By Paul Rolly
The Salt Lake Tribune
SALT LAKE CITY — It’s a beautiful summer night outdoors in a peaceful suburb, replete with joggers, walkers and folks going shopping, to a movie or to get ice cream.
But deep in the bowels of the second floor of a Murray commercial building where the Utah attorney general has a satellite office, up to a dozen agents are cramped in a cluttered room full of computers working nonstop to keep your children safe.
“What are you wearing?” writes the white supremacist from Las Vegas who thinks he is chatting with a 14-year-old girl.
“What do you like to do?” he adds.
“You want to get naked?” he continues, as he becomes more aggressive in the Internet conversation.
Then he sends a picture of himself sitting in front of a Confederate flag. Then he sends another picture of his private parts, all the time believing he is conversing with a junior high school kid.
He is one of four men chatting online simultaneously with Lt. Rhett McQuiston, a criminal investigator with the Attorney General’s Office and a member of the Utah Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) task force.
None of them knows he is talking to anyone else in another chat room. None of them are aware they are gleefully setting themselves up for felony charges.
This was Thursday night and I was invited to observe the operation when members of the task force, mostly investigators with the A.G., but also agents from other law enforcement agencies, go about their weekly ritual of reeling in would-be predators looking for sex.
McQuiston, using a girl’s name as an alias, describes himself early in the computer chat as a 14-year-old girl. Several who have begun conversations say, “too young,” and log off. But a disturbing number of men remain in the conversation, getting more graphic as the night wears on.
Even more disturbing is how prevalent the online stalking game is. Every time it sets up a sting, the task force gets numerous hits from men talking sex with what they think is a young girl.
While McQuiston is carrying on his simultaneous conversations - he leads the nation in these types of arrests - other agents go out on “knock-and-talks.” That is the term they use when they go to the home of a person they believe has illegal child porn and ask to view the suspect’s computer files.
Another member of the task force is Homeland Security/Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agent Jeff Bridge. He is busy with what the team calls the “peer-on-peer” project.
He scans popular download sharing sites on the Internet and, armed with a list of codes for hard-core porn videos, scans the sites to see who is downloading illegal materials. Once he gets hits, he can, through the Internet address of the downloader, eventually determine where that person lives and another suspect is added to the watch list.
The agents who do this have periodic psychiatric evaluations to ensure this constant association with the dark side doesn’t mess them up too much.
They do it to keep your kids safe.
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