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By Jeff Gammage
Philadelphia Inquirer

PHILADELPHIA — In trying to catch creeps who prey on children, Detective Michele Deery has stridden through cyberspace as many different people.
She's been a 14-year-old girl. A 55-year-old man. Last month, she posed as the mother of two adolescent daughters — willing to turn those fictitious children over for sex with a stranger. The man was arrested when he arrived for a rendezvous at an Upper Darby, Pa., diner.
"I like my work," Deery said recently. "It's important work."
Deery is one of two undercover online investigators attached to the Delaware County, Pa., ICAC — that's pronounced "I-Kack," and stands for Internet Crimes Against Children.
Child pornography has exploded on the Internet, and the Delaware County task force has scored notable successes, making high-profile arrests of men who seek to commit terrible crimes. Yet the ICAC, like similar units around the country, is challenged by evolving defense tactics and the ever-changing nature of the digital age.
Pornographic images that once would have been easily discovered on a computer hard drive can now be hidden on zip drives shaped like pens or watches, or even folded inside a video game. And criminals are getting smarter about covering their online fingerprints.

Following their desires
Deery said that despite how it looks on TV, where predators seem to hypnotically follow their desire up the walkway, through the front door, and into the glare of news-camera lights, catching these people is not so simple. Men who are trolling the Internet watch television, too.
"Are you a cop?" they ask.
If you want a potential child abuser to believe you're a teenage girl, Deery said, you have to know what teenage girls are interested in — the latest Harry Potter novel, the songs of Hilary Duff.
The job is hard for another reason, too. It requires the detective to regularly view harrowing photos and films.
"The children seem to be getting younger, the videos are more violent," Deery said. "Sometimes you just have to get up and leave."
The cops call them "travelers." And not because they're summer tourists.
Travelers are men who journey, sometimes great distances, to meet a girl or boy, first contacted online, for what they expect to be a sexual encounter.

Date with detective
Earlier this month, police said, Drew Weidner, 40, of Hamburg, Pa., drove 78 miles to Upper Darby, expecting to have sex with a mother and her two daughters. He had been corresponding with a woman he believed to be the parent of 11- and 14-year-old girls, telling her he wanted the children to watch the two of them have sex, then have the girls join in, police said. He was unknowingly chatting with Deery.
When Weidner arrived in Delaware County, he was met and arrested by police, while other officers seized computers and disks from his home.
There seems to be no shortage of men willing to put their family, reputation and freedom at risk, Deery said. When she logs in to a sex-themed chat room, she's quickly contacted by five or six men. She can sign on at 7:30 a.m., come back at 10:30 p.m., and find the same people at the same site.
Some will ask her for a photo — they get a picture of a young-looking police officer. Others want to talk on the phone, reassured by a live voice. Deery must chat in a way that doesn't constitute entrapment - never making a suggestion of sexual contact.
She's surprised how often they mention NBC's highly popular program To Catch a Predator. And how readily they concede to wrongdoing.
"They talk about it with me," Deery said. "They acknowledge the fact that what they're doing is illegal. They'll even mention the show."
The Delaware County task force works with 32 affiliated agencies across Pennsylvania, passing on hundreds of "cybertips" that come from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Since 2000, the Delaware County ICAC has been involved in 3,308 investigations, making hundreds of referrals to other jurisdictions and 385 arrests on its own. It's arrested 45 accused travelers in Delaware County.
In the mid-1980s, federal officials say, the trafficking of child pornography had been nearly eradicated. Producing photos was difficult and costly, buying the images risky.
Today the opposite is true. The Internet allows pictures and movies to be copied and sent at the touch of a button. Likewise, a Web site can quickly appear, disappear and reappear under a new name. And investigators with units such as the Delaware County ICAC face challenges from a defense bar that has learned to attack procedural issues concerning how the arrests are made.
"Law enforcement is challenged," said Lt. David Peifer, the ICAC's supervisor. The task is not just catching predators and sending them to prison, he said. It's keeping track of them when they come out.
"History shows that they don't stop," he said. "They're just going to be more covert."

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