Feeling safer yet?

By now you'll have heard about Brian Doyle, the deputy press secretary for the Department of Homeland Security who just got busted for soliciting sex acts with a minor. (He thought he was emailing with a 14-year-old girl, but whoops! It was the sherriff's department!) Christy at Firedoglake has a must-read post about this, from the perspective of someone who's prosecuted sex-offenders for many years.

I’ve prosecuted a number of pedophiles in my time, as well as participating in ongoing probation supervision for already-convicted sexual predators, and there is one thing about which I am absolutely certain: you can never cure a pedophile. You can work with them, you can do aggressive therapy to help them control urges, you can do any number of things which require them to limit contact with children and porn and what-have-you, but there is no cure. [...]

But ultimately it is all about power and/or the thrill of the hunt, depending on the pedophile. Controlling your victim becomes everything. And almost every pedophile that I’ve ever had the misfortune of supervising or prosecuting had a long, long history of being a sexual predator. Most pedophiles don’t just molest one child (as if that weren’t bad enough). I attended a prosecutor’s seminar on sexual predators when I was working, and was told that the average pedophile has hundreds (yes, hundreds) of victims over a lifetime. [...]

Here’s what’s in store for Mr. Doyle: his computer will have been seized by those police officers. They will comb through the hard drive of that computer for every, single chat in which he ever participated with a child. If there are more, they will track down every one of those children that they can to determine whether or not they have had sexual relations with him. They will comb through the hard drive for any child pornography that may exist thereon — and he faces federal criminal charges if there is any (and there likely is, considering that’s a fairly usual find in this type of case). There is a criminal count for each, individual picture. There are definitely Florida state charges — since this was a Florida state investigation/sting that caught Mr. Doyle.

There's more, and it's all worth reading. Check it out. I hope they throw the book at this guy.