The agent logs onto a popular instant messaging site. Within seconds, a mustached stranger whose professional-looking snapshot greets the agent opens a chat window with a proposal that would turn your stomach.

"I'd sure like to watch you and her together," is a paraphrase of the man's opening line.

He thinks he's talking to a parent with a child under 10.

WSB's Veronica Waters reports already, there are well over a dozen other chat windows already blinking with new invitations of similarly lewd propositions asking for, say, sex with this parent and their daughter. The agent has to close out more than 12 additional chat windows; her computer screen can't comfortably hold all of them in view.

"All this right here is all about incest," she explains, clicking through the chat room menu. "That's what all these people are doing."

Such is the world of pedophiles online, the world the FBI Safe Child Task Force explores every day, on computers and networks untraceable to the tech-savviest of the illegal sex seekers. Their room at the FBI headquarters in Atlanta is a secluded one, off-limits to even other agents. On this visit late in the spring of 2006, many special agents in the building seem impressed that a reporter is being allowed in for the first time. Still, one gets the feeling that, knowing what kinds of horrors are investigated here, not many of the other agents want to wander into this room anyway. At first glance, it looks a lot like any other office; computers in cubicles decorated with pictures of the task force members' kids, drawings, song lyrics. But those comforting, homey touches are in direct contrast to the nastiness the agents are seeing on their computer screens.

At a desk on the far side of the room (below) are computers in various stages of gutting, being mined for evidence by forensic experts after seizures from suspected pedophiles.

Courtesy: FBI & Photographer Peter Hirshenberger

Officer J., with the Clayton County sheriff's department, has worked these cases with the task force for months. Because of the sensitivity of her investigations and her undercover work which includes phone conversations with suspects, WSB agreed not to use her name and to alter her voice for radio. She is not surprised at how quickly the man, with whom she's never chatted before, offered up such a proposal.

"We already know from our investigations that these rooms are where they go," she says. "So as soon as you go in here, everybody is into the same topic. Incest."

The task force's chief tells WSB the Internet has helped blossom the world of child porn and pedophilia into a forest of nasty fruits with many takers. They take a false sense of comfort, he says, in what they see as the relative anonymity of the world wide web. High-speed Internet connections, instant messaging, and peer-to-peer file-sharing networks like those used to share music have given pedophiles new avenues to exchange pictures, video, advice, and to meet online and share their fantasies.

What philosophies and fantasies drive them? The answers are shocking.

"It's disturbing and it should surprise us," says Agent J. "Your normal people aren't going to know how surprising it is unless you've seen it. I don't think they'd believe it."

Monday, 11 December 2006
Tuesday: 'The King of the Pedophiles'