LEAD STORY
Where the Boys Are:
A couple of Portland-based Web sites are pushing the bounds of free speech by serving as virtual watering holes for self-described "boylovers." They're creepy, legal and wildly popular.BY NIGEL JAQUISS
njaquiss@wweek.com
LEAD STORY SIDEBAR:
Club Ped
Prosecutors say their investigation of Lanny Swerdlow involes Internet child pornography.
Dr. Fred Berlin, founder of the Johns Hopkins University sexual disorders clinic, says that homosexuals are no more likely to be attracted to children than heterosexuals are.
Virtually all pedophile sites on the Internet relate to the love of men for boys, although by definition women can also be pedophiles.
Different countries have different laws about child pornography and different ages of consent. According to postal inspector Paul Groza, a lot of the new kiddie porn is coming from the Eastern bloc countries, particularly Russia and the Balkans.
The first federal
law against child pornography was passed in 1978, says Groza. After vigorous prosecution, the industry moved to Europe. Production virtually ground to a halt,
to the point that investigators knew virtually every image in circulation. Then came
the Internet.
The possession
of three or more images of child pornography is a felony. In cases where child pornography is transmitted over the Internet, both the sender and receiver have committed a crime.
Online, Robert Neugebauer uses the name Silas Marner, an allusion to the 19th-century novel of the same name, in which a man's life is changed by the purity of a young child. Raveloe is the village in which Silas lives; the castle is its center.
Last summer Congress voted 416 to 0 to pass a bill that would establish a three-year minimum sentence for those using the Internet to solicit children for sex.
According to the Center for Missing & Exploited Children, over 650 people have been convicted in federal courts of Internet-related child sexual exploitation.
Last year, in a widely reported story, a New Jersey boy named Sam Manzie, then 15, met 44 year-old Long Island resident Stephen Simmons on BoyChat. They had sex several times. Manzie became distraught and eventually
notified the police.
The day after Simmons was arrested, Manzie
sat at home alone. An 11-year-old boy who was selling candy for a school fund-raiser knocked on his door. Manzie allegedly lured the boy inside, then raped and murdered him.
Mike Echols has battled the North American Man Boy Love Association for years. On his Web site (www.shadow-net.com), he has posted the names of many of the group's members, including several who have been convicted of sexually abusing children.
The first nationwide Internet kiddie-porn bust occurred in 1995. Among those arrested was Ronald Lester Decker of St. Helens, who in 1997 was convicted of raping a 15-year-old boy he had met in an online chat group.
At 1704 NE 32nd Ave., wedged between a catering business and a trophy shop, is a plain door curtained by a shabby piece of white fabric. A small sign identifies the business inside as PHIX-Net, Inc. Welcome to the dark side of the Internet.
PHIX-Net is an Internet service provider that, among other things, provides a connection to the World Wide Web for an online discussion group called BoyChat.
You won't find much discussion of baseball, video games or girls on BoyChat. Instead, the site is a cyber watering hole for pedophiles--specifically, men who love boys--and sometimes the kids who become their victims. Last year, BoyChat was linked to the rape and murder of an 11-year-old.
BoyChat isn't Portland's only link to online pedophilia. One of the Internet's most articulate advocates for "boylovers" is a Southeast resident, Robert A. Neugebauer, the creator of a sophisticated Web site called Raveloe Castle.
Both BoyChat and Raveloe Castle and the sites they link to appear to flirt with--but not violate--federal laws regulating kiddie porn, which, unlike adult pornography, is strictly illegal.
In the age of the Internet, trying to police online content is like to trying to dam the Columbia River with sugar cubes. While angry parents and lawmakers everywhere are cracking down on child molesters--witness Megan's law and the posters of sexual predators that dot Portland's neighborhoods--Web sites that feed off the exploitation of children are multiplying like bacteria. Portland's links to the online world of pedophilia show just how difficult it is to extend that crackdown into cyberspace. Forget the fact that authorities may always lag behind motivated netizens technologically; BoyChat and Raveloe Castle raise the more fundamental question of whether children's safety outweighs the right to free speech.
PHIX-Net, Inc. was founded in Portland in January 1997 by a transplanted Philadelphian named Corey Lindsly. The privately held company is among the smallest of the city's dozens of Internet service providers, but Lindsly says his firm has found a niche. Asked where PHIX-Net does rank, Lindsly estimates his company is probably last in terms of number of customers. "But on the other hand," he adds, "measured by web traffic, we may rank up there pretty close to the top, given the number and popularity of sites we host here."
If you want access to the Internet, either as a consumer or a "publisher" of a Web site, you need an Internet service provider. For instance, the online version of this newspaper is prepared on the premises at WW, then transmitted to an ISP. The ISP has a powerful computer, called a server, which then makes WW'S content available on the Internet. The ISP thus serves as a bridge between content and consumer by "hosting" a given site. An ISP's customers may be anyone from a newspaper to a Fortune 500 company to an individual who needs e-mail.
Lindsly says that his firm hosts hundreds of Web sites. Many of them contain adult content, but none is quite like BoyChat. BoyChat's format is simple: People post messages on the board, either in response to earlier posts or on new subjects. The messages range widely, from advocacy of pedophilia and tirades against uncomprehending enemies of boylove to discussions about whether boys look better in Speedos or briefs. Heated exchanges about pornography are also common. "Personally, I think the sight of two beautiful boys making love to each other is a most wonderful thing to behold," begins a post by AnonyMouse.
For obvious reasons, the men who visit BoyChat do so under the cover of nicknames, such as "boybuddy" and "Goodguy." Set against a background of a cornflower blue sky dotted with wispy clouds, the site features an endless string of anecdotes about "boymoments" and references to "yfs" (young friends). Regular visitors end their messages with pictures of themselves as boys so that their posts can't be forged. Cops and other enemies often lurk undercover on the board, but BoyChatters have become more and more technically savvy. Recently a rumor circulated that enemies had hacked into the site. A poster named Tygyr noted that "Ethical Hackers Against Pedophiles (ha!) exist. But it's becoming very hard to hack these days, and it often takes months of research."
According to its devotees, BoyChat is the most popular site of its kind, recording over 1.2 million hits in the past two years. An exhaustive site history includes a roster of posters and a summary of significant events, such as the incarceration of fellow boylovers. Some regulars appear to read each of the thousand or so messages posted every day. "For many if not most of us," writes BoyChat's self-appointed historian, Alexis, "BoyChat is the only real family we've ever had."
The site has seven rules, which include "no picture trading." BoyChat's moderator, a Manhattan resident named Jim Finn, censors pornographic postings with a zeal that would make Lon Mabon proud. Still, some messages are fairly graphic. "I prefer sex to ice cream when I'm in bed," writes poster Adam Selene, "on account of that fact it's easier to get K-Y jelly and semen out of the sheets than it is to wash out chocolate fudge ripple and Rocky Road. My current 'main squeeze' is a chocoholic, bless his freckled countenance." If there's any doubt about the maturity of the freckled squeeze, Selene clears that up: "And there's also the problem that when other little boys get a look at what your beloved is having, they're going to want some, too."
Included in the site's history is the tale of its round-the-world odyssey as it fled from ISP to ISP. A cyber pariah, it has been the target of e-mail and letter-writing campaigns by children's advocates such as Cyber-Angels and Safeguarding Our Children. Originally, BoyChat was hosted by a server in Seattle. From there, it fled to Korea, Australia, Russia, Germany and the Netherlands before returning to the United States. Finally, in September 1997, the site found a home in Portland.
Oregon is known for having the most liberal free speech laws in the country, but Lindsly says that the state's constitutional freedoms have nothing to do with his company's presence in Portland or its decision to host BoyChat. "It's my belief, based on several consultations with our attorney, that ivan.net [BoyChat's Internet address] could be hosted anywhere in the United States," he says.
Legally, BoyChat appears to be shielded by the First Amendment. Even though to some people advocacating pedophilia is akin to advocating rape, constitutional protection applies, according to David Fidanque, head of the local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. "The discussion and advocacy of pedophilia is not criminal," he says. Moreover, Fidanque adds, ISP's are given the same protection as telephone companies or the U.S. mail in that they're all considered blameless for the content of what they transmit. Assistant U.S. Attorney John Deits agrees that his office is powerless to rein in such sites as BoyChat unless they are transmitting child pornography or being used by adults to solicit sex from children. As a whole, the body of law on Internet practices remains thinner than a supermodel.
For his part, Lindsly takes the position that PHIX-Net is merely a conduit. "We don't know what content our customers are putting on their Web sites, and we don't concern ourselves with it," he says. He admits that BoyChat has attracted criticism, but he shrugs it off. "I do know it has generated a number of complaints from outside parties around the country," he says, "and no specific legal action at all." As long as the sites PHIX-Net carries are legal, Lindsly says, people should mind their own business and look only at what interests them.
One of BoyChat and PHIX-Net's fiercest critics is Mike Echols, a children's rights advocate and author from Monterey, Calif. Echols entered BoyChat undercover last year, posing online as a lonely 14-year-old. Within days, Echols says, he received 36 responses to the personal e-mail address he listed, many of them suggesting he meet the respondent for sex. Such approaches are illegal, says U.S. Postal Service inspector Paul Groza. "Once you make your pitch with intent to have sex, you have attempted to engage in a sexual act with a minor, which is against the law." Echols posted the names, addresses and whatever information he could find about his suitors on his Web site and has become public enemy No. 1 on BoyChat.
Echols claims that Portland resident Robert Neugebauer, 36, was one of the men who pursued him most ardently, sending Echols private e-mail numerous times and suggesting meetings. WW has learned that Neugebauer is the "Webmaster" or creator of a boylover's Web site called Raveloe Castle.
Raveloe Castle contains chat groups and links to various sites of interest to boylovers. Many of the links contain galleries packed with photographs of scantily clad youngsters. Some of the boys pictured are naked. Their photographs are presumably meant to be art. If they're not art, they're pornography. Legally, child porn includes any depiction of children having sex or displaying their genitals lasciviously. The vagueness of the word "lasciviously" loosens the definition, says Groza. One of Neugebauer's featured links, BoyPics, is controversial even among pedophiles. The moderator of BoyChat, Jim Finn, has written that BoyPics "only provides access to news groups that are filled with illegal porn."
Neugebauer's site also contains the same kind of pro-pedophile propaganda that fills BoyChat. "BoyLove is caring more about a boy than anyone or anything else," he writes. "Boylove is that powerful energizing euphoria that takes over your entire being when in the presence of a beautiful boy. BoyLove is loving a boy with the same intensity and devotion that others have for members of the opposite sex."
Raveloe Castle contains a "dungeon," inside which is a depiction of a bloody dagger piercing the skulls of heretics who don't support pedophiles. A more instructional part of the castle provides an exhaustive review of the software available for viewing newsgroups, which are the Wild West of the Internet. On newsgroups, individuals post a veritable pornucopia of free pictures and videos. Whereas sites such as BoyLinks and Boy Pics nibble around the edges of what's permissible, newsgroups are littered with hard-core kiddie porn.
Online, Neugebauer is a confident figure, displaying a firm grasp of legal issues and technical sophistication. But public documents paint a very different picture. Court records show that Neugebauer grew up in Southeast Portland and lived in the same house on Tibbetts Street for the first 34 years of his life. Little more than a year after moving into his own apartment near Clackamas Town Center, he declared personal bankruptcy. Court records show he has earned virtually nothing in the past few years in his work as a computer-software consultant, surviving on gift income. Neugebauer has shown ingenuity, however. Shortly after his bankruptcy, he somehow managed to acquire a new Ford truck complete with vanity plates reading "Wabbit," his online nickname. Those plates are now on a new Honda Accord.
A stocky 5 feet 10 inches and 225 pounds, Neugebauer is the father of a 17-year-old boy from a previous relationship. Multnomah County Circuit Court records show that at least through last year he had custody of his son. Aside from a few minor traffic infractions, the lifelong Portland resident has no criminal record. Neugebauer initially agreed to be interviewed for this article but changed his mind after consulting a lawyer.
Neugebauer and other BoyChat regulars claim that they are simply providing a forum for one of society's most oppressed minorities--pedophiles.
To law-enforcement officials, such a justification is disingenuous at best. The FBI's foremost expert on exploited children is critical of the concept of online pedophile sites.
"I'm very concerned about the role that chat groups play in validating behavior," says special agent Ken Lanning. An instructor at the FBI's academy in Quantico, Va., Lanning has been a part of the bureau's behavioral science unit (of Silence of the Lambs fame) for nearly 20 years. He has spent much of that time studying pedophiles. Online support groups, he says, strengthen pedophiles' beliefs that having sex with boys is natural and that society simply doesn't understand them.
Lanning also believes that chat groups allow pedophiles greater access to children and aid in the trafficking of pornography. Others agree that the investigations of the sexual abuse of children inevitably overlap with the enforcement of kiddie-porn laws. "Child pornography and pedophilia are completely interrelated," says Groza, who has been investigating child pornographers for 20 years. These days, Groza estimates, 95 percent of all child pornography is found on the Internet. For years, he says, there was no new kiddie porn, but with the advent of scanners and digital cameras, the world is awash in illegal images of kids.
Part of the Internet's seemingly limitless potential is ease of access. As parents have found, however, that ease can be a curse. Type the word "boy" into any search engine and see what comes back--it's not pretty. Kids end up on pedophile chat sites all too often, drawn by loneliness, curiosity or even error. Hiding behind the cloak of anonymity and the First Amendment, the operators of such sites are the modern-day version of the raincoated playground lurkers parents always warned against. Advocacy groups like the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children have gone on the offensive, having realized that putting children's pictures on milk cartons is not enough. The NCMEC is fighting back against child abusers by turning its attention to the Internet, putting pressure on renegade ISP's and tipping the cops when they find online violations.
"Our view is that pedophile chat rooms are very dangerous," says NCMEC President Ernie Allen. "While people have the right to free speech, a message needs to be sent that the Internet isn't a sanctuary."
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Willamette Week | originally published October 7, 1998
