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In the December 19 New York Times, Kurt Eichenwald published a 6500-word feature headlined "Through His Webcam, a Boy Joins a Sordid Online World." The boy in question was Justin Berry, a teenaged entrepreneur, now 19, who developed and operated lucrative internet porn sites where he was the main attraction. More than two-thirds of the way through the article, Eichenwald discloses his own involvement in the story as Justin's protector, source of legal representation, and escort to the Justice Department.

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Eichenwald's account is broadsheet journalism marinated in tabloid ideas, an alarmist exercise reminiscent of "Cyberporn," the 1995 Time cover story spun from a soon-to-be-discredited report on internet pornography by free-range crackpot Martin Rimm. It seems crafted for easy translation into a tearstained Movie of the Week, complete with arc of redemption. At once lurid and sentimental, it raises a host of questions.

Did Eichenwald cross ethical boundaries to get his story? Are the reporter and his paper criminally liable, in the tradition of NPR's Larry Matthews and other journalists, for venturing into the world of putative child porn and accessing images? How credible are Justin Berry's sometimes unverifiable statements? To what extent was Justin, who had made a career out of catering to men's fantasies, cravings, and projections, telling Eichenwald just what he wanted to hear? Did Justin, confronted with an authority figure who had cast himself in the dual role of savior and cop, cooperate mainly out of fear of prosecution? Was Justin, as the brother of a man he turned over to the FBI has suggested, simply looking for a "get out of jail free card?"

Spider in his own web?

Justin Berry is the product of a troubled family in Bakersfield, California, the site of overlapping ritual-abuse panics during the 1980s. (See "The Devil in Kern County" in The Guide, March 2004.) Eichenwald describes Justin as a "soccer-playing honor roll student" hijacked by "predators." In fact, he was a lonely, dyed-blond outsider reminiscent of gay filmmaker Jonathan Caouette, creator of the personal documentary Tarnation. Before becoming a "camwhore," Justin, whose parents were divorced, had been subjected to domestic battering. He had few friends, and lived online. He had a sharp, active mind of his own. His precocious computer skills facilitated setting up his own registered website development agency when he was 13.

In 2000, Justin subscribed to the internet service provider Earthlink in order to obtain a free webcam offered as a premium. According to Eichenwald, he thought the device would help him meet "some girls my age." Whatever his intentions, he quickly attracted adult men, and neither blocked their messages nor told them to get lost.

At one point, Justin says, a man offered him $50 to take off his shirt and pose bare-chested for three minutes, explaining how payment could be arranged via PayPal. In Eichenwald's version, the man "oozed compliments" when the boy complied. Availing himself of a handy source of cash, Justin made performing for pay his occupation. For an on-camera jerkoff session, he charged up to $900; most requests simply ranged "anywhere from 'Let me see your feet' to 'Get naked.'" He claims he earned "hundreds of thousands of dollars."

Family drama

Justin's born-again mother seems to have been oblivious to her son's new affluence, and not to have noticed the expensive computer equipment that engulfed his room-- gifts, mostly, from online fans kept informed of his needs through his Amazon.com wish list. While Justin was still underage, she seems not to have minded his jaunts to Michigan, Nevada, and elsewhere to meet clients in person. As his business grew, however, he moved his equipment out of his mother's home and into a nearby apartment subsidized by one of his customers.

Justin had a difficult, sometimes abusive relationship with his father, Knute Berry, who once was detained by police for bashing his son's head against a wall. Berry senior, who ran a chain of massage clinics, fled to Mexico in 2003 to dodge insurance fraud charges.

16-year-old Justin soon followed. He had his own reasons for wanting to skip town, having just been subjected to taunts and beatings when a former classmate circulated pornographic images of Justin among their peers. At about this time, Eichenwald says, Justin briefly embraced Christianity, plastering Biblical verses all over his porn site. Eichenwald assumes Justin's aim was to confound or possibly convert his fans, but a likelier motive might have been to confuse unwanted, prying visitors.

In Mexico, Justin told his dad about his webcam operation. Father and son became business partners, establishing their own new multi-tiered membership website. Knute Berry allegedly procured prostitutes to spice up Justin's live-sex webcam performances. Justin supplemented his income from membership fees by selling pornographic photos and video clips of himself and others online. He apparently sunk his profits into a growing drug habit.

Times over the edge?

Eichenwald, an award-winning investigative reporter best known for exposés of corporate corruption, was working on another project when he somehow stumbled on justinsfriends. com in June 2005. Intrigued, he asked its young proprietor a lot of questions. Justin says he suspected Eichenwald might be a law enforcement official, but he agreed to meet the reporter in LA, just as he had agreed to meet other men he had met online. Eichenwald did not identify himself as a reporter until he finally met Berry face-to-face.

Eichenwald never says exactly what he found on Justin's hard drives when he reviewed their contents, but he writes, "The review convinced me that Justin's story was true." But the images, transcripts, and credit-card records simply confirm Justin's identity as a camwhore. They do not fill in all the details of his personal history, or provide a thorough overview of what he did when, where, and with whom off-camera. Nor do they fully substantiate his allegations about the internet activities of others. Using the word child to mean mid-to-late adolescents, Eichenwald darkly alludes to children in danger, but does not specify the nature of the threat. In danger of what? Being raped? Being killed? Turning queer?

After his self-appointed liberator entered the picture, Justin showed remarkable zeal for reform. "In the days that followed, Justin agreed in discussions with this reporter to abandon the drugs and his pornography business," Eichenwald writes. "He cut himself off from his illicit life. He destroyed his cell phone, stopped using his online screen name, and fled to another part of the country where no one would find him." Where, one wonders-- a rehab facility? Kurt Eichenwald's home?

Eichenwald's Times piece intimates that the 1500 individuals who paid to join Justin's membership websites were "predators" and "pedophiles"-- loaded words that Eichenwald, and under his tutelage, Justin, puts to liberal, all-purpose, McCarthyite use. Eichenwald stresses that an analysis of 300 credit card records in Justin's possession shows that he sometimes performed for pediatricians, teachers, and other professionals dealing with children-- perpetuating the myth that an inordinate number of men who choose to work around minors are potential rapists.

Eichenwald and others have speculated that only driven and disturbed individuals would supply credit-card information to access a porn site featuring teenaged models. But a curiosity-seeker who reads and agrees to a membership website's terms-- especially one aware of federal proof-of-age records-keeping requirements-- might reasonably assume that a highly visible operation that takes MasterCard meets legal standards. Since pornographic webcam sites have been operating above ground for years, a minority of them featuring "teenaged" models, it seems curious that the Justice Department's generously funded, notoriously zealous anti-child porn program, "Operation Innocent Images," hasn't intervened.

In fact, DOJ officials who must know otherwise haven't challenged Eichenwald's depiction of camwhore operations as new, under-radar phenomena. While this position bolsters the plausible suspicion that Operation Innocent Images is run by naive and fanatical nincompoops, it also suggests a strategic reluctance to state publicly that most professional sites exist openly and in compliance with the law.

Legal Never-never land

In the world of anti-porn zealotry, of course, legal standards have great elasticity. Under the Child Pornography Protection Act (CPPA) of 1996, "child pornography" could mean whatever law enforcement officials found it expedient to mean. In 2002, the US Supreme Court struck down the CPPA provision criminalizing material that simply "conveys the impression" that it depicts children engaged in sexual activity, but even clothed images of minors in non-sexual poses remain possible grounds for prosecution.

In the repressive atmosphere of the Bush Administration, Senator Orrin Hatch (R.-Utah) and others in both houses of Congress have helped anti-smut legislation proliferate. Lurking now in the House Judiciary Committee is House Resolution 3726, a measure introduced by religious conservative Congressman Mike Pence (R.-Indiana). The resolution would expand the Recordkeeping and Labeling Act to require proof of age of all actors and models shown in visual depictions of "sexually explicit conduct"-- omitting the word "actual," and thus including films such as Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet. It would also broaden the Justice Department's power to prosecute obscenity cases within a state.

In May 2005, US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales unveiled his new Obscenity Prosecution Task Force, stating that "obscenity and child pornography rip at the heart of our moral values and easily corrupt our communities." In July, he circulated a memorandum declaring obscenity cases one of his top priorities. Deeply embedded in the Bush-era DOJ are such zealots as Bruce Taylor, President of the National Law Center for Children and Families. Taylor is a veteran of more than 700 porn prosecutions, including the 1990 action against Dennis Barrie, director of Cincinnati's Contemporary Art Center, for exhibiting photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe. (Later acquitted, Barrie was charged with "pandering obscenity" and illegal use of a minor in "nudity-oriented material.")

Eichenwald's relationship to the Alberto Gonzales Justice Department is comparable to that of his former colleague Judith Miller to the Donald Rumsfeld Defense Department and Vice President Dick Cheney's staff, whose lies about Iraq's nonexistent 'weapons of mass destruction' she obligingly validated in the Times. Steeped in prosecutorial culture, the Times reporter urged his protege to place his fate in the hands of the DOJ. He put Justin in touch with attorney Stephen M. Ryan, a former federal prosecutor now in private practice. Ryan in turn contacted the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section of the Justice Department. Accompanied by Ryan and Eichenwald, Justin met in late July with FBI and Justice Department officials, "identified children he believed were in the hands of adult predators," handed over his records, and gave law enforcement officials access to his computers.

In September, he was granted immunity from prosecution. A few days later, he helped the FBI entrap one of his business partners, Greg Mitchel, 38, of Dublin, Virginia. The following week, the FBI descended on Nashville and took Tim Richards, 24, into custody. A 13-year-old boy known as "Dew" supposedly lived with Richards and appeared with him in live pornographic webcasts. Richards, who had started an internet business with another high school student in the 1990s, had recently hosted and helped market justinsfriends.com. Other arrests may be pending.

"Justin's dark coming-of-age story is a collateral effect of recent technological advances," writes Eichenwald. Sensationalizing real or imagined sinister aspects of new technologies, he ignores the low-tech, foot-to-the-pavement ease with which teenaged prostitutes have sought johns from time immemorial. It never occurs to Eichenwald that a teenager's entry into prostitution, whatever its technological or social dimensions, can constitute anything other than pure, passive victimization. Its possibilities as a declaration of autonomy and a means to power remain inadmissible.

Eichenwald's stance as a moral crusader has drawn accolades, mostly from the Right. At the Christian website WorldViews, a posting by "Olasky" compliments Eichenwald on "a terrific piece of investigative reporting," hailing his webcam story as a return to the standards of "Times anti-abortion reporting in the 19th century: no attempt at 'objectivity,' but a direct condemnation of evil through the piling up of specific detail that shows personal harm."

Prostitution can indeed be a dangerous business, for teens or 30-year-olds, but in what way is cybersex more dangerous than hanging out on a park bench waiting for johns of unknown provenance to show up in the flesh? It's fair to ask if strangers who pay a fee to watch a teenaged boy beat off cause greater harm than relatives who beat him up for free-- or how their actions can be any more exploitive than those of a reporter who uses that boy as his ticket to the talk-show circuit, a book contract, a movie deal.

It's also fair to ask how Justin Berry, years from now, will feel about his role in the kind of witch hunt that costs people homes and jobs, destroys families, and terminates lives.