disgusting, yet vital, daily dive into the sewer of child pornography. But that’s life on the Internet Crimes Against Children task force.

The statewide team of child porn busters — the people who built the cases against Jared Fogle and Russell Taylor, the former head of Fogle’s foundation — is among the most prolific in the country in terms of arrests, averaging more than 200 per year from 2012 to 2014.

But that record comes at a price: repeated exposure to children abused sexually. People often ask the investigators some version of the same question.

“How can you stomach it?”

Nobody in law enforcement is required to take the job. Anyone can step away anytime. No questions asked.

“This work is really stressful and difficult,” said Steve DeBrota, assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Indiana. “Some of the material these agents have to work with is horrific — beyond imagination, horrific. But the reason why, day in and day out, they keep doing that is because without dealing with that material, that kid won't be found. The worse that material, the more trouble that kid's in.”

Those who take on the difficult assignment are required to meet with a psychologist once a year. Beyond that, they must find other ways to cope.

Sometimes, when reviewing video evidence, they turn down the volume. The sounds of a child being violated, officers said, can be particularly haunting and hard to shake.

Most officers on the task force have the ability to compartmentalize, to separate work from the rest of their life. Humor outside work can help.

And everyone finds some relief in knowing that whatever they’re going through, they’re saving children from a much worse fate. Success is a psychological salve.

But there are moments during or right after an investigation when what they need most is each other. So they get together with the only people who truly understand what they are dealing with and talk over fried rice or sweet and sour chicken. They even have a name for it: “Chinese buffet therapy.”

“What that provides is time to decompress,” said Chuck Cohen, commander of the Indiana State Police cybercrime and investigative technology section. “To say, ‘Did you see this? Can you believe this?’ So you don’t have to go home and dwell on it individually. And that’s important.”

After all, they have to wake up tomorrow and do it again.

Monsters

Child porn is escalating in terms of quantity and severity, including the falling age of victims, DeBrota said.

The local task force — there are 60 others nationally — is among the nation’s most aggressive. It investigated more than 1,700 tips in 2014 just from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Those reports often pull investigators down an Internet rabbit hole that multiplies the number of suspects.

This year, the task force is on pace to receive more than 2,000 such tips, or an average of more than four every day. And that doesn’t include reports from other law enforcement agencies or individuals, like the one that led to them to Fogle.

DeBrota said that in 2001, law enforcement was aware of one set of sadistic child porn images on the Internet. Law enforcement today sees “dozens and dozens and dozens.”

And criminals are ever more sophisticated in covering their digital tracks.

That requires cyberspace savvy from the ICAC team, made up of officers from 40 local, state and federal agencies. They combat an ugly world where even some of the pedophiles draw imaginary moral lines, ratting out others they think have gone too far.

Even the worst criminals can find an affirming, kindred spirit on the Internet.

“What’s happened over time,” DeBrota said, “is the monsters have found each other.”

And in doing so, it can provide the illusion of normalcy.

Unlike Hoosier icon Fogle, the former spokesman of the Subway sandwich chain, many of those suspects had never stepped foot in Indiana. Pedophiles from as far away as Europe and Australia, as well as across the United States, have been brought to justice in Indiana. Some received sentences of hundreds of years or life in prison.

The crimes of those far-flung child pornographers involved sharing images with someone in Indiana, which caught the eye of ICAC. In one such case, DeBrota secured a 30-year prison sentence for an Australian man who had adopted a young boy, then traveled the world allowing other men to have sex with the child from the time he was a toddler until he was about 6. Some of those sex acts were filmed, according to court records, and shared with others around the world.

“The guy in Australia’s worst day,” DeBrota said, “was when some of that material hit Indiana.”

Indiana formed its ICAC unit in 1991, before federal law required every state to have one. Back then, the cases typically didn’t involve a conspiracy among numerous people.

The criminals shared child porn by mail, finding each other through ads in adult newspapers offering, euphemistically, “hard-to-find videos.”

“Everything changes in 1993 with easy Internet access,” DeBrota said.

About that time, DeBrota was at a law enforcement conference where a long-retired prosecutor of child porn cases said he prided himself on the fact that he had never looked at any of the material.

“I remember thinking, ‘Why didn’t they? Wouldn’t that be a crime scene?’ ” DeBrota said. “Couldn’t there be clues in the background you could use to maybe find the kids or maybe prove the case. If I was doing a bank robbery, wouldn’t I look at the video of the bank robbery? Of course I would.”

That’s how they catch the monsters.

Solving the crimes

Consider the case of the “hidden Mickey.”

The photograph seemed innocuous on its own: A pre-teen girl in a bathing suit standing by a sink.

It was, however, among images uncovered by the Indiana investigators from an Internet cache that included pornographic pictures of the same little girl. But the seemingly innocent photograph helped rescue the girl and bring down a major worldwide child porn ring.

That photograph provided a series of obscure clues: a plastic drink cup, a lighting sconce, an electrical outlet, a baseball cap.

The sconce had a small Mickey Mouse symbol on it. That’s called a “hidden Mickey,” a subtle symbol that shows up at Disneyland or on Disney products. Disney enthusiasts delight in spotting them.

“We knew we had a hidden Mickey, and Disney is not going to let that be in any kind of hotel,” DeBrota said. “Then we noticed a sign saying voltage limitations on this plug are the following. So we guessed it couldn’t be a hotel, it had to be a cruise ship.”

There was enough in the photos to compare the class of the cabin to what Disney advertised on its website.

Law enforcement knew the photo was from around the Fourth of July. A University of Michigan baseball cap showed up in one of the photos. Maybe it was an alumni cruise, investigators thought.

Thanks to the clues, the child was removed from the situation that led to her exploitation, and the suspect eventually pleaded guilty and received a 35-year sentence for two counts of producing, distributing and receiving child porn.

“Once you find the ‘hidden Mickey,’ the rest of that took about three hours,” DeBrota said. “That’s cool stuff. So I get to have that happen. ... That’s so rewarding. When you can solve a crime like that, it doesn’t get better.”

Public conversation

At the monthly meetings of the Indiana ICAC task force at the U.S. attorney’s office in Indianapolis, the talk is about current investigations, emerging technologies and the ways kids are communicating.

Part of what makes Indiana’s ICAC task force unique, DeBrota said, is that the various agencies work well together without concern for which one gets the credit.

Lindsey Olson, director of the exploited children division at the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, said the center “has a long-standing, positive working relationship” with the Indiana ICAC team.

Such partnerships are critical as child pornography and exploitation continues to flourish on the Internet. The center receives tips about child exploitation from the public as well as Facebook and Twitter, both of which are required to report suspected child exploitation. Those tips have increased by 500 percent since 2013. Most of those reports, Olson said, relate to online child pornography.

“They are very responsive to our reports,” she explained. “They do fantastic work.”

But good police work, alone, won’t eliminate child porn.

Kids with cellphones have to know that the person on the other end of their communication could be dangerous. As DeBrota sees it, too much of the conversation focuses on high schoolers.

He sees criminals going after kids in elementary school and junior high.

He has seen a fourth-grader involved in a “sex-tortion” case.

“We’ve got to have that public conversation about this,” DeBrota said, “because I don’t think we can investigate and prosecute our way out of this problem.”

Tony Cook and Marisa Kwiatkowski contributed to this story.

Contact Mark Alesia at (317) 444-6311. Follow him on Twitter: @markalesia. Contact Tim Evans at (317) 444-6204. Follow him on Twitter: @starwatchtim.

How to make a report

To report suspected child pornography or exploitation, contact the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children at (800) 843-5678 or visit cybertipline.org.

If a child is in immediate danger, you can also call 911.

More information on fighting child pornography and explotation is available at http://www.missingkids.com/home and www.in.gov/attorneygeneral/2563.htm