Minding The Cyber-Neighborhood
Daniel Honzik was arrested trying to meet a 13-year-old named Kendra. He had asked her for sex over the Internet. Thomas Ormsby was arrested trying to meet a 14-year-old Kendra that he, too, had propositioned online.
While both men were arrested in sting operations organized by police, Kendra was no cop.
Kendra is Julie Posey. By all appearances, she is your average mother. Yet she spends eight hours a day hunting down online threats to children. CBS News Correspondent Wyatt Andrews reports in the second of a three-part "Eye on America" report.
Operating from her home near the Rocky Mountains, Posey navigates the netherworld of the Internet. Her specialty is finding serious sexual predators so she can then tip off the police.
"I'm looking for anyone trying to meet a kid, anybody that's posting possibly child pornography," she says.
|
"They don't hem haw around," Posey says. "They don't say I would like to find a pen pal that's 11 to 13. They say flat out, 'I am looking for nude pictures of kids. I'm looking to have sex with a child.'"
Just in Jefferson County, Colo., Posey's work has led to four arrests and convictions, says District Attorney Dave Thomas. "Frankly I commend her for it," he says.
The FBI now averages six new "traveler" cases per week. The Center for Missing and Exploited Children gets two new leads every day. For this new, Web era crime, there's a new neighborhood watch, watching who's threatening the children, on the new cyber-playground.