[ISN] DHS Spokesman Is Accused of Soliciting Teen Online

[InfoSec News]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/04/AR2006040401973.html

By Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writer
April 5, 2006

The deputy press secretary for the Department of Homeland Security was
arrested last night on charges that he used the Internet to seduce an
undercover Florida sheriff's detective who he thought was a
14-year-old girl, the Polk County Sheriff's Office said.

Brian J. Doyle, 55, was arrested at his Silver Spring home at 7:45
p.m. and charged with seven counts of using a computer to seduce a
child and 16 counts of transmitting harmful materials to a minor,
according to a sheriff's office statement.

Agents with the department's Inspector General's Office, the U.S.  
Secret Service, the Montgomery County police and the Polk County
Sheriff's Office served a search warrant and seized his home computer
and other materials, the statement said.

Doyle was online at the time awaiting what he thought was a nude image
of a girl who had lymphoma, Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said in an
interview with Fox News' "On the Record With Greta Van Susteren." "We
wanted to make sure he was using that computer and talking to
detectives at the time of the arrest," Judd said.

In his initial communication last month, Doyle told an undercover
computer-crimes detective who he was and that he worked for the
Department of Homeland Security, later disclosing numbers for his
office phone and government-issued cellphone and using those lines,
the sheriff's office said.

"If he would provide that kind of information to include a photograph
of himself with his identification tags, who else may he be talking to
around the world who he thinks to be a 14-year-old girl?" Judd said on
CNN's "Anderson Cooper 360."

Attempts to reach Doyle, who was booked into the Montgomery County
jail on the Polk County charges, on his office and cellphone numbers
and by his official e-mail were unsuccessful.

He was a TSA spokesman before becoming deputy press secretary last
year to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.

Chertoff press secretary Russ Knocke declined to comment on the case
beyond releasing a written statement, saying, "We take these
allegations very seriously and we will cooperate fully with this
ongoing investigation."

Judd said Doyle confessed and waived extradition to Polk County.

According to the sheriff's office, Doyle initiated a sexually explicit
conversation with the detective on March 12 in response to an Internet
profile of a 14-year-old girl.

Doyle allegedly sent pornographic movie clips, non-pornographic photos
of himself and instant messages from his AOL account, the police
statement said. The sheriff's office alleged that Doyle "on many
occasions" instructed the undercover detective to perform a sexual act
while thinking of him and described explicit acts he wished to
perform.

Another Homeland Security official -- Frank Figueroa, special agent in
charge of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Tampa -- faces
trial this week on charges of exposing himself to a teenage girl last
year at a mall. Figueroa, who has been suspended, pleaded not guilty.