As one professor put it, what the New York Law School response demonstrated was “just how abstracted faculty can be from the real world.”

Often overlooked in the ongoing debate about possession of pornography—one of the more inflammatory contemporary legal issues—are the crucial differences between adult and child pornography. Possession of child porn is both a federal and, in New York, a state crime. The images lack First Amendment protection because their creation requires a criminal act, the abuse of a child.

“Possession is where you see very clearly the difference between obscenity laws and child-pornography laws,” explains Amy Adler, a professor at NYU School of Law and a specialist on child-porn laws. “In obscenity laws, the rationale for banning possession of images is thought control, and that’s a First Amendment violation. In child-pornography law, the thinking is that it has nothing to do with First Amendment thought control and everything to do with the fact that child pornography is created through violating a child. We have to ban the pictures themselves because they result from a crime. Someone, somewhere has to have committed a crime.”

The first thing the FBI’s Crimes Against Children Unit will tell you is that child porn is not Lolita. Or Sally Mann. “It’s not just little children playing naked or little girls in their underwear,” says Belisa Vranich, a clinical psychologist who has worked with FBI child-porn experts. “A lot of it is extremely violent, and the images show children obviously in a terrific amount of pain. Because it involves children, the sexual acts recorded are always rape. Some of the victims appear to be unconscious; a lot of them are drugged and bound. It’s not so much sexual as it is extremely violent.”

The FBI’s Austin Berglas adds: “People think this is American Beauty–type stuff. It’s not. It’s violent crime.”

Child porn, unlike adult porn, is rarely for sale on the Internet. In its 1984 Child Protection Act, Congress recognized that since much of the material isn’t produced for commercial purposes, its distribution and production should be illegal regardless of no intent to sell. Nowadays, putting up your credit-card information on the Internet for child porn would be the equivalent—as the Who’s Pete Townshend learned in January and Penn’s Paul Mosher realized in April—of holding out your hands to be cuffed. But to law enforcement, the fact that these images are disseminated for free, by the disturbed cottage industry of fathers, stepfathers, uncles, and boyfriends who produce most of them in their bedrooms, living rooms, or garages, is no excuse to leave them up. According to Vranich, the sheer volume of porn out there creates online communities where “you think what you’re doing is completely normal.”

Law enforcement targets the end user—even though no money is changing hands—in order to discourage production of the images.

“The idea is that this is an underground industry and we have to go after the end users because it’s so difficult to find the original perpetrators,” explains Adler. “If we punish enough end users, and enough people are scared to go to jail, the argument is, no one will create the images.”

Law enforcement’s commitment is a response to the increased accessibility of child porn on the Internet. And, experts say, the sheer quantity of child porn available on the Internet has raised viewers’ thresholds. Marianna Novielli, a Secret Service agent with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, explains that cases involving infants have become more and more frequent in the past six years. “The belief is that it’s just not exciting enough to have a child victim; it’s even more stimulating to have a younger victim, an infant, even more taboo.”

According to Berglas, most active viewers of child porn hoard and trade images like baseball cards. With his 100,000 images, Samuels was certainly an obsessive, but he’s by no means alone. “A lot of the computers we find and seize have pictures catalogued under headings like ‘Girls 12 and Under’ or ‘Under 10 Boys,’ ” Berglas says. “Often the series are labeled by name and collectors can ask each other, ‘Hey, does anybody have the Linda series? Does anybody have the Peg series?’”

On the afternoon of Sunday, June 2, 2002, Dorothea Perry arrived at New York Law School without the slightest inkling that she was about to trigger a chain of events that would lead to Samuels’s arrest and, she contends, her own eventual firing. A 36-year-old computer technician who worked on the school’s IT help desk, Perry had received a message the previous Friday that Samuels thought his computer had a virus. Around 2:30 p.m., she entered the professor’s neat, orderly office on Worth Street, with its odd screen of stacked Coca-Cola cans Samuels had erected against his window—which she later concluded had been put up to prevent people across the street from seeing in—and sat down to reinstall an antivirus program. She restarted the computer, but the machine kept dumping memory and giving her what she called “the blue screen of death.” After about two hours, she left a note saying she had worked on the machine unsuccessfully, and that someone would come in to make another attempt the following morning. Then she left a message on the voice-mail of her colleague Rob Gross, asking him to see if he could solve the problem.

The following day, Gross tried and failed. Following the guidelines of their company, Collegis, a subcontractor to the law school for all IT-related matters, Perry and Gross decided to give the professor a new machine while they worked on his. This meant they had to back up his files on the school’s network in order to later transfer them to the new machine, something Gross had done hundreds of times in similar cases. Noticing a folder labeled “My Music,” Rob thought, This is something he might want. He clicked on an imbedded folder labeled “Nime2” and photographs popped up on the screen. There were two dozen of them, and they showed girls, maybe 8 or 9 years old, who seemed to be “trying to look sexy.” Not, Rob thought, your average family photographs.

“Oh, my God, Dorothea,” he called across the office. “Come take a look at this.”

Perry walked over to his cubicle and peered over his shoulder. She noticed the girls had no pubic hair. They were flat-chested. She had never seen images of child porn, but as a single mother with an 8-year-old boy, who had also helped raise her younger sisters, she felt certain that these were pornographic images of children. She reported them to Collegis’s executive director, Margaret Perley, who agreed to alert the associate dean for finance and administration, Fred DeJohn, her liaison at the school.