FORT LAUDERDALE, Florida – FBI agent Daniel Alfin gained international attention when he led a team that shut down a major global child pornography website. Agent Laura Schwartzenberger worked more anonymously, teaching children and adults how to avoid sexual exploitation online
Alfin and Schwartzenberger, shot to death on Tuesday while carrying out a search warrant in the apartment of a child pornography suspect in South Florida, have dedicated their careers to capturing criminals who sexually abuse young people, often testing the legal limits of privacy the computer.
“We are still recovering from the news,” said Shelley Allwang, director of the Division of Exploited Children at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. “I feel lucky to have worked with people who were so committed and determined.”
The suspect was identified on Wednesday as David Huber, 55, who lived in the apartment complex. A police officer familiar with the matter said investigators were investigating whether Huber may have used a camera to monitor the agents’ activity before opening fire on them and believed that several shots were fired through the door. The officer was unable to publicly discuss an ongoing investigation and spoke to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity.
Three other officers were injured, two of them hospitalized. One of the hospitalized officers was released Wednesday, while the other was in a stable state on Tuesday. The third agent was treated on the spot. Huber apparently killed himself after an impasse.
Florida court records show Huber with only minor traffic violations. He had no record of sex offender and no record of arrest in Florida. Records show that he owned computer consulting firms from 2008 until last year. Broward County records show that he divorced in 2016.
Alfin, 36, and an agent for almost 13 years, made headlines seven years ago when he led a team that took down Naples, Florida, the principal administrator of Playpen, the largest known child pornography site in the world. Steven Chase created the site on Tor, an open network on the Internet where users could communicate anonymously through “hidden services” sites.
Playpen had more than 150,000 users worldwide. Members uploaded and viewed tens of thousands of graphic images of young victims, categorized by age, sex and type of sexual activity involved. The FBI launched an investigation in 2014 after Playpen’s IP address was accidentally revealed.
After Chase’s arrest in 2015, the FBI kept the site running for two weeks to identify other users, hiding malware in the images to discover their IP addresses. From that effort, investigators sent more than 1,000 leads to FBI field offices across the country and thousands more to law enforcement agencies abroad.
According to the FBI, 350 arrests were made in the United States and 548 internationally, including 25 producers of child pornography and 51 abusers. The operation identified or rescued 55 American children who were sexually abused and 296 internationally. Chase was 30 years old.
“It is the same with any criminal violation: as they become more intelligent, we adapt; we found them, ”said Alfin at the time. The New York native added, “It’s a cat and mouse game, except it’s not a game. Children are being abused and it is our job to prevent this. ”He was married and had a son.
Allwang, who worked with Alfin on the Playpen investigation, said he was humble, collaborative and committed to the mission of ending child exploitation.
“Dan was unshakable and was determined to try to locate and rescue as many children as possible who were being abused,” said Allwang. “It was never about ego or credit or anything like that. He was a really selfless and collaborative individual. “
Schwartzenberger, 43, and an agent for 15 years, was part of Rockway Middle School’s magnetic law studies program, teaching children about the dangers of the internet, including sexual exploitation and cyberbullying.
“She always said, ‘I feel like coming here and talking about difficult things means I won’t be seeing you by my side,'” the Miami school said about Pueblo, Colorado, in a statement.
Allwang said Schwartzenberger was “a wonderful collaborator”, who always shared any information about his cases that could be useful to the center.
“Laura was committed to taking care of this and entering this information so that these children could be helped,” said Allwang.
In 2018, Schwartzenberger, married and mother of two, gave a TV interview in which he discussed computer “sexual exploitation”, in which hackers claim they used a person’s computer camera to record it while watching porn or naked. They threaten to send the video to spouses, relatives and friends if the person does not pay for extortion. Sometimes they broke into the victim’s computer and found sexually explicit images.
“It is very traumatic for the victim,” Schwartzenberger told WPEC-TV. “Their reputation is at stake.”
Attempts to contact the agents’ families on Wednesday were not immediately successful.