Cooling Off Hotseattle

By NADYA LABI

Patrick Naughton understood, and trusted, computers. The blond, classically handsome 34-year-old was a devoted techie from the moment in high school when he designed an application that mapped out his parents' restaurant. He was one of the early Web warriors, an engineer who helped develop the software language Java before eventually heading technology at Infoseek. He later caught the attention of Disney chief Michael Eisner, who tapped him to oversee the company's new Internet portal. So when Naughton logged on to a chat room called "dad&daughtersex" last March, he probably thought he was safe. After all, this was his domain.

Naughton signed on as "hotseattle," according to a criminal complaint filed by the FBI last week, and sent a private message to a user he believed to be a 13-year-old girl from Los Angeles. Chatting from his office in Seattle, he offered to meet her in Los Angeles to "kiss, make out, play and stuff." After months of cyber foreplay--saying at one point that "he was going to be very careful since he could go to jail"--Naughton arranged to meet the girl at the pier in Santa Monica, Calif. What he encountered there was a tiny woman in tan overalls, silver butterfly hair clips and a backpack. But she was, in fact, a cop working with the man who had impersonated the 13-year-old Lolita--special agent Bruce Applin, who is part of the FBI's Sexual Assault Felony Enforcement team. Naughton was arrested and charged with the federal crime of "knowingly traveling in interstate commerce for the purpose of engaging in sexual acts with a girl..." Naughton, who has lost his job at Infoseek, could not be reached for comment.

The arrest was a major embarrassment to Disney and a shock to the Internet world. It also demonstrated the increasing efforts by the FBI to hunt down what the agency terms travelers, people who troll the Internet for impressionable children, trying to persuade them to meet for sex in the real world. "We've encountered a brand new kind of offender," says Randy Aden, supervisor of Southern California's safe squad. "You don't get the stereotypical bogeyman. You get doctors, lawyers, policemen, firemen--the guy next door." Aided by an infusion of $20 million from Congress in the past two years, the FBI last year brought 698 cases against cyber pedophiles, an increase from 108 in 1996.

To avoid the charge of entrapment, agents cannot create their own chat rooms or initiate sexually explicit talk. The suspect "needs to take the first step," says David Knowlton, deputy assistant director of the FBI. "Then we'll talk with him." Applin says he gave Naughton several opportunities to back out of their planned encounter; at one point, Applin even joked that he had told the L.A.P.D., FBI and CIA about the dirty pictures Naughton had put on display. The warning went unheeded.

The youngest of eight children in an Irish immigrant family, Naughton, who is married, had achieved the kind of success and air of invincibility that have become common among highflyers in the dotcom world. "I'm glad I'm at the top of the food chain," he wrote in a 1997 article for Forbes ASAP. But in his ramblings as hotseattle, he was playing an even more dangerous game than he realized. According to the FBI, he was pursuing another 13-year-old girl in the same chatroom. She turned out to be an FBI agent too.

--Reported by James Willwerth/Los Angeles and Mark Thompson/Washington

With reporting by James Willwerth/Los Angeles and Mark Thompson/Washington