Jailbait Justice

This is a partial transcript of "The Big Story With John Gibson," April 5, 2006, that has been edited for clarity.

JOHN GIBSON, HOST: A top spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security is under arrest. He's charged with trying to seduce a person he thought was a child on the Internet. Brian Doyle made his first appearance in the suburban Washington court this afternoon via videoconference from his jail cell. No bail was set.

While prosecutors start building their case against him, a group of good samaritans known as the "Minutemen of the Net" are working to help law enforcement catch other suspected online predators. Jane Skinner is here with that story.

JANE SKINNER, FOX NEWS CORRESPONDENT: Well, John, as you know, this idea has been controversial in the past. This new group is out of Texas. It's called Jail Bait Justice. They go online posing as underage potential victims and when somebody contacts them, they give the information to police.

Michael Blank is the founder of Jail Bait Justice. Michael, you started this effort just four days ago. Why did you do it?

MICHAEL BLANK, JAIL BAIT JUSTICE FOUNDER: Well, I was kind of looking through different settings and I saw, you know, people getting raped and stuff like that, younger women, and then I thought, you know, this is just wrong. It shouldn't happen and I thought it's sick, so you know, we started looking to the research of the penal code and we went on and we started doing this. I mean, it needs to be done.

SKINNER: So you figured out how to do it legally. What exactly do you do? You pose as an underage boy or girl and then what happens?

BLANK: Right, what we do is we pose as an underage, like you said, male or female. Usually age 13 to 16 and what we do is we try to get the name, phone number and a picture if possible and we take the phone number and we look into it and we do a reverse search and get the address and then we give that information to the police.

SKINNER: You know, in the past, law enforcement has been somewhat hesitant to embrace groups like your own, saying they can really mess up an investigation. What's been the reaction to yours so far, if any?

BLANK: Well, right now we have help from the San Antonio Police Department. We have some support from them. And really that's the only place we've contacted so far because most of the people that we've seen are in San Antonio.

We're going to be contacting local law enforcement pretty soon and just trying to get some support from some kind of law enforcement agency. I mean, I really don't think that they should shun us because, you know, we are helping them in a sense. It's not like we're trying to mess anything up. We're aiding them if anything.

SKINNER: Will you post names and numbers of these people on the Internet, on your Web site?

BLANK: What we'll do is we'll post the screen name that they went on with the chat service and then we'll post the conversation that they had. Can't really post the phone number and the name and the address and all that kind of stuff because, you know, obviously that's privacy. But we will post the screen names, the pictures and the conversations that they had.

SKINNER: And Michael, real quickly, so far how easy has it been to find somebody attracted to an underage boy or girl?

BLANK: You wouldn't believe how easy it is. I mean, just, you go online and maybe five or ten minutes later you have three, four or five people that are contacting you already.

SKINNER: Michael Blank from a new group, Jail Bait Justice. Michael, thanks very much. John, back to you.

BLANK: You're welcome.

GIBSON: All right, Jane, thank you.

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