[Infowarrior] - F.B.I. and Justice Dept. Are Faulted Over Child Predators on Web

[Richard Forno]

April 7, 2006
F.B.I. and Justice Dept. Are Faulted Over Child Predators on Web
By JOSHUA BROCKMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/07/us/07porn.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted
=print

WASHINGTON, April 6 ‹ Lawmakers from both parties continued on Thursday to
question the commitment of the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of
Investigation to halting the online exploitation of children. They also
accused the agencies of failing to provide major witnesses for a
Congressional investigation into the matter.

House members voiced their protest before and after testimony on the second
day of hearings of the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, part of
the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. The tenor of the hearings, which
focused on law enforcement efforts to capture online predators and rescue
child victims, signaled that a showdown might be imminent.

"We keep trying to cooperate with the Justice Department and the F.B.I.,"
said Representative Joe L. Barton, Republican of Texas, the chairman of the
full committee.

Speaking directly to William W. Mercer, a United States attorney for Montana
who testified at the hearings, Mr. Barton said: "You folks seem bound and
determined to be as uncooperative as possible. I'm going to call the
attorney general one more time, and we had better get the people we want to
testify."

Mr. Mercer testified that the caseload of the child exploitation section had
increased 445 percent in the last four years, adding that federal
prosecutions of child pornography and abuse cases increased to more than
1,500 cases last year from 344 in 1995.

"The attorney general himself," he said, "has made very clear his and the
department's commitment to protecting children from sexual exploitation over
the Internet." The urgency of the hearings, where witnesses from agencies
including the Phoenix police, the Postal Inspection Service and the
Department of Homeland Security testified, was underscored by the arrest on
Tuesday of a Homeland Security spokesman, Brian J. Doyle, on charges of
using the Internet to try to seduce a Florida detective posing as a
teenager.

Officials on hand to testify, including James Plitt, chief of the Cyber
Crimes Center for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement division, said
arrests of federal employees had come as no surprise to them.

The hearing followed testimony on Tuesday by Justin Berry, a teenager who
was molested by online predators. Kurt Eichenwald, a reporter for The New
York Times, chronicled Mr. Berry's experience in an article in December that
spurred the Congressional investigation.

Citing Mr. Berry's testimony that he had no faith in the Justice
Department's efforts to act on information he had provided to them,
Representative Edward Whitfield, a Kentucky Republican who is chairman of
the subcommittee, asked, "Why has it taken so long for the department to act
and rescue children in imminent danger of being molested?"

Mr. Whitfield also asked why certain witnesses, including Andrew Oosterbaan,
chief of the department's Child Exploitation and Obscenity section, and Raul
Roldan, chief of the F.B.I.'s Cyber Crimes section, who appeared on
television news programs Thursday morning, did "not have time for us."