Most people think of catching a sexual predator as lying in wait for someone to walk through a door in anticipation of a good time.
It is that. But for Lt. Wade Williams of the Collier County Sheriff’s Office, it is also a digital hunt in a vast, dark, online realm for extraordinarily cruel, perverse and exploitive people who target even infants in their quest for sexual pleasure and abuse.
Williams addressed the Press Club of Southwest Florida on Feb. 11, with a comprehensive—and sometimes jarring—overview titled “Spotlight on Human Trafficking and Child Exploitation.”
Williams heads the Inter-agency Child Exploitation And Persons Trafficking Task Force (INTERCEPT) in Collier County. It’s a law enforcement effort aimed at fighting exploitation and trafficking using the latest digital tools, technology and techniques. It provides education to the public and draws on the knowledge of a full spectrum of experts across all the disciplines involved in fighting trafficking, whether in the enforcement, legal, medical or psychological realms.
Williams’ presentation was very direct. Much of the abuse and exploitation of children is done through social media and an enormous variety of platforms and applications. Abusers target children through everything from otherwise innocent online games to networking apps, to dating sites and more.
“Predators around the world are now able to connect in ways that they never could before,” Williams said. “Prior to the Internet they had to do actual hand-to-hand exchanges of child sexual abuse material.” But now the Internet provides a medium for global exchanges of stories, images and even twisted competitions of instances of child abuse and exploitation.
The material Williams monitors and fights goes beyond what is usually defined as “pornography.” The law enforcement term is “child sexual abuse material” (CSAM) and 86 percent of apprehended CSAM viewers admitted to actively abusing children, so where there’s CSAM, there’s usually active crime.
According to Williams, an estimated 400 million images of sexual abuse are in circulation, up from 105 million in 2001. The instances that produce that abuse have left an estimated 50,000 abused children unidentified and missing.
Forcing children and pre-teens into the CSAM “game” can be particularly cruel, with predators “sextorting” young people with threats and intimidation, blackmailing even young children by using currency in online video games. One in four sextortion victims was 13 years old or younger and two out of every three were girls under the age of 16.
The activity is international: for example, two gangs, one called the “Yahoo Boys” operated out of Nigeria and the Ivory Coast.
It’s all a huge problem but one organization that’s trying to make a difference is Operation Light Shine, a non-profit 501c3 coalition of foundations, companies and organizations. Through the INTERCEPT Task Force, Operation Light Shine is trying to help law enforcement defeat predators.
Since the problem is technological, so is the enforcement effort, and INTERCEPT requires servers, facilities, hardware, software and personnel to do the job.
There have already been results, including in Collier County, which was able to hire four detectives, four investigative specialists and a police sergeant to pursue predators.
In its first year operating in Southwest Florida, Operation Intercept launched 1,052 investigations. Using its digital tools, officers were able to review over 176 million images, over 55 million videos and seize over 140,000 CSAMs. Using 158 search warrants they examined 320 digital devices and made 63 arrests based on abuse of 90 victims.
The record shows an exponential increase in law enforcement actions, up from just five in 2021.
Williams made clear Operation INTERCEPT’s need for funding to continue its work. Social media “is an out-of-control freight train right now,” he said. Indeed, locally detectives were getting burned out on the work and were being replaced annually.
“Who wants to do this job?” he asked. “There’s no extra pay for this, or bonus,” he observed.
“What’s the benefit here to have these cases constantly weighing on you with all these child victims? But once we properly staffed it we found that there were some motivated detectives that are unique, that want to do this kind of work and they need to be properly supported, otherwise they’re buried.”
Today, the sheriff’s office has gone from one detective dedicated to the effort to nine and gained civilian support to help with interviews and other tasks. In the last year the task force made 44 arrests—but even more important, they identified victims, going from just five in 2021 to 47 last year. In these cases detectives were able to tell parents who otherwise had no idea that their children were being exploited and abused and get help for the children.
Much more needs to be done both nationally and locally, stated Williams.
“We have tons of really cool technology right now, especially with AI, but they require a lot of processing power, they require a lot of resources, we need to be able to store all this stuff on a server, we need really nice technology,” he explained. Nationally, annual needs include $612,000 for facilities, $521,000 for investigative software and the same amount for a server room and investigative software—among other needs for laboratory software, forensic laboratory hardware. Local law enforcement needs a total of $1.5 million.
Task Force members are currently traveling the country assessing local needs and then aiding local enforcement offices to establish task forces and begin local fundraising so that the money goes into local efforts.
“That’s our point,” said Williams. “We want to be taking care of our back yards first; we can’t be policing the whole world. Some of our investigations take us there but we’ve got to start with our own back yard.”
David Silverberg is a retired journalist who spent most of his journalistic career in the Washington, D.C., area. He is a former reporter and editor for numerous defense and homeland security publications, as well as the former managing editor of The Hill.
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