by In July of 2005, I published Take Your Children Offline NOW on this blog, and the comments arrived in two distinct waves. The first wave came from parents who said the article forced them to think, and several of them removed every photograph of their children from their websites within hours of reading it. The second wave came from parents and bloggers who told me, with varying degrees of contempt, that I was hysterical, paranoid, anti-celebration, and ill-positioned to speak on parenting because I was married without children. One commenter wrote that if he lived in fear of someone furtively masturbating to pictures of his kids, he would never get anything done. The post was held up by a few critics as a case study in childless people moralizing at parents.
In October of 2008, I followed the original piece with Hiding Behind Your Children Online, which argued that parents who concealed their own names behind usernames like “ZachsMom” and “CharlottesMom” were performing a cowardly inversion of privacy: shielding the adult who chose to be online while volunteering the first name of the minor who did not. That piece was met with the same dismissal. A commenter named Anne told me parents were just proud of their kids and the practice was harmless.
Then we had the Jeffrey Epstein case, with its catalog of how access to underage girls had been brokered across networks of wealth and influence. The federal sex offender registry expanded faster than any state could process its filings. Major child-safety organizations began reporting an annual flood of online exploitation tips that swamped law enforcement capacity. The conversation about whether the internet was a safe place to display children quietly closed. Mockery of writers who had warned about it earlier became impossible to sustain in mixed company. The “you don’t have kids, what do you know” rebuttal lost its social cover. Parents who once defended posting their children’s school portraits, swimsuit pictures, and birthday party photos started locking down their accounts, blurring faces, and replacing names with initials.
Something else collapsed during those same two decades that is harder to name. There was a time when a proud father wanted you to look at his family photographs, and the mechanics of that wanting kept his children safe. He directed you to his mantle. He pulled out his wallet and showed you a small photograph encased in plastic. The transmission was supervised, physical, and one copy at a time. No machine in the room could duplicate the image. No remote viewer could request additional angles. The picture lived inside the perimeter of the visit, and the visit ended. By 2026, the photograph that once waited inside the wallet has been replicated to a wrist, a phone, a tablet, an Instagram feed, a school newsletter, a sports league recap, and the slide deck for next week’s PTA meeting. The proud father has not changed. The infrastructure around his pride has changed beyond recognition.
And now, in May of 2026, we have the next move in the same long game, and it is worse than the version I described twenty-one years ago.
The Guardian first reported, and the United Kingdom’s National Crime Agency, the Internet Watch Foundation, and the Early Warning Working Group have since confirmed, that an unnamed British secondary school received a blackmail demand from an organized criminal group operating out of West Africa. The criminals scraped ordinary photographs of pupils directly from the school’s own website and social media accounts. They fed those photographs into AI deepfake software to manufacture child sexual abuse material. They then contacted the school and demanded payment to keep the synthesized images offline. The Internet Watch Foundation classified one hundred and fifty of the resulting fabricated images as illegal CSAM under UK law and generated digital fingerprints so platforms could block reuploads. IWF investigators do not believe the case was isolated. According to the Early Warning Working Group, it is only a matter of time before more schools face similar demands.
The same playbook has been operating against American children since at least 2022, with named victims and prison sentences on the record. On the night of March 24 of that year, a seventeen-year-old high school football and basketball player from Marquette, Michigan named Jordan DeMay received an Instagram message from a profile presenting itself as a college woman from Atlanta. The exchange escalated and concluded within roughly six hours. The profile was a front operated by two brothers in Lagos, Nigeria, Samuel and Samson Ogoshi, who ran a financial sextortion business specializing in young American males with athletic and social profiles. Jordan died by suicide in his Marquette Township home before deputies arrived the following morning. The Ogoshi brothers were extradited to the United States in August 2023, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to sexually exploit a minor, and were sentenced in September 2024 to seventeen and a half years in federal prison. A separate U.S.-based money laundering ring of five men from Georgia and Alabama was charged for processing nearly one hundred and seventy-nine thousand dollars in extortion payments routed from American victims back to the operation in Nigeria. The FBI’s Child Exploitation Operational Unit has stated publicly that male high school athletes are now a primary target of this kind of operation, in part because their elevated local social status and the pressure to project a clean image for college recruitment make the leverage immediate.
In October of 2023, tenth-grade girls at Westfield High School in Westfield, New Jersey discovered that male classmates had used a consumer AI nudify app to fabricate sexually explicit images using their faces, lifted from ordinary social media posts. More than thirty girls were named as victims in subsequent reporting. One of them, Francesca Mani, was fourteen at the time. She became a national advocate for the Take It Down Act, signed into federal law in 2025, which made the distribution of non-consensual intimate imagery, including AI-generated material, punishable by up to three years in prison. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received more than five hundred thousand sextortion-related reports involving minors in 2024 alone. The FBI estimates that at least twenty American teenagers have killed themselves over sextortion threats since 2021.
Across the UK, the National Crime Agency now logs more than one hundred and ten sextortion referrals each month. UK Childline took three hundred and ninety-four blackmail reports from people under eighteen last year, up by one third from the year before. The FBI has been warning since 2023 that the playbook has shifted: organized groups no longer need stolen intimate photographs of a child, because ordinary social media images of a child are enough raw material to fabricate the threat. The UK government is now amending the Crime and Policing Bill to require platforms to remove flagged intimate images within forty-eight hours or face fines of ten percent of global revenue.
This is what I was trying to describe in 2005 without the language to do it. I wrote then that the context of an image is irrelevant to the predator: only the face, the size, and the shape of the child mattered, because the stimulation occurs in the act of fantasy and creation. Critics treated me as a man with an unhealthy imagination. As of 2026, that 2005 paragraph turns out to have been describing, in lay terms and two decades early, the exact technical workflow of a sextortion operation: take the face from a public source, generate or solicit the desired imagery, monetize the fantasy. The only thing I got wrong was the speed. I underestimated it.
The version I described in 2005 still applies, and the new version is wider. A child’s photograph on a school website now functions as industrial input for a foreign criminal enterprise. The first name printed under the photograph supplies the social engineering hook that makes the blackmail message credible to the parent or the child. A local newspaper feature on the winning girls’ soccer team operates as an open invitation, free of charge, to anyone with a laptop and a malicious nudify app. The threshold for committing this crime has collapsed to the price of a streaming subscription.
There is a temptation, in the face of mainstream press coverage and government statements, to treat the 2026 awakening as fresh insight arriving on time. The wisdom is twenty-one years old. This same warning was published on this blog in 2005, again in 2008, and again in subsequent pieces on child beauty pageants and cybersecurity education, while the technology caught up with the argument. Op-ed writers now urging schools to remove pupil photographs are correct on the merits, and the merits have been visible since the launch of consumer broadband. I take no satisfaction from the vindication. Jordan DeMay needed elementary caution from the platforms and adults in his orbit at the moment a stranger’s first “Hey” arrived in his Instagram inbox. The girls at Westfield needed adults around them to understand what a consumer-grade nudify app could do to a school portrait in 2023. Those protections failed in real time, before any vindication could matter.
For the parents reading this in 2026, the practical recommendation has not weakened. The most effective protection remains the one I recommended in 2005: no recognizable images of your child online, no identifying first name posted publicly alongside the image, no school activity calendar that pins your child to a specific time and place.
There is a real friction in this advice. Schools post team photos. Sports leagues post tournament results. Friends and grandparents tag your child on platforms you do not control. The advice cannot be honored in full by any individual parent in 2026. It can, however, be honored in degrees that matter. Refuse to upload your child’s photograph to public-facing platforms. Submit a written request to your school to either remove or unname your child in any team or class photograph posted online. Decline consent for local newspaper coverage that names and photographs your minor child, even when the coverage is celebratory. Audit the privacy settings of every relative and family friend who posts your child’s likeness, and request takedown of anything identifiable. Choose family communication tools that are not public-by-default. Return, in spirit, to the mantle and the wallet. Block the photo before the photo becomes the crime.
The mainstream press will tell you in 2026 that this is the responsible standard. The press will not tell you it was the responsible standard in 2005, because admitting that would require admitting the previous twenty-one years were a collective failure of nerve dressed up as parental joy.
Take your children offline NOW. The advice has aged perfectly, and the world finally caught up.
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