Entrapment for Profit: The Disturbing Truth About Operation Net Nanny

There’s a must read article in The Appeal about the very disturbing and deeply problematic “Operation Net Nanny” that pretended to be a child sex trafficking operation, but was actually a manufactured crime wave that destroyed dozens of lives in Washington state.

We encourage you to read the article, which can be found here: https://theappeal.org/net-nanny-washington-state-police-stings/ and share it. For those who want a preview, here are some excerpts:

“It was more of a scam than it was detective work,” Dan Wright, Ezra’s father, told The Appeal. “The undercover operative … heavily steer[ed] the conversation” toward an in-person hookup.

“Hundreds … put on lifetime sex-offender registries.”

“Rodriguez and WSP helped supply OUR with positive media exposure and sensational arrest numbers that the organization could use to impress donors.”

“Kelly calls the Net Nanny stings ‘inefficient and largely a waste of taxpayer money,’ noting … the cost of litigating cases in which there are issues with entrapment.”

Regarding the tactics used: “Police are ‘luring people into behaving in a way that they would not otherwise have behaved, and are then arresting them for that behavior,’” which Kelly says makes “the arrest … unconstitutional.”

As a former undercover-FBI operative put it: “The chats they were doing were aggressive … and that this sort of aggressiveness can become entrapment.”

“The entrapment issue had been raised on more than one occasion, in more than one jurisdiction … if two separate prosecutors in two separate counties raised the same issue, there’s an issue.”

Even on the key metric of “rescued children,” described by operatives as 31 children “saved” through the stings — a counting method was revealed: they simply added up the children in each arrested person’s family and declared them rescued. “You can’t count those,” said one former ICAC-task-force official. By accepted standards, the actual number of children rescued by Net Nanny is zero.