An undercover investigator who spends up to 18 hours a day posing as a paedophile online has described the psychological toll of the work and the determination required to bring abusers to justice. Greg Squire, a 50-year-old former postman from New Hampshire, has spent more than a decade working for US Homeland Security, infiltrating dark web forums to identify child sex abusers and rescue victims.
Squire said he first understood the true horror of child sexual abuse in 2008, about a year into his role, when he watched a video seized during an investigation. It showed a young girl being read a bedtime story before being raped. He described the moment as "very intense", adding that he was "lucky" to have a strong team around him so the girl could be rescued quickly.
His work is the subject of a new BBC Eye investigation for Storyville, The Darkest Web, directed by Sam Piranty, which followed him and a team of agents from around the world for seven years. For much of his career, Squire kept his work secret, and his daughter only realised he was no longer a postman about a decade into the job.
The dark web was created in the 1990s by the US Department of Defence for secure spy communications and became public in 2004. Squire said it took another eight years for paedophiles to establish themselves there, and it is now estimated that child abuse forums have more than one million active users. "It's organised crime but the currency is children," he said.
Describing the intensity of his work, Squire said: "There's no real hours to it - it might be 18 hours - and it's every day. You have to, because what are the kids doing? The kids don't get days off. Nor should you." He said the work was an "honour" but also like "drinking poison".
A breakthrough case in 2014, which shaped later investigations, involved a girl the agents called Lucy. Images of her abuse showed she was 12, but older images revealed it had been happening since she was seven. Electrical sockets in her bedroom helped the team establish she lived in the US, and Squire and his colleagues spent nine months working to identify and rescue her.
