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From the Los Angeles Times

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Mexico City an unlikely draw for those fleeing drug war violence

Traffickers are aware of the risks of major provocations in Mexico City, home to the federal police, army, navy and intelligence services, not to mention many of the cartel leaders' families.

by Ken Ellingwood, Los Angeles Times

March 27, 2011

Reporting from Mexico City

When the highway shootouts and roadblocks by gunmen in her hometown finally became too much, Karla Garza found sanctuary in the unlikeliest of places: the big, bad capital, Mexico City.

Garza, a 21-year-old marketing student, switched campuses in December after her parents decided that even with its rampant robberies and kidnappings, Mexico City was safer than their home in Monterrey, a once-quiet northern city that for months has served as a battlefield for warring drug gangs.

"Ten years ago, my parents never would have imagined sending me to live in [Mexico City]. It would have been insane," Garza said. Now, though, "the bad news is coming from Monterrey."

Mexico City used to be an emblem of runaway crime, viewed by many Mexicans as a viper pit that was best avoided if you didn't want to be mugged or forced at gunpoint to withdraw money from ATMs and hand it over. But four years of drug violence across much of the rest of the country suddenly has Mexico City looking like an island of tranquillity, despite its rampant petty crime.

"We haven't had heads cut off. We don't have blockades. We don't have houses on fire. We don't have bombs. We don't have shooting in the streets," said Eduardo Gallo, president of the anti-crime group Mexico United Against Crime. "We have some robberies, but we don't see armed people in vans and trucks chasing each other."

Not yet, at least. The winds have been known to shift quickly in this drug war, and metropolitan Mexico City, with 20 million residents, is hardly free of cartel activity.

But drug traffickers are aware of the risks of igniting major provocations in a city that is home to the federal police, army, navy and intelligence services, not to mention many of the cartel leaders' families. And Mexico City's size and complexity are a barrier to control by any one crime boss.

Stakes are also high for authorities. Gun battles amid high-rise offices and stately monuments of Mexico's political and economic hub would be a disaster for President Felipe Calderon, who launched his offensive against organized crime in December 2006.

"Mexico City is the place where the drug traffickers live, the place where drug traffickers do business, the place where drug traffickers have their families," said Jorge Chabat, a national security scholar in Mexico City. "There's some sort of an agreement, not an explicit agreement, that Mexico City is a neutral place."

Even so, several mass killings in and around the capital recently have stirred worry that the extreme violence besieging other zones may be nibbling at the edges.

On Feb. 13, a crowd on a graffiti-spattered street corner in a scruffy, crime-ridden suburb called Nezahualcoyotl was sprayed with gunfire; seven people were killed. A month earlier, gunmen killed nine people and wounded three in another incident in the same city, which has long been known as one of the most violent spots in the area.

The area around Nezahualcoyotl in Mexico state has a high homicide rate, with more than 1,500 slayings in the last four years, according to federal government figures. (Mexico City's total is a little less than half that, or 653 through December.)

Authorities say the shootings apparently stemmed from internal disputes over street drug sales in a group linked to La Familia cartel, a violent gang based in nearby Michoacan state. Nezahualcoyotl Mayor Edgar Navarro Sanchez called the slayings "isolated incidents," but he acknowledged that La Familia has operated in the city for several years.

In the bleak neighborhood where the Feb. 13 slayings took place, fearful residents lock their children indoors and hope the latest killings aren't the start of a frightening new phase.

"It's very delicate and very dangerous," said Mariana Gonzalez, a 30-year-old homemaker who was passing the street corner, still stained dark with blood. She said the victims were known for selling drugs.

Gonzalez said residents lately have seen carloads of armed men and leaflets warning of "massacres" to come. The neighborhood, hemmed on one side by a cemetery and railroad tracks, has long been beset by gang crime.

"But shootouts with many dead, no," she said.

Tension also escalated in Mexico City in January when gun-toting Mexican marines swarmed a middle-class area in search of drug-trafficking suspects.

Without firing a shot, the troops arrested a man suspected of laundering money for the Zetas gang. But the scene of masked commandos evoked images of troubled cities, such as Ciudad Juarez, where Calderon has deployed the military as part of his 4-year-old offensive against drug cartels.

It has long been an open secret that traffickers own mansions, manage drug shipments, launder money and stage cocaine-fueled parties in the same leafy precincts that house Mexico City's law-abiding rich and famous.

Federal police have arrested numerous suspects in the capital, including family members of top drug figures. Edgar Millan Gomez, the No. 2 official in the federal police, was assassinated at his home here in 2008.

But amid Mexico City's choking sprawl and disorder, it can be easy to hide in plain sight.

After the arrest of suspected kingpin Sergio Villarreal Barragan in September, Gallo, the anti-crime activist, said he and neighbors were stunned to learn that Villarreal had been renting a house in their gated community. Guards had watched the suspect come and go for months. "No one realized we had a huge criminal as a neighbor," Gallo said.

The city also serves traffickers in other ways. Benito Juarez International Airport is a strategic relay point for smaller-scale shipments of drugs smuggled north toward the United States. The crime-plagued Tepito neighborhood is a hungry market for street sales of cocaine and marijuana.

But Miguel Angel Mancera, Mexico City's top prosecutor, said the array of security forces, including the 75,750-strong local police force, and a tighter command structure than in many states, "makes it difficult for them to operate."

Some analysts say rising drug use in Mexico is likely to produce more violence, and that could extend to the capital, a huge market. Mexico City would also offer a juicy target if traffickers decided to make a political point by unleashing violence.

Mexico City's mayor, Marcelo Ebrard, and the Mexico state governor, Enrique Pena Nieto, share a keen political interest in making sure the region doesn't descend into extreme violence. Both are expected to run for president next year, and neither can afford gangland mayhem on his home turf.

Garza, the university student, said she'll go home to Monterrey if conditions there feel safer.

But if not, Garza said, she might not be alone in the capital for long: The next to seek haven in Mexico City may be the parents who sent her here.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-mexico-city-calm-20110327,0,1487869,print.story

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From the New York Times

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Rapes of Women Show Clash of Old and New India

GHAZIABAD, India — The young lovers met at a secluded spot next to a field of wheat at the edge of this sprawling suburb of New Delhi, where the timeless India of mustard fields and bullock carts abuts the frantically rising apartment towers of the budding middle class. They went seeking solitude, but instead found themselves at the violent cusp of old India and new.

There, according to the police, five drunken young men from a nearby farming village accosted the couple last month, beating the young man and gang-raping the woman. It was the latest in a series of brutal sexual assaults and gang rapes of women in India's booming capital and its sprawling suburbs.

In each case there has been an explosive clash between the rapidly modernizing city and the embattled, conservative village culture upon which the capital increasingly encroaches. The victims are almost invariably young, educated working women who are enjoying freedom unknown even a decade ago. The accused are almost always young high school dropouts from surrounding villages, where women who work outside the home are often seen as lacking in virtue and therefore deserving of harassment and even rape.

“If these girls roam around openly like this, then the boys will make mistakes,” the mother of two of those accused in the rape said in an interview, refusing to give her name.

It is a deeply ingrained attitude that has made New Delhi, by almost any measure, the most dangerous large city in India for women. The rate of reported rape is nearly triple that of Mumbai, and 10 times as high as Kolkata, formerly Calcutta, according to government records. A survey completed last year by the government and several women's rights groups found that 80 percent of women had faced verbal harassment in Delhi and that almost a third had been physically harassed by men.

Nearly half the women surveyed reported being stalked, a statistic grimly illustrated earlier this month when a student at Delhi University was shot in broad daylight by a man the police suspect was stalking her.

The attackers often do not see their actions as crimes, the police said, and do not expect the women they attack to report them. “They have no doubt that they will get away with it,” said H. G. S. Dhaliwal, a deputy police commissioner in New Delhi who has investigated several such cases.

India's economy is expected to grow 9 percent this year, and its extended boom has brought sweeping social change. The number of women in the workforce has roughly doubled in the past 15 years.

Law enforcement officials say that the rate of violent crime against women has actually dropped in Delhi in the past four years, owing to more aggressive policing efforts, measures like women-only train cars and laws that require companies that employ women on late shifts to chauffeur them home.

But a vast majority of crimes against women go unreported, the police and women's activists say. The clash between the increasingly cosmopolitan city and its traditional surroundings is worsening, they say.

“There is a lot of tension between the people who are traditional in their mind-set and the city that is changing so quickly,” said Ranjana Kumari, a leading women's rights advocate. “Men are not used to seeing so many women in the country occupying public spaces.”

In few places is that conflict as evident as here in Ghaziabad, which sits at the eastern edge of New Delhi, a metastasizing megacity. The farmland where the young couple met represents an invisible but indelible dividing line.

There is no question to which side the young couple belonged. The man was an engineer at a high-tech company with a salary good enough to afford him a motorbike and a laptop computer.

Their attackers lived in the village of Raispur, less than a mile from the tidy complex where the young man shared an apartment with his parents, but they belong to an altogether different India. None of them managed to graduate from high school. The narrow lanes of their sleepy village are redolent of cow dung; every home, it seems, has a few cattle or buffaloes, many of them living in pens within residents' houses.

Unlike the growing ranks of professional women in the city on their doorstep, the women of Raispur live hemmed-in lives, covering their faces with shawls in front of strangers and seldom roaming beyond the village.

Seema Chowdhury, 20, the sister of one of the accused men, graduated from high school. But when she tried to enroll in college to become a teacher, her brothers refused to allow it. Young women who wander too far face many dangers, they argued.

“I wanted to do something in my life,” she said. “But they thought it was not a good idea.”

In comparison, the young woman who was raped here had unimaginable freedom. She had a job as an accountant at a garment factory and her own cellphone and e-mail account. Using those, she carried on a secret romance with a young man she met online despite the fact that her parents had arranged for her to be married to someone else, according to the police.

Vijay Kumar Singh, a senior police official here who investigated the rape, said that on Feb. 5 a young man came into his police station to report that his cellphone and laptop had been stolen. When the young man claimed they had been snatched near some isolated farmland at the edge of the city, Mr. Singh became suspicious: it was an unlikely place for a robbery.

He pressed for details, and eventually the young man admitted taking his girlfriend to the secluded area so they could be alone, and that five men had beaten him and raped her.

Based on the description, the police quickly identified one attacker as a village tough named Tony from Raispur with whom the police had tangled before.

When they picked up Tony, who goes by one name, he was still drunk, Mr. Singh said.

“He was so shameless he narrated the whole thing without any sense of remorse,” he said. Tony later denied that he had raped the woman, according to the police report.

Tony had apparently assumed that the rape victim would not come forward because the shame would be too great.

Mr. Singh feared that he was right. “I realized from the beginning that the girl would not help us,” he said.

The police arrested the five young men and charged them with rape and robbery. They tried repeatedly to get the young woman to come forward. The city's police chief sent her an e-mail asking her to cooperate and offering to protect her identity.

She sent a curt e-mail reply, the police said: “The police will not be able to restore my honor.”

The police approached her father, and he urged her to cooperate, said Raghubir Lal, Ghaziabad's police chief. But the next morning her brother found her trying to hang herself, Mr. Lal said. The police decided to stop pressing her to cooperate.

Mr. Singh, the officer who first investigated the rape, said that with no physical evidence or victim's testimony, the rape charge would not stand.

The police and women's advocates say that successful convictions are central to changing attitudes that tolerate sexual assault.

A similar episode in Delhi in November had a very different ending. Men in a pickup abducted and gang-raped a woman who worked at an outsourcing center after a taxi dropped her and a roommate near their apartment.

The roommate called the police, who found the young woman and took her to the hospital. She was eager to press charges, the police said. Investigators tracked down and arrested five men. DNA evidence was matched to them, the police said, all but ensuring convictions.

Mr. Dhaliwal, the senior Delhi police official who investigated that rape case, estimated that only one in 10 rapes in the Delhi region were reported.

“But this girl was very brave,” Mr. Dhaliwal said. “It is a very difficult thing in the Indian context, but you have to report it.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/27/world/asia/27india.html?_r=1&ref=world&pagewanted=print

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A Girl's Nude Photo, and Altered Lives

LACEY, Wash. — One day last winter Margarite posed naked before her bathroom mirror, held up her cellphone and took a picture. Then she sent the full-length frontal photo to Isaiah, her new boyfriend.

Both were in eighth grade.

They broke up soon after. A few weeks later, Isaiah forwarded the photo to another eighth-grade girl, once a friend of Margarite's. Around 11 o'clock at night, that girl slapped a text message on it.

“Ho Alert!” she typed. “If you think this girl is a whore, then text this to all your friends.” Then she clicked open the long list of contacts on her phone and pressed “send.”

In less than 24 hours, the effect was as if Margarite, 14, had sauntered naked down the hallways of the four middle schools in this racially and economically diverse suburb of the state capital, Olympia. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of students had received her photo and forwarded it.

In short order, students would be handcuffed and humiliated, parents mortified and lessons learned at a harsh cost. Only then would the community try to turn the fiasco into an opportunity to educate.

Around the country, law enforcement officials and educators are struggling with how to confront minors who “sext,” an imprecise term that refers to sending sexual photos, videos or texts from one cellphone to another.

But adults face a hard truth. For teenagers, who have ready access to technology and are growing up in a culture that celebrates body flaunting, sexting is laughably easy, unremarkable and even compelling: the primary reason teenagers sext is to look cool and sexy to someone they find attractive.

Indeed, the photos can confer cachet.

“Having a naked picture of your significant other on your cellphone is an advertisement that you're sexually active to a degree that gives you status,” said Rick Peters, a senior deputy prosecuting attorney for Thurston County, which includes Lacey. “It's an electronic hickey.”

In the fall of 2009, Margarite, a petite, pretty girl with dark hair and a tiny diamond stud in her nose, was living with her father, and her life was becoming troubled. Her relationship with her father's new wife was tense. Her grades were in a free fall.

Her social life was deteriorating. A good friendship with a girl had soured, abetted by a fight over a boy. This girl would be the one who would later brand Margarite's photo and forward it.

Margarite's former friend is tough and strong-willed, determined to stand out as well as fit in, according to those who know her. Her parents, recent immigrants, speak limited English and were not able to supervise her texting.

In the shifting power dynamics of middle school girls, the former friend understood well that she who sneers first sneers best. The flick of a cutting remark, swiftly followed by “Just kidding!” The eye roll. As the animosity between the two girls escalated, Margarite felt shunned by an entire group of girls and was eating lunch by herself. At home she retreated to her bedroom, alone with her cellphone and computer.

Her mother would later speculate that Margarite desperately needed to feel noticed and special. That December, just before the holidays, she took the photo of herself and sent it to Isaiah, a low-key, likable athlete she had recently gotten to know.

After the winter break, Margarite was preparing a fresh start. She would move back in with her mother and transfer to a school in a nearby district.

But one night in late January, a few days before her transfer, Margarite's cellphone began vibrating around 1 a.m., waking her. She was being bombarded by texts — alerts from worried friends, leers from boys she scarcely knew.

The next morning in her mother's car, Margarite lowered her head, hiding her reddened eyes, her terrible secret.

“Are you O.K.?” asked her mother, Antoinette, who like other parents and children who agreed to be interviewed asked to be identified by only first or middle names to protect their privacy.

“Yeah.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah.”

But her mother knew otherwise. Earlier that morning a parent had phoned Kirsten Rae, the principal of Margarite's school, Chinook Middle, complaining about a naked photo sent to her child. The child knew at least a dozen students who had received it.

The principal then called Antoinette. The police wanted to question Margarite. On the drive to school, the girl sobbed uncontrollably, feeling betrayed and degraded.

The school was buzzing. “When I opened my phone I was scared,” recalled an eighth grader. “I knew who the girl in the picture was. It's hard to unsee something.”

Meanwhile, another middle school principal in Lacey had begun investigating a sexting complaint that morning. Ms. Rae realized that Margarite's photo had gone viral.

Students were summoned to Ms. Rae's office and questioned by the police. Their cellphones were confiscated.

Ms. Rae went into crisis management. Parents were calling, wanting to know whether their children would be arrested and how she would contain the spread. She drafted a letter for school families. Administrators planned a districtwide voicemail to the families of middle school students. Chinook teachers would discuss the issue in homerooms the next day.

By late morning, Isaiah and Margarite's former friend had been identified and pulled out of class.

Then Isaiah's mother, Jennifer, got the call. “Naked?” she shouted. “How naked?”

When Jennifer, who works for an accountant, arrived at the school, she ran to Isaiah, a tall, slender boy with the startled air of an unfolding foal. He was weeping.

“I was in shock that I was in trouble,” he recalled during a recent interview. “I didn't go out of my way to forward it, but I felt responsible. It was bad. Really bad.”

He told the police that the other girl had pressured him into sending her Margarite's photo, vowing she just wanted to look at it. He said he had not known that their friendship had disintegrated.

How had the sexting from Margarite begun? “We were about to date, and you'll be like, ‘Oh, blah blah, I really like you, can you send me a picture?' ” Isaiah recalled.

“I don't remember if I asked her first or if she asked me. Well, I think I did send her a picture. Yeah, I'm pretty sure. Mine was, like, no shirt on.

“It is very common,” he said. “I'd seen pictures on other boys' cellphones.”

Mr. Peters, the county prosecutor, had been hearing that sexting was becoming a problem in the community. In a recent interview, he said that if the case had just involved photos sent between Isaiah and Margarite, he would have called the parents but not pressed charges.

“The idea of forwarding that picture was bad enough,” he said. “But the text elevated it to something far more serious. It was mean-girl drama, an all-out attempt to destroy someone without thinking about the implications.”

He decided against charging Margarite. But he did charge three students with dissemination of child pornography, a Class C felony, because they had set off the viral outbreak.

After school had been let out that day in late January, the police read Isaiah his rights, cuffed his hands behind his back and led him and Margarite's former friend out of the building. The eighth graders would have to spend the night in the county juvenile detention center.

The two of them and a 13-year-old girl who had helped forward the photo were arraigned before a judge the next day. (Margarite's former friend declined to be interviewed, as did the girl who helped her.)

Officials took away Isaiah's clothes and shoes. He changed into regulation white briefs and a blue jumpsuit. He was miserable and terrified.

“My socks got wet in the shower,” Isaiah said.

WHERE TO DRAW THE LINE?

Sexting is not illegal.

Two adults sending each other naughty pictures, dirty language? Just garden-variety First Amendment-protected speech.

A November 2009 AARP article, “Sexting Not Just For Kids,” reported approvingly on the practice for older people, too. In women's magazines and college students' blogs, coy guides include pragmatic tips like making sure to keep your face out of the photo.

But when that sexually explicit image includes a participant — subject, photographer, distributor or recipient — who is under 18, child pornography laws may apply.

“I didn't know it was against the law,” Isaiah said.

That is because culturally, such a fine distinction eludes most teenagers. Their world is steeped in highly sexualized messages. Extreme pornography is easily available on the Internet. Hit songs and music videos promote stripping and sexting.

“Take a dirty picture for me,” urge the pop stars Taio Cruz and Kesha in their recent duet, "Dirty Picture." "Send the dirty picture to me. Snap.”

In a 2010 Super Bowl advertisement for Motorola, the actress Megan Fox takes a cellphone picture of herself in a bubble bath. “I wonder what would happen if I were to send this out?” she muses. The commercial continues with goggle-eyed men gaping at the forwarded photo — normalizing and encouraging such messages.

“You can't expect teenagers not to do something they see happening all around them,” said Susannah Stern, an associate professor at the University of San Diego who writes about adolescence and technology.

“They're practicing to be a part of adult culture,” Dr. Stern said. “And in 2011, that is a culture of sexualization and of putting yourself out there to validate who you are and that you matter.”

The prevalence of under-age sexting is unclear and can often depend on the culture of a particular school or circle of students. An Internet poll conducted for The Associated Press and MTV by Knowledge Networks in September 2009 indicated that 24 percent of 14- to 17-year-olds had been involved in “some type of naked sexting,” either by cellphone or on the Internet. A December 2009 telephone poll from the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project found that 5 percent of 14- to 17-year-olds had sent naked or nearly naked photos or video by cellphone, and that 18 percent had received them. Boys and girls send photos in roughly the same proportion, the Pew survey found.

But a double standard holds. While a boy caught sending a picture of himself may be regarded as a fool or even a boastful stud, girls, regardless of their bravado, are castigated as sluts.

Photos of girls tend to go viral more often, because boys and girls will circulate girls' photos in part to shame them, explained Danah Boyd, a senior social media researcher at Microsoft and a fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

In contrast, when a boy sends a revealing photo of himself to a girl, Dr. Boyd noted, she usually does not circulate it. And, Dr. Boyd added, boys do not tend to circulate photos of other boys: “A straight-identified boy will never admit to having naked photos of a boy on his phone.”

Policy makers are beginning to recognize that a uniform response to these cases does not fit.

“I hate the word ‘sexting,' ” said Andrew J. Harris, an assistant professor of criminology at the University of Massachusetts in Lowell, who is leading a study of the practice among adolescents to help develop policies to address it. “We're talking about a lot of different behaviors and a lot of different motivations.”

There is the high-tech flirt. The troubled attention-seeker. A couple's consensual exchanges. Drunken teenagers horsing around. Pressure from a boyfriend. Malicious distribution. A teenager who barrages another with unsolicited lewd photos or texts. Or, as in a 2009 Wisconsin case of “sextortion,” a boy, pretending to be a girl online, who solicited explicit pictures of boys, which he then used as blackmail to compel those boys to have sex with him.

The content of the photos can vary widely too, from suggestive to sadistic.

Adults in positions of authority have been debating how to respond. Many school districts have banned sexting and now authorize principals to search cellphones. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, at least 26 states have tried to pass some sort of sexting legislation since 2009.

“The majority of states are trying to put something in place to educate kids before and after the event,” said Justin T. Fitzsimmons, a senior attorney at the National District Attorneys Association who specializes in Internet crimes against children. “We have to protect kids from themselves sometimes. We're on the cusp of teaching them how to manage their electronic reputations.”

But if the Lacey students were convicted of dissemination of child pornography, they could be sentenced to up to 36 weeks in a juvenile detention center. They would be registered as sex offenders. Because they were under 15, however, after two years they could petition a court to remove their names from the registry, if they could prove they no longer posed a threat to the public.

PENALTIES AND PREVENTION

Rick Peters, the prosecuting attorney, never intended for the Chinook Middle School students to receive draconian sentences. But he wanted to send a scared-straight message to them, as well as to the community.

Yet when the local news media storm cascaded, the outcry was not about the severe penalties for a felony sexting conviction. It was about why Mr. Peters had not also arrested Margarite.

“She's a victim,” Mr. Peters said. “She made an ill-advised decision to share that picture with her boyfriend. As far as she knew, that was as far as it would go.

“What good would come from prosecuting her? What lesson could we teach her that she hasn't already learned now 1,000 times over?”

Eventually a deal was brokered for the three teenagers who were charged. The offense would be amended from the child pornography felony to a gross misdemeanor of telephone harassment. Isaiah and the two girls who had initially forwarded Margarite's photo would be eligible for a community service program that would keep them out of court, and the case could be dismissed.

Those three students would have to create public service material about the hazards of sexting, attend a session with Margarite to talk about what happened and otherwise have no contact with her.

After Margarite and her mother approved the conditions, Mr. Peters signed off, pleased.

Throughout last spring, on Monday afternoons after school, Eric Fredericks, Isaiah's math teacher, met with the three students to help them develop their material.

Margarite's former friend made a PowerPoint presentation, with slides copied from the Internet.

The younger girl made a poster dense with warnings about sexting's consequences. She concluded: “I am a 13 year old teen that made a bad choice and got my life almost totaled forever. I regret what I did more than anything but I cant take it back.”

Isaiah created a two-page brochure, citing studies from the Internet, accompanied by a tumble of adolescent feeling:

“Not only does it hurt the people that are involved in the pictures you send, it can hurt your family and friends around you, the way they see you, the way you see yourself. The ways they feel about you. Them crying because of your mistakes.”

Ms. Rae has yet to distribute the material. Chinook, with 630 seventh and eighth graders, still has students who know those involved in last year's episode. She wants to give Isaiah, Margarite and the others more time to distance themselves.

While the case was on its way to resolution, prosecutors and district educators decided to put its aftershock to good use.

“After the story broke, parents called us because they didn't know about the law that could send kids to jail for a bad choice,” said Courtney Schrieve, a spokeswoman for the North Thurston Public Schools. “Kids didn't know about it either. So we decided to turn this into an opportunity to educate teachers, parents and students.”

In October, Ms. Rae, the police, prosecutors and Mr. Fitzsimmons of the National District Attorneys Association held separate forums about sexting for Lacey's teachers, parents and student delegations from the four middle schools.

The students then returned to their homerooms to teach classmates what they had learned.

Elizabeth Colón taught a session with Jon Reid. Both are eighth graders at Chinook.

“Most of the questions were about penalties,” she said. “Kids wanted to know if they would get into trouble just for receiving the picture.”

Jon spoke about long-term consequences. “I said that people may look at you differently,” he said. “They'll know what kind of person you were, even though you changed.”

One spring evening, the three students who had been disciplined met for a mediation session with Margarite and two facilitators from Community Youth Services. The searing, painful session, which included the students' parents and Mr. Fredericks, lasted several hours. Everyone was asked to talk about his or her role in the episode.

Mr. Fredericks listed all the people who had spent hours trying to clean the mess the students had created in a matter of seconds: police officers, lawyers, teachers, principals, hundreds of families.

Then it was Isaiah's turn. He looked Margarite in the eye. “He poured his heart out,” Mr. Fredericks recalled. Isaiah said that he was ashamed of himself, but that most of all, he was sorry he had broken Margarite's trust. Then he asked for her understanding and forgiveness. “He cried,” Mr. Fredericks said. “I choked up.”

The former friend who had forwarded the photo, creating the uproar, was accompanied by her mortified father, an older sister and a translator. She came across as terse and somewhat perfunctory, recalled several people who were there.

One of the last to speak was Margarite's father, Dan, an industrial engineer.

“I could say it was everyone else's fault,” Dan said. “But I had a piece of it, too. I learned a big lesson about my lack of involvement in her use of the phone and texting. I trusted her too much.”

He had not expected the students to be punished severely, he continued. But they needed to understand that their impulsive actions had ramifications.

“When you walk out of here tonight, it's over, you're done with it,” he said, looking around the room.

“Keep in mind that the only person this will have a lasting impact on,” he concluded, is his daughter.

The photo most certainly still exists on cellphones, and perhaps on social networking sites, readily retrievable.

“She will have to live with this for the rest of her life.”

THE VICTIM

When the police were finished questioning Margarite at Chinook in January 2010, her mother, a property manager, laid down the law. For the time being, no cellphone. No Internet. No TV.

Margarite, used to her father's indulgence and unfettered access to technology, was furious.

But the punishment insulated Margarite from the wave of reaction that surged online, in local papers and television reports, and in texted comments by young teenagers throughout town. Although the police and the schools urged parents to delete the image from their children's phones, Antoinette heard that it had spread to a distant high school within a few days.

The repercussions were inescapable. After a friend took Margarite skating to cheer her up, he was viciously attacked on his MySpace page. Kids jeered, telling him to change schools and go with “the whore.”

The school to which Margarite had transferred when she moved back in with her mother was about 15 miles away. She badly wanted to put the experience behind her. But within weeks she was recognized. A boy at the new school had the picture on his cellphone. The girls began to taunt her: Whore. Slut.

Margarite felt depressed. Often she begged to stay home from school.

In January, almost a year to the day when her photo went viral, she decided to transfer back to her old district, where she figured she at least had some friends.

The episode stays with her still. One recent evening in her mother's condominium, Margarite chatted comfortably about her classes, a smile flashing now and then. But when the moment came to recount the events of the winter before, she slipped into her bedroom, shutting the door.

As Antoinette spoke about what had happened, the volume on the television in Margarite's room grew louder.

Finally, she emerged. The smell of pizza for supper was irresistible.

What is it like to be at school with her former friend?

“Before I switched back, I called her,” Margarite said. “I wanted to make sure the drama was squashed between us. She said, were we even legally allowed to talk? And I said we should talk, because we'd have math together. She apologized again.”

What advice would Margarite give anyone thinking of sending such a photo?

She blushed and looked away.

“I guess if they are about to send a picture,” she replied, laughing nervously, “and they have a feeling, like, they're not sure they should, then don't do it at all. I mean, what are you thinking? It's freaking stupid!”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/27/us/27sexting.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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F.B.I. Casts Wide Net Under Relaxed Rules for Terror Inquiries, Data Show

WASHINGTON — Within months after the Bush administration relaxed limits on domestic-intelligence gathering in late 2008, the F.B.I. assessed thousands of people and groups in search of evidence that they might be criminals or terrorists, a newly disclosed Justice Department document shows.

In a vast majority of those cases, F.B.I. agents did not find suspicious information that could justify more intensive investigations. The New York Times obtained the data, which the F.B.I. had tried to keep secret, after filing a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act.

The document, which covers the four months from December 2008 to March 2009, says the F.B.I. initiated 11,667 “assessments” of people and groups. Of those, 8,605 were completed. And based on the information developed in those low-level inquiries, agents opened 427 more intensive investigations, it says.

The statistics shed new light on the F.B.I.'s activities in the post-Sept. 11 era, as the bureau's focus has shifted from investigating crimes to trying to detect and disrupt potential criminal and terrorist activity.

It is not clear, though, whether any charges resulted from the inquiries. And because the F.B.I. provided no comparable figures for a period before the rules change, it is impossible to determine whether the numbers represent an increase in investigations.

Still, privacy advocates contend that the large number of assessments that turned up no sign of wrongdoing show that the rules adopted by the Bush administration have created too low a threshold for starting an inquiry. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has left those rules in place.

Michael German, a former F.B.I. agent who is now a policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, argued that the volume of fruitless assessments showed that the Obama administration should tighten the rules.

“These are investigations against completely innocent people that are now bound up within the F.B.I.'s intelligence system forever,” Mr. German said. “Is that the best way for the F.B.I. to use its resources?”

But Valerie E. Caproni, the bureau's general counsel, said the numbers showed that agents were running down any hint of a potential problem — including vigilantly checking out potential leads that might have been ignored before the Sept. 11 attacks.

“Recognize that the F.B.I.'s policy — that I think the American people would support — is that any terrorism lead has to be followed up,” Ms. Caproni said. “That means, on a practical level, that things that 10 years ago might just have been ignored now have to be followed up.”

F.B.I. investigations are controlled by guidelines first put in place by Attorney General Edward H. Levi during the Ford administration, after the disclosure that the bureau had engaged in illegal domestic spying for decades. After the Sept. 11 attacks, those rules were loosened by Attorney General John Ashcroft and then again by Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey.

Some Democrats and civil liberties groups protested the Mukasey guidelines, contending that the new rules could open the door to racial or religious profiling and to fishing expeditions against Americans.

In 2006, The New York Times reported that the National Security Agency had each month been flooding the bureau with thousands of names, phone numbers and e-mail addresses that its surveillance and data-mining programs had deemed suspicious. But frustrated agents found that virtually all of the tips led to dead ends or innocent Americans.

When the Mukasey guidelines went into effect in December 2008, they allowed the F.B.I. to use a new category of investigation called an “assessment.” It permits an agent, “proactively or based on investigative leads,” to scrutinize a person or a group for signs of a criminal or national security threat, according to the F.B.I. manual.

The manual also says agents need “no particular factual predication” about a target to open an assessment, although the basis “cannot be arbitrary or groundless speculation.” And in selecting subjects for such scrutiny, agents are allowed to use ethnicity, religion or speech protected by the First Amendment as a factor — as long as it is not the only one.

An assessment is less intensive than a more traditional “preliminary” inquiry or a “full” investigation, which requires greater reason to suspect wrongdoing but also allows agents to use more intrusive information-gathering techniques, like wiretapping.

Still, in conducting an assessment, agents are allowed to use other techniques — searching databases, interviewing the subjects or people who know them, sending confidential informers to infiltrate an organization, attending a public meeting like a political rally or a religious service, and following and photographing people in public places.

In March 2009, Russ Feingold, then a Democratic senator from Wisconsin, asked the F.B.I. how many assessments it had initiated under the new guidelines and how many regular investigations had been opened based on information developed by those assessments.

In November 2010, the Justice Department sent a classified letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee answering Mr. Feingold's question. This month, it provided an uncensored copy of the same answer to The Times as a result of its Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

F.B.I. officials said in an interview that the statistics represented a snapshot as of late March 2009, so the 11,667 assessment files were generated over a roughly four-month period. But they said they believed that agents had continued to open assessments at roughly the same pace since then.

Some aspects of the statistics are hazy, officials cautioned.

For example, even before the December 2008 changes, the bureau routinely followed up on low-grade tips and leads under different rules. But that activity was not formally tracked as an “assessment” that could be easily counted and compared.

F.B.I. officials also said about 30 percent of the 11,667 assessments were just vague tips — like a report of a suspicious car that included no license plate number. Such tips are entered into its computer system even if there is no way to follow up on them.

Finally, they said, it is impossible to know precisely how many assessments turned up suspicious facts. A single assessment may have spun off more than one higher investigation, and some agents may have neglected to record when such an investigation started as an assessment.

Ms. Caproni also said that even though the F.B.I. manual says agents can open assessments “proactively,” they still must always have a valid reason — like a tip that is not solid enough to justify a more intensive level of investigation but should still be checked out.

But Mr. German, of the A.C.L.U., said that allowing agents to initiate investigations without a factual basis “seems ripe for abuse.” He added, “What they should be doing is working within stricter guidelines that help them focus on real threats rather than spending time chasing shadows.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/27/us/27fbi.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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