ALBANY — The child was not crying, FBI Special Agent David Fallon remembers. It was the first time he burst into a room to rescue a minor from hands-on sexual abuse.

“Many of these kids don’t understand that they’re being sexually abused, because they’re so young,” Fallon told The Enterprise as he talked in a conference room at the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Albany Field Office, where he has worked since 1991.

Seated at a glossy black table, Fallon keeps his hands neatly folded on the table. His words are deliberate, with pauses between them, yet he speaks fast.

For more than two decades, he said, his work has focused on three areas: looking for online predators who want to meet children for sex; investigating the downloading or production of child pornography; and searching for missing or abducted children.

He is the case agent for the Albany Field Office’s Child Exploitation Task Force, which he helped launch in 2001.

The task force involves officers from a number of agencies, which change over the years. Currently, they include the Rotterdam Police, the Saratoga and Warren counties’ sheriff’s offices, the State Police, and the Colonie Police.

Asked to describe his attitude toward offenders, Fallon said, “Nonjudgmental.” He explained, “They do what they do; we try to understand why they do what they do, so that we can better investigate future offenders.

“It’s not for me to judge them; it’s for a jury of their peers to make the decision. My job is to investigate an alleged crime, follow evidence, gather evidence, see where it takes us.”

Fallon has seen, during his 20 years on the job, the amount of pornography being downloaded and traded online grow exponentially, and the age of victims move downward. Most of the pornographic material, when he started at the FBI, was of teenagers, he said; now it includes infants and toddlers.

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children launched its CyberTipline in 1998 as a national mechanism for the public and electronic service providers to report instances of suspected child sexual exploitation, including apparent child sexual-abuse images, online enticement, child sex trafficking, and child sexual molestation. Since its start, it has received more than 45 million reports.

The center recently analyzed reports of online enticement made to its CyberTipline and found that child victims ranged from 1 to 17 years old, with a mean age of 15. Nearly all of the children reported not knowing the offender, except through online communication. Eighty-two percent of offenders were male, 9 percent were female, and in 9 percent of cases the gender could not be determined.

Fallon’s own child, a son who is 22, has grown up during the two decades Fallon has spent fighting child sexual exploitation. Fallon didn’t allow his job, he said, to influence the way he raised his son, which involved giving him freedom, independence, and room to grow.

Compartmentalize

“I think the way that I’m able to compartmentalize it has helped me to not be affected by it,” he said of his work. “I don’t think about it when I go home. I’m watching TV, spending time with my family. I’m in the moment.”  

Fallon might think about cases, he said, but he doesn’t dwell on disturbing images he has seen. “I’ll bring it to the forefront when it has to be,” he said, “but other than that, I don’t think about them.”

Agents who do this type of work have to undergo “a battery of tests” every year and meet with a psychologist and a peer counselor to see if they are having any issues dealing with their own spouses or children. “If there’s something that pops up,” Fallon said, the agents are asked to change assignments.

Fallon’s first assignment was white-collar crime. He made the move to investigating crimes against children because he “wanted to make a difference,” he said.

A friend of his, an assistant United States attorney, had told him about a case he was handling that had to do with child sexual exploitation and said it was “really worthwhile and rewarding,” Fallon recalled.

The satisfaction for Fallon comes not from seeing people put in jail but from a sense that he is helping victims, whether known or unknown.  

“Most of our cases are where there’s no live victim; it’s an undercover operation, by us,” Fallon said. “So when we come across a live victim, we have to step up our game a little bit.”

If investigators know that they are talking to somebody online who is a hands-on abuser and who may want to provide them with pictures of that abuse, the investigator “can’t let that individual abuse that kid,” Fallon said. “So we will act very quickly and identify that offender, locate him, and either get an arrest warrant or search warrant … Bang down the door.”

The first case Fallon worked on that had a live victim involved a 14-year-old girl who had met a man online. The man had taken her back to his house in Maryland, sexually abused her, and then, after several days, brought her back to the town where she lived and dropped her off on a street corner. Falon first met her, he said, in a hospital’s psychiatric center.

“She was quite troubled by what had happened,” Fallon said. “And we knew that it would take some time for her to be able to talk to us about it. It took about a year and a half before she was able to do so. We never gave up. We always kept in contact with her parents and, when she was ready to talk, she spelled out what happened.”

The girl identified her offender, Fallon said, and the case almost went to trial. “He pled guilty just before trial.”

The Child Exploitation Task Force gets an alert about once a week, Fallon esimated, of someone in his geographic area of responsibility downloading child pornography, Fallon said.

The Albany Field Office’s area of responsibility is wide. The territory extends from south of Kingston up to the Canadian border and west to Syracuse, Ithaca, and Binghamton. It also includes the entire state of Vermont. The FBI’s Buffalo field office handles everything west of Syracuse, Fallon said.

Digital fingerprints

Agents are not usually scouring the internet for pornographic images featuring children, Fallon said. Any photograph that anyone takes has a digital fingerprint, or hash value, unique to that image, he said; known images of child pornography are tracked through those digital fingerprints.

Hash values trigger alerts to, for instance, the security departments of the websites or social-media networks where the image or video has appeared, Fallon explained. The networks then report the alert to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which investigates. The center sends leads to Fallon’s team, he said, if the computer being used has an internet-protocol address in the team’s area of responsibility.

His team sees a lot more cases of downloading than of producing promography, he said. Fallon estimated that the task force opens 20 or 30 cases a year of someone producing pornography in his area of responsibility.

The “vast majority” of production cases in his area, Fallon said, involve people who are able to convince kids whom they have never met in person to take their clothes off for them.

And the majority of the pornography that his team deals with involves children who range in age from about 8 to 12, he said.  

“Kids are online, so they’re on social media networks,” he said. “Kids are curious, so what the bad guys like to do is manipulate them into taking off their clothes or sending them sexually explicit pictures through their telephone, their cellphone, or on the website doing a livestream.

“In some way, shape, or form,” Fallon continued, “they’re manipulating kids to give them what they want.“

The pornographic material involving children younger than 8, Fallon said, “is produced by somebody that knows the child, or has responsibility for caring for that child at some point during the day, and is able to do what they need to do.”

“Proactive undercover work”

The task force does a lot of “proactive undercover work,” Fallon said, to find people who are looking for minors to meet for sex. The FBI agent might do this by posing as a young person in a chat room or on a website, or by posing as a man with a sexual interest in children.

In “Child Sexual Predators: The Familiar Stranger,” a DVD produced almost a decade ago by the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services, Fallon demonstrated how he works.

While showing his computer screen on camera, Fallon explained that he had entered a chat room as a 15-year-old girl; within 30 seconds, he said, an instant-message chat had been initiated by someone who said he was a 47-year-old man from Cape Cod; within a minute-and-a-half, two more men had also initiated chats.

One, a 47-year-old man from Florida with the screen name Superhero129, wanted to know if “she” likes older guys and asked “what’s been your oldest.” The man sent “her” a picture of his naked torso striking a muscle pose.

Another thing the task force does, Fallon said, is to investigate when a parent reports that a child may have been communicating online with a predator. If agents find evidence that this has occurred, they will sometimes ask for permission to “assume the child’s identity,” Fallon said, and take over communicating with the adult.

When Fallon talks about internet safety to community groups, he emphasizes that, although a parent’s first reaction might be to delete the account or smash the phone, this is the wrong thing to do. He recommends instead taking screenshots and saving whatever evidence exists, so that an investigation can be done, and the person can be located.

Of the evidence, Fallon said, “Once that’s gone, the trail is gone.”

Looking ahead

Over the course of Fallon’s career, the technology that predators are able to use has changed dramatically, as have the tools that law enforcement can use to search for people who hurt children. “Nobody had cellphones back in 2001,” he said. “Nobody texted. If they had phones, they were flip phones.” Blackberrys came along in 2009 or 2010 but “their internet capability was pretty poor.” Then, he said, along came the iPhone, “and changed everything.”

Fallon is anxious, he said, to see what new technology or equipment offenders will be using in 10 years to view these materials. “Maybe some sort of glasses,” he said.

Will he still be searching for offenders in 10 years?

“No,” he said definitively. Fallon is 56, one year shy of the FBI’s mandatory retirement age of 57.

He currently teaches part-time as an adjunct in the University at Albany’s department of criminal justice and plans to expand his work as a teacher. He is looking into his options. His wife is a special-education teacher at Guilderland High School.

Meanwhile, his son is set to graduate from college this spring and plans to begin a career in law enforcement, his father said.