Sunday, March 12, 2006
Friday, March 10, 2006
Miss Porter's School
Link
March 3, 2006
Day Trip
A 'Village of Pretty Houses,' Where Women's Lives Were Reshaped
By EVE GLASBERG
FARMINGTON, Conn., looks like a rich but sleepy suburb where nothing much happens. That's fine with its preppy residents, who would just as soon not be noticed. The rapper 50 Cent found it and joined its mansion-owning crowd in 2004. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis knew her way around the place, too, as did her sister, Lee Radziwill, and her White House social secretary, Letitia Baldrige, as well as Gene Tierney and Lilly Pulitzer — all of whom attended Miss Porter's, the fancy girls' boarding school that occupies much of the historical village center.
And behind Farmington's prosperous-looking facade of tree-lined residential streets and sedate-looking buildings, there are discoveries for the casual visitor: a collection of Impressionist art, a look at the modern incarnation of the young Jacqueline Bouvier's school, traces of kidnapped Africans' rebellion on the slave ship Amistad.
George Washington, who passed through several times in 1780 and 1781, is said to have called Farmington "the village of pretty houses." Some of those houses still stand, including a saltbox at 37 High Street, built in 1720, now preserved as the Stanley-Whitman House museum. Also in the village center are the buildings of Miss Porter's School, many of them brick and brown-shingled structures built in the 19th century. At the small fieldstone St. Patrick's Church at 112 Main Street, a brass plaque reading "Misses Bouvier" remains on the pew donated by the future Mrs. Kennedy and her sister when they were at Miss Porter's in the 1940's.
Boarders at the school now pay $35,050, plus $1,766 in fees, a year, and it has long had an air of privilege. But its founder, Sarah Porter, was a revolutionary of sorts. She had received a classical education at Yale "after hours," working around the ban on female students with the help of sympathetic professors and tutors, and girls at her school, started in 1843, received the kind of education usually reserved for their brothers. Today Miss Porter's is a prep school, still only for girls, with 325 high-school-age students. Downtown, dressed in jeans and hoodies, they browse through best sellers like Curtis Sittenfeld's "Prep" in the Millrace Bookshop or chatter over lattes and brownies at Starbucks.
Miss Porter's was such a good experience for Theodate Pope, who studied there from 1886 to 1888, that she decided to build a big house in Farmington — to her own design — where her parents could retire. Most people in that era thought that women should not be architects, but that did not stop her. The house was built, her parents came from Cleveland to move in, and her father brought his art collection. The property is now the Hill-Stead Museum.
Visitors winding up the long driveway see a rambling white clapboard house atop a hill, with a commanding view of the surrounding Litchfield Hills. Of the original 250 acres, 152 remain, with nine buildings and extensive grounds designed by Miss Pope with the help of Warren H. Manning, a protégé of Frederick Law Olmsted, and Beatrix Farrand, another noted landscape architect who was Edith Wharton's niece. At a time when the trajectory of most privileged young women's lives began with debutante and ended with homemaker, Miss Pope had other goals. "For years I have felt breathlessly that I must help the cause of good architecture," she wrote in her diary. She hired Princeton architecture professors to teach her and enlisted help with the house from the prestigious New York architectural firm McKim, Mead & White, while reserving major decisions for herself. "It will be a Pope house," she wrote to the firm, "instead of a McKim, Mead & White house."
The rooms are elegantly furnished. Mementos of Miss Pope (she later married John Wallace Riddle) convey the sense of real life lived in this house — her hats and dresses; some stockings, stained in the heel, lying delicately on tissue paper in a half-opened bureau drawer. And what a life — Miss Pope survived the sinking of the Lusitania and was a friend of Henry James, who used to come out for séances. But what really takes the eye is the art collection.
Two paintings from Monet's haystack series face each other across the expanse of two adjoining rooms. "Jockeys," an 1886 Degas pastel, hangs above the fireplace in the dining room. More works by Monet and Degas, as well as others by Manet, Whistler and Cassatt, are carefully placed throughout the house. Hill-Stead's most important Degas, an 1886 pastel of a nude bathing called "The Tub," now hangs in the drawing room but at one point was tucked away in a bedroom. Decorative objects include a Wedgwood tea set in a rare creamy yellow porcelain bisque and a Corinthian pyxis jar dating from between 600 and 575 B.C.
Hidden in a corner of the drawing room is a Matisse drawing of Juan Gris and his wife, given to Miss Pope as a wedding present in 1916 by Anna Roosevelt Cowles, a Farmington neighbor and a sister of Theodore Roosevelt. She had introduced Miss Pope and Mr. Riddle. In 1920, Theodate Pope Riddle got an architectural commission for reconstruction of Theodore Roosevelt's birthplace in Manhattan.
Back in the center of town, visitors can also tour Miss Porter's School. Student guides point out classrooms, art studios, athletic facilities and more, revealing an academically rigorous institution that is better equipped than some small colleges.
The guides may know little about the school's most famous alumna, but it's easy to imagine her walking among the graceful older buildings on shaded paths or gossiping with girlfriends in the dining hall at 60 Main Street, still used for the same purpose. At Miss Porter's, Jacqueline Bouvier rode horses and was on the tennis team. She excelled at languages and won an English prize, a book of poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay, which she collected in a graduation ceremony held at the Congregational church at 75 Main Street. Miss Porter's has Bouvier artifacts, including a windowpane in which Jacqueline etched her name with a diamond, which can be seen by appointment.
Also in Farmington's downtown are several buildings with another kind of historical significance. At the beginning of the 1840's, Farmington abolitionists sheltered the Africans who had rebelled aboard the slave ship Amistad. Farmington was a strongly Abolitionist town, and its residents supported the legal case that eventually won the Africans' freedom.
Most of the Amistad-connected buildings are private homes and not open to the public, but the National Park Service Web site explains their significance and outlines an interesting walking tour.
In one of the houses, at 116 Main Street, a young girl named Margru stayed with the family of a minister, Noah Porter. She was given lessons and learned English. In 1841 Margru and the others who had been on the Amistad were returned to Africa. Two years after that, the Porters' oldest daughter, Sarah, founded her famous school.
If You Go
Farmington, Conn., is about 10 miles west of Hartford. From Interstate 84, take Exit 39, follow Route 4 west and turn left onto Route 10 South.
The Hill-Stead Museum (35 Mountain Road; 860-677-4787; www.hillstead.org) is open from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday to Sunday from November through April and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. the rest of the year. Admission is $9 for adults and $4 for children.
Miss Porter's School (860-409-3500, www.missporters.org), offers student-led tours on weekdays and, for weekend visitors, provides a brochure at 66 Main Street for self-guided visits. A guide to buildings in Farmington's village-center historic district is at www.hartnet.org/hha/Main_Street.htm. For the Amistad story, with links to a map and guide for Farmington sites, see www.cr.nps.gov/nr/travel/amistad/amistadstory.htm.
For lunch or dinner in Farmington, try the Grist Mill Restaurant (44 Mill Lane; 860-676-8855, reservations recommended), with fine dining in a rustically restored 17th-century building with a view of the Farmington River, or Picolo Arancio (819 Farmington Avenue; 860-674-1224), with Italian meals and pizzas.
March 3, 2006
Day Trip
A 'Village of Pretty Houses,' Where Women's Lives Were Reshaped
By EVE GLASBERG
FARMINGTON, Conn., looks like a rich but sleepy suburb where nothing much happens. That's fine with its preppy residents, who would just as soon not be noticed. The rapper 50 Cent found it and joined its mansion-owning crowd in 2004. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis knew her way around the place, too, as did her sister, Lee Radziwill, and her White House social secretary, Letitia Baldrige, as well as Gene Tierney and Lilly Pulitzer — all of whom attended Miss Porter's, the fancy girls' boarding school that occupies much of the historical village center.
And behind Farmington's prosperous-looking facade of tree-lined residential streets and sedate-looking buildings, there are discoveries for the casual visitor: a collection of Impressionist art, a look at the modern incarnation of the young Jacqueline Bouvier's school, traces of kidnapped Africans' rebellion on the slave ship Amistad.
George Washington, who passed through several times in 1780 and 1781, is said to have called Farmington "the village of pretty houses." Some of those houses still stand, including a saltbox at 37 High Street, built in 1720, now preserved as the Stanley-Whitman House museum. Also in the village center are the buildings of Miss Porter's School, many of them brick and brown-shingled structures built in the 19th century. At the small fieldstone St. Patrick's Church at 112 Main Street, a brass plaque reading "Misses Bouvier" remains on the pew donated by the future Mrs. Kennedy and her sister when they were at Miss Porter's in the 1940's.
Boarders at the school now pay $35,050, plus $1,766 in fees, a year, and it has long had an air of privilege. But its founder, Sarah Porter, was a revolutionary of sorts. She had received a classical education at Yale "after hours," working around the ban on female students with the help of sympathetic professors and tutors, and girls at her school, started in 1843, received the kind of education usually reserved for their brothers. Today Miss Porter's is a prep school, still only for girls, with 325 high-school-age students. Downtown, dressed in jeans and hoodies, they browse through best sellers like Curtis Sittenfeld's "Prep" in the Millrace Bookshop or chatter over lattes and brownies at Starbucks.
Miss Porter's was such a good experience for Theodate Pope, who studied there from 1886 to 1888, that she decided to build a big house in Farmington — to her own design — where her parents could retire. Most people in that era thought that women should not be architects, but that did not stop her. The house was built, her parents came from Cleveland to move in, and her father brought his art collection. The property is now the Hill-Stead Museum.
Visitors winding up the long driveway see a rambling white clapboard house atop a hill, with a commanding view of the surrounding Litchfield Hills. Of the original 250 acres, 152 remain, with nine buildings and extensive grounds designed by Miss Pope with the help of Warren H. Manning, a protégé of Frederick Law Olmsted, and Beatrix Farrand, another noted landscape architect who was Edith Wharton's niece. At a time when the trajectory of most privileged young women's lives began with debutante and ended with homemaker, Miss Pope had other goals. "For years I have felt breathlessly that I must help the cause of good architecture," she wrote in her diary. She hired Princeton architecture professors to teach her and enlisted help with the house from the prestigious New York architectural firm McKim, Mead & White, while reserving major decisions for herself. "It will be a Pope house," she wrote to the firm, "instead of a McKim, Mead & White house."
The rooms are elegantly furnished. Mementos of Miss Pope (she later married John Wallace Riddle) convey the sense of real life lived in this house — her hats and dresses; some stockings, stained in the heel, lying delicately on tissue paper in a half-opened bureau drawer. And what a life — Miss Pope survived the sinking of the Lusitania and was a friend of Henry James, who used to come out for séances. But what really takes the eye is the art collection.
Two paintings from Monet's haystack series face each other across the expanse of two adjoining rooms. "Jockeys," an 1886 Degas pastel, hangs above the fireplace in the dining room. More works by Monet and Degas, as well as others by Manet, Whistler and Cassatt, are carefully placed throughout the house. Hill-Stead's most important Degas, an 1886 pastel of a nude bathing called "The Tub," now hangs in the drawing room but at one point was tucked away in a bedroom. Decorative objects include a Wedgwood tea set in a rare creamy yellow porcelain bisque and a Corinthian pyxis jar dating from between 600 and 575 B.C.
Hidden in a corner of the drawing room is a Matisse drawing of Juan Gris and his wife, given to Miss Pope as a wedding present in 1916 by Anna Roosevelt Cowles, a Farmington neighbor and a sister of Theodore Roosevelt. She had introduced Miss Pope and Mr. Riddle. In 1920, Theodate Pope Riddle got an architectural commission for reconstruction of Theodore Roosevelt's birthplace in Manhattan.
Back in the center of town, visitors can also tour Miss Porter's School. Student guides point out classrooms, art studios, athletic facilities and more, revealing an academically rigorous institution that is better equipped than some small colleges.
The guides may know little about the school's most famous alumna, but it's easy to imagine her walking among the graceful older buildings on shaded paths or gossiping with girlfriends in the dining hall at 60 Main Street, still used for the same purpose. At Miss Porter's, Jacqueline Bouvier rode horses and was on the tennis team. She excelled at languages and won an English prize, a book of poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay, which she collected in a graduation ceremony held at the Congregational church at 75 Main Street. Miss Porter's has Bouvier artifacts, including a windowpane in which Jacqueline etched her name with a diamond, which can be seen by appointment.
Also in Farmington's downtown are several buildings with another kind of historical significance. At the beginning of the 1840's, Farmington abolitionists sheltered the Africans who had rebelled aboard the slave ship Amistad. Farmington was a strongly Abolitionist town, and its residents supported the legal case that eventually won the Africans' freedom.
Most of the Amistad-connected buildings are private homes and not open to the public, but the National Park Service Web site explains their significance and outlines an interesting walking tour.
In one of the houses, at 116 Main Street, a young girl named Margru stayed with the family of a minister, Noah Porter. She was given lessons and learned English. In 1841 Margru and the others who had been on the Amistad were returned to Africa. Two years after that, the Porters' oldest daughter, Sarah, founded her famous school.
If You Go
Farmington, Conn., is about 10 miles west of Hartford. From Interstate 84, take Exit 39, follow Route 4 west and turn left onto Route 10 South.
The Hill-Stead Museum (35 Mountain Road; 860-677-4787; www.hillstead.org) is open from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday to Sunday from November through April and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. the rest of the year. Admission is $9 for adults and $4 for children.
Miss Porter's School (860-409-3500, www.missporters.org), offers student-led tours on weekdays and, for weekend visitors, provides a brochure at 66 Main Street for self-guided visits. A guide to buildings in Farmington's village-center historic district is at www.hartnet.org/hha/Main_Street.htm. For the Amistad story, with links to a map and guide for Farmington sites, see www.cr.nps.gov/nr/travel/amistad/amistadstory.htm.
For lunch or dinner in Farmington, try the Grist Mill Restaurant (44 Mill Lane; 860-676-8855, reservations recommended), with fine dining in a rustically restored 17th-century building with a view of the Farmington River, or Picolo Arancio (819 Farmington Avenue; 860-674-1224), with Italian meals and pizzas.
Sunday, March 05, 2006
Neighbors piggybacking wireless connections
Link
March 5, 2006
Hey Neighbor, Stop Piggybacking on My Wireless
By MICHEL MARRIOTT
For a while, the wireless Internet connection Christine and Randy Brodeur installed last year seemed perfect. They were able to sit in their sunny Los Angeles backyard working on their laptop computers.
But they soon began noticing that their high-speed Internet access had become as slow as rush-hour traffic on the 405 freeway.
"I didn't know whether to blame it on the Santa Ana winds or what," recalled Mrs. Brodeur, the chief executive of Socket Media, a marketing and public relations agency.
The "what" turned out to be neighbors who had tapped into their system. The additional online traffic nearly choked out the Brodeurs, who pay a $40 monthly fee for their Internet service, slowing their access until it was practically unusable.
Piggybacking, the usually unauthorized tapping into someone else's wireless Internet connection, is no longer the exclusive domain of pilfering computer geeks or shady hackers cruising for unguarded networks. Ordinarily upstanding people are tapping in. As they do, new sets of Internet behaviors are creeping into America's popular culture.
"I don't think it's stealing," said Edwin Caroso, a 21-year-old student at Miami Dade College, echoing an often-heard sentiment.
"I always find people out there who aren't protecting their connection, so I just feel free to go ahead and use it," Mr. Caroso said. He added that he tapped into a stranger's network mainly for Web surfing, keeping up with e-mail, text chatting with friends in foreign countries and doing homework.
Many who piggyback say the practice does not feel like theft because it does not seem to take anything away from anyone. One occasional piggybacker recently compared it to "reading the newspaper over someone's shoulder."
Piggybacking, makers of wireless routers say, is increasingly an issue for people who live in densely populated areas like New York City or Chicago, or for anyone clustered in apartment buildings in which Wi-Fi radio waves, with an average range of about 200 feet, can easily bleed through walls, floors and ceilings. Large hotels that offer the service have become bubbling brooks of free access that spill out into nearby homes and restaurants.
"Wi-Fi is in the air, and it is a very low curb, if you will, to step up and use it," said Mike Wolf of ABI Research, a high-technology market research company in Oyster Bay, N.Y.
This is especially true, Mr. Wolf said, because so many users do not bother to secure their networks with passwords or encryption programs. The programs are usually shipped with customers' wireless routers, devices that plug into an Internet connection and make access to it wireless. Many home network owners admit that they are oblivious to piggybackers.
Some, like Marla Edwards, who think they have locked intruders out of their networks, learn otherwise. Ms. Edwards, a junior at Baruch College in New York, said her husband recently discovered that their home network was not secure after a visiting friend with a laptop easily hopped on.
"There's no gauge, no measuring device that says 48 people are using your access," Ms. Edwards said.
When Mr. Wolf turns on his computer in his suburban Seattle home, he regularly sees on his screen a list of two or three wireless networks that do not belong to him but are nonetheless available for use. Mr. Wolf uses his own wired network at home, but he says he has piggybacked onto someone else's wireless network when traveling.
"On a family vacation this summer we needed to get access," Mr. Wolf recalled, explaining that his father, who took along his laptop, needed to send an e-mail message to his boss on the East Coast from Ocean Shores, Wash.. "I said, 'O.K., let's drive around the beach with the window open.' We found a signal, and the owner of the network was none the wiser," Mr. Wolf said. "It took about five minutes."
Jonathan Bettino, a senior product marketing manager for the Belkin Corporation, a major maker of wireless network routers based in Compton, Calif., said home-based wireless networks were becoming a way of life. Unless locking out unauthorized users becomes commonplace, piggybacking is likely to increase, too.
Last year, Mr. Bettino said, there were more than 44 million broadband networks among the more than 100 million households in the United States. Of that number, 16.2 million are expected to be wireless by the end of this year. In 2003, 3.9 million households had wireless access to the Internet, he said.
Humphrey Cheung, the editor of a technology Web site, tomshardware.com, measured how plentiful open wireless networks have become. In April 2004, he and some colleagues flew two single-engine airplanes over metropolitan Los Angeles with two wireless laptops.
The project logged more than 4,500 wireless networks, with only about 30 percent of them encrypted to lock out outsiders, Mr. Cheung said.
"Most people just plug the thing in," he said of those who buy wireless routers. "Ninety percent of the time it works. You stop at that point and don't bother to turn on its security."
Martha Liliana Ramirez, who lives in Miami, said she had not thought much about securing her $100-a-month Internet connection until recently. Last August, Ms. Ramirez, 31, a real estate agent, discovered a man camped outside her condominium with a laptop pointed at her building.
When Ms. Ramirez asked the man what he was doing, he said he was stealing a wireless Internet connection because he did not have one at home. She was amused but later had an unsettling thought: "Oh my God. He could be stealing my signal."
Yet some six months later, Ms. Ramirez still has not secured her network.
Beth Freeman, who lives in Chicago, has her own Internet access, but it is not wireless. Mostly for the convenience of using the Internet anywhere in her apartment, Ms. Freeman, 58, said that for the last six months she has been using a wireless network a friend showed her how to tap into.
"I feel sort of bad about it, but I do it anyway," Ms. Freeman said her of Internet indiscretions. "It just seems harmless."
And if she ever gets caught?
"I'm a grandmother," Ms. Freeman said. "They're not going to yell at an old lady. I'll just play the dumb card."
David Cole, director of product management for Symantec Security Response, a unit of Symantec, a maker of computer security software, said consumers should understand that an open wireless network invites greater vulnerabilities than just a stampede of "freeloading neighbors."
He said savvy users could piggyback into unprotected computers to peer into files containing sensitive financial and personal information, release malicious viruses and worms that could do irreparable damage, or use the computer as a launching pad for identity theft or the uploading and downloading of child pornography.
"The best case is that you end up giving a neighbor a free ride," Mr. Cole said. "The worst case is that someone can destroy your computer, take your files and do some really nefarious things with your network that gets you dragged into court."
Mr. Cole said Symantec and other companies had created software that could not only lock out most network intruders but also protect computers and their content if an intruder managed to gain access.
Some users say they have protected their computers but have decided to keep their networks open as a passive protest of what they consider the exorbitant cost of Internet access.
"I'm sticking it to the man," said Elaine Ball, an Internet subscriber who lives in Chicago. She complained that she paid $65 a month for Internet access until she recently switched to a $20-a-month promotion plan that would go up to $45 a month after the first three months.
"I open up my network, leave it wide open for anyone to jump on," Ms. Ball said.
For the Brodeurs in Los Angeles, a close reading of their network's manual helped them to finally encrypt their network. The Brodeurs told their neighbors that the network belonged to them and not to the neighborhood. While apologetic, some neighbors still wanted access to it.
"Some of them asked me, 'Could we pay?' But we didn't want to go into the Internet service provider business," Mrs. Brodeur said. "We gave some weird story about the network imposing some sort of lockdown protocol."
Andrea Zarate contributed reporting from Miami for this article, and Gretchen Ruethling from Chicago.
March 5, 2006
Hey Neighbor, Stop Piggybacking on My Wireless
By MICHEL MARRIOTT
For a while, the wireless Internet connection Christine and Randy Brodeur installed last year seemed perfect. They were able to sit in their sunny Los Angeles backyard working on their laptop computers.
But they soon began noticing that their high-speed Internet access had become as slow as rush-hour traffic on the 405 freeway.
"I didn't know whether to blame it on the Santa Ana winds or what," recalled Mrs. Brodeur, the chief executive of Socket Media, a marketing and public relations agency.
The "what" turned out to be neighbors who had tapped into their system. The additional online traffic nearly choked out the Brodeurs, who pay a $40 monthly fee for their Internet service, slowing their access until it was practically unusable.
Piggybacking, the usually unauthorized tapping into someone else's wireless Internet connection, is no longer the exclusive domain of pilfering computer geeks or shady hackers cruising for unguarded networks. Ordinarily upstanding people are tapping in. As they do, new sets of Internet behaviors are creeping into America's popular culture.
"I don't think it's stealing," said Edwin Caroso, a 21-year-old student at Miami Dade College, echoing an often-heard sentiment.
"I always find people out there who aren't protecting their connection, so I just feel free to go ahead and use it," Mr. Caroso said. He added that he tapped into a stranger's network mainly for Web surfing, keeping up with e-mail, text chatting with friends in foreign countries and doing homework.
Many who piggyback say the practice does not feel like theft because it does not seem to take anything away from anyone. One occasional piggybacker recently compared it to "reading the newspaper over someone's shoulder."
Piggybacking, makers of wireless routers say, is increasingly an issue for people who live in densely populated areas like New York City or Chicago, or for anyone clustered in apartment buildings in which Wi-Fi radio waves, with an average range of about 200 feet, can easily bleed through walls, floors and ceilings. Large hotels that offer the service have become bubbling brooks of free access that spill out into nearby homes and restaurants.
"Wi-Fi is in the air, and it is a very low curb, if you will, to step up and use it," said Mike Wolf of ABI Research, a high-technology market research company in Oyster Bay, N.Y.
This is especially true, Mr. Wolf said, because so many users do not bother to secure their networks with passwords or encryption programs. The programs are usually shipped with customers' wireless routers, devices that plug into an Internet connection and make access to it wireless. Many home network owners admit that they are oblivious to piggybackers.
Some, like Marla Edwards, who think they have locked intruders out of their networks, learn otherwise. Ms. Edwards, a junior at Baruch College in New York, said her husband recently discovered that their home network was not secure after a visiting friend with a laptop easily hopped on.
"There's no gauge, no measuring device that says 48 people are using your access," Ms. Edwards said.
When Mr. Wolf turns on his computer in his suburban Seattle home, he regularly sees on his screen a list of two or three wireless networks that do not belong to him but are nonetheless available for use. Mr. Wolf uses his own wired network at home, but he says he has piggybacked onto someone else's wireless network when traveling.
"On a family vacation this summer we needed to get access," Mr. Wolf recalled, explaining that his father, who took along his laptop, needed to send an e-mail message to his boss on the East Coast from Ocean Shores, Wash.. "I said, 'O.K., let's drive around the beach with the window open.' We found a signal, and the owner of the network was none the wiser," Mr. Wolf said. "It took about five minutes."
Jonathan Bettino, a senior product marketing manager for the Belkin Corporation, a major maker of wireless network routers based in Compton, Calif., said home-based wireless networks were becoming a way of life. Unless locking out unauthorized users becomes commonplace, piggybacking is likely to increase, too.
Last year, Mr. Bettino said, there were more than 44 million broadband networks among the more than 100 million households in the United States. Of that number, 16.2 million are expected to be wireless by the end of this year. In 2003, 3.9 million households had wireless access to the Internet, he said.
Humphrey Cheung, the editor of a technology Web site, tomshardware.com, measured how plentiful open wireless networks have become. In April 2004, he and some colleagues flew two single-engine airplanes over metropolitan Los Angeles with two wireless laptops.
The project logged more than 4,500 wireless networks, with only about 30 percent of them encrypted to lock out outsiders, Mr. Cheung said.
"Most people just plug the thing in," he said of those who buy wireless routers. "Ninety percent of the time it works. You stop at that point and don't bother to turn on its security."
Martha Liliana Ramirez, who lives in Miami, said she had not thought much about securing her $100-a-month Internet connection until recently. Last August, Ms. Ramirez, 31, a real estate agent, discovered a man camped outside her condominium with a laptop pointed at her building.
When Ms. Ramirez asked the man what he was doing, he said he was stealing a wireless Internet connection because he did not have one at home. She was amused but later had an unsettling thought: "Oh my God. He could be stealing my signal."
Yet some six months later, Ms. Ramirez still has not secured her network.
Beth Freeman, who lives in Chicago, has her own Internet access, but it is not wireless. Mostly for the convenience of using the Internet anywhere in her apartment, Ms. Freeman, 58, said that for the last six months she has been using a wireless network a friend showed her how to tap into.
"I feel sort of bad about it, but I do it anyway," Ms. Freeman said her of Internet indiscretions. "It just seems harmless."
And if she ever gets caught?
"I'm a grandmother," Ms. Freeman said. "They're not going to yell at an old lady. I'll just play the dumb card."
David Cole, director of product management for Symantec Security Response, a unit of Symantec, a maker of computer security software, said consumers should understand that an open wireless network invites greater vulnerabilities than just a stampede of "freeloading neighbors."
He said savvy users could piggyback into unprotected computers to peer into files containing sensitive financial and personal information, release malicious viruses and worms that could do irreparable damage, or use the computer as a launching pad for identity theft or the uploading and downloading of child pornography.
"The best case is that you end up giving a neighbor a free ride," Mr. Cole said. "The worst case is that someone can destroy your computer, take your files and do some really nefarious things with your network that gets you dragged into court."
Mr. Cole said Symantec and other companies had created software that could not only lock out most network intruders but also protect computers and their content if an intruder managed to gain access.
Some users say they have protected their computers but have decided to keep their networks open as a passive protest of what they consider the exorbitant cost of Internet access.
"I'm sticking it to the man," said Elaine Ball, an Internet subscriber who lives in Chicago. She complained that she paid $65 a month for Internet access until she recently switched to a $20-a-month promotion plan that would go up to $45 a month after the first three months.
"I open up my network, leave it wide open for anyone to jump on," Ms. Ball said.
For the Brodeurs in Los Angeles, a close reading of their network's manual helped them to finally encrypt their network. The Brodeurs told their neighbors that the network belonged to them and not to the neighborhood. While apologetic, some neighbors still wanted access to it.
"Some of them asked me, 'Could we pay?' But we didn't want to go into the Internet service provider business," Mrs. Brodeur said. "We gave some weird story about the network imposing some sort of lockdown protocol."
Andrea Zarate contributed reporting from Miami for this article, and Gretchen Ruethling from Chicago.
Monday, January 23, 2006
Pad Thai & Chicken Stew recipes
January 15, 2006
Food
Generation Pad Thai
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
The owner of the Gucci handbag plunked it down at the Fairway cash register, next to three expensive cheeses, a large filet mignon, two packages of Cocoa Puffs Milk ‘n Cereal Bars and an eight-pack of apple juice boxes, and impatiently awaited her tally.
If we can infer that the apple juice was not meant as a chaser for her English farmstead cheese, may we then stop to ponder why she would foist such foodstuffs on her offspring? Or is it that American children have somehow conspired to turn their otherwise reasonable parents into weak-willed rulers of their collective roosts, tricked into believing that it is acceptable to ask a dinner-party host carving a roast for a corn-syrup-packed protein alternative. Truly, a chicken/nugget conundrum.
The same parents who micromanage every other aspect of their children’s lives - puzzle tutoring for 4-year-olds, clarinet lessons, baby yoga - seem to stop the mini-me’ing at the lunch box. The evidence surrounds us. Syrupy shots of glucose masquerading as yogurt. Premade peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. (I long to have been in that marketing meeting: “Working parents have no time to hoist a butter knife!”) An abomination called string cheese.
Skip your starchy e-mail about food snobbery: even those parents who torture others with cellphone conversations plotting a reservation at the new Batali venture serve Gummi Bears as a soccer snack. Do not be fooled!
So what would Daniel Boulud do? Foie-gras-stuffed chicken fingers?
I polled several chefs with young children to see what they fed them and found serious challenges to the notion that small people simply will not brook fresh vegetables, texture or spice. They serve their children pad Thai, which blends pungent seasonings like fish sauce and tamarind with noodles, eggs and peanuts.
“I look in people’s fridges and it appalls me,” said Hugo Matheson, a chef at the Kitchen in Boulder, Colo. “The demographic around here doesn’t have financial issues, but they still buy prepackaged lasagna from Whole Foods when all the kid really needs to eat is half a chicken breast.”
The fact that chefs’ kids eat better than yours or mine isn’t surprising. They often bring the little ones to work, where they eat tiny plates of duck confit (“They lap it up,” said Matheson of his nearly 3-year-old twins) or buckwheat pasta (the 2-year-old and 4-year-old children of Scott Dolich of Park Kitchen in Portland, Ore., request it). They also have rules at home:
1. Make your children eat at the table from a very young age. Jody Adams, the chef at Rialto in Cambridge, Mass., said that her children - Oliver and Roxanne - never had highchairs. “It was really hard, because 2-year-olds throw food. But I saw the benefit in treating the dinner table as something that was important and that everyone had to participate in.”
2. Make them eat what you do, even if you have to purée it. “If we ate butternut squash and carrots, so did they,” Matheson said, “and sometimes with fish. I just really thinned it with cooking water.” Grant Achatz, the chef and owner of Alinea in Chicago, treated his 4-year-old to a 10-course dinner. “He didn’t finish everything, but he tried every course, which included white truffles, crab, bison,” he said. Do not feel compelled to top this.
3. Pack lunches fashioned from leftovers. “If we go for Thai food,” said Naomi Hebberoy, a chef and owner of the Gotham Building Tavern in Portland, Ore., her daughter, August, “takes pad Thai the next day.”
4. Eschew Baggies filled with Goldfish. (Car rides are exempt.) “If kids are hungry, they’re going to eat,” Dolich said. “If you fill them up on Bugles, they won’t.”
5. Buy them the most expensive chocolate you can afford. Who craves Ho Hos when they’ve had Scharffen Berger? I do. But I wasn’t raised on the good stuff.
Lest you think this is some culinary tomfoolery, these are the food ways our forefathers hewed to. “Historically, there was no such thing as children’s food,” said Andrew F. Smith, who teaches culinary history at the New School in New York. “Babies would eat what adults ate, chopped up, until Gerber created baby food in 1927.” “Children’s meals” didn’t exist until the McDonald’s Happy Meal came along in the late 1970’s, Smith said, and only when snack-food producers concluded that their real market was children did they start sponsoring events and advertising in the 1950’s.
A caveat: Even chefs’ kids eat boxed macaroni and cheese (albeit Annie’s, the organic kind). Feel free to wolf down wooden spoonfuls of it as you make it, too.
Pad Thai
8 ounces rice noodles
1 tablespoon tamarind paste
1 ½ tablespoons fish sauce
1 ½ tablespoons sugar
1 tablespoon lime juice
4 cups broccoli florets
1 carrot, thinly sliced
½ cup canola oil
2 teaspoons minced garlic
1 teaspoon minced ginger
16 large shrimp, peeled and deveined
2 large eggs, lightly beaten
3 scallions, thinly sliced
1 cup bean sprouts
1/3 cup chopped salted peanuts
3 tablespoons chopped cilantro
1 lime, cut into wedges
Sesame seeds
Red pepper flakes (optional).
1. Place the noodles in a bowl and cover with cold water. Let sit for 1 hour.
Meanwhile, in a small bowl, whisk together the tamarind paste, fish sauce, sugar, lime juice and ¼ cup water; set aside. Lightly steam the broccoli and carrot; set aside.
2. Drain the noodles. Set a wok over high heat for 1 minute, then add the oil and heat until almost smoking. Add the garlic and ginger; sauté for 30 seconds. Add the shrimp and sauté until almost cooked through, 2 to 3 minutes. Transfer to a plate.
3. Add the noodles and stir-fry for 1 minute. Pour in three-quarters of the tamarind sauce and toss to coat the noodles. Add more sauce if needed. Cook until the noodles are al dente, then push them to one side of the wok and scramble the eggs in the remaining space. Add the shrimp, broccoli, carrot, scallions, bean sprouts and half the peanuts. Toss to mix. Divide among 4 plates and garnish with the remaining peanuts, the cilantro, lime wedges, sesame seeds and (for brave children) red pepper flakes. Serves 2 adults and 2 children. Adapted from Naomi Hebberoy of Gotham Building Tavern.
Oliver’s Chicken Stew
1 3 ½ - to 4-pound chicken, rinsed
8 cups chicken stock
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
5 medium carrots, thickly sliced
4 medium leeks, tender white part only, thickly sliced
4 celery stalks, thickly sliced
4 cloves garlic, smashed
1 teaspoon chopped thyme
1 bay leaf
3 sprigs flat-leaf parsley
½ cup stellini (tiny star pasta)
3 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 tablespoon chopped tarragon
¼ cup chopped flat-leaf parsley
6 slices toasted Italian bread
¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil
½ cup grated Parmesan cheese.
1. Place the chicken in a 6-quart pot breast side down. Add the stock, lightly seasoned with salt and pepper, and bring to a boil, skimming often. Add the carrots, leeks, celery, garlic, thyme, bay leaf and parsley and simmer. After 15 minutes, flip the chicken and cook for 25 minutes more. Remove the chicken and let cool.
2. Strain the vegetables, discarding the bay leaf and parsley. Return the stock to the pot; simmer until reduced by half. Pull the chicken meat off the bones. Add the pasta to the stock and cook for 3 minutes, then whisk in the butter, lemon juice, tarragon and parsley. Add the chicken and vegetables; heat through.
3. To serve, place a piece of toast in the bottom of each of 6 bowls, then drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with Parmesan. Top with stew. Serves 6. Adapted from “In the Hands of a Chef,” by Jody Adams and Ken Rivard.
Food
Generation Pad Thai
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
The owner of the Gucci handbag plunked it down at the Fairway cash register, next to three expensive cheeses, a large filet mignon, two packages of Cocoa Puffs Milk ‘n Cereal Bars and an eight-pack of apple juice boxes, and impatiently awaited her tally.
If we can infer that the apple juice was not meant as a chaser for her English farmstead cheese, may we then stop to ponder why she would foist such foodstuffs on her offspring? Or is it that American children have somehow conspired to turn their otherwise reasonable parents into weak-willed rulers of their collective roosts, tricked into believing that it is acceptable to ask a dinner-party host carving a roast for a corn-syrup-packed protein alternative. Truly, a chicken/nugget conundrum.
The same parents who micromanage every other aspect of their children’s lives - puzzle tutoring for 4-year-olds, clarinet lessons, baby yoga - seem to stop the mini-me’ing at the lunch box. The evidence surrounds us. Syrupy shots of glucose masquerading as yogurt. Premade peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. (I long to have been in that marketing meeting: “Working parents have no time to hoist a butter knife!”) An abomination called string cheese.
Skip your starchy e-mail about food snobbery: even those parents who torture others with cellphone conversations plotting a reservation at the new Batali venture serve Gummi Bears as a soccer snack. Do not be fooled!
So what would Daniel Boulud do? Foie-gras-stuffed chicken fingers?
I polled several chefs with young children to see what they fed them and found serious challenges to the notion that small people simply will not brook fresh vegetables, texture or spice. They serve their children pad Thai, which blends pungent seasonings like fish sauce and tamarind with noodles, eggs and peanuts.
“I look in people’s fridges and it appalls me,” said Hugo Matheson, a chef at the Kitchen in Boulder, Colo. “The demographic around here doesn’t have financial issues, but they still buy prepackaged lasagna from Whole Foods when all the kid really needs to eat is half a chicken breast.”
The fact that chefs’ kids eat better than yours or mine isn’t surprising. They often bring the little ones to work, where they eat tiny plates of duck confit (“They lap it up,” said Matheson of his nearly 3-year-old twins) or buckwheat pasta (the 2-year-old and 4-year-old children of Scott Dolich of Park Kitchen in Portland, Ore., request it). They also have rules at home:
1. Make your children eat at the table from a very young age. Jody Adams, the chef at Rialto in Cambridge, Mass., said that her children - Oliver and Roxanne - never had highchairs. “It was really hard, because 2-year-olds throw food. But I saw the benefit in treating the dinner table as something that was important and that everyone had to participate in.”
2. Make them eat what you do, even if you have to purée it. “If we ate butternut squash and carrots, so did they,” Matheson said, “and sometimes with fish. I just really thinned it with cooking water.” Grant Achatz, the chef and owner of Alinea in Chicago, treated his 4-year-old to a 10-course dinner. “He didn’t finish everything, but he tried every course, which included white truffles, crab, bison,” he said. Do not feel compelled to top this.
3. Pack lunches fashioned from leftovers. “If we go for Thai food,” said Naomi Hebberoy, a chef and owner of the Gotham Building Tavern in Portland, Ore., her daughter, August, “takes pad Thai the next day.”
4. Eschew Baggies filled with Goldfish. (Car rides are exempt.) “If kids are hungry, they’re going to eat,” Dolich said. “If you fill them up on Bugles, they won’t.”
5. Buy them the most expensive chocolate you can afford. Who craves Ho Hos when they’ve had Scharffen Berger? I do. But I wasn’t raised on the good stuff.
Lest you think this is some culinary tomfoolery, these are the food ways our forefathers hewed to. “Historically, there was no such thing as children’s food,” said Andrew F. Smith, who teaches culinary history at the New School in New York. “Babies would eat what adults ate, chopped up, until Gerber created baby food in 1927.” “Children’s meals” didn’t exist until the McDonald’s Happy Meal came along in the late 1970’s, Smith said, and only when snack-food producers concluded that their real market was children did they start sponsoring events and advertising in the 1950’s.
A caveat: Even chefs’ kids eat boxed macaroni and cheese (albeit Annie’s, the organic kind). Feel free to wolf down wooden spoonfuls of it as you make it, too.
Pad Thai
8 ounces rice noodles
1 tablespoon tamarind paste
1 ½ tablespoons fish sauce
1 ½ tablespoons sugar
1 tablespoon lime juice
4 cups broccoli florets
1 carrot, thinly sliced
½ cup canola oil
2 teaspoons minced garlic
1 teaspoon minced ginger
16 large shrimp, peeled and deveined
2 large eggs, lightly beaten
3 scallions, thinly sliced
1 cup bean sprouts
1/3 cup chopped salted peanuts
3 tablespoons chopped cilantro
1 lime, cut into wedges
Sesame seeds
Red pepper flakes (optional).
1. Place the noodles in a bowl and cover with cold water. Let sit for 1 hour.
Meanwhile, in a small bowl, whisk together the tamarind paste, fish sauce, sugar, lime juice and ¼ cup water; set aside. Lightly steam the broccoli and carrot; set aside.
2. Drain the noodles. Set a wok over high heat for 1 minute, then add the oil and heat until almost smoking. Add the garlic and ginger; sauté for 30 seconds. Add the shrimp and sauté until almost cooked through, 2 to 3 minutes. Transfer to a plate.
3. Add the noodles and stir-fry for 1 minute. Pour in three-quarters of the tamarind sauce and toss to coat the noodles. Add more sauce if needed. Cook until the noodles are al dente, then push them to one side of the wok and scramble the eggs in the remaining space. Add the shrimp, broccoli, carrot, scallions, bean sprouts and half the peanuts. Toss to mix. Divide among 4 plates and garnish with the remaining peanuts, the cilantro, lime wedges, sesame seeds and (for brave children) red pepper flakes. Serves 2 adults and 2 children. Adapted from Naomi Hebberoy of Gotham Building Tavern.
Oliver’s Chicken Stew
1 3 ½ - to 4-pound chicken, rinsed
8 cups chicken stock
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
5 medium carrots, thickly sliced
4 medium leeks, tender white part only, thickly sliced
4 celery stalks, thickly sliced
4 cloves garlic, smashed
1 teaspoon chopped thyme
1 bay leaf
3 sprigs flat-leaf parsley
½ cup stellini (tiny star pasta)
3 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 tablespoon chopped tarragon
¼ cup chopped flat-leaf parsley
6 slices toasted Italian bread
¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil
½ cup grated Parmesan cheese.
1. Place the chicken in a 6-quart pot breast side down. Add the stock, lightly seasoned with salt and pepper, and bring to a boil, skimming often. Add the carrots, leeks, celery, garlic, thyme, bay leaf and parsley and simmer. After 15 minutes, flip the chicken and cook for 25 minutes more. Remove the chicken and let cool.
2. Strain the vegetables, discarding the bay leaf and parsley. Return the stock to the pot; simmer until reduced by half. Pull the chicken meat off the bones. Add the pasta to the stock and cook for 3 minutes, then whisk in the butter, lemon juice, tarragon and parsley. Add the chicken and vegetables; heat through.
3. To serve, place a piece of toast in the bottom of each of 6 bowls, then drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with Parmesan. Top with stew. Serves 6. Adapted from “In the Hands of a Chef,” by Jody Adams and Ken Rivard.
Crystal meth replacing home-cooked
Link
January 23, 2006
As States Curb Homemade Meth, a More Potent Variety Emerges
By KATE ZERNIKE
DES MOINES, Jan. 18 - In the seven months since Iowa passed a law restricting the sale of cold medicines used to make methamphetamine, seizures of homemade methamphetamine laboratories have dropped to just 20 a month from 120. People once terrified about the neighbor's house blowing up now walk up to the state's drug policy director, Marvin Van Haaften, at his local Wal-Mart to thank him for making them safer.
But Mr. Van Haaften, like officials in other states with similar restrictions, is now worried about a new problem: the drop in home-cooked methamphetamine has been met by a new flood of crystal methamphetamine coming largely from Mexico.
Sometimes called ice, crystal methamphetamine is far purer, and therefore even more highly addictive, than powdered home-cooked methamphetamine, a change that health officials say has led to greater risk of overdose. And because crystal methamphetamine costs more, the police say thefts are increasing, as people who once cooked at home now have to buy it.
The University of Iowa Burn Center, which in 2004 spent $2.8 million treating people whose skin had been scorched off by the toxic chemicals used to make methamphetamine at home, says it now sees hardly any cases of that sort. Drug treatment centers, on the other hand, say they are treating just as many or more methamphetamine addicts.
And although child welfare officials say they are removing fewer children from homes where parents are cooking the drug, the number of children being removed from homes where parents are using it has more than made up the difference.
"It's killing us, this Mexican ice," said Mr. Van Haaften, a former sheriff. "I'm not sure we can control it as well as we can the meth labs in your community."
The influx of the more potent drug shows the fierce hold of methamphetamine, which has devastated many towns once far removed from violent crime or drugs. As Congress prepares to restrict the sale of pseudoephedrine, the cold medicine ingredient that is used to make methamphetamine, officials here and in other states that have recently imposed similar restrictions caution that they fall far short of a solution.
"You can't legislate away demand," said Betty Oldenkamp, secretary of human services in South Dakota, where the governor this month proposed tightening a law that last year restricted customers to two packs of pseudoephedrine per store. "The law enforcement aspects are tremendously important, but we also have to do something to address the demand."
Here, officials boast that their law restricting pseudoephedrine, which took effect in May, has been faster than any other state's in reducing methamphetamine laboratories. Still, when Mr. Van Haaften, director of the Governor's Office of Drug Control Policy, surveyed the local police, 74 percent said that the law had not changed demand, and 61 percent said supply had remained steady or increased.
In a survey of treatment professionals, 92 percent said they had seen as many or more methamphetamine addicts; the state treated 6,000 in 2005 and expects to treat more than 7,000 this year, based on current trends. Some health officials said abuse among women, typically the biggest users of methamphetamine, was rising particularly fast.
While seizures of powdered methamphetamine declined to 4,572 in 2005 from 6,488 in 2001, seizures of crystal methamphetamine increased, to 2,025 from one.
Federal drug agents tend to describe ice as methamphetamine that is at least 90 percent pure. Officials here say much of their crystal methamphetamine is less pure - "dirty ice," they call it. But either is far more potent than homemade powdered methamphetamine; a "good cook" yields a drug that is about 42 percent pure, but around 25 percent is more common. And in the first four months after the law took effect here, average purity went to 80 percent from 47 percent.
Other states have seen the same.
"The Mexican drug cartels were right there to feed that demand," said Tom Cunningham, the drug task force coordinator for the district attorneys council for Oklahoma, the first state to put pseudoephedrine behind pharmacy counters, in 2004. "They have always supplied marijuana, cocaine, and heroin. When we took away the local meth lab, they simply added methamphetamine to the truck."
A methamphetamine cook could make an ounce for $50 on a stovetop or in a lab in a car; that same amount now costs $800 to $1,500 on the street, the police say.
"Our burglaries have just skyrocketed," said Jerry Furness, who represents Buchanan County, 150 miles northeast of Des Moines, on the Iowa drug task force. "The state asks how the decrease in meth labs has reduced danger to citizens, and it has, as far as potential explosions. But we've had a lot of burglaries where the occupants are home at the time, and that's probably more of a risk. So it's kind of evening out."
When the state surveyed the children in state protection in southeastern Iowa four months after the law took effect, it found that 49 percent were taken from parents who had been using methamphetamine, the same percentage as two years earlier, even as police said they were removing fewer children from homes with laboratories.
Some law enforcement officials say that addicts may find the crystal form more desirable. "If they don't have to mess with precursor chemicals, it's actually a bit easier on them, and safer," said Kevin Glaser, a drug task force supervisor for the state highway patrol in Missouri, which last year led the nation in methamphetamine lab seizures.
But the switch has also increased the risks. "People are overdosing; they're not expecting it to do this much," said Darcy Jensen, director of Prairie View Prevention Services in South Dakota. "They don't realize that that fourth of a gram they're used to using is double or triple in potency."
Federal officials say there are 1.4 million methamphetamine addicts in the United States, concentrated in the West, where the drug began to take hold in the late 1980's, and the Midwest and South, where it moved in the mid- and late 1990's.
Drug enforcement officials have always said that 80 percent of the nation's supply comes from so-called super labs, those able to make 10 pounds or more. But in some counties here, officials say that all the methamphetamine came from mom-and-pop labs that made the drug by cooking pseudoephedrine with toxic farm and household chemicals.
Law enforcement focused on the laboratories because they were so destructive: the police found children who had drunk lye thinking it was water, or went without food as parents went through the long binge-and-sleep cycles of using. Laboratories in homes, motels, abandoned farm buildings or cars frequently exploded, or dumped their toxic chemicals into drains or soil. Small police departments spent much of their time attending to contaminated sites.
More than 30 states have restricted pseudoephedrine in some way. Nine have put it behind pharmacy counters, and Oregon now requires a prescription to obtain it.
Addicts and cookers have proved to be skilled at getting around the restrictions; as one state imposes a law, bordering states see an increase in laboratories. Oklahoma recently linked its pharmacies by a computer database to track sales after discovering that cooks were going county-to-county buying from several pharmacies a day.
Iowa's law passed unanimously. As in other states, officials say the number of laboratories had already begun to decline, most likely because cooks feared they would be caught because there was so much public attention on the problem.
The law resulted in a decline of at least 80 percent. Police found 138 laboratories from June to December, down from 673 for the same period the year before. The state had hit a high of 1,500 lab busts in 2004, but with the law, had 731 for 2005, and expects just 257 this year. Law enforcement says the costs of policing and cleaning up labs will drop to $528,000 next year from $2.6 million in 2004.
But here and in many of the states with recent pseudoephedrine restrictions, frustration with the stubborn rate of addiction has moved the discussion from enforcement to treatment and demand reduction.
That discussion, officials say, will be much tougher.
After listening to Mr. Van Haaften's report on the effects of the law this week, State Representative Clel Baudler, a former state trooper who now heads the public safety committee for the Iowa General Assembly, charged his committee to come back to the next meeting with strategies to reduce demand.
"My fear is, when I ask what they think we should do, they'll say 'I don't know,' " Mr. Baudler said in an interview afterward. "We've increased penalties, we've increased prison time, we're still not getting in front of it."
Officials say they never advertised the law as one that would reduce methamphetamine addiction. Still, they are surprised at how the drug has hung on.
"Things that are highly destructive, including diseases, tend to be self-limiting," said Arthur Schut, president of the Mid-Eastern Council on Chemical Abuse in Iowa City, and a member of the state's drug policy advisory council. "This has been devastating. It's remarkable how quickly people are damaged by it."
Mr. Van Haaften, too, knows that it was too much to hope that the law would reduce demand. Still, he says, "I had a little hope."
"I knew of the addictive nature, but in my heart, I believed people didn't want to deal with dealers," he said. "They have guns, it's dangerous, if you make your own it's safer. I hoped for a dip, but the availability did not allow that to happen."
January 23, 2006
As States Curb Homemade Meth, a More Potent Variety Emerges
By KATE ZERNIKE
DES MOINES, Jan. 18 - In the seven months since Iowa passed a law restricting the sale of cold medicines used to make methamphetamine, seizures of homemade methamphetamine laboratories have dropped to just 20 a month from 120. People once terrified about the neighbor's house blowing up now walk up to the state's drug policy director, Marvin Van Haaften, at his local Wal-Mart to thank him for making them safer.
But Mr. Van Haaften, like officials in other states with similar restrictions, is now worried about a new problem: the drop in home-cooked methamphetamine has been met by a new flood of crystal methamphetamine coming largely from Mexico.
Sometimes called ice, crystal methamphetamine is far purer, and therefore even more highly addictive, than powdered home-cooked methamphetamine, a change that health officials say has led to greater risk of overdose. And because crystal methamphetamine costs more, the police say thefts are increasing, as people who once cooked at home now have to buy it.
The University of Iowa Burn Center, which in 2004 spent $2.8 million treating people whose skin had been scorched off by the toxic chemicals used to make methamphetamine at home, says it now sees hardly any cases of that sort. Drug treatment centers, on the other hand, say they are treating just as many or more methamphetamine addicts.
And although child welfare officials say they are removing fewer children from homes where parents are cooking the drug, the number of children being removed from homes where parents are using it has more than made up the difference.
"It's killing us, this Mexican ice," said Mr. Van Haaften, a former sheriff. "I'm not sure we can control it as well as we can the meth labs in your community."
The influx of the more potent drug shows the fierce hold of methamphetamine, which has devastated many towns once far removed from violent crime or drugs. As Congress prepares to restrict the sale of pseudoephedrine, the cold medicine ingredient that is used to make methamphetamine, officials here and in other states that have recently imposed similar restrictions caution that they fall far short of a solution.
"You can't legislate away demand," said Betty Oldenkamp, secretary of human services in South Dakota, where the governor this month proposed tightening a law that last year restricted customers to two packs of pseudoephedrine per store. "The law enforcement aspects are tremendously important, but we also have to do something to address the demand."
Here, officials boast that their law restricting pseudoephedrine, which took effect in May, has been faster than any other state's in reducing methamphetamine laboratories. Still, when Mr. Van Haaften, director of the Governor's Office of Drug Control Policy, surveyed the local police, 74 percent said that the law had not changed demand, and 61 percent said supply had remained steady or increased.
In a survey of treatment professionals, 92 percent said they had seen as many or more methamphetamine addicts; the state treated 6,000 in 2005 and expects to treat more than 7,000 this year, based on current trends. Some health officials said abuse among women, typically the biggest users of methamphetamine, was rising particularly fast.
While seizures of powdered methamphetamine declined to 4,572 in 2005 from 6,488 in 2001, seizures of crystal methamphetamine increased, to 2,025 from one.
Federal drug agents tend to describe ice as methamphetamine that is at least 90 percent pure. Officials here say much of their crystal methamphetamine is less pure - "dirty ice," they call it. But either is far more potent than homemade powdered methamphetamine; a "good cook" yields a drug that is about 42 percent pure, but around 25 percent is more common. And in the first four months after the law took effect here, average purity went to 80 percent from 47 percent.
Other states have seen the same.
"The Mexican drug cartels were right there to feed that demand," said Tom Cunningham, the drug task force coordinator for the district attorneys council for Oklahoma, the first state to put pseudoephedrine behind pharmacy counters, in 2004. "They have always supplied marijuana, cocaine, and heroin. When we took away the local meth lab, they simply added methamphetamine to the truck."
A methamphetamine cook could make an ounce for $50 on a stovetop or in a lab in a car; that same amount now costs $800 to $1,500 on the street, the police say.
"Our burglaries have just skyrocketed," said Jerry Furness, who represents Buchanan County, 150 miles northeast of Des Moines, on the Iowa drug task force. "The state asks how the decrease in meth labs has reduced danger to citizens, and it has, as far as potential explosions. But we've had a lot of burglaries where the occupants are home at the time, and that's probably more of a risk. So it's kind of evening out."
When the state surveyed the children in state protection in southeastern Iowa four months after the law took effect, it found that 49 percent were taken from parents who had been using methamphetamine, the same percentage as two years earlier, even as police said they were removing fewer children from homes with laboratories.
Some law enforcement officials say that addicts may find the crystal form more desirable. "If they don't have to mess with precursor chemicals, it's actually a bit easier on them, and safer," said Kevin Glaser, a drug task force supervisor for the state highway patrol in Missouri, which last year led the nation in methamphetamine lab seizures.
But the switch has also increased the risks. "People are overdosing; they're not expecting it to do this much," said Darcy Jensen, director of Prairie View Prevention Services in South Dakota. "They don't realize that that fourth of a gram they're used to using is double or triple in potency."
Federal officials say there are 1.4 million methamphetamine addicts in the United States, concentrated in the West, where the drug began to take hold in the late 1980's, and the Midwest and South, where it moved in the mid- and late 1990's.
Drug enforcement officials have always said that 80 percent of the nation's supply comes from so-called super labs, those able to make 10 pounds or more. But in some counties here, officials say that all the methamphetamine came from mom-and-pop labs that made the drug by cooking pseudoephedrine with toxic farm and household chemicals.
Law enforcement focused on the laboratories because they were so destructive: the police found children who had drunk lye thinking it was water, or went without food as parents went through the long binge-and-sleep cycles of using. Laboratories in homes, motels, abandoned farm buildings or cars frequently exploded, or dumped their toxic chemicals into drains or soil. Small police departments spent much of their time attending to contaminated sites.
More than 30 states have restricted pseudoephedrine in some way. Nine have put it behind pharmacy counters, and Oregon now requires a prescription to obtain it.
Addicts and cookers have proved to be skilled at getting around the restrictions; as one state imposes a law, bordering states see an increase in laboratories. Oklahoma recently linked its pharmacies by a computer database to track sales after discovering that cooks were going county-to-county buying from several pharmacies a day.
Iowa's law passed unanimously. As in other states, officials say the number of laboratories had already begun to decline, most likely because cooks feared they would be caught because there was so much public attention on the problem.
The law resulted in a decline of at least 80 percent. Police found 138 laboratories from June to December, down from 673 for the same period the year before. The state had hit a high of 1,500 lab busts in 2004, but with the law, had 731 for 2005, and expects just 257 this year. Law enforcement says the costs of policing and cleaning up labs will drop to $528,000 next year from $2.6 million in 2004.
But here and in many of the states with recent pseudoephedrine restrictions, frustration with the stubborn rate of addiction has moved the discussion from enforcement to treatment and demand reduction.
That discussion, officials say, will be much tougher.
After listening to Mr. Van Haaften's report on the effects of the law this week, State Representative Clel Baudler, a former state trooper who now heads the public safety committee for the Iowa General Assembly, charged his committee to come back to the next meeting with strategies to reduce demand.
"My fear is, when I ask what they think we should do, they'll say 'I don't know,' " Mr. Baudler said in an interview afterward. "We've increased penalties, we've increased prison time, we're still not getting in front of it."
Officials say they never advertised the law as one that would reduce methamphetamine addiction. Still, they are surprised at how the drug has hung on.
"Things that are highly destructive, including diseases, tend to be self-limiting," said Arthur Schut, president of the Mid-Eastern Council on Chemical Abuse in Iowa City, and a member of the state's drug policy advisory council. "This has been devastating. It's remarkable how quickly people are damaged by it."
Mr. Van Haaften, too, knows that it was too much to hope that the law would reduce demand. Still, he says, "I had a little hope."
"I knew of the addictive nature, but in my heart, I believed people didn't want to deal with dealers," he said. "They have guns, it's dangerous, if you make your own it's safer. I hoped for a dip, but the availability did not allow that to happen."
Thursday, January 05, 2006
Cat Evolution According to DNA
Link
January 6, 2006
DNA Offers New Insight Concerning Cat Evolution
By NICHOLAS WADE
Researchers have gained a major insight into the evolution of cats by showing how they migrated to new continents and developed new species as sea levels rose and fell.
About nine million years ago - two million years after the cat family first appeared in Asia - these successful predators invaded North America by crossing the Beringian land bridge connecting Siberia and Alaska, a team of geneticists writes in the journal Science today.
Later, several American cat lineages returned to Asia. With each migration, evolutionary forces morphed the pantherlike patriarch of all cats into a rainbow of species, from ocelots and lynxes to leopards, lions and the lineage that led to the most successful cat of all, even though it has mostly forsaken its predatory heritage: the cat that has induced people to pay for its board and lodging in return for frugal displays of affection.
This new history of the family, known as Felidae, is based on DNA analyses of the 37 living species performed by Warren E. Johnson and Stephen J. O'Brien of the National Cancer Institute and colleagues elsewhere.
Before DNA, taxonomists had considerable difficulty in classifying the cat family. The fossil record was sparse and many of the skulls lacked distinctiveness. One scheme divided the family into Big Cats and Little Cats. Then, in 1997, Dr. Johnson and Dr. O'Brien said they thought most living cats fell into one of eight lineages, based on the genetic element known as mitochondrial DNA.
Having made further DNA analyses, the researchers have drawn a full family tree that assigns every cat species to one of the lineages. They have also integrated their tree, which is based solely on changes in DNA, with the fossil record. The fossils, which are securely dated, allow dates to be assigned to each fork in the genetic family tree.
Knowing when each species came into existence, the Johnson-O'Brien team has been able to reconstruct a series of at least 10 intercontinental migrations by which cats colonized the world. The cheetah, for instance, now found in Africa, belongs to a lineage that originated in North America and some three million years ago migrated back across the Bering land bridge to Asia and then Africa.
Dr. O'Brien said the cats were very successful predators, second only to humans, and quickly explored new territories as opportunity arose. Sea levels were low from 11 million to 6 million years ago, enabling the first modern cats, in paleontologists' perspective (saber-tooth tigers are ancient cats), to spread from Asia west into Africa, creating the caracal lineage, and east into North America, generating the ocelot, lynx and puma lineages.
The leopard lineage appeared around 6.5 million years ago in Asia. The youngest of the eight lineages, which led eventually to the domestic cat, emerged some 6.2 million years ago in Asia and Africa, either from ancestors that had never left Asia or more probably from North American cats that had trekked back across the Bering land bridge.
Sea levels then rose, confining each cat species to its own continent, but sank again some three million years ago, allowing a second round of cat migrations. It was at this time that the ancestors of the cheetah and the Eurasian lynxes colonized the Old World from the New.
Chris Wozencraft, an authority on the classification of carnivorous mammals, said the new cat family tree generally agreed with one that he had just published in Mammal Species of the World, a standard reference. Dr. Wozencraft, a taxonomist at Bethel College in Indiana, based his classification on fossil and zoological information, as well as on DNA data already published by Dr. O'Brien's laboratory.
Cat fossils are very hard to tell apart, because they differ mostly just in size, and the DNA data emerging over the last decade has helped bring the field from confusion to consensus, Dr. Wozencraft said.
Despite their evolutionary success, most of the large cats are in peril because their broad hunting ranges have brought them into collision with people. "With the exception of the house cat and a few other small cat species, nearly every one of the 37 species is considered endangered or threatened," Dr. Johnson and Dr. O'Brien write in the current Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics.
Fewer than 15,000 tigers, cheetahs and snow leopards remain in the wild, they estimate, and pumas and jaguar populations have been reduced to about 50,000 each.
January 6, 2006
DNA Offers New Insight Concerning Cat Evolution
By NICHOLAS WADE
Researchers have gained a major insight into the evolution of cats by showing how they migrated to new continents and developed new species as sea levels rose and fell.
About nine million years ago - two million years after the cat family first appeared in Asia - these successful predators invaded North America by crossing the Beringian land bridge connecting Siberia and Alaska, a team of geneticists writes in the journal Science today.
Later, several American cat lineages returned to Asia. With each migration, evolutionary forces morphed the pantherlike patriarch of all cats into a rainbow of species, from ocelots and lynxes to leopards, lions and the lineage that led to the most successful cat of all, even though it has mostly forsaken its predatory heritage: the cat that has induced people to pay for its board and lodging in return for frugal displays of affection.
This new history of the family, known as Felidae, is based on DNA analyses of the 37 living species performed by Warren E. Johnson and Stephen J. O'Brien of the National Cancer Institute and colleagues elsewhere.
Before DNA, taxonomists had considerable difficulty in classifying the cat family. The fossil record was sparse and many of the skulls lacked distinctiveness. One scheme divided the family into Big Cats and Little Cats. Then, in 1997, Dr. Johnson and Dr. O'Brien said they thought most living cats fell into one of eight lineages, based on the genetic element known as mitochondrial DNA.
Having made further DNA analyses, the researchers have drawn a full family tree that assigns every cat species to one of the lineages. They have also integrated their tree, which is based solely on changes in DNA, with the fossil record. The fossils, which are securely dated, allow dates to be assigned to each fork in the genetic family tree.
Knowing when each species came into existence, the Johnson-O'Brien team has been able to reconstruct a series of at least 10 intercontinental migrations by which cats colonized the world. The cheetah, for instance, now found in Africa, belongs to a lineage that originated in North America and some three million years ago migrated back across the Bering land bridge to Asia and then Africa.
Dr. O'Brien said the cats were very successful predators, second only to humans, and quickly explored new territories as opportunity arose. Sea levels were low from 11 million to 6 million years ago, enabling the first modern cats, in paleontologists' perspective (saber-tooth tigers are ancient cats), to spread from Asia west into Africa, creating the caracal lineage, and east into North America, generating the ocelot, lynx and puma lineages.
The leopard lineage appeared around 6.5 million years ago in Asia. The youngest of the eight lineages, which led eventually to the domestic cat, emerged some 6.2 million years ago in Asia and Africa, either from ancestors that had never left Asia or more probably from North American cats that had trekked back across the Bering land bridge.
Sea levels then rose, confining each cat species to its own continent, but sank again some three million years ago, allowing a second round of cat migrations. It was at this time that the ancestors of the cheetah and the Eurasian lynxes colonized the Old World from the New.
Chris Wozencraft, an authority on the classification of carnivorous mammals, said the new cat family tree generally agreed with one that he had just published in Mammal Species of the World, a standard reference. Dr. Wozencraft, a taxonomist at Bethel College in Indiana, based his classification on fossil and zoological information, as well as on DNA data already published by Dr. O'Brien's laboratory.
Cat fossils are very hard to tell apart, because they differ mostly just in size, and the DNA data emerging over the last decade has helped bring the field from confusion to consensus, Dr. Wozencraft said.
Despite their evolutionary success, most of the large cats are in peril because their broad hunting ranges have brought them into collision with people. "With the exception of the house cat and a few other small cat species, nearly every one of the 37 species is considered endangered or threatened," Dr. Johnson and Dr. O'Brien write in the current Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics.
Fewer than 15,000 tigers, cheetahs and snow leopards remain in the wild, they estimate, and pumas and jaguar populations have been reduced to about 50,000 each.
Monday, December 19, 2005
Barry Halper, Yankees Memorabilia Collector, Dies
Barry Halper, noted memorabilia collector, dies at 66
LIVINGSTON, N.J. -- Barry Halper, owner of one of the most extensive collections of baseball memorabilia and a limited partner in the New York Yankees, has died at 66.
Halper, who died Sunday at Saint Barnabas Medical Center, was bedridden for nearly a year because of complications of diabetes, said Marty Appel, a longtime friend and former Yankees spokesman.
A portion of his Halper's collection was acquired by Major League Baseball and donated to the Hall of Fame in 1998. Halper also fetched $21.8 million -- a record for sports memorabilia -- during a weeklong auction at Sotheby's in 1999. Included in that sale was a game-used Mickey Mantle glove, purchased by actor-comedian Billy Crystal for $239,000.
"Barry was a dear friend, a valued partner for many years and a decent, genuine person," Yankees owner George Steinbrenner said in a statement. "What a great baseball fan he was. I'll miss him dearly."
Halper amassed some 80,000 items, including uniforms of many Hall of Famers, an original ticket from the first World Series in 1903 and the jersey Lou Gehrig wore in his farewell speech at Yankee Stadium in 1939. Halper also owned oddities such as the false teeth worn by Ty Cobb, baseball's career batting average leader.
The New York Daily News reported that during a news conference in Dallas in 1995 to announce Mantle's successful liver transplant, the Hall of Famer spotted Halper in the audience and joked, "Hey, Barry, did you get my other liver?"
Also in Halper's collection were uniforms worn by Cobb, Walter Johnson, Cy Young and Mantle, during his rookie season in 1951. Halper also had the contract finalizing the sale of Babe Ruth from the Boston Red Sox to the Yankees, and a Honus Wagner baseball card.
Survivors include Halper's wife, Sharon; sons Steven and Jason; and daughter, Marnie Stark.
Funeral services are Tuesday at Temple B'Nai Jeshurun in Short Hills.
LIVINGSTON, N.J. -- Barry Halper, owner of one of the most extensive collections of baseball memorabilia and a limited partner in the New York Yankees, has died at 66.
Halper, who died Sunday at Saint Barnabas Medical Center, was bedridden for nearly a year because of complications of diabetes, said Marty Appel, a longtime friend and former Yankees spokesman.
A portion of his Halper's collection was acquired by Major League Baseball and donated to the Hall of Fame in 1998. Halper also fetched $21.8 million -- a record for sports memorabilia -- during a weeklong auction at Sotheby's in 1999. Included in that sale was a game-used Mickey Mantle glove, purchased by actor-comedian Billy Crystal for $239,000.
"Barry was a dear friend, a valued partner for many years and a decent, genuine person," Yankees owner George Steinbrenner said in a statement. "What a great baseball fan he was. I'll miss him dearly."
Halper amassed some 80,000 items, including uniforms of many Hall of Famers, an original ticket from the first World Series in 1903 and the jersey Lou Gehrig wore in his farewell speech at Yankee Stadium in 1939. Halper also owned oddities such as the false teeth worn by Ty Cobb, baseball's career batting average leader.
The New York Daily News reported that during a news conference in Dallas in 1995 to announce Mantle's successful liver transplant, the Hall of Famer spotted Halper in the audience and joked, "Hey, Barry, did you get my other liver?"
Also in Halper's collection were uniforms worn by Cobb, Walter Johnson, Cy Young and Mantle, during his rookie season in 1951. Halper also had the contract finalizing the sale of Babe Ruth from the Boston Red Sox to the Yankees, and a Honus Wagner baseball card.
Survivors include Halper's wife, Sharon; sons Steven and Jason; and daughter, Marnie Stark.
Funeral services are Tuesday at Temple B'Nai Jeshurun in Short Hills.
Sunday, December 18, 2005
Teen Webcam Porn Exploitation
Link
December 19, 2005
Through His Webcam, a Boy Joins a Sordid Online World
By KURT EICHENWALD
The 13-year-old boy sat in his California home, eyes fixed on a computer screen. He had never run with the popular crowd and long ago had turned to the Internet for the friends he craved. But on this day, Justin Berry's fascination with cyberspace would change his life.
Weeks before, Justin had hooked up a Web camera to his computer, hoping to use it to meet other teenagers online. Instead, he heard only from men who chatted with him by instant message as they watched his image on the Internet. To Justin, they seemed just like friends, ready with compliments and always offering gifts.
Now, on an afternoon in 2000, one member of his audience sent a proposal: he would pay Justin $50 to sit bare-chested in front of his Webcam for three minutes. The man explained that Justin could receive the money instantly and helped him open an account on PayPal.com, an online payment system.
"I figured, I took off my shirt at the pool for nothing," he said recently. "So, I was kind of like, what's the difference?"
Justin removed his T-shirt. The men watching him oozed compliments.
So began the secret life of a teenager who was lured into selling images of his body on the Internet over the course of five years. From the seduction that began that day, this soccer-playing honor roll student was drawn into performing in front of the Webcam - undressing, showering, masturbating and even having sex - for an audience of more than 1,500 people who paid him, over the years, hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Justin's dark coming-of-age story is a collateral effect of recent technological advances. Minors, often under the online tutelage of adults, are opening for-pay pornography sites featuring their own images sent onto the Internet by inexpensive Webcams. And they perform from the privacy of home, while parents are nearby, beyond their children's closed bedroom doors.
The business has created youthful Internet pornography stars - with nicknames like Riotboyy, Miss Honey and Gigglez - whose images are traded online long after their sites have vanished. In this world, adolescents announce schedules of their next masturbation for customers who pay fees for the performance or monthly subscription charges. Eager customers can even buy "private shows," in which teenagers sexually perform while following real-time instructions.
A six-month investigation by The New York Times into this corner of the Internet found that such sites had emerged largely without attracting the attention of law enforcement or youth protection organizations. While experts with these groups said they had witnessed a recent deluge of illicit, self-generated Webcam images, they had not known of the evolution of sites where minors sold images of themselves for money.
"We've been aware of the use of the Webcam and its potential use by exploiters," said Ernest E. Allen, chief executive of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a private group. "But this is a variation on a theme that we haven't seen. It's unbelievable."
Minors who run these sites find their anonymity amusing, joking that their customers may be the only adults who know of their activities. It is, in the words of one teenage site operator, the "Webcam Matrix," a reference to the movie in which a computerized world exists without the knowledge of most of humanity.
In this virtual universe, adults hunt for minors on legitimate sites used by Webcam owners who post contact information in hopes of attracting friends. If children respond to messages, adults spend time "grooming" them - with praise, attention and gifts - before seeking to persuade them to film themselves pornographically.
The lure is the prospect of easy money. Many teenagers solicit "donations," request gifts through sites like Amazon.com or negotiate payments, while a smaller number charge monthly fees. But there are other beneficiaries, including businesses, some witting and some unwitting, that provide services to the sites like Web hosting and payment processing.
Not all victims profit, with some children ending up as pornographic commodities inadvertently, even unknowingly. Adolescents have appeared naked on their Webcams as a joke, or as presents for boyfriends or girlfriends, only to have their images posted on for-pay pornography sites. One Web site proclaims that it features 140,000 images of "adolescents in cute panties exposing themselves on their teen Webcams."
Entry into this side of cyberspace is simplicity itself. Webcams cost as little as $20, and the number of them being used has mushroomed to 15 million, according to IDC, an industry consulting group. At the same time, instant messaging programs have become ubiquitous, and high-speed connections, allowing for rapid image transmission, are common.
The scale of Webcam child pornography is unknown, because it is new and extremely secretive. One online portal that advertises for-pay Webcam sites, many of them pornographic, lists at least 585 sites created by teenagers, internal site records show. At one computer bulletin board for adults attracted to adolescents, a review of postings over the course of a week revealed Webcam image postings of at least 98 minors.
The Times inquiry has already resulted in a large-scale criminal investigation. In June, The Times located Justin Berry, then 18. In interviews, Justin revealed the existence of a group of more than 1,500 men who paid for his online images, as well as evidence that other identifiable children as young as 13 were being actively exploited.
In a series of meetings, The Times persuaded Justin to abandon his business and, to protect other children at risk, assisted him in contacting the Justice Department. Arrests and indictments of adults he identified as pornography producers and traffickers began in September. Investigators are also focusing on businesses, including credit card processors that have aided illegal sites. Anyone who has created, distributed, marketed, possessed or paid to view such pornography is open to a criminal charge.
"The fact that we are getting so many potential targets, people who knowingly bought into a child pornographic Web site, could lead to hundreds of other subjects and potentially save hundreds of other kids that we are not aware of yet," said Monique Winkis, a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation who is working the case.
Law enforcement officials also said that, with the cooperation of Justin, they had obtained a rare guide into this secluded online world, whose story illuminates the exploitation that takes place there.
"I didn't want these people to hurt any more kids," Justin said recently of his decision to become a federal witness. "I didn't want anyone else to live the life I lived."
A High-Tech Transformation
Not long ago, the distribution of child pornography in America was a smallish trade, relegated to back rooms and corners where even the proprietors of X-rated bookstores refused to loiter.
By the mid-1980's, however, technology had transformed the business, with pedophiles going online to communicate anonymously and post images through rudimentary bulletin board systems. As Internet use boomed in the 1990's, these adults honed their computer skills, finding advanced ways to meet online and swap illegal photos; images once hard to obtain were suddenly available with the click of a mouse.
As the decade drew to a close, according to experts and records of online conversations, these adults began openly fantasizing of the day they would be able to reach out to children directly, through instant messaging and live video, to obtain the pornography they desired.
Their dream was realized with the Web camera, which transformed online pornography the way the automobile changed transportation. At first, the cameras, some priced at more than $100, offered little more than grainy snapshots, "refreshed" a few times per minute. But it was not long before easy-to-use $20 Webcams could transmit high-quality continuous color video across the globe instantly.
By 2000, things had worked out exactly the way the pedophiles hoped. Webcams were the rage among computer-savvy minors, creating a bountiful selection of potential targets.
Among them was Justin Berry. That year, he was a gangly 13-year-old with saucer eyes and brown hair that he often dyed blond. He lived with his mother, stepfather and younger sister in Bakersfield, Calif., a midsize city about 90 miles north of Los Angeles. Already he was so adept at the computer that he had registered his own small Web site development business, which he ran from the desk where he did his schoolwork.
So Justin was fascinated when a friend showed off the free Webcam he had received for joining Earthlink, an Internet service provider. The device was simple and elegant. As Justin remembers it, he quickly signed up, too, eager for his own Webcam.
"I didn't really have a lot of friends," he recalled, "and I thought having a Webcam might help me make some new ones online, maybe even meet some girls my age."
As soon as Justin hooked the camera to his bedroom computer and loaded the software, his picture was automatically posted on spotlife.com, an Internet directory of Webcam users, along with his contact information. Then he waited to hear from other teenagers.
No one Justin's age ever contacted him from that listing. But, within minutes, he heard from his first online predator. That man was soon followed by another, then another.
Justin remembers his earliest communications with these men as nonthreatening, pleasant encounters. There were some oddities - men who pretended to be teenage girls, only to slip up and reveal the truth later - but Justin enjoyed his online community.
His new friends were generous. One explained how to put together a "wish list" on Amazon.com, where Justin could ask for anything, including computer equipment, toys, music CD's or movies. Anyone who knew his wish-list name - Justin Camboy - could buy him a gift. Amazon delivered the presents without revealing his address to the buyers.
The men also filled an emotional void in Justin's life. His relationship with his father, Knute Berry, was troubled. His parents divorced when he was young; afterward, police records show, there were instances of reported abuse. On one occasion Mr. Berry was arrested and charged with slamming Justin's head into a wall, causing an injury that required seven staples in his scalp. Although Justin testified against him, Mr. Berry said the injury was an accident and was acquitted. He declined comment in a telephone interview.
The emotional turmoil left Justin longing for paternal affection, family members said. And the adult males he met online offered just that. "They complimented me all the time," Justin said. "They told me I was smart, they told me I was handsome."
In that, experts said, the eighth-grade boy's experience reflected the standard methods used by predatory adults to insinuate themselves into the lives of minors they meet online.
"In these cases, there are problems in their own lives that make them predisposed to" manipulation by adults, Lawrence Likar, a former F.B.I. supervisor, said of children persuaded to pose for pornography. "The predators know that and are able to tap into these problems and offer what appear to be solutions."
Justin's mother, Karen Page, said she sensed nothing out of the ordinary. Her son seemed to be just a boy talented with computers who enjoyed speaking to friends online. The Webcam, as she saw it, was just another device that would improve her son's computer skills, and maybe even help him on his Web site development business.
"Everything I ever heard was that children should be exposed to computers and given every opportunity to learn from them," Ms. Page said in an interview.
She never guessed that one of her son's first lessons after turning on his Webcam was that adults would eagerly pay him just to disrobe a little.
The Instant Audience
It was as if the news shot around the Web. By appearing on camera bare-chested, Justin sent an important message: here was a boy who would do things for money.
Gradually the requests became bolder, the cash offers larger: More than $100 for Justin to pose in his underwear. Even more if the boxers came down. The latest request was always just slightly beyond the last, so that each new step never struck him as considerably different. How could adults be so organized at manipulating young people with Webcams?
Unknown to Justin, they honed their persuasive skills by discussing strategy online, sharing advice on how to induce their young targets to go further at each stage.
Moreover, these adults are often people adept at manipulating teenagers. In its investigation, The Times obtained the names and credit card information for the 1,500 people who paid Justin to perform on camera, and analyzed the backgrounds of 300 of them nationwide. A majority of the sample consisted of doctors and lawyers, businessmen and teachers, many of whom work with children on a daily basis.
Not long ago, adults sexually attracted to children were largely isolated from one another. But the Internet has created a virtual community where they can readily communicate and reinforce their feelings, experts said. Indeed, the messages they send among themselves provide not only self-justification, but also often blame minors with Webcam sites for offering temptation.
"These kids are the ones being manipulative," wrote an adult who called himself Upandc in a posting this year to a bulletin board for adults attracted to children.
Or, as an adult who called himself DLW wrote: "Did a sexual predator MAKE them make a site? No. Did they decide to do it for themselves? Yes."
Tempting as it may be for some in society to hold the adolescent Webcam operators responsible, experts in the field say that is misguided, because it fails to recognize the control that adults exercise over highly impressionable minors.
"The world will want to blame the kids, but the reality is, they are victims here," said Mr. Allen of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
But there is no doubt that the minors cash in on their own exploitation. With Justin, for example, the road to cyberporn stardom was paved with cool new equipment. When his growing legion of fans complained about the quality of his Webcam, he put top-rated cameras and computer gear on his Amazon wish list, and his fans rushed to buy him all of it.
A $35 Asante four-port hub, which allowed for the use of multiple cameras, was bought by someone calling himself Wesley Taylor, Amazon receipts show. For $45, a fan nicknamed tuckertheboy bought a Viking memory upgrade to speed up Justin's broadcast. And then there were cameras - a $60 color Webcam by Hawking Technologies from banjo000; a $60 Intel Deluxe USB camera from boyking12; and a $150 Hewlett-Packard camera from eplayernine.
Justin's desk became a high-tech playhouse. To avoid suspicions, he hid the Webcams behind his desk until nighttime. Whenever his mother asked about his new technology and money, Justin told her they were fruits of his Web site development business. In a way, it was true; with one fan's help, he had by then opened his own pornographic Web site, called justinscam.com.
His mother saw little evidence of a boy in trouble. Justin's grades stayed good - mostly A's and B's, although his school attendance declined as he faked illness to spend time with his Webcam.
As he grew familiar with the online underground, Justin learned he was not alone in the business. Other teenagers were doing the same things, taking advantage of an Internet infrastructure of support that was perfectly suited to illicit business.
As a result, while it helped to have Justin's computer skills, even minors who fumbled with technology could operate successful pornography businesses. Yahoo, America Online and MSN were starting to offer free instant message services that contained embedded ability to transmit video, with no expertise required. The programs were offered online, without parental controls. No telltale credit card numbers or other identifying information was necessary. In minutes, any adolescent could have a video and text system up and running, without anyone knowing, a fact that concerns some law enforcement officials.
There were also credit card processing services that handled payments without requiring tax identification numbers. There were companies that helped stream live video onto the Internet - including one in Indiana that offered the service at no charge if the company president could watch free. And there were sites - portals, in the Web vernacular - that took paid advertising from teenage Webcam addresses and allowed fans to vote for their favorites.
Teenagers, hungry for praise, compete for rankings on the portals as desperately as contestants on TV reality shows, offering special performances in exchange for votes. "Everyone please vote me a 10 on my cam site," a girl nicknamed Thunderrockracin told her subscribers in 2002, "and I will have a live sleep cam!"
In other words, she would let members watch her sleep if they boosted her up the rankings.
Fearing the Fans
Justin began to feel he belonged to something important, a broad community of teenagers with their own businesses. Some he knew by their real names, others by the screen names they used for their sites - Strider, Stoner, Kitty, Calvin, Emily, Seth and so on. But collectively, they were known by a name now commonplace in this Internet subculture:
They call themselves "camwhores."
Justin chatted with the boys online, and sometimes persuaded the girls to masturbate on camera while he did the same. Often, he heard himself compared to Riotboyy, another young-looking teenager whose site had experienced as many as 6,400 hits in a single week.
In conversations with Justin, other minors with for-pay sites admitted to being scared of certain fans. Some adults wrote things like "It wants to possess you." They had special wardrobe requests for the adolescents: in jeans with a belt, without a belt, with a lacy bra, showing legs, showing feet, wearing boxers with an erection, and others.
One 16-year-old who called himself hot boyy 23 finally found the entreaties too much. "Hey guys," he wrote when he shut down his site, "I'm sorry, there are just too many freaks out there for me. I need to live a more normal life, too. I might be back someday and I might not. I'm sorry I had to ruin all the fun."
It was not only the minors operating Webcam sites for pay who faced frightening adults. Earlier this year, a teenage girl in Alabama posed seminude on her Webcam in a sexually charged conversation with someone she thought was another teenage girl. But her new confidant, it turned out, was an adult named Julio Bardales from Napa, Calif., law enforcement officials said. And when the girl stopped complying, she received an e-mail message from Mr. Bardales containing a montage of her images. Across them was a threat in red letters that the images would be revealed unless she showed a frontal nude shot over the Webcam. Mr. Bardales was subsequently arrested. The police said he possessed images of more under-age girls on Webcams, including other montages with the same threat.
Justin says that he did not fully understand the dangers his fans posed, and before he turned 14, he was first lured from the relative safety of his home. A man he met online hosted Justin's Web site from Ann Arbor, Mich., and invited him there to attend a computer camp. Justin's mother allowed him to go, thinking the camp sounded worthwhile.
Another time, the man enticed Justin to Michigan by promising to arrange for him to have sex with a girl. Both times, Justin said, the man molested him. Transcripts of their subsequent conversations online support the accusations, and a video viewed by The Times shows that the man, who appears for a short time in the recording, also taped pornography of Justin.
From then on, Justin's personality took on a harder edge, evident in the voluminous instant message traffic he made available to The Times. He became an aggressive negotiator of prices for his performances. Emboldened by a growing contempt for his audience, he would sometimes leave their questions unanswered for hours, just to prove to himself that they would wait for him.
"These people had no lives," Justin said. "They would never get mad."
Unnerved by menacing messages from a fan of his first site, Justin opened a new one called jfwy.com, an online acronym that loosely translates into "just messing with you." This time, following an idea suggested by one of his fans, he charged subscribers $45 a month. In addition, he could command large individual payments for private shows, sometimes $300 for an hourlong performance.
"What's in the hour," inquired a subscriber named Gran0Stan in one typical exchange in 2002. "What do you do?"
"I'll do everything, if you know what I mean," Justin replied.
Gran0Stan was eager to watch, and said the price was fine. "When?" he asked.
"Tonight," Justin said. "After my mom goes to sleep."
As his obsession with the business grew, Justin became a ferocious competitor. When another under-age site operator called Strider ranked higher on a popular portal, Justin sent him anonymous e-mail messages, threatening to pass along images from Strider's site to the boy's father. The site disappeared.
"I was vicious," Justin said. "But I guess I really did Strider a favor. Looking back, I wish someone had done that to me."
By then, fans had begun offering Justin cash to meet. Gilo Tunno, a former Intel employee, gave him thousands of dollars to visit him in a Las Vegas hotel, according to financial records and other documents. There, Justin said, Mr. Tunno began a series of molestings. At least one assault was videotaped and the recording e-mailed to Justin, who has since turned it over to the F.B.I.
Mr. Tunno played another critical role in Justin's business, the records show. When he was 15, Justin worried that his mother might discover what he was doing. So he asked Mr. Tunno to sign an apartment lease for him and pay rent. Justin promised to raise money to pay a share. "I'll whore," he explained in a message to Mr. Tunno.
Mr. Tunno agreed, signing a lease for $410 a month for an apartment just down the street from Justin's house. From then on, Justin would tell his mother he was visiting friends, then head to the apartment for his next performance. Mr. Tunno, who remains under investigation in the case, is serving an eight-year federal sentence on an unrelated sexual abuse charge involving a child and could not be reached for comment.
The rental symbolized a problem that Justin had not foreseen: his adult fans would do almost anything to ensure that his performances continued. At its worst, they would stand between him and the people in his offline life whom they saw as a threat to his Webcam appearances.
For example, when a girlfriend of Justin's tried to convince him to shut down his site in December 2002, a customer heaped scorn on her.
"She actually gets mad at you for buying her things with the money you make from the cam?" messaged the customer, a man using the nickname Angelaa. "Just try and remember, Justin, that she may not love you, but most of us in your chat room, your friends, love you very much."
A Life Falls Apart
In early 2003, Justin's offline life began to unravel. A former classmate found pornographic videos on the Internet from Justin's Web site, made copies, and handed them out around town, including to students at his school. Justin was taunted and beaten.
Feeling embarrassed and unable to continue at school, Justin begged his mother to allow him to be home-schooled through an online program. Knowing he was having trouble with classmates, but in the dark about the reasons why, she agreed.
Then, in February, came another traumatic event. Justin had begun speaking with his father, hoping to repair their relationship. But that month, Mr. Berry, who had been charged with insurance fraud related to massage clinics he ran, disappeared without a word.
Despairing, Justin turned to his online fans. "My dad left. I guess he doesn't love me," he wrote. "Why did I let him back in my life? Let me die, just let me die."
His father did not disappear for long. Soon, Mr. Berry called his son from Mazatlán, Mexico; Justin begged to join him, and his father agreed.
In Mexico, Justin freely spent his cash, leading his father to ask where the money had come from. Justin said that he confessed the details of his lucrative Webcam business, and the reunion soon became a collaboration. Justin created a new Web site, calling it mexicofriends, his most ambitious ever. It featured Justin having live sex with prostitutes. During some of Justin's sexual encounters, a traffic tracker on his site showed hundreds watching. It rapidly became a wildly popular Webcam pornography site, making Justin one of the Internet's most sought after under-age pornography stars.
For this site, Justin, then 16, used a pricing model favored by legitimate businesses. For standard subscribers, the cost was $35, billed monthly. But discounts were available for three-month, six-month and annual memberships. Justin used the cash to support a growing cocaine and marijuana habit.
Money from the business, Justin said, was shared with his father, an accusation supported by transcripts of their later instant message conversations. In exchange, Justin told prosecutors and The Times, his father helped procure prostitutes. One video obtained by the F.B.I. shows Mr. Berry sitting with Justin as the camera is turned on, then making the bed before a prostitute arrives to engage in intercourse with his teenage son. Asked about Justin's accusations, Mr. Berry said, "Obviously, I am not going to comment on anything."
In the fall of 2003, Justin's life took a new turn when a subscriber named Greg Mitchel, a 36-year-old fast food restaurant manager from Dublin, Va., struck up an online friendship with the boy and soon asked to visit him. Seeing a chance to generate cash, Justin agreed.
Mr. Mitchel arrived that October, and while in Mexico, molested Justin for what would be the first of many times, according to transcripts of their conversations and other evidence. Mr. Mitchel, who is in jail awaiting trial on six child pornography charges stemming from this case, could not be reached for comment.
Over the following year, Justin tried repeatedly to break free of this life. He roamed the United States. He contemplated suicide. For a time he sought solace in a return to his boyhood Christianity. At one point he dismantled his site, loading it instead with Biblical teachings - and taking delight in knowing the surprise his subscribers would experience when they logged on to watch him have sex.
But his drug craving, and the need for money to satisfy it, was always there. Soon, Mr. Mitchel beckoned, urging Justin to return to pornography and offering to be his business partner. With Mr. Mitchel, records and interviews show, Justin created a new Web site, justinsfriends.com, featuring performances by him and other boys he helped recruit. But as videos featuring other minors appeared on his site, Justin felt torn, knowing these adolescents were on the path that had hurt him so badly.
Justin was now 18, a legal adult. He had crossed the line from under-age victim to adult perpetrator.
Opening a Hidden World
In June, Justin began communicating online with someone who had never messaged him before. The conversations involved many questions, and Justin feared his new contact might be an F.B.I. agent. Still, when a meeting was suggested, Justin agreed. He says part of him hoped he would be arrested, putting an end to the life he was leading.
They met in Los Angeles, and Justin learned that the man was this reporter, who wanted to discuss the world of Webcam pornography with him. After some hesitation, Justin agreed. At one point, asked what he wanted to accomplish in his life, Justin pondered for a moment and replied that he wanted to make his mother and grandmother proud of him.
The next day, Justin began showing the inner workings of his online world. Using a laptop computer, he signed on to the Internet and was quickly bombarded with messages from men urging him to turn on his Webcam and strip.
One man described, without prompting, what he remembered seeing of Justin's genitals during a show. Another asked Justin to recount the furthest distance he had ever ejaculated. Still another offered an unsolicited description of the sexual acts he would perform on Justin if they met.
"This guy is really a pervert," Justin said. "He kind of scares me."
As the sexual pleadings continued, Justin's hands trembled. His pale face dampened with perspiration. For a moment he tried to seem tough, but the protective facade did not last. He turned off the computer without a final word to his online audience.
In the days that followed, Justin agreed in discussions with this reporter to abandon the drugs and his pornography business. He cut himself off from his illicit life. He destroyed his cellphone, stopped using his online screen name and fled to a part of the country where no one would find him.
As he sobered up, Justin disclosed more of what he knew about the Webcam world; within a week, he revealed the names and locations of children who were being actively molested or exploited by adults with Webcam sites. After confirming his revelations, The Times urged him to give his information to prosecutors, and he agreed.
Justin contacted Steven M. Ryan, a former federal prosecutor and partner with Manatt, Phelps & Phillips in Washington. Mr. Ryan had learned of Justin's story during an interview with The Times about a related legal question, and offered to represent him.
On July 14, Mr. Ryan contacted the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section of the Justice Department, informing prosecutors that he had a client with evidence that could implicate potentially hundreds of people. By then, Mr. Ryan had learned that some of Justin's old associates, disturbed by his disappearance, were hunting for him and had begun removing records from the Internet. Mr. Ryan informed prosecutors of the dangers to Justin and the potential destruction of evidence. Two weeks passed with little response.
Finally, in late July, Justin met in Washington with the F.B.I. and prosecutors. He identified children who he believed were in the hands of adult predators. He listed the marketers, credit card processors and others who supported Webcam child pornography. He also described the voluminous documentary evidence he had retained on his hard drives: financial information, conversation transcripts with his members, and other records. But that evidence would not be turned over, Mr. Ryan said, until Justin received immunity.
The meeting ended, followed by weeks of silence. Word came back that prosecutors were wrestling with Justin's dual role as a victim and as a perpetrator. Justin told associates that he was willing to plead guilty if the government would save the children he had identified; Mr. Ryan dissuaded him.
By September, almost 50 days had passed since the first contact with the government, with no visible progress. Frustrated, Mr. Ryan informed prosecutors that he would have to go elsewhere, and contacted the California attorney general.
That proved unnecessary. Prodded by the F.B.I. and others in the Justice Department, on Sept. 7, prosecutors informed Mr. Ryan that his client would be granted immunity. A little more than four weeks after his 19th birthday, Justin became a federal witness.
A Final Online Confrontation
Five days later, on the third floor of a lakeside house in Dublin, Va., Greg Mitchel - Justin's 38-year-old business partner on his pornography Web site - rested on his bed as he chatted online with others in his illicit business.
Ever since Justin's disappearance weeks before, things had been tense for Mr. Mitchel. Some in the business already suspected that Justin might be talking to law enforcement. One associate had already declared to Mr. Mitchel that, if Justin was revealing their secrets, he would kill the boy.
But this night, Sept. 12, the news on Mr. Mitchel's computer screen was particularly disquieting. An associate in Tennessee sent word that the F.B.I. had just raided a Los Angeles computer server used by an affiliated Webcam site. Then, to Mr. Mitchel's surprise, Justin himself appeared online under a new screen name and sent a greeting.
Mr. Mitchel pleaded with Justin to come out of hiding, inviting the teenager on an all-expense-paid trip to Las Vegas with him and a 15-year-old boy also involved in Webcam pornography. But Justin demurred.
"You act like you're in witness protection," Mr. Mitchel typed. "Are you?"
"Haha," replied Justin. Did Mr. Mitchel think he would be on the Internet if he was a federal witness? he asked. Justin changed the subject, later asking the whereabouts of others who lived with Mr. Mitchel, including two adolescents; Mr. Mitchel replied that everyone was home that night.
In a location in the Southwest, Justin glanced from his computer screen to a speakerphone. On the line was a team of F.B.I. agents who at that moment were pulling several cars into Mr. Mitchel's driveway, preparing to arrest him.
"The kids are in the house!" Justin shouted into the phone, answering a question posed by one of the agents.
As agents approached the house, Justin knew he had little time left. He decided to confront the man who had hurt him for so long.
"Do you even remember how many times you stuck your hand down my pants?" he typed.
Mr. Mitchel responded that many bad things had happened, but he wanted to regain Justin's trust.
"You molested me," Justin replied. "Don't apologize for what you can't admit."
There was no response. "Peekaboo?" Justin typed.
On the screen, a message appeared that Mr. Mitchel had signed off. The arrest was over.
Justin thrust his hands into the air. "Yes!" he shouted.
In the weeks since the first arrest, F.B.I. agents and prosecutors have focused on numerous other potential defendants. For example, Tim Richards - identified by Justin as a marketer and principal of justinsfriends.com - was arrested in Nashville last month and arraigned on child pornography charges. According to law enforcement officials, Mr. Richards was stopped in a moving van in his driveway, accompanied by a young teenage boy featured by Mr. Richards on his own Webcam site. Mr. Richards has pleaded not guilty.
Hundreds of thousands of computer files, including e-mail containing a vast array of illegal images sent among adults, have been seized from around the country. Information about Justin's members has been downloaded by the F.B.I. from Neova.net, the company that processed the credit cards; Neova and its owner, Aaron Brown, are targets of the investigation, according to court records and government officials. And Justin has begun assisting agents with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who hope to use his evidence to bring new charges against an imprisoned child rapist.
Justin himself has found a measure of control over his life. He revealed the details of his secret life to his family, telling them of all the times in the past that he had lied to them. He has sought counseling, kept off drugs, resumed his connection with his church and plans to attend college beginning in January.
In recent weeks, Justin returned to his mother's home in California, fearing that - once his story was public - he might not be able to do so easily. On their final day together, Justin's mother drove him to the airport. Hugging him as they said goodbye, she said that the son she once knew had finally returned.
Then, as tears welled in her eyes, Justin's mother told him that she and his grandmother were proud of him.
December 19, 2005
Through His Webcam, a Boy Joins a Sordid Online World
By KURT EICHENWALD
The 13-year-old boy sat in his California home, eyes fixed on a computer screen. He had never run with the popular crowd and long ago had turned to the Internet for the friends he craved. But on this day, Justin Berry's fascination with cyberspace would change his life.
Weeks before, Justin had hooked up a Web camera to his computer, hoping to use it to meet other teenagers online. Instead, he heard only from men who chatted with him by instant message as they watched his image on the Internet. To Justin, they seemed just like friends, ready with compliments and always offering gifts.
Now, on an afternoon in 2000, one member of his audience sent a proposal: he would pay Justin $50 to sit bare-chested in front of his Webcam for three minutes. The man explained that Justin could receive the money instantly and helped him open an account on PayPal.com, an online payment system.
"I figured, I took off my shirt at the pool for nothing," he said recently. "So, I was kind of like, what's the difference?"
Justin removed his T-shirt. The men watching him oozed compliments.
So began the secret life of a teenager who was lured into selling images of his body on the Internet over the course of five years. From the seduction that began that day, this soccer-playing honor roll student was drawn into performing in front of the Webcam - undressing, showering, masturbating and even having sex - for an audience of more than 1,500 people who paid him, over the years, hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Justin's dark coming-of-age story is a collateral effect of recent technological advances. Minors, often under the online tutelage of adults, are opening for-pay pornography sites featuring their own images sent onto the Internet by inexpensive Webcams. And they perform from the privacy of home, while parents are nearby, beyond their children's closed bedroom doors.
The business has created youthful Internet pornography stars - with nicknames like Riotboyy, Miss Honey and Gigglez - whose images are traded online long after their sites have vanished. In this world, adolescents announce schedules of their next masturbation for customers who pay fees for the performance or monthly subscription charges. Eager customers can even buy "private shows," in which teenagers sexually perform while following real-time instructions.
A six-month investigation by The New York Times into this corner of the Internet found that such sites had emerged largely without attracting the attention of law enforcement or youth protection organizations. While experts with these groups said they had witnessed a recent deluge of illicit, self-generated Webcam images, they had not known of the evolution of sites where minors sold images of themselves for money.
"We've been aware of the use of the Webcam and its potential use by exploiters," said Ernest E. Allen, chief executive of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a private group. "But this is a variation on a theme that we haven't seen. It's unbelievable."
Minors who run these sites find their anonymity amusing, joking that their customers may be the only adults who know of their activities. It is, in the words of one teenage site operator, the "Webcam Matrix," a reference to the movie in which a computerized world exists without the knowledge of most of humanity.
In this virtual universe, adults hunt for minors on legitimate sites used by Webcam owners who post contact information in hopes of attracting friends. If children respond to messages, adults spend time "grooming" them - with praise, attention and gifts - before seeking to persuade them to film themselves pornographically.
The lure is the prospect of easy money. Many teenagers solicit "donations," request gifts through sites like Amazon.com or negotiate payments, while a smaller number charge monthly fees. But there are other beneficiaries, including businesses, some witting and some unwitting, that provide services to the sites like Web hosting and payment processing.
Not all victims profit, with some children ending up as pornographic commodities inadvertently, even unknowingly. Adolescents have appeared naked on their Webcams as a joke, or as presents for boyfriends or girlfriends, only to have their images posted on for-pay pornography sites. One Web site proclaims that it features 140,000 images of "adolescents in cute panties exposing themselves on their teen Webcams."
Entry into this side of cyberspace is simplicity itself. Webcams cost as little as $20, and the number of them being used has mushroomed to 15 million, according to IDC, an industry consulting group. At the same time, instant messaging programs have become ubiquitous, and high-speed connections, allowing for rapid image transmission, are common.
The scale of Webcam child pornography is unknown, because it is new and extremely secretive. One online portal that advertises for-pay Webcam sites, many of them pornographic, lists at least 585 sites created by teenagers, internal site records show. At one computer bulletin board for adults attracted to adolescents, a review of postings over the course of a week revealed Webcam image postings of at least 98 minors.
The Times inquiry has already resulted in a large-scale criminal investigation. In June, The Times located Justin Berry, then 18. In interviews, Justin revealed the existence of a group of more than 1,500 men who paid for his online images, as well as evidence that other identifiable children as young as 13 were being actively exploited.
In a series of meetings, The Times persuaded Justin to abandon his business and, to protect other children at risk, assisted him in contacting the Justice Department. Arrests and indictments of adults he identified as pornography producers and traffickers began in September. Investigators are also focusing on businesses, including credit card processors that have aided illegal sites. Anyone who has created, distributed, marketed, possessed or paid to view such pornography is open to a criminal charge.
"The fact that we are getting so many potential targets, people who knowingly bought into a child pornographic Web site, could lead to hundreds of other subjects and potentially save hundreds of other kids that we are not aware of yet," said Monique Winkis, a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation who is working the case.
Law enforcement officials also said that, with the cooperation of Justin, they had obtained a rare guide into this secluded online world, whose story illuminates the exploitation that takes place there.
"I didn't want these people to hurt any more kids," Justin said recently of his decision to become a federal witness. "I didn't want anyone else to live the life I lived."
A High-Tech Transformation
Not long ago, the distribution of child pornography in America was a smallish trade, relegated to back rooms and corners where even the proprietors of X-rated bookstores refused to loiter.
By the mid-1980's, however, technology had transformed the business, with pedophiles going online to communicate anonymously and post images through rudimentary bulletin board systems. As Internet use boomed in the 1990's, these adults honed their computer skills, finding advanced ways to meet online and swap illegal photos; images once hard to obtain were suddenly available with the click of a mouse.
As the decade drew to a close, according to experts and records of online conversations, these adults began openly fantasizing of the day they would be able to reach out to children directly, through instant messaging and live video, to obtain the pornography they desired.
Their dream was realized with the Web camera, which transformed online pornography the way the automobile changed transportation. At first, the cameras, some priced at more than $100, offered little more than grainy snapshots, "refreshed" a few times per minute. But it was not long before easy-to-use $20 Webcams could transmit high-quality continuous color video across the globe instantly.
By 2000, things had worked out exactly the way the pedophiles hoped. Webcams were the rage among computer-savvy minors, creating a bountiful selection of potential targets.
Among them was Justin Berry. That year, he was a gangly 13-year-old with saucer eyes and brown hair that he often dyed blond. He lived with his mother, stepfather and younger sister in Bakersfield, Calif., a midsize city about 90 miles north of Los Angeles. Already he was so adept at the computer that he had registered his own small Web site development business, which he ran from the desk where he did his schoolwork.
So Justin was fascinated when a friend showed off the free Webcam he had received for joining Earthlink, an Internet service provider. The device was simple and elegant. As Justin remembers it, he quickly signed up, too, eager for his own Webcam.
"I didn't really have a lot of friends," he recalled, "and I thought having a Webcam might help me make some new ones online, maybe even meet some girls my age."
As soon as Justin hooked the camera to his bedroom computer and loaded the software, his picture was automatically posted on spotlife.com, an Internet directory of Webcam users, along with his contact information. Then he waited to hear from other teenagers.
No one Justin's age ever contacted him from that listing. But, within minutes, he heard from his first online predator. That man was soon followed by another, then another.
Justin remembers his earliest communications with these men as nonthreatening, pleasant encounters. There were some oddities - men who pretended to be teenage girls, only to slip up and reveal the truth later - but Justin enjoyed his online community.
His new friends were generous. One explained how to put together a "wish list" on Amazon.com, where Justin could ask for anything, including computer equipment, toys, music CD's or movies. Anyone who knew his wish-list name - Justin Camboy - could buy him a gift. Amazon delivered the presents without revealing his address to the buyers.
The men also filled an emotional void in Justin's life. His relationship with his father, Knute Berry, was troubled. His parents divorced when he was young; afterward, police records show, there were instances of reported abuse. On one occasion Mr. Berry was arrested and charged with slamming Justin's head into a wall, causing an injury that required seven staples in his scalp. Although Justin testified against him, Mr. Berry said the injury was an accident and was acquitted. He declined comment in a telephone interview.
The emotional turmoil left Justin longing for paternal affection, family members said. And the adult males he met online offered just that. "They complimented me all the time," Justin said. "They told me I was smart, they told me I was handsome."
In that, experts said, the eighth-grade boy's experience reflected the standard methods used by predatory adults to insinuate themselves into the lives of minors they meet online.
"In these cases, there are problems in their own lives that make them predisposed to" manipulation by adults, Lawrence Likar, a former F.B.I. supervisor, said of children persuaded to pose for pornography. "The predators know that and are able to tap into these problems and offer what appear to be solutions."
Justin's mother, Karen Page, said she sensed nothing out of the ordinary. Her son seemed to be just a boy talented with computers who enjoyed speaking to friends online. The Webcam, as she saw it, was just another device that would improve her son's computer skills, and maybe even help him on his Web site development business.
"Everything I ever heard was that children should be exposed to computers and given every opportunity to learn from them," Ms. Page said in an interview.
She never guessed that one of her son's first lessons after turning on his Webcam was that adults would eagerly pay him just to disrobe a little.
The Instant Audience
It was as if the news shot around the Web. By appearing on camera bare-chested, Justin sent an important message: here was a boy who would do things for money.
Gradually the requests became bolder, the cash offers larger: More than $100 for Justin to pose in his underwear. Even more if the boxers came down. The latest request was always just slightly beyond the last, so that each new step never struck him as considerably different. How could adults be so organized at manipulating young people with Webcams?
Unknown to Justin, they honed their persuasive skills by discussing strategy online, sharing advice on how to induce their young targets to go further at each stage.
Moreover, these adults are often people adept at manipulating teenagers. In its investigation, The Times obtained the names and credit card information for the 1,500 people who paid Justin to perform on camera, and analyzed the backgrounds of 300 of them nationwide. A majority of the sample consisted of doctors and lawyers, businessmen and teachers, many of whom work with children on a daily basis.
Not long ago, adults sexually attracted to children were largely isolated from one another. But the Internet has created a virtual community where they can readily communicate and reinforce their feelings, experts said. Indeed, the messages they send among themselves provide not only self-justification, but also often blame minors with Webcam sites for offering temptation.
"These kids are the ones being manipulative," wrote an adult who called himself Upandc in a posting this year to a bulletin board for adults attracted to children.
Or, as an adult who called himself DLW wrote: "Did a sexual predator MAKE them make a site? No. Did they decide to do it for themselves? Yes."
Tempting as it may be for some in society to hold the adolescent Webcam operators responsible, experts in the field say that is misguided, because it fails to recognize the control that adults exercise over highly impressionable minors.
"The world will want to blame the kids, but the reality is, they are victims here," said Mr. Allen of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
But there is no doubt that the minors cash in on their own exploitation. With Justin, for example, the road to cyberporn stardom was paved with cool new equipment. When his growing legion of fans complained about the quality of his Webcam, he put top-rated cameras and computer gear on his Amazon wish list, and his fans rushed to buy him all of it.
A $35 Asante four-port hub, which allowed for the use of multiple cameras, was bought by someone calling himself Wesley Taylor, Amazon receipts show. For $45, a fan nicknamed tuckertheboy bought a Viking memory upgrade to speed up Justin's broadcast. And then there were cameras - a $60 color Webcam by Hawking Technologies from banjo000; a $60 Intel Deluxe USB camera from boyking12; and a $150 Hewlett-Packard camera from eplayernine.
Justin's desk became a high-tech playhouse. To avoid suspicions, he hid the Webcams behind his desk until nighttime. Whenever his mother asked about his new technology and money, Justin told her they were fruits of his Web site development business. In a way, it was true; with one fan's help, he had by then opened his own pornographic Web site, called justinscam.com.
His mother saw little evidence of a boy in trouble. Justin's grades stayed good - mostly A's and B's, although his school attendance declined as he faked illness to spend time with his Webcam.
As he grew familiar with the online underground, Justin learned he was not alone in the business. Other teenagers were doing the same things, taking advantage of an Internet infrastructure of support that was perfectly suited to illicit business.
As a result, while it helped to have Justin's computer skills, even minors who fumbled with technology could operate successful pornography businesses. Yahoo, America Online and MSN were starting to offer free instant message services that contained embedded ability to transmit video, with no expertise required. The programs were offered online, without parental controls. No telltale credit card numbers or other identifying information was necessary. In minutes, any adolescent could have a video and text system up and running, without anyone knowing, a fact that concerns some law enforcement officials.
There were also credit card processing services that handled payments without requiring tax identification numbers. There were companies that helped stream live video onto the Internet - including one in Indiana that offered the service at no charge if the company president could watch free. And there were sites - portals, in the Web vernacular - that took paid advertising from teenage Webcam addresses and allowed fans to vote for their favorites.
Teenagers, hungry for praise, compete for rankings on the portals as desperately as contestants on TV reality shows, offering special performances in exchange for votes. "Everyone please vote me a 10 on my cam site," a girl nicknamed Thunderrockracin told her subscribers in 2002, "and I will have a live sleep cam!"
In other words, she would let members watch her sleep if they boosted her up the rankings.
Fearing the Fans
Justin began to feel he belonged to something important, a broad community of teenagers with their own businesses. Some he knew by their real names, others by the screen names they used for their sites - Strider, Stoner, Kitty, Calvin, Emily, Seth and so on. But collectively, they were known by a name now commonplace in this Internet subculture:
They call themselves "camwhores."
Justin chatted with the boys online, and sometimes persuaded the girls to masturbate on camera while he did the same. Often, he heard himself compared to Riotboyy, another young-looking teenager whose site had experienced as many as 6,400 hits in a single week.
In conversations with Justin, other minors with for-pay sites admitted to being scared of certain fans. Some adults wrote things like "It wants to possess you." They had special wardrobe requests for the adolescents: in jeans with a belt, without a belt, with a lacy bra, showing legs, showing feet, wearing boxers with an erection, and others.
One 16-year-old who called himself hot boyy 23 finally found the entreaties too much. "Hey guys," he wrote when he shut down his site, "I'm sorry, there are just too many freaks out there for me. I need to live a more normal life, too. I might be back someday and I might not. I'm sorry I had to ruin all the fun."
It was not only the minors operating Webcam sites for pay who faced frightening adults. Earlier this year, a teenage girl in Alabama posed seminude on her Webcam in a sexually charged conversation with someone she thought was another teenage girl. But her new confidant, it turned out, was an adult named Julio Bardales from Napa, Calif., law enforcement officials said. And when the girl stopped complying, she received an e-mail message from Mr. Bardales containing a montage of her images. Across them was a threat in red letters that the images would be revealed unless she showed a frontal nude shot over the Webcam. Mr. Bardales was subsequently arrested. The police said he possessed images of more under-age girls on Webcams, including other montages with the same threat.
Justin says that he did not fully understand the dangers his fans posed, and before he turned 14, he was first lured from the relative safety of his home. A man he met online hosted Justin's Web site from Ann Arbor, Mich., and invited him there to attend a computer camp. Justin's mother allowed him to go, thinking the camp sounded worthwhile.
Another time, the man enticed Justin to Michigan by promising to arrange for him to have sex with a girl. Both times, Justin said, the man molested him. Transcripts of their subsequent conversations online support the accusations, and a video viewed by The Times shows that the man, who appears for a short time in the recording, also taped pornography of Justin.
From then on, Justin's personality took on a harder edge, evident in the voluminous instant message traffic he made available to The Times. He became an aggressive negotiator of prices for his performances. Emboldened by a growing contempt for his audience, he would sometimes leave their questions unanswered for hours, just to prove to himself that they would wait for him.
"These people had no lives," Justin said. "They would never get mad."
Unnerved by menacing messages from a fan of his first site, Justin opened a new one called jfwy.com, an online acronym that loosely translates into "just messing with you." This time, following an idea suggested by one of his fans, he charged subscribers $45 a month. In addition, he could command large individual payments for private shows, sometimes $300 for an hourlong performance.
"What's in the hour," inquired a subscriber named Gran0Stan in one typical exchange in 2002. "What do you do?"
"I'll do everything, if you know what I mean," Justin replied.
Gran0Stan was eager to watch, and said the price was fine. "When?" he asked.
"Tonight," Justin said. "After my mom goes to sleep."
As his obsession with the business grew, Justin became a ferocious competitor. When another under-age site operator called Strider ranked higher on a popular portal, Justin sent him anonymous e-mail messages, threatening to pass along images from Strider's site to the boy's father. The site disappeared.
"I was vicious," Justin said. "But I guess I really did Strider a favor. Looking back, I wish someone had done that to me."
By then, fans had begun offering Justin cash to meet. Gilo Tunno, a former Intel employee, gave him thousands of dollars to visit him in a Las Vegas hotel, according to financial records and other documents. There, Justin said, Mr. Tunno began a series of molestings. At least one assault was videotaped and the recording e-mailed to Justin, who has since turned it over to the F.B.I.
Mr. Tunno played another critical role in Justin's business, the records show. When he was 15, Justin worried that his mother might discover what he was doing. So he asked Mr. Tunno to sign an apartment lease for him and pay rent. Justin promised to raise money to pay a share. "I'll whore," he explained in a message to Mr. Tunno.
Mr. Tunno agreed, signing a lease for $410 a month for an apartment just down the street from Justin's house. From then on, Justin would tell his mother he was visiting friends, then head to the apartment for his next performance. Mr. Tunno, who remains under investigation in the case, is serving an eight-year federal sentence on an unrelated sexual abuse charge involving a child and could not be reached for comment.
The rental symbolized a problem that Justin had not foreseen: his adult fans would do almost anything to ensure that his performances continued. At its worst, they would stand between him and the people in his offline life whom they saw as a threat to his Webcam appearances.
For example, when a girlfriend of Justin's tried to convince him to shut down his site in December 2002, a customer heaped scorn on her.
"She actually gets mad at you for buying her things with the money you make from the cam?" messaged the customer, a man using the nickname Angelaa. "Just try and remember, Justin, that she may not love you, but most of us in your chat room, your friends, love you very much."
A Life Falls Apart
In early 2003, Justin's offline life began to unravel. A former classmate found pornographic videos on the Internet from Justin's Web site, made copies, and handed them out around town, including to students at his school. Justin was taunted and beaten.
Feeling embarrassed and unable to continue at school, Justin begged his mother to allow him to be home-schooled through an online program. Knowing he was having trouble with classmates, but in the dark about the reasons why, she agreed.
Then, in February, came another traumatic event. Justin had begun speaking with his father, hoping to repair their relationship. But that month, Mr. Berry, who had been charged with insurance fraud related to massage clinics he ran, disappeared without a word.
Despairing, Justin turned to his online fans. "My dad left. I guess he doesn't love me," he wrote. "Why did I let him back in my life? Let me die, just let me die."
His father did not disappear for long. Soon, Mr. Berry called his son from Mazatlán, Mexico; Justin begged to join him, and his father agreed.
In Mexico, Justin freely spent his cash, leading his father to ask where the money had come from. Justin said that he confessed the details of his lucrative Webcam business, and the reunion soon became a collaboration. Justin created a new Web site, calling it mexicofriends, his most ambitious ever. It featured Justin having live sex with prostitutes. During some of Justin's sexual encounters, a traffic tracker on his site showed hundreds watching. It rapidly became a wildly popular Webcam pornography site, making Justin one of the Internet's most sought after under-age pornography stars.
For this site, Justin, then 16, used a pricing model favored by legitimate businesses. For standard subscribers, the cost was $35, billed monthly. But discounts were available for three-month, six-month and annual memberships. Justin used the cash to support a growing cocaine and marijuana habit.
Money from the business, Justin said, was shared with his father, an accusation supported by transcripts of their later instant message conversations. In exchange, Justin told prosecutors and The Times, his father helped procure prostitutes. One video obtained by the F.B.I. shows Mr. Berry sitting with Justin as the camera is turned on, then making the bed before a prostitute arrives to engage in intercourse with his teenage son. Asked about Justin's accusations, Mr. Berry said, "Obviously, I am not going to comment on anything."
In the fall of 2003, Justin's life took a new turn when a subscriber named Greg Mitchel, a 36-year-old fast food restaurant manager from Dublin, Va., struck up an online friendship with the boy and soon asked to visit him. Seeing a chance to generate cash, Justin agreed.
Mr. Mitchel arrived that October, and while in Mexico, molested Justin for what would be the first of many times, according to transcripts of their conversations and other evidence. Mr. Mitchel, who is in jail awaiting trial on six child pornography charges stemming from this case, could not be reached for comment.
Over the following year, Justin tried repeatedly to break free of this life. He roamed the United States. He contemplated suicide. For a time he sought solace in a return to his boyhood Christianity. At one point he dismantled his site, loading it instead with Biblical teachings - and taking delight in knowing the surprise his subscribers would experience when they logged on to watch him have sex.
But his drug craving, and the need for money to satisfy it, was always there. Soon, Mr. Mitchel beckoned, urging Justin to return to pornography and offering to be his business partner. With Mr. Mitchel, records and interviews show, Justin created a new Web site, justinsfriends.com, featuring performances by him and other boys he helped recruit. But as videos featuring other minors appeared on his site, Justin felt torn, knowing these adolescents were on the path that had hurt him so badly.
Justin was now 18, a legal adult. He had crossed the line from under-age victim to adult perpetrator.
Opening a Hidden World
In June, Justin began communicating online with someone who had never messaged him before. The conversations involved many questions, and Justin feared his new contact might be an F.B.I. agent. Still, when a meeting was suggested, Justin agreed. He says part of him hoped he would be arrested, putting an end to the life he was leading.
They met in Los Angeles, and Justin learned that the man was this reporter, who wanted to discuss the world of Webcam pornography with him. After some hesitation, Justin agreed. At one point, asked what he wanted to accomplish in his life, Justin pondered for a moment and replied that he wanted to make his mother and grandmother proud of him.
The next day, Justin began showing the inner workings of his online world. Using a laptop computer, he signed on to the Internet and was quickly bombarded with messages from men urging him to turn on his Webcam and strip.
One man described, without prompting, what he remembered seeing of Justin's genitals during a show. Another asked Justin to recount the furthest distance he had ever ejaculated. Still another offered an unsolicited description of the sexual acts he would perform on Justin if they met.
"This guy is really a pervert," Justin said. "He kind of scares me."
As the sexual pleadings continued, Justin's hands trembled. His pale face dampened with perspiration. For a moment he tried to seem tough, but the protective facade did not last. He turned off the computer without a final word to his online audience.
In the days that followed, Justin agreed in discussions with this reporter to abandon the drugs and his pornography business. He cut himself off from his illicit life. He destroyed his cellphone, stopped using his online screen name and fled to a part of the country where no one would find him.
As he sobered up, Justin disclosed more of what he knew about the Webcam world; within a week, he revealed the names and locations of children who were being actively molested or exploited by adults with Webcam sites. After confirming his revelations, The Times urged him to give his information to prosecutors, and he agreed.
Justin contacted Steven M. Ryan, a former federal prosecutor and partner with Manatt, Phelps & Phillips in Washington. Mr. Ryan had learned of Justin's story during an interview with The Times about a related legal question, and offered to represent him.
On July 14, Mr. Ryan contacted the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section of the Justice Department, informing prosecutors that he had a client with evidence that could implicate potentially hundreds of people. By then, Mr. Ryan had learned that some of Justin's old associates, disturbed by his disappearance, were hunting for him and had begun removing records from the Internet. Mr. Ryan informed prosecutors of the dangers to Justin and the potential destruction of evidence. Two weeks passed with little response.
Finally, in late July, Justin met in Washington with the F.B.I. and prosecutors. He identified children who he believed were in the hands of adult predators. He listed the marketers, credit card processors and others who supported Webcam child pornography. He also described the voluminous documentary evidence he had retained on his hard drives: financial information, conversation transcripts with his members, and other records. But that evidence would not be turned over, Mr. Ryan said, until Justin received immunity.
The meeting ended, followed by weeks of silence. Word came back that prosecutors were wrestling with Justin's dual role as a victim and as a perpetrator. Justin told associates that he was willing to plead guilty if the government would save the children he had identified; Mr. Ryan dissuaded him.
By September, almost 50 days had passed since the first contact with the government, with no visible progress. Frustrated, Mr. Ryan informed prosecutors that he would have to go elsewhere, and contacted the California attorney general.
That proved unnecessary. Prodded by the F.B.I. and others in the Justice Department, on Sept. 7, prosecutors informed Mr. Ryan that his client would be granted immunity. A little more than four weeks after his 19th birthday, Justin became a federal witness.
A Final Online Confrontation
Five days later, on the third floor of a lakeside house in Dublin, Va., Greg Mitchel - Justin's 38-year-old business partner on his pornography Web site - rested on his bed as he chatted online with others in his illicit business.
Ever since Justin's disappearance weeks before, things had been tense for Mr. Mitchel. Some in the business already suspected that Justin might be talking to law enforcement. One associate had already declared to Mr. Mitchel that, if Justin was revealing their secrets, he would kill the boy.
But this night, Sept. 12, the news on Mr. Mitchel's computer screen was particularly disquieting. An associate in Tennessee sent word that the F.B.I. had just raided a Los Angeles computer server used by an affiliated Webcam site. Then, to Mr. Mitchel's surprise, Justin himself appeared online under a new screen name and sent a greeting.
Mr. Mitchel pleaded with Justin to come out of hiding, inviting the teenager on an all-expense-paid trip to Las Vegas with him and a 15-year-old boy also involved in Webcam pornography. But Justin demurred.
"You act like you're in witness protection," Mr. Mitchel typed. "Are you?"
"Haha," replied Justin. Did Mr. Mitchel think he would be on the Internet if he was a federal witness? he asked. Justin changed the subject, later asking the whereabouts of others who lived with Mr. Mitchel, including two adolescents; Mr. Mitchel replied that everyone was home that night.
In a location in the Southwest, Justin glanced from his computer screen to a speakerphone. On the line was a team of F.B.I. agents who at that moment were pulling several cars into Mr. Mitchel's driveway, preparing to arrest him.
"The kids are in the house!" Justin shouted into the phone, answering a question posed by one of the agents.
As agents approached the house, Justin knew he had little time left. He decided to confront the man who had hurt him for so long.
"Do you even remember how many times you stuck your hand down my pants?" he typed.
Mr. Mitchel responded that many bad things had happened, but he wanted to regain Justin's trust.
"You molested me," Justin replied. "Don't apologize for what you can't admit."
There was no response. "Peekaboo?" Justin typed.
On the screen, a message appeared that Mr. Mitchel had signed off. The arrest was over.
Justin thrust his hands into the air. "Yes!" he shouted.
In the weeks since the first arrest, F.B.I. agents and prosecutors have focused on numerous other potential defendants. For example, Tim Richards - identified by Justin as a marketer and principal of justinsfriends.com - was arrested in Nashville last month and arraigned on child pornography charges. According to law enforcement officials, Mr. Richards was stopped in a moving van in his driveway, accompanied by a young teenage boy featured by Mr. Richards on his own Webcam site. Mr. Richards has pleaded not guilty.
Hundreds of thousands of computer files, including e-mail containing a vast array of illegal images sent among adults, have been seized from around the country. Information about Justin's members has been downloaded by the F.B.I. from Neova.net, the company that processed the credit cards; Neova and its owner, Aaron Brown, are targets of the investigation, according to court records and government officials. And Justin has begun assisting agents with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who hope to use his evidence to bring new charges against an imprisoned child rapist.
Justin himself has found a measure of control over his life. He revealed the details of his secret life to his family, telling them of all the times in the past that he had lied to them. He has sought counseling, kept off drugs, resumed his connection with his church and plans to attend college beginning in January.
In recent weeks, Justin returned to his mother's home in California, fearing that - once his story was public - he might not be able to do so easily. On their final day together, Justin's mother drove him to the airport. Hugging him as they said goodbye, she said that the son she once knew had finally returned.
Then, as tears welled in her eyes, Justin's mother told him that she and his grandmother were proud of him.
Saturday, December 17, 2005
Teenage Charlie Brown show
Link
December 16, 2005
THEATER REVIEW | 'DOG SEES GOD: CONFESSIONS OF A TEENAGE BLOCKHEAD'
Aargh! The 'Peanuts' Gang Hits a Rocky Adolescence
By JASON ZINOMAN
Even the most devoted fans of the comic strip "Peanuts" must wish that Charlie Brown would just once change out of that yellow, jagged-striped shirt. Or shave his string of hair, kick that darn football or do something - anything - different.
But, alas, the world created by Charles M. Schulz hasn't changed much since it first appeared in 1950, which makes the premise of the disposable parody "Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead" so irresistible: what would happen to Charlie Brown and his friends if they grew up?
It's 10 years later, and - prepare yourself - Snoopy has been put to sleep after killing Woodstock. Linus has become Van (Keith Nobbs), a stoner who smoked the burned remains of his security blanket. Pigpen has cleaned up into a violent jock (Ian Somerhalder, from "Lost"). Lucy, known only as Van's sister (Eliza Dushku, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"), is a lithium-addled pyromaniac who has slept with, believe it or not, Charlie Brown, or CB (Eddie Kaye Thomas), as he's called, a popular kid with a mean streak.
If nothing else, Bert V. Royal's scenario is a welcome antidote to the notion that the "Peanuts" gang provides merely a slice of American cuteness, perfect for Hallmark cards or Broadway musicals. For while there are plenty of winks to fans, the spirit of the play has as much in common with "Peanuts" as it does with the view of high school as a Darwinian hell (presented in movies like "Heathers" and "Mean Girls"). Turning Schulz's world into the hormone-infused disaster area imagined by overprotective parents and teenager movies makes for an occasionally funny joke, but it is a cheap one. And when Mr. Royal tries to blend serious, darker issues in with the shockers, he misses as badly as Charlie Brown does with the football.
This is the third incarnation of this black comedy (it opened at the 2004 New York International Fringe Festival), and the cutie-pie young actors in the new cast are the kind of marginal celebrities who make audiences wonder, "Isn't he the guy who starred in ... ?"
For those still wondering, yes, Mr. Thomas was the kid with bowel issues in "American Pie." He plays CB as an empty slate who goes along with the crowd. That might not be a problem if the part didn't call for him to express some emotion. In an unexpected plot turn, CB falls in love with Beethoven (think Schroeder), the pianist who has been long abused by the popular kids. Just as in a real Hollywood teenager movie, the nerd is played by someone so handsome - Logan Marshall-Green (from "The OC") - that he must overdo his awkwardness, adding a pair of glasses to really prove the point.
The director, Trip Cullman, applies a light touch in some of the romantic scenes - a tender respite from the more hard-edged satire, which doesn't send up so much as retrace steps. How many times have you seen someone parody a performance artist?
The show works best when it maintains the crass and footloose feel of a guilty pleasure, the kind of play in which it's all right to talk back to the actors. As Tricia and Marcy - Peppermint Patty and Marcie, as if you needed to know - Kelli Garner and Ari Graynor deliver big, broad laughs as scantily clad girls so tipsy that they cackle at their every joke. Best of all is Mr. Nobbs, whose pothead Van shades his flaky character with a sharp intelligence.
When Mr. Royal shifts his comedy toward melodrama, wading into more introspective themes that touch on free will, it's abrupt and unconvincing. "Do you ever feel like you're not a real person?" CB asks his sister. "That you're the product of someone's imagination and you can't think for yourself because you're really just like some creation and that somewhere there's people laughing every time you fall?"
Whatever happened to "Good grief"?
"Dog Sees God" is at the Century Center, 111 East 15th Street, Manhattan, (212) 239-6200.
December 16, 2005
THEATER REVIEW | 'DOG SEES GOD: CONFESSIONS OF A TEENAGE BLOCKHEAD'
Aargh! The 'Peanuts' Gang Hits a Rocky Adolescence
By JASON ZINOMAN
Even the most devoted fans of the comic strip "Peanuts" must wish that Charlie Brown would just once change out of that yellow, jagged-striped shirt. Or shave his string of hair, kick that darn football or do something - anything - different.
But, alas, the world created by Charles M. Schulz hasn't changed much since it first appeared in 1950, which makes the premise of the disposable parody "Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead" so irresistible: what would happen to Charlie Brown and his friends if they grew up?
It's 10 years later, and - prepare yourself - Snoopy has been put to sleep after killing Woodstock. Linus has become Van (Keith Nobbs), a stoner who smoked the burned remains of his security blanket. Pigpen has cleaned up into a violent jock (Ian Somerhalder, from "Lost"). Lucy, known only as Van's sister (Eliza Dushku, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"), is a lithium-addled pyromaniac who has slept with, believe it or not, Charlie Brown, or CB (Eddie Kaye Thomas), as he's called, a popular kid with a mean streak.
If nothing else, Bert V. Royal's scenario is a welcome antidote to the notion that the "Peanuts" gang provides merely a slice of American cuteness, perfect for Hallmark cards or Broadway musicals. For while there are plenty of winks to fans, the spirit of the play has as much in common with "Peanuts" as it does with the view of high school as a Darwinian hell (presented in movies like "Heathers" and "Mean Girls"). Turning Schulz's world into the hormone-infused disaster area imagined by overprotective parents and teenager movies makes for an occasionally funny joke, but it is a cheap one. And when Mr. Royal tries to blend serious, darker issues in with the shockers, he misses as badly as Charlie Brown does with the football.
This is the third incarnation of this black comedy (it opened at the 2004 New York International Fringe Festival), and the cutie-pie young actors in the new cast are the kind of marginal celebrities who make audiences wonder, "Isn't he the guy who starred in ... ?"
For those still wondering, yes, Mr. Thomas was the kid with bowel issues in "American Pie." He plays CB as an empty slate who goes along with the crowd. That might not be a problem if the part didn't call for him to express some emotion. In an unexpected plot turn, CB falls in love with Beethoven (think Schroeder), the pianist who has been long abused by the popular kids. Just as in a real Hollywood teenager movie, the nerd is played by someone so handsome - Logan Marshall-Green (from "The OC") - that he must overdo his awkwardness, adding a pair of glasses to really prove the point.
The director, Trip Cullman, applies a light touch in some of the romantic scenes - a tender respite from the more hard-edged satire, which doesn't send up so much as retrace steps. How many times have you seen someone parody a performance artist?
The show works best when it maintains the crass and footloose feel of a guilty pleasure, the kind of play in which it's all right to talk back to the actors. As Tricia and Marcy - Peppermint Patty and Marcie, as if you needed to know - Kelli Garner and Ari Graynor deliver big, broad laughs as scantily clad girls so tipsy that they cackle at their every joke. Best of all is Mr. Nobbs, whose pothead Van shades his flaky character with a sharp intelligence.
When Mr. Royal shifts his comedy toward melodrama, wading into more introspective themes that touch on free will, it's abrupt and unconvincing. "Do you ever feel like you're not a real person?" CB asks his sister. "That you're the product of someone's imagination and you can't think for yourself because you're really just like some creation and that somewhere there's people laughing every time you fall?"
Whatever happened to "Good grief"?
"Dog Sees God" is at the Century Center, 111 East 15th Street, Manhattan, (212) 239-6200.
Thursday, December 15, 2005
Restrictions on Meth Ingredients
Link
December 15, 2005
Restrictions on Meth Ingredients Are Sought
By GARDINER HARRIS
WASHINGTON, Dec. 14 - A bipartisan group of lawmakers announced an agreement on Wednesday to restrict the sales of cold medicines that can be used to manufacture the illegal and highly addictive drug methamphetamine.
Under the proposal, Sudafed and similar medicines would have to be under lock and key in stores. Buyers would have to sign a sheet and show a driver's license. Purchases would be limited to one box a day and three boxes a month.
The legislation is attached to the renewal of the USA Patriot Act, which passed in the House on Wednesday but whose prospects in the Senate are uncertain.
Thirty-four states have enacted similar restrictions, and these sorts of controls have long been advocated by officials of the Drug Enforcement Administration, who argue that controlling the supply of the medications is the best way to reduce abuse.
But officials at the Food and Drug Administration have quietly fought such proposals, arguing that most methamphetamine is imported and that restricting cold medicines would lead to unneeded suffering among patients in need.
The fight, pitting government law enforcers against drug regulators, extends beyond cold medicines to steroids and painkillers.
On Wednesday, the enforcers won a crucial battle. Representative Mark Souder, Republican of Indiana and sponsor of the methamphetamine legislation, said the F.D.A. was wrong. "Yes, consumers will have less choice," Mr. Souder said, "but it will have a minimal effect on sinus relief and pain relief."
Dan Troy, former general counsel of the food and drug agency, countered that cold sufferers would have a harder time getting relief as a result of the legislation. "I think it's very sad when you punish the good and the needy because of a few bad actors," Mr. Troy said.
A casual poll of a handful of internal medicine doctors who routinely treat cold sufferers found unanimous agreement that the legislation was needed.
"The restrictions on Sudafed, although somewhat onerous, aren't that bad," Dr. William Schreiber, an internist in Louisville, Ky., where such restrictions are already in place, said, adding, "anything that goes about limiting the production of meth probably has to be done."
Dr. Mary Klotman, chief of infectious diseases at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in Manhattan, called the restrictions "reasonable."
"I don't think anyone should stockpile these medicines," Dr. Klotman said.
Officials of the two federal agencies would not speak for attribution about the dispute between them. But Rogene Waite, a spokeswoman for the Drug Enforcement Administration, said the legislation would "help the D.E.A. force more methamphetamine traffickers out of business."
Kristen Neese, a spokeswoman for the Food and Drug Administration, said, "We are concerned about the problems of abuse and are committed to finding the right balance between access and safety."
But the battle between the agencies was confirmed by legislators and others. "That's true," said Senator Jim Talent, Republican of Missouri, adding that officials of the food and drug agency "were not able to come together and support our bill, which was very frustrating to me."
An official at the Drug Enforcement Administration appeared at the legislative announcement in the House, and more than a dozen representatives of law enforcement and the judiciary appeared for the Senate announcement. No public health officials appeared at either event.
The legislation is intended to reverse a growing epidemic of methamphetamine abuse that started a decade ago on the West Coast and has gradually spread East. There are an estimated 1.4 million methamphetamine abusers in the United States, many in rural communities.
The drug's arrival in small towns often leads to crime sprees and crowded jails. A recent survey of 500 local law enforcement officials found methamphetamine to be their No. 1 concern. Methamphetamine can be manufactured in kitchens using hundreds of pills containing pseudoephedrine or ephedrine, decongestant ingredients in Sudafed and other over-the-counter cold and flu treatments.
Americans suffer an estimated one billion colds each year. There is no cure, but Sudafed and similar drugs offer safe and effective palliative treatment. Sales of pseudoephedrine products topped $580 million in 2004 and have not grown appreciably in recent years, suggesting that any diversion of the product for methamphetamine production is a relatively small part of overall sales.
Sudafed and similar medicines are widely sold in convenience stores and pharmacies. The new legislation will probably mean that far fewer stores will offer the drugs, said Steve Francesco, an expert in over-the-counter drug marketing.
"Most stores are not structured" to have products under lock and key, Mr. Francesco said. "This bill is a disaster for anyone with a cold."
The methamphetamine legislation creates a new class of "behind the counter" drugs in the United States. Many European countries have this class of medicines, and the creation of such a class in this country has long been debated. But the Food and Drug Administration has argued that it does not have the power to mandate such sales or to enforce the restrictions.
Indeed, the agency recently rejected a proposal to allow the sales of an emergency contraceptive, known as Plan B, as a "behind-the-counter" drug for precisely these reasons. Some agency observers suggested that the methamphetamine legislation might make it easier for the agency to approve the emergency contraceptive application.
"This could make Plan B more palatable," said Dr. Eric Brass, a professor of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles.
A 1995 Congressional study of "behind the counter" programs in 10 other countries found that these programs provided few protections and failed to reduce access to the medicines in the programs significantly. Some states have found, however, that restricting access to cold medicines leads to a sharp drop in the number of methamphetamine laboratories discovered by law enforcement officials. Whether these laws also result in reduced use of the drug is not known, several legislators said.
Backers of the methamphetamine provision say that should the Patriot Act fail to pass this year, they will attach it to another piece of legislation.
December 15, 2005
Restrictions on Meth Ingredients Are Sought
By GARDINER HARRIS
WASHINGTON, Dec. 14 - A bipartisan group of lawmakers announced an agreement on Wednesday to restrict the sales of cold medicines that can be used to manufacture the illegal and highly addictive drug methamphetamine.
Under the proposal, Sudafed and similar medicines would have to be under lock and key in stores. Buyers would have to sign a sheet and show a driver's license. Purchases would be limited to one box a day and three boxes a month.
The legislation is attached to the renewal of the USA Patriot Act, which passed in the House on Wednesday but whose prospects in the Senate are uncertain.
Thirty-four states have enacted similar restrictions, and these sorts of controls have long been advocated by officials of the Drug Enforcement Administration, who argue that controlling the supply of the medications is the best way to reduce abuse.
But officials at the Food and Drug Administration have quietly fought such proposals, arguing that most methamphetamine is imported and that restricting cold medicines would lead to unneeded suffering among patients in need.
The fight, pitting government law enforcers against drug regulators, extends beyond cold medicines to steroids and painkillers.
On Wednesday, the enforcers won a crucial battle. Representative Mark Souder, Republican of Indiana and sponsor of the methamphetamine legislation, said the F.D.A. was wrong. "Yes, consumers will have less choice," Mr. Souder said, "but it will have a minimal effect on sinus relief and pain relief."
Dan Troy, former general counsel of the food and drug agency, countered that cold sufferers would have a harder time getting relief as a result of the legislation. "I think it's very sad when you punish the good and the needy because of a few bad actors," Mr. Troy said.
A casual poll of a handful of internal medicine doctors who routinely treat cold sufferers found unanimous agreement that the legislation was needed.
"The restrictions on Sudafed, although somewhat onerous, aren't that bad," Dr. William Schreiber, an internist in Louisville, Ky., where such restrictions are already in place, said, adding, "anything that goes about limiting the production of meth probably has to be done."
Dr. Mary Klotman, chief of infectious diseases at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in Manhattan, called the restrictions "reasonable."
"I don't think anyone should stockpile these medicines," Dr. Klotman said.
Officials of the two federal agencies would not speak for attribution about the dispute between them. But Rogene Waite, a spokeswoman for the Drug Enforcement Administration, said the legislation would "help the D.E.A. force more methamphetamine traffickers out of business."
Kristen Neese, a spokeswoman for the Food and Drug Administration, said, "We are concerned about the problems of abuse and are committed to finding the right balance between access and safety."
But the battle between the agencies was confirmed by legislators and others. "That's true," said Senator Jim Talent, Republican of Missouri, adding that officials of the food and drug agency "were not able to come together and support our bill, which was very frustrating to me."
An official at the Drug Enforcement Administration appeared at the legislative announcement in the House, and more than a dozen representatives of law enforcement and the judiciary appeared for the Senate announcement. No public health officials appeared at either event.
The legislation is intended to reverse a growing epidemic of methamphetamine abuse that started a decade ago on the West Coast and has gradually spread East. There are an estimated 1.4 million methamphetamine abusers in the United States, many in rural communities.
The drug's arrival in small towns often leads to crime sprees and crowded jails. A recent survey of 500 local law enforcement officials found methamphetamine to be their No. 1 concern. Methamphetamine can be manufactured in kitchens using hundreds of pills containing pseudoephedrine or ephedrine, decongestant ingredients in Sudafed and other over-the-counter cold and flu treatments.
Americans suffer an estimated one billion colds each year. There is no cure, but Sudafed and similar drugs offer safe and effective palliative treatment. Sales of pseudoephedrine products topped $580 million in 2004 and have not grown appreciably in recent years, suggesting that any diversion of the product for methamphetamine production is a relatively small part of overall sales.
Sudafed and similar medicines are widely sold in convenience stores and pharmacies. The new legislation will probably mean that far fewer stores will offer the drugs, said Steve Francesco, an expert in over-the-counter drug marketing.
"Most stores are not structured" to have products under lock and key, Mr. Francesco said. "This bill is a disaster for anyone with a cold."
The methamphetamine legislation creates a new class of "behind the counter" drugs in the United States. Many European countries have this class of medicines, and the creation of such a class in this country has long been debated. But the Food and Drug Administration has argued that it does not have the power to mandate such sales or to enforce the restrictions.
Indeed, the agency recently rejected a proposal to allow the sales of an emergency contraceptive, known as Plan B, as a "behind-the-counter" drug for precisely these reasons. Some agency observers suggested that the methamphetamine legislation might make it easier for the agency to approve the emergency contraceptive application.
"This could make Plan B more palatable," said Dr. Eric Brass, a professor of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles.
A 1995 Congressional study of "behind the counter" programs in 10 other countries found that these programs provided few protections and failed to reduce access to the medicines in the programs significantly. Some states have found, however, that restricting access to cold medicines leads to a sharp drop in the number of methamphetamine laboratories discovered by law enforcement officials. Whether these laws also result in reduced use of the drug is not known, several legislators said.
Backers of the methamphetamine provision say that should the Patriot Act fail to pass this year, they will attach it to another piece of legislation.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)