6-23-2008 Alaska:
CYBERCOPS: Officers all over the state being trained to find, fight exploitation.
FAIRBANKS -- Two days after Christmas last year, Marc Poeschel slipped into a Yahoo chatroom.
Using the screen name "freakkid99701," the University of Alaska Fairbanks police officer posed as a 14-year-old girl whose mother was at work.
A 33-year-old husband and father of four contacted Poeschel's pubescent persona, sent nude pictures of himself, told Poeschel he likes to teach young people "self love," and set up a meeting.
The next day, the father of four drove his Dodge Neon to the UAF campus, bringing with him KY Jelly and warming lubricant. But instead of engaging in an encounter with an underaged girl, the man was snagged by authorities.
He didn't know it at the time, but the man had been chatting online with a foot soldier in the growing army of cybercops in Alaska.
Hundreds of Alaska's law enforcement officers are being trained to catch Internet predators and child pornography collectors thanks to a $300,000 federal grant that arrived last fall.
The officers belong to the Alaska Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, a statewide crime-fighting network designed to train police and educate the public about child exploitation on the Internet.
Almost 50 workshops on Internet safety were held in the state during the first three months of this year, according to Ron Tidler, the Anchorage police sergeant in charge of the task force.
EARLY EFFORTS
Poeschel first went online hunting predators in the late 1990s, not long after a toddler in Fairbanks was killed by his uncle while being sexually molested.
The case outraged many people, including Poeschel, who by then had carved out a niche for himself as a cop who knew computers.
Poeschel said he wasn't positioned to investigate crimes against children at the time, but he was free to explore the digital side of crime-fighting. he went online, posing as a young girl, and before long, a child predator made contact with him, he said.
Poeschel went to his supervisor and to the District Attorney's office only to learn that Alaska had no laws to prosecute would-be Internet predators.
"It ended up being dropped completely," Poeschel said.
It wasn't until 2005 that online enticement of a minor was made a crime in Alaska, laying the groundwork for Internet predator investigations.
GAINING EXPERIENCE
Posing as a young girl online is no problem for Poeschel, who is exposed to teenagers regularly on the UAF campus. Poeschel also promotes Internet safety in junior high and high schools. He said he listens to radio stations favored by young people and pays attention to how teenagers talk in cyberspace.
"I'll check Billboard to see what's popular," he said.
Poeschel's online personas are a work in progress.
"I don't script," he said.
He occasionally takes notes, writing down things like "dog" if he has mentioned it during a chat with a potential predator.
About 90 percent of the people who contact Poeschel's alter ego are turned off when they learn she is underaged, Poeschel said.
"Ten percent will hang in there," he said.
GROWING PROBLEM
The task force has generated a handful of cases in Fairbanks, and prosecutor Jenel Domke is bracing for more.
"I think we are going to see more and more cases because I think this has become more and more of a problem," she said. "What the Internet does is it allows individuals to be anonymous. The child doesn't really know who they are talking to on the other end.
"Some children, after they have talked to someone on the Internet a few times, to them that person is no longer a stranger, even though they really don't know who they are."
CHILD PORNOGRAPHY
Child pornography is another problem being addressed by the Alaska Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force.
"You've got this underground network of file-sharing on the Internet," trooper Sgt. David Willson said.
The task force has access to technology that can more or less scan the wires for people downloading and sharing child pornography.
The software can pinpoint the child pornography collector down to his or her neighborhood, according to Tidler, the task force commander.
"It's not just how many people out there have it," Tidler said. "It also breaks down by who has the most."
Lists are generated and used to obtain search warrants so that computers can be seized.
That's how authorities say child pornography was found on a computer belonging to a 22-year-old Fort Wainwright infantryman not long ago.
Peyton Merideth is the Fairbanks police detective who worked the case, which involves 90 charges of possession of child pornography. The criminal trial is scheduled for August.
"There's plenty of cases," Merideth said. "It's finding the time to work them." ..News Source.. by Anchorage Daily News
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