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October 23, 2004
Preying On Children Online
FBI Agents Who Track Sexual Predators Worry About Everybody's Kids, Including Their Own
October 22, 2004
By GARY LIBOW, Courant Staff Writer
NEW HAVEN -- It's not surprising that FBI Special Agent Tom Veivia considers himself an overprotective parent.
Posing online as a youngster or pedophile, Veivia spends countless hours scouring Internet chat rooms for people who prey on children sexually.
In a cramped room equipped with eight computers, Veivia works with undercover agents and police officers in the Innocent Images National Initiative.
Victims range from infants to 18-year-olds.
Working late evening and early morning hours at FBI headquarters on State Street, these undercover agents and officers have made 11 arrests since September 2003.
On Thursday, the FBI granted a group of University of New Haven students rare public access to the fifth floor, where its war on child abuse takes center stage.
Supervisory Special Agent Joseph P. Dooley, who oversees the FBI Computer Crime Squad and the Connecticut Computer Crimes Task Force, led the students on the tour.
The New Haven division has been on the cutting edge since creation of its hybrid computer crimes squad in 2001. The New Haven Model cyber crime squad was eventually adopted by the FBI on creation of the cyber division.
"We'll come in here and go on at night," Veivia said of undercover activities. "I've worked the midnight shift. ... When I'm here, I worry about everybody else's kids. And when I go home I worry about my own."
Veivia said undercover agents helped arrest a Middletown man who repeatedly instant-messaged his nephew's young girlfriend on America Online to arrange a sexual rendezvous.
"When he went to McDonald's to meet her, he met us," Veivia said.
The undercover squad - which includes police officers from Glastonbury, New Britain, New Haven and Milford - regularly infiltrates chat rooms in AOL, Yahoo, MSN and IRC to locate predators.
"We go in as young girls, young boys," Veivia said, noting undercover squad members read youth magazines to keep up with the current lingo and trends.
Dooley said the FBI purposely put undercover squad members in a bullpen setting, where information is readily shared.
"They have young kids and they're really committed to what they do," Dooley said. "They basically call it God's work."
Down the hallway is the FBI's computer forensics lab, where three full-timers autopsy confiscated hard drives believed to contain child pornography and records of adult attempts to meet minors for sex.
Ken Morrison, a civilian employee who completed 300 hours of FBI training, estimates about 80 percent of the cases the lab handles involve child pornography.
Noting that one confiscated hard drive contained about 20,000 lewd images, Morrison said child pornographers are fairly unsophisticated when trying to delete or hide unlawful images.
State-of-the-art forensic computer tools can usually recapture images relatively easily, he said.
FBI Agent Jim Butler said his forensic lab has a hard time keeping up with the stream of confiscated computers.
Viewing a child pornographer's gallery is extremely stressful, Morrison said. "I try to stay focused. I have two small children. ... We're working on getting the guys who are doing this."
Posted by Nealus at October 23, 2004 12:52 PM
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