  The cosmic censorship conjecture posits that singularities forming to the
future of a regular Cauchy surface are hidden by an event horizon. Consequently
any topological structures will ultimately collapse within the horizon of a set
of black holes and so no observer can actively probe them classically. We
consider here a quantum analog of this problem, in which we compare the
transition rates of an Unruh-DeWitt detector placed outside the horizon of an
eternal BTZ black hole and its associated geon counterpart. We find the
transition rates differ, with the latter being time-dependent, implying that we
are indeed able to probe the structure of the singularity from outside the
Killing horizon.
