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Report: Wireless Hotspot Used To Download Child Porn

By KYLE MARTIN

Hernando Today

Published: March 9, 2009

SPRING HILL - A Brooksville man was arrested Friday on charges that he took advantage of a wireless Internet hotspot to download child pornography.
Daniel Staats, 44, came under official scrutiny last December when a hotel clerk called authorities to report a suspicious person. Deputies were told that the suspect, Staats, had been sitting in his truck for the past hour and an half at the rear of the building.
Staats was confronted by the deputies and he freely admitted to accessing the hotel's wireless Internet to surf the Web on his Play Station portable device, an affidavit shows.
Staats said he was checking out the "International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers" Union Web site.
A background was run on Staats, which reportedly returned an outstanding warrant for failure to pay child support. Staats was arrested and his gaming device confiscated as evidence.
Deputies next sent the device to a Florida Department of Law Enforcement forensics lab, where the stored images where extracted. Last Tuesday, the device was returned to the Sheriff's Office and the investigating deputy got a look at its contents.
All told, there were 96 images of prepubescent children engaged in sex acts stored on the device, an arrest affidavit states. The time stamp on the images corresponded with the time Staats was at the hotel.
On Friday, the investigating deputy drove to Staats' home at 13346 Ester Drive to speak with his suspect. When the deputy informed Staats that he knew about the images, Staats reportedly admitted to downloading them outside the hotel because there was no Internet access in his home.
Staats was arrested on 96 counts of possession of images depicting a sexual performance by a child and unauthorized access to a computer network.