When Greg Squire was transferred to a new cyber equipment of undercover agents of the National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States, specialized in «Andrk Web«he never imagined the global impact his work would have. Nor the emotional cost that it would imply.
Squire is one of the protagonists of the brand new documentary The Darkest Webavailable on the YouTube channel of the BBCwhich was already seen by more than 600,000 people in just two days.
Under the direction of the journalist Piranty himselfin one hour and twenty minutes, summarizes the monitoring he carried out on a team of 50 agents from different countries for seven years.
From postman to undercover agent in the Dark Web: the testimony of Greg Squire
During the interview with BBC cameras, Squire confirmed that he currently does not have social networks. After everything you’ve seen, in your free time the last thing you want to do is go online or post content from your personal life.
The mission entrusted to him more than a decade ago was to access the most remote corners of the Internet to identify children that they were victims of abuse in the Dark Webrescue them and arrest all the criminals they could.
The Dark Web or «dark web«is a small portion within the Deep Web o «deep web«, where all the Internet content not indexed by search engines is found that cannot be accessed with normal browsers and search engines.
«They are digital spaces designed to evade detection; there are victims that we were never able to identify, but we cannot give up because we are convinced that always some detail will lead us to catch them«said Squire.
Their work began in 2004, when there was still little activity on the dark web, but over the next eight years the forums child abuse They multiplied until they reached one million active users.
«The content about pedophilia increased considerably in a way that I think no one in their right mind could accept,» said Squire, who says nothing prepared him for that kind of material.
At the time he was married, had two small children, had previously been in the army, and He had worked as a postman for seven years while studying computer security at night school.
«I still had a certain naivety when I joined the elite unit of the US Department of Homeland Security Investigations, which tries to identify children who appear in sexual abuse material,» Squire acknowledged.
One Sunday he was at his home in New Hampshire, sitting on the porch, with his two little ones running and playing. He grabbed his laptop and saw that the results of an email search warrant against a suspect had arrived.
«It had an attachment, a video, that for the first 15 seconds seemed ‘normal’, with a girl reading a children’s book in her room, but the next four minutes an adult man undressed her and abused her,» she said.
«Those four minutes were eternal, and I felt like I was witnessing the moment when that girl’s soul disappeared, trying to endure the unimaginable,» he said sadly.
The case of Lucy, the 12-year-old girl who was rescued thanks to a detail on the wall of her room
In 2014 he was part of the investigation of a case that inspired him not to give up: Lucy, a 12-year-old girl who had been abused since she was 7.
«I was personally shocked that she was the same age as my own daughterand that new photos constantly appeared of her being assaulted by a man, apparently in the bedroom of her house,» Squire revealed.
«That had been his childhood and continued to be»he stated. For nine months they dedicated themselves to analyzing every detail of the recordings. «The plugs in his room indicated that he lived in the United Statesbut there were 29 possible states that matched the type of furniture of the bedroom that we detected when consulting with the manufacturers,» he explained.
They looked at the armchairs in the room, the sheets on the bed, the clothes and the stuffed animals of the girl, every tiny pixel leaving nothing to chance, but still, they were stuck.
«The responsibility of putting the puzzle together becomes a daily burden, and my partner, Pete, and I talked about the case about a hundred times a day,» he said.
The question they asked themselves is what elements remained the same in all the videos that the attacker had uploaded in the last five years. «That’s how we started to look at the brickswhy, «How often is there an exposed brick wall in a child’s room?»he questioned.
He searched for «types of brick» on Google and discovered that there was Brick Industry Association (BIA). He contacted them to show them the photo of the wall and to provide him with as much information as possible, such as when and where they were made.
«The woman who answered me on the phone was incredible, when I told her I worked for National Security on the case of a missing girl, she made all the brick experts from all over the country»he pointed out.
John Harpa brick worker and salesman at Acme Brick Company since 1981, was one of the first to contact Greg after seeing the image.
«I knew immediately which brick it was when I saw that it was a very pinkish tone and had a light layer of charcoal; I knew it was the model Burning Poplar, Made in Texas from the ’60s to the mid-’80s,» said Harp, who also participated in the documentary.
Squire asked to access the digitized list of customers who had ever purchased that type of brick, but Harp explained that they just had «a bunch of notes» going back decades.
However, he gave him information that was key to catching the aggressor and rescue Lucy. «The brick guy was the crucial clue since he told me: ‘Those bricks are too heavywe could not transport more than 10,000 in a truck, so we could not sell those bricks throughout the country, but within a maximum radius of 80 kilometers from the plant; hence those bricksThey can’t get very far«Greg described.
The arrest and conviction of «Lucy’s» sex offender
The team went back through the list of sofa customers they had compiled earlier, and narrowed the search to just those who lived in a radius of 160 kilometers from the brick factory of Harp, in the southwestern United States.
«We put together a list of about 50 people, who were easy to find and track on their social networks. Suddenly, on a woman’s profile On Facebook we found a photo of Lucy with an adult who seemed close to the girl, possibly a relative,» he said.
They located the woman’s address and used that to find all the other related addresses and everyone she had ever lived with.
«We would take a screenshot of the possible residences and send it to Harp to tell us if that type of construction could have those bricks inside the house,» Squire said.
They managed to reduce the options until they limited it to a single house, Lucy’s potential address.. If they made a mistake, they ran the risk of the suspect knowing that he was in the sights of the authorities.
«We began the process of confirming who lived there through state records, driver’s licenses, school information, and discovered that A woman, Lucy’s mother, lived in that house with her boyfriend, a convicted sex offender.«Greg revealed.
They organized an operation to reach the house that same day before the girl returned from school, so that the man would not have access to her even once again.
«By five in the afternoon that man was detained thanks to local National Security agents. He had been raping Lucy for six years and was sentenced to more than 70 years in prison«said Squaire excitedly.
Harp, the brick expert, was moved to tears when he was told the news of the arrest. «Together with my wife we have been a foster family for more than 150 children, many of them had been victims of abuse, and we adopted three,» revealed the brick industry worker.
«We know that it leaves a mark on your psyche, and really what Greg and his team have seen is a hundred times worse than what I heard from all those children,» Harp said.
The mental health impact of Greg Squire’s work as an undercover agent
After a decade as an undercover agent monitoring the activity of the Dark WebGreg suffered mental health consequences, and sought professional help.
«It affected me to know that They exchange child abuse material all night and all day. There are thousands of them and it is a terrifying breeding ground that can be overwhelming, open 24 hours a day,» he explained before the cameras.
«It can be very overwhelming when you look at the entire space; it’s like working in an operating room where patients are constantly coming in, and the victims are getting younger«Squires warned.
He was once part of an operation to arrest a man who had organized a weekend camp with the sole objective of abusing babies. «I can’t understand it, I can’t accept that there are people who do that, and when we stopped him the worst thing is that his two small children were in the back seat of his car,» he said brokenly.
«We have always had sexual offenders, but now we have a specific part of society that wants to share the abuses they commit so that others can see what they did,» he questioned.
«It’s hard to hear, but there was an increase in violence and the perpetrators are also youngerabout twenty-something years old. It is no longer just 50-year-old men living alone, but also 21-year-old boys, with technical knowledge, network engineers and with great jobs,» he said.
He felt insignificant and helpless when he thought about what he could do against an approximate mass of 100,000 criminals, with the resources they had at their disposal.
«I know all those kids don’t have days off, so my team and I felt like we shouldn’t have them either.«He attacked. All that mental load was too much and it also overflowed his family life.
«My children were a little older and I started to pressure to believe that if I got up at three in the morning I had a better chance of surprising an online aggressor, and over demanding myself,» he explained.
«My marriage fell apart, I started drinking more than I should for the wrong reasons, to make myself sleepy, and I had suicidal thoughts,» he confessed.
«It wasn’t just a bad day at the office, it was a bad life. I got to a point where I didn’t even know who I was anymore. It was impossible for me to separate my professional life from my work life and I hated myself when I had to talk to pedophiles online to get information from them,» he added.
His co-worker, Special Agent Pete Manninghelped him rehabilitate. «It saved my life, without a doubt,» Squire said. Since then he goes to therapy daily, takes refuge in the moments shared with his children and found a way to achieve catharsis in carpentry.
«I build things, that’s my escape valve,» he said. «I learned to feel honored to belong to a team that could make a difference, and preferred to be there, fighting the battle, because if we don’t look for them, who will?» he questioned.
In September 2025, Greg met Lucy in person.that girl he helped rescue at the beginning of his career, who is currently over 20 years old.
Lucy’s voice-over is heard in the final minutes of the BBC documentary. Her words speak for themselves: «I have more stability, I have the energy to talk to people about abuse, something I wouldn’t have been able to do even a couple of years ago, and When they came to get me out of there, it was a prayer answered to all my prayers.«
«Meeting the victims is something that never really happens to us, so this was very moving. She is an incredible young woman, a survivor, and to see how she pulled through is the best inspiration you could ask for,» Squire concluded.
