Repeat Sex Offender Busted for Downloading Child Porn at Starbucks
Detectives arrested a registered sex offender Saturday while he was allegedly in the midst of downloading child pornography on the free Wi-Fi at a Hillsboro, Ore., Starbucks.
Robert Dietz, 59, was charged with encouraging child sex abuse and violating his parole after a surveillance operation by Detective Gary Wright, who arrested Dietz for the same crime in 2009, the Oregonian reports.
Dietz has been convicted four times since 1996, on charges including sodomy, sex abuse, and failing to register as a sex offender.
After receiving reports of child porn being downloaded at the Starbucks store—conveniently located across the street from the D.A.'s office and the county courthouse—Wright identified Dietz as a suspect and monitored him for two months to collect enough evidence for an arrest.
On the one hand, it's nice that using public Wi-Fi—say, from a car in the Lowe's parking lot—isn't all it takes for a creep to get away with downloading sexual images of kids. On the other hand, it's not fantastic that your internet traffic could be monitored for sitting at the same Starbucks as said creep.
Internet surveillance has faded into the background as a source of public outrage this year—amid everything else worth being outraged about—but if you're in the mood to get mad about it all over again, take a look at the documents the NSA released on Christmas Eve.
