Lessons learned? I believe I was the target of a police sting

Originally published at narsol.org

By Atwo Zee, Registered Traveler . . . Not long after I returned to Iowa after the 2024 NARSOL conference in Atlanta, I received an email forwarded by the national NARSOL office.  This message came to them on their main “Contact Us” email address, and whoever sent it was looking specifically for me, “whose story “Unwanted Images” hit home when I was suicidal and wracked with fear …”  The sender also complimented my travel blog and expressed a desire to have me participate in a podcast of some kind

This message was a little odd because of the reference to “Unwelcome Images,” the actual name of my prison story which I never even talk to anybody in our movement about (because I won’t bore you with my prison story if you won’t bore me with yours).  Nevertheless, seeing nothing suspicious, I contacted the sender with an “Okay, how can I help you?” reply.

I received a reply within a couple of days.  I was sitting at the public computer at my local senior center (because, as some of you know, I don’t have home internet service).  The sender said glowing things about me, re-stated his desire to have me participate in a podcast, and included a link to a “recent podcast” so I could see what it was all about.

I need to point out here that, like most senior center public computers, this one has only the most rudimentary software and certainly not much video software, so when I clicked on the link, I could hear the sound but the video only displayed some kind of error message.  Knowing trying to fix the video was useless, I leaned in to see what I could hear--which was a man welcoming everyone to the podcast, “We’re here in beautiful Hawaii today, which is such a great place for …”

… and then he used an expression which I recognized all too well from my bad old days online.  I won’t repeat that expression here except to say it’s an abbreviation, the letters of which refer favorably to a type of child pornography.  

As soon as I heard this abbreviation, I immediately blurted out, “WTF!?” and clicked the video away.  Then I replied to the message, telling the sender that if that’s what they are about, I wanted no part of it, and that they obviously have not learned the true lessons of my story (which of course is that no one should ever yield to the temptations of online CP).  Good bye!

The next time I was at the senior center, I found a reply in my inbox.  The sender apologized profusely, saying the beginning of the video was meant to be a parody, and it’s too bad I didn’t get the joke, and wouldn’t I please watch more of it before I made any decision …

Well, I couldn’t have done that anyway because of the software shortcomings of the computer, but also, now that this reply was trying to goad me into watching more of something I didn’t want in the first place, I started to become suspicious.  I forwarded the entire email exchange back to the NARSOL person who’d originally sent it to me, expressed my growing suspicions and asked, “For one thing, how did this person know to contact you asking for me specifically by name?  Nobody outside our group is supposed to know my real name – only Atwo Zee, Registered Traveler.  And now they’re trying to get me to watch more of this video?”

As my brother later said, “Cops know that sh*t.”  Exactly.  The NARSOL contact person replied, expressing shared suspicion, and promised to scrub whoever it was from their contact list.  Later I replied to the sender saying simply, “Go away.  You’re a cop doing a sting,” and I have not heard anything back since.

What lessons can be learned from this experience?  Well, the first lesson is that if you don’t want to get caught in a sting, be your genuine self when communicating with anyone online.  If there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s that anyone active enough in our movement to be reading this right now is part of the 95% of registrants who will never reoffend.  Therefore, acting like your genuine self is always best.

I’m sure that every cop--and every Florida state legislator who voted this year to give every Florida sheriff’s department grant funding to carry out these disgusting stings--will laugh and say, “Yes that’s exactly how the system is supposed to work.  You responded correctly, and you didn’t get arrested [well not yet anyway].  What are you bitching about?”  

The answer, as all of us know, is that there were any number of places along the way where, if I had acted perfectly innocently but only a little differently than I did, I could have unknowingly put myself in legal jeopardy.  As I thought about it, I realized that the cop’s first test had actually been to see what email account I might reply from.  Would I reply from some secret, unregistered email account?  If so, they could’ve arrested me on the spot for “failure to register an email account.”  But hey cops – guess what?  Nope!  I really don’t have any secret email account!  Just the one you already have in your records.

Then they must have been kind of confused about where my reply originated.  Why some random public computer instead of my secret home account?  But hey, cops--guess what?  Nope!  I really don’t have any secret home internet account!  That’s why you don’t have one in your records.

But the part that could have gone differently that I can’t get out of my mind is-- there I was, sitting at a public computer with other people around.  What if, just as I was leaning in to hear what was on the video, another senior had stopped to talk about something and I just muted the video but left it running while we talked?  What if it had run for enough time to get to the illegal part without my being aware of it?  What if the video suddenly began to work, showing illegal images while that senior was standing there?  Does anyone here believe that senior would not have immediately concluded they’d caught me searching the internet for those images?

Or what if I had been just a little bit less attentive to the sound track that day and not noticed that first ugly reference to a type of child pornography?  What if I had been distracted by the video problems and had persisted in trying to get the video to work long enough for it to suddenly pop on at the point where illegal images were on screen?  For me these are truly frightening counter narratives.

Or what if they had targeted this sting on someone else--and for that matter, what if they already HAVE targeted this sting on someone else--someone less active in our movement, someone less suspicious about the messages they’re receiving in their email account every day, someone who wasn’t listening carefully when the video came up, someone more naïve or just unlucky on that day.  This may have already happened--arrests may have already been made and we won’t even know about it until the county sheriff makes his big announcement about how great he is for “cracking down on sex offenders.”  By that time facts no longer matter.

I fear that law enforcement will draw the wrong conclusion from this attempt to sting me.  The right conclusion of course would be that there’s nothing nefarious to find here, just me and my one email account and no home internet service to investigate; the wi-fi card has been removed from my home laptop; I have no data plan on my phone, and that wi-fi is permanently turned off.  But I fear they will instead conclude that they’ll have to be sneakier about it if they want to catch me doing these things I’m not doing.  If they do decide to get sneakier, I fear that I could get tripped up in any one of a thousand innocent scenarios like the examples above that could get me falsely arrested.  And I hate law enforcement for forcing me to live in this paranoid state.

I also keep asking myself, why me specifically?  Why did someone contact NARSOL looking for me by name?  The only answer I can come up with is that this person thinks I’m some big deal activist, and it could discredit our movement to lure me onto a CP site.  Of course I’m not some big deal activist; I’m just the travel guy.  But it occurs to me that if they’re looking for me, they could be looking for other “big deal activists” too, especially those associated with Orange County or other Florida counties receiving sting grant money.  So actual big deal activists should be extra careful.

Lastly, what if this incident has made me completely paranoid and it’s not a police sting?  Who else could it have been?  It has to be someone who (a) knows me by name and by my two online outlets and (b) thinks NARSOL is a good place to look for me.  Could it be a vigilante or a scam artist?  If so, they must have access to information about me only the cops should have.  Or could this be a real online minor-attracted person delusional enough to think I want to be part of a CP-adjacent podcast?  It’s hard for me to believe, but I’d be interested if someone can come up with a believable innocent explanation.

Meanwhile I’m trying to get this story posted on as many sites as possible, both as a warning to others and as a way of getting my side of this incident--which is to say the truth--out there before somebody else tries to twist this truth into a lie and an arrestable offense.