Not long after the Faiths vanished from Pueblo, Sheila’s brother, William Howell, started getting letters that purportedly came from his sister. They were typed and carried her signature at the bottom, telling him that she and Debbie were doing just fine.
A Most Seductive Web
XV
In the animal kingdom, predators seek out the weak and the infirm, usually isolating them from the herd before making the kill. They hunt with great skill and efficiency so that they or their offspring or their pack will have enough to eat. They choose their prey carefully and strike when the victim may not be paying attention. They learn how to get close enough to the food so that it can’t escape.
Now that he was out of prison and back on the street, Robinson began searching for vulnerable people and found them everywhere. For years he’d been meeting women through fake charitable organizations, hustling them on the streets of Kansas City, offering them jobs and travel opportunities, picking them up in restaurants or connecting with them through personal ads in the print media. In the mid-1990s, his hunting ground was about to expand exponentially, and everything he’d learned about luring victims and exploiting their weaknesses was now going to be attached to the most powerful technology of the last decade of the twentieth century: the Internet and its World Wide Web.
Computers were first built in the 1940s following World War II, but only a few major corporations and government agencies used the original data-processing machines because they were so bulky and expensive. By the 1960s, the U.S. Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) had begun designing a network that, in the case of war, would allow the military to continue to issue orders to the armed forces. Experts at the Rand Corporation had studied this problem and concluded that during an attack the main communication centers—telephone switching offices, broadcast stations, military and government buildings—would be among the first targets destroyed. Researchers felt that the best way to prevent such a disaster was through a computer network located in more than one place. Their strategy was implemented when the military built a system called ARPAnet.
In 1970, the network began with connections between four western universities: Stanford, the University of California branches at Los Angeles and San Diego, and the University of Utah. ARPAnet worked well but soon evolved into something quite different from what the early planners had had in mind. The systems’ creators had imagined that the four universities would employ ARPAnet to communicate about professional matters and not much else. It hadn’t occurred to them that civilians at the schools would start logging on to the computers and talking directly with one another by exchanging type-written messages or that this system would be used for personal purposes, sometimes very personal purposes. No one had quite envisioned that this might be a whole new way to communicate your private thoughts. By 1972, people on ARPAnet were firing electronic mail back and forth and using a program called FTP (File Transfer Protocol) to transfer files between computers. Instead of making phone calls or dropping letters into mailboxes—this old and incredibly slow method of communication would contemptuously be dubbed “snail mail” by those on-line—they just sent instant messages across the system. To link all the available networks together—to create an “internet,” so to speak—a common protocol was necessary. Technicians invented one known as TCP/IP, and in 1983, TCP/IP was up and running. The Internet had been born.
The growth of the Net was slow at first because most Americans did not yet own personal computers. As this gradually began to change in the late eighties and then more rapidly in the 1990s, the service spread across the nation and overseas, becoming an international network connecting millions of computers and multimillions of human beings. The Net was labeled the “information superhighway” because it carried more data and moved it faster than any previous device in human history. By the midnineties, some 30 to 40 million Americans were going on-line at least once a week and accessing the World Wide Web—the system that allowed computer users to presentand retrieve information over the Internet. People who would otherwise never have met one another were now connecting in cyberspace and regularly communicating. And as the ARPAnet founders had discovered more than two decades before, much of the communication was intensely personal.
By the midnineties, something radically novel had arrived on the global stage, bringing with it a whole new world unlike anything that had previously existed. This world contained hidden realms within hidden realms, and each had its own language, its own rules and online etiquette (called Netiquette), its own secrets and subtle pathways into even more hidden realms. A person sitting in front of a computer screen in, for example, Chicago could instantaneously and simultaneously talk to individuals throughout that city and America and across the earth. The old concepts of geographical boundaries, borders, and limitations were gone. The walls were down. People were no longer doing things at the speed of physically moving objects from one place to another, but were trading their thoughts, their emotions, their images, their angers, their fears, and their deepest desires and fantasies at the speed of light. The human imagination seemed to be freed from the constraints and the conceptions of the past. When you went on-line, you could go anywhere you wanted to go that had an Internet connection, and you could be anyone you wanted to be. The world had suddenly been wired for new forms of communication—and personal interaction.
The Net was both a vast research tool into every possible subject and a gateway to information that most people could not begin to imagine. It provided services as varied as how to adopt a child from the United States or a foreign country to how to trade stocks or collect coins to how to stalk an unsuspecting person. If it offered the greatest collective library on the planet, it also provided the opportunity for frustrated couples to “adopt” nonexistent children in scams that cost people thousands of dollars and broke their hearts. The Net featured everything from pie recipes to bomb-making techniques and other information used by terrorists, both domestic and foreign. Since the mideighties, America’s radical right had been linked through computer networks, and by the turn of the new millennium, international terrorists like Osama bin Laden and the Al Qaeda network were joined to their followers via e-mail and zip files. The Internet had an endless capacity for doing good as well as evil. It held humanitarian sites that donated food to people in starving countries every time you logged on to these Web pages, but it had other sites dedicated to promoting pedophilia involving three-and four-year-old children.
The Net had organized “cyber-gangs” that roamed the darkest recesses of the Web—gangs so technologically proficient that they could “reach in” to your computer and swipe your password, your home address, and your telephone number. They could steal your financial records and sabotage the files on your hard drive, destroying everything you’d created and stored. But as soon as these underground gangs were found to be operating in the on-line world, software companies began building “firewalls” to keep them out. Each time one of these firewalls—which shut down certain computer portals that allow in information—was cracked by a hacker, still newer barriers were generated to become even more impenetrable. It was a game with one set of technology masters taking on the other, with the side of crime prevention sometimes winning and sometimes taking a loss. Everything about the Internet was a competition to expand the notion of what was possible in the unexplored domains of cyberspace.
The Net meant new ways to do business, new ways to hunt for research material, and new ways to meet potential mates or partners. Every form of communication had become electronic, and both “E-business” and “E-romance” Web sites were everywhere. On-line personal ads and chat rooms became the new bars and singles’ clubs—with one huge difference. Instead of having access to a few people in a physical setting, you could now access unlimited would be partners worldwide. In years past, when people met, interacted with, and assessed each other in person, eye contact, body language, and appearance all came into play. Our co
mbined human and animal instincts were the best gifts to protect us from danger. The fight-or-flight response was most effective based on vision, and intuition was a valuable tool when studying potential partners or mates.
In cyberspace, all this would change. In this impersonal technological playground you could fabricate everything—your age, your name, your looks, your occupation, your race, your gender, your sexual orientation, your personal history, and your personality itself. You could rearrange or reinvent yourself every time you logged on. If you were shy, you could be daring and flirtatious. If you were outrageously forward in person, you could come across as gentle and cautious. If you were fourteen and could bring off the act, you could appear to be much older and far more sophisticated than your years. If you were seventy-five, why not tell people you were thirty-three? Nothing was out of bounds. Anything went in this atmosphere, which someone once described as “Mardi Gras with typewriters.” It was as if the technology itself had set loose something in the human mind or the unconscious, so that the old rules and forms of self-expression and self-control no longer applied. Here you could be whatever you or someone else wanted you to be. Here was a realm where you could finally let go. The technology seemed to encourage people to spell out—and sometimes to act on—their less civilized impulses.
If you were an ex-con in Kansas, you could present yourself as a caring farmer and successful entrepreneur willing to help those in need. If you were a woman who would never have ventured into erotic clubs or sex businesses in the physical world, you could now explore these places alone and unembarrassed, where no one even knew you were female. You were suddenly liberated from all the restrictions of the past and you were safe—or so it seemed—whenever you dipped your toe into this on-line pool or that one, gradually testing the waters without revealing much of yourself or taking the plunge.
In an office in Ohio, a female state employee grows bored in the afternoon lull of her workday and glances around to see if anyone is watching her. Her boss is out and no one else is looking her way. She turns on her computer screen and punches a few keys that are reserved for situations just like this. Within seconds, she’s connected to a Web site offering hard-core pornography. She takes it in with furtive eyes, constantly peeking over her shoulder to make sure no one is approaching her desk; she’s both fascinated and repelled by the images, unable to stare at them and unable to look away. If she’s a little ashamed of herself for doing this on company time, she’s also briefly entertained. A few minutes later, she returns to work, rejuvenated and ready to resume the tedious chores that make up her job. She’s tried not to do this very often, but lately she’s been checking in with the site every day.
In Louisiana, a man shares his marital woes and extramarital fantasies with cyber-girlfriends in Sweden, Japan, Spain, and California. He long ago gave up on having intimacy with his wife, but this kind of romance invigorates him and allows him to be kinder to his spouse and children. Sometimes, he’s convinced it makes him a better person. Initially, he likes to meet women in chat rooms, but then he breaks away from those settings and establishes one-on-one relationships with them. He asks them to send him pictures of themselves, which most of them are willing to do, and he keeps an extensive file of their photos and e-mails. His wife never uses his computer. She doesn’t have the password that would allow her to go online on this machine. He’s made it clear through remarks and attitude that he doesn’t want her in this office space, so she leaves him alone and never asks him what he’s doing during all those hours he spends on-line in his basement. He doesn’t reveal what takes place in there and she doesn’t really want to know.
In New Hampshire, a stressed-out police officer stays up all night with his “backup” women on the Net. He’s been fighting with his boss and with his wife and with his mistress, whom he met on-line a few months earlier. Now he’s searching for a new connection out there—someone fresh, someone who doesn’t know his past and won’t judge him, someone who will find him interesting and lively and funny, someone who will make him feel connected to the world and good about himself. If he hunts long enough in chat rooms and presents himself in a favorable enough light, he knows he can find somebody like this because he’s done it so many times before.
The man never tells anyone on-line that he’s a cop, and he doesn’t talk about his looks or his age, either. He focuses on his own mind and the thoughts and emotions of the women he’s speaking to. He knows how to be caring and sympathetic, a good listener. He uses some of these same techniques as a police officer when interrogating suspects or witnesses to get them to tell him what he wants to know. He’s been doing all this for years on the job, and he knows how to hook people by sharing his secrets with them.
“The Net is like a confessional,” he says. “You tell things to people on-line that you wouldn’t tell your closest friend. You have someone to talk to who doesn’t know you or your family or your background. You feel incredibly free and alive and attached. Your Internet connections quickly become very intimate because you can unburden yourself of your deepest feelings without the idea that there will be any consequences. You can escape being an adult for a while, escape being a husband or a parent or even being a man. You can be anything out there—anything at all. And in some ways there usually aren’t any consequences, but it still feels like cheating.
“The guilt is still there because you’re talking to a stranger instead of talking to the people you live with. It erodes relationships at home because more than anything else you look forward to going on-line and spilling your guts to someone out there. It goes very deeply to that place that says somebody in the world can really understand and appreciate and love me for who I am. I think that’s the deepest human fantasy of all—that someone can know us in the way we want to be known and see us the way we want to be seen. Someone can know our inner reality. Just that possibility is what keeps some people going. Without it, you feel very small and very alone.
“People on-line may want sex but they crave connectedness to others. The Net provides that in a global way. It’s something totally new, and like all new things, it generates hope. Even if that hope ultimately proves to be false. It’s like taking a little vacation from your own life—and everyone needs that once in a while.”
XVI
A woman who enters a chat room and is willing to identify herself as a woman needs to be prepared for what happens next. Some people in the room will perceive her arrival as an invitation for sexual aggression. She might instantly be asked where she lives, her age, and the size of her breasts. Others will demand that she send them her picture. If she enters a chat room and says that she’s young and blond, a feeding frenzy will ensue, with the woman immediately becoming the center of attention, regardless of who she really is or what she actually looks like. All this can be fun and flattering, but it can also, at least for many women, start to feel invasive, even like an assault. There isn’t much chivalry in cyberspace. On-line you meet new people all the time, things get personal fast, and instant gratification is the common currency. It’s easy to get addicted to the rush of having secret relationships with those who pay attention to you whenever you want this kind of attention. If you are primarily interacting only with yourself and your own emotions, for many people this at least seems as if you’re connected to something outside you.
The Net has a remarkably seductive feel.
What often starts out as an on-line lark can lead to more serious consequences. Stories began surfacing everywhere about relationships and marriages dissolving because of cyber-romance. On the Net, personal interaction quickly moves from casual e-mails to intimate e-mails to sensual/sexual communications to the exchange of pictures to the decision to meet physically, to having an affair, to planning on bolting a marriage—and sometimes to divorce and breaking up households. As on-line love has become more popular, services have popped up offering to track your lover or spouse on the Net, without ever being detected, to see whom he or she is meeting
in cyberspace. Private investigation has taken on a whole new meaning.
Many times an abandoned husband or wife never realizes that a spouse has been going on-line and carrying out hidden adultery via the Net for months or even years. Everything has unfolded just a few feet away from the wounded party and has taken place in total silence, within the electronic confines of a computer. Machines, as social critics had been saying for decades, are neutral. It’s what you do with them that matters.
“Technology in any form,” children’s TV star Fred Rogers once said in ON magazine, “can be used for good or evil. It all depends on the hearts and minds of those who use it.”
People’s hearts and minds are now being tested in strikingly new ways. Instead of conducting just one illicit affair on-line, some users carry on four or five or six at once, with women or men in countries around the globe. When Internet lovers discover that their on-line partners are not involved exclusively with them, hell occasionally breaks loose. The old emotions of jealousy and rage are still the same; only the technology has changed.
Surfing the Net for love can easily become a minor hobby that evolves into a major pastime that turns into an addiction that can be almost as demanding and consuming as a full-time job.
An altered reality had arrived at the close of the second millennium, and it would most frequently be compared to the Old West in nineteenth-century America, where many people were armed and dangerous and lawmen struggled to maintain order and protect the citizens of the new frontier. That era may have been wild and lawless, but it had not been driven by a rapidly growing, ever-expanding technology. Horses dominated the Western landscape, and both criminals and sheriffs used the same animals in their chosen lines of work. The outlaws and the peacekeepers were fairly evenly matched. When automobiles came along, criminals quickly adapted them to fit their needs, but once again law enforcement easily made the same adaptation. In the on-line world, the old patterns did not apply. Technology was changing so fast that the authorities simply could not keep up with it—at least not during the midnineties, when the Internet exploded onto the American scene. During those years, when dot-com businesses erupted everywhere and fortunes were made overnight, things really were wild in cyberspace.
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