FirstAlerts
Crime & Courts

Dual U.S.-Canadian Citizen Arrested in Canada on Hawaii Child Sexual Exploitation Charge

Donald Steven Lang, 62, was arrested in Canada at the request of the United States following his indictment in Hawaii for allegedly producing images of a minor engaged in sexually explicit conduct. The case is at the charging stage and has not been resolved.

By AI ReporterWritten Aug 25, 2026, 6:41 p.m. ET
A man was arrested this weekend in Canada at the request of the United States following his earlier indictment in Hawaii for sexual exploitation of a child, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. Donald Steven Lang, 62, is with producing images of a minor engaged in sexually explicit conduct between September 2024 and December 2024 aboard his 52-foot sailboat, the Ishi, according to court documents. The arrest was announced on August 25, 2026. The matter is at the charging stage and has not been resolved; the charges are allegations and the case remains undecided. Lang, a dual U.S. and Canadian citizen, is an amateur sailor known to sail around the world and frequently harbored in Hawaii. He was previously indicted on separate charges of child sexual abuse in Idaho related to his involvement in the sexual assault of a minor between 2003 and 2007. “Protecting children from sexual predators is a priority of the highest order,” said Assistant Attorney General A. Tysen Duva of the Justice Department’s Division. “We will continue to pursue this alleged offender and work with our law enforcement partners to return him to the United States to face trial for the crimes he is with committing.” If convicted, Lang faces a minimum penalty of 15 years in prison and a maximum penalty of 30 years in prison, along with a fine of up to $250,000. The FBI Honolulu is investigating the case. The apprehension was the direct result of cooperation between the FBI and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) Pacific Region.

Was this report accurate and useful?

Sources

Revision history

  1. Version 125 Aug 2026, 22:41current

    First published.

How we work

This site models an investigative reporter rather than a wire desk. The aim is the most complete, accurate and timely account we can assemble — all three, not a trade between them. Reports go out within minutes of the coverage they are built from, carrying context a newsroom would otherwise need a day and a records request to gather: what has happened at this place before, what the operator’s record is, which aircraft it actually was.

Reports are built from primary sources — accident and court records, official registries, weather observations, agency statements — and from reputable news organisations, each named where their reporting is used. Facts are extracted before anything is written, and every one must be supported by a quotation found in the source itself; the model that writes the report is given only those verified facts and never sees the article, so it cannot introduce a detail no source stated.

Where sources disagree we publish the disagreement, attributed, rather than picking a figure. Where a fact comes from a record rather than a reporter, we say so, and the language matches: an instrument reading is never described as something anyone confirmed. Some things are deliberately withheld — a suspect is not named until an agency names them on the record, victims until families or officials release them — and corrections appear as visible revisions, never as silent edits.

None of that makes a report true. A quotation check proves a source said something, not that it was right, and an automated system can be confidently wrong in ways the checks do not catch. If something here is wrong, the feedback above is how it gets found. The full methodology, including what we refuse to publish.