high profile pedophile

this article would seem routine if you didn't read the first paragraph:

... Brian J. Doyle, 55, was arrested at his residence in Maryland on charges of use of a computer to seduce a child and transmission of harmful material to a minor. The charges were issued out of Polk County, Fla.

Doyle, of Silver Spring, Md., had a sexually explicit conversation with what he believed was a 14-year-old girl whose profile he saw on the Internet on March 14, the Polk County Sheriff's Office said in a statement.

The girl was an undercover Polk County Sheriff's Computer Crimes detective, the sheriff's office said.

Doyle sent the girl pornographic movie clips and had sexually explicit conversations via the Internet, the statement said.

you've probably read 20 stories just like that one. sad, sick, but nothing out of the ordinary. let's go back and read that first paragraph.

The deputy press secretary for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security was arrested Tuesday for using the Internet to seduce what he thought was a teenage girl, authorities said.

not your run-of-the-mill pedophile. maybe he's not as well known as michael jackson or even gary glitter, but as far as i know he's the highest-ranking member of the government ever to be arrested for something like this. crazy.

Doyle, who is the fourth-ranking official in the department's public affairs office, was expected to be placed on administrative leave Wednesday morning.

this guy is a flack so his name is all over the net. in fact, i checked my own blog a post including his name! remember when cat stevens was denied admission to the US?

Homeland Security spokesman Brian Doyle said Islam would be put on the first available flight back to Britain after his Washington D.C.-bound plane was diverted on Tuesday to Maine for security reasons.

"Why is he on the watch lists? Because of his activities that could be potentially linked to terrorism. The intelligence community has come into possession of additional information that further raises our concern (about Islam)," Doyle said.

a google search for brian doyle "homeland security" currently turns up 214,000 hits... and that doesn't include pedophile stories because those are too new to be in the index yet. i'm sure those hits will make some fascinating reading. (john at americablog has already turned up one good example.)

update: holy crap! i hadn't realized that doyle was actually the second DHS official to be accused of such things (and this for a department that's only existed for 4-5 years). from think progress:

Frank Figueroa, the former head of the Department of Homeland Security's program to stop child predators (Operation Predator), today pleaded no contest to charges he exposed himself to a 16-year-old girl. According to the victim, "Figueroa pulled up a leg of his shorts, exposed himself and masturbated for about 10 minutes" in front of her.

that's right: this was the guy who ran the program designed to catch pedophiles.¶