LIBBY COPELAND WASHINGTON POST STAFF WRITER

Tuesday, August 8, 2000 ; Page C01

"I'm not doing anything wrong, believe me," she'd said for weeks. But he didn't buy it.

He'd read her e-mail, listened in on her phone conversations. He wanted the chats, too. Fifty bucks bought him software to slip into the family computer and secretly record his wife's every move, like a leprechaun crouching amid the circuit boards with a tiny camera.

So, it's 5 a.m., she's sleeping upstairs, he ventures onto the computer. Starts up the new software and finds a series of black-and-white snapshots taken of the screen while she was online. She calls herself "rita_neb" and her every come-on, every flirtation, every misspelling, is saved. The correspondent is some guy elsewhere in Nebraska and the talk is not just flirting but, you know, graphic--the things she'll do to him and what he'll do to her--and Greg Young begins to cry.

This is not his Rita, he thinks, knowing it is. But he doesn't confront her, not then. He secretes the spy back into the computer and leaves for work.

For a month he watches her, dropping hints here and there that suggest he knows something, telling her he just has a "feeling."

For the longest time, she can't figure out how he knows so much. By the time she does, well, it really doesn't matter. The marriage is over.

This story is proof that chat rooms are not like spoken-word conversations, though they're informal and instant and lend themselves to impulsive declarations--no, chat rooms are not ephemeral like the breath and vibration that comes from our mouths and fades on the air.

This is a cautionary story about the permanence of the online word.

It's somewhat like the flap over Carnivore, the software that allows the FBI to monitor e-mail--except the software we're talking about is arguably more menacing. Because it's cheap. Because its legality has not been questioned. Because it can be sitting on your own computer, without your knowledge, installed by anyone with access to your world. And because it has become the instrument for the most insecure of people--jealous lovers.

Greg Young discovered it after 22 years of marriage to Rita Young, and now the two are nearing a painful divorce settlement. Rita, 46, has found her own place in Beatrice, Neb. Greg, also 46, takes care of their two sons in Grand Island, Neb., and tells people about this software he has discovered that will monitor your spouse online.

"If you can't get the truth, you gotta do something," he says.

Spector is made by a company based in Vero Beach, Fla., and Young happened to find it in his online searches. He could have found a host of other software to do the same thing. WinWhatWhere Investigator, Desktop Surveillance, Cyber Snoop, 007 Stealth Activity Monitor. There are tens of companies that publish computer monitoring software for the home, many of which also make a similar product for the workplace.

Companies like Spectorsoft, which makes Spector, intended their home versions for parents concerned over their children's online adventures. But six months after Spector was launched in early 1999, a curious thing happened: A wronged fiancee e-mailed to say Thank you, Spector! for nabbing her significant other having cybersex.

Perhaps we should not be surprised that Spector easily found its way to a population of cyber-cuckolds. Its weapon is omniscience: Operating like a quick-clicking camera, it takes a picture every few seconds of whatever is on the screen. The pictures play back in slide-show fashion, like a herky-jerky '20s film.

Spector also can record every raw keystroke that the user types, every syllable and space, even if the person immediately deletes them. Want to find your husband's password so you can root around in his e-mail? This will do.

After that first letter to Spectorsoft, the testimonials kept coming, and the fledgling company figured it had tapped a vein of gold. It started posting banner ads and counting the traffic.

"The 'Spouse cheating? Find out with this' was getting four times the click-through rate that the other ads were getting," says Doug Fowler, the company's president. Fowler claims it's selling about 10 times what it was a year ago--more than 7,000 sales overall. Encouraged by Spector's success, the company recently released a new program, eBlaster, that makes remote snooping possible. The snooper needs access to the subject's PC just once, to install the software. After that, eBlaster automatically e-mails reports of everything that's done on the computer.

Fowler's experience is not unique. So far, Spectorsoft is one of the few to actively target spouses for its home product, but at least seven other companies that make home monitoring software have experienced the phenomenon. The creator of one monitoring product intended to protect children, called Prudence, even stopped promoting his software in part because he discovered people were using it to watch their husbands and wives. On sites devoted to discussing adultery, message boards flurry with recommendations for this or that brand. Private investigators use the software in adultery cases.

"We have a whole network of private investigators that resell Desktop Surveillance personal edition, and I'd say probably 95 percent of the clientele that purchase this product from them are suspecting spouses," says Julie Allen, director of product development for Tech Assist, a Clearwater, Fla., company that distributes Desktop. "Then they call you back hysterically crying and in need of psychological counseling."

Like other software of its kind, Spector can be installed overtly or in stealth mode, and like other companies, Spectorsoft's official line is that consumers should let their spouses and children know they're installing it. But in big, multicolored letters, the company's Web site proposes something else: "Secretly record everything your spouse, children & employees do online."

It is the secrecy that brings up legal questions. Whether this software violates state or federal wiretapping laws is simply not clear. Spokesmen for the Maryland and Virginia attorneys general, as well as for the U.S. Justice Department, have never seen cases involving the software. Internet lawyers have not seen any suits.

"It's not wiretapping in any traditional sense," says Harvey Silverglate, a criminal defense and civil liberties lawyer in Massachusetts. "The question does become whether wiretapping laws can be stretched to cover this."

The stretch may be difficult, as one case in Maryland about five years ago suggests. Bryan Renehan, a divorce lawyer in Gaithersburg, persuaded a judge to admit the documents his client obtained by installing a homemade keystroke monitor to record his wife. By admitting the evidence, Renehan says, the judge effectively ruled that the monitoring did not amount to a wiretap.

As much as the clandestine nature of such programs worries privacy experts and infuriates those who've been spied on, it is also a selling point. It's the secrecy that let Greg Young know his wife was going to meet a man in Missouri he says she met over the Internet. That was the final straw. Now, he waits for a judge to settle the terms of his divorce. Now, Rita Young gets a call from a reporter who wants to know what she thinks of this software.

She doesn't have much to say. In single syllables, she confirms the basic outline of her estranged husband's account. Yes, she chatted quite a lot. No, she doesn't deny she flirted. She never cheated, though, she says, and the man she went to meet in Missouri was a friend.

So, what do you think of the technology that infiltrates your home, that makes chat rooms so enticing, that makes temptation so immediate? Do you ever wish the Internet hadn't entered your life?

"Yes I do," Rita Young says, and does not elaborate.

Online affairs aren't new. The promise of chat rooms has always been easy anonymity and instantaneous interaction--a potent brew that fosters intimacy with strangers.

But scratch the explanation. It's the stories themselves that illustrate how technology taps a needy, often wretched side of humanity. They are stories of people who ignore their young children for hours while they hole themselves up in chat rooms, people who leave their families for lovers they've never met.

"The sad thing is that more than half the times we catch the person meeting someone they met on the Internet for the first time, it wasn't what they expected," says Anthony DeLorenzo, who captures business for his New Jersey-based investigation agency from his support group site, Infidelity.com. Much of DeLorenzo's work is Internet-related, and he installs home monitoring software in two to three cases a week. When the chats progress to meetings, he follows them. He tells of watching newly introduced online lovers sitting awkwardly beside each other at a bar, not even speaking; of watching one man arrive for the time-of-his-life "threesome" to be greeted by people considerably older than he expected.

"You can see the guy had no idea what he was going into," DeLorenzo says.

Sure, there are happy endings. Surely somewhere there's a happy couple who met in a barbecue discussion room, commiserated first over pork recipes and then over loneliness, exchanged pictures and forged a lifelong bond. Somewhere.

But you don't hear those stories. You hear the sordid ones. You witness how innocent chat rooms reek of sex talk, especially at night. You note the desperation of the come-ons. ("I'm 36-26-34.") You see how easy it is to--what's that word the experts use?--disinhibit. (So what if we play a little virtual spin the bottle? No one even knows who we are.)

For a Canadian named John, who is still monitoring his wife, the suspicion began because of the time his wife was spending on the computer, plus her frequent evenings out. He hired a private investigator, installed monitoring software, and last time she met with an alleged paramour, John watched them from the restaurant next door.

It's no wonder people grow wary when their loved ones close the office door. Indeed, some sites actually seem designed to induce paranoia. Cheating-Husbands.com asks: "Did you know that your hubby could be married ONLINE? There are many online chapels he and his cyber mistress could tie the knot that could make the bond between them even stronger." From that point, perhaps it's not much of a leap to buying a $60 Deluxe Infidelity Network Kit or a $500 device you can install in your spouse's car to record all comings and goings.

Fowler says the "really sad cases" are the few whose suspicions are unfounded. They find nothing at home but call the company back, unconvinced and desperate, to ask how they can sneak Spector onto a spouse's work computer. (Sorry. No dice.)

Even Greg Young admits, "You do kind of get consumed with [snooping] . . . It's kind of like an addiction."

But think about it.

Is it cheating if it never gets physical? Say it's just a bit of hot back-and-forth. Say she calls herself cute-chick-something and he calls himself brawny-guy-something-else and they get together in a private chat room and she types, like one woman caught by Spector, "i would love to kiss your neck, your chest," or, like another caught by WinWhatWhere's Investigator, "i want to rock your world tonight."

Does it count?

Now factor this in: 31 percent of people considered "Internet-addicted" (a small minority) and 13 percent of all other Internet users progress from cyber flirtations to actual sex, according to a 1999 study of 18,000 people conducted by David Greenfield, who heads the Center for Internet Studies in West Hartford, Conn. What if you're like the woman who calls herself "Sharie," who told a message board on Infidelity.com that "I just finished reading Spec[tor] and found out that my husband asked a 24 yr old (He's 39), to go out for an ice cream with him."

Now is it okay to intervene?

Is whatever you find out this way ultimately worth knowing? What if the flirting is just a temporary thing, a bit of harmless stir-craziness that's better ignored? Do you really want to know what that stranger you call your husband is doing for hours in the computer room? Do you really want to know why your wife minimizes the screen each time you walk past? If you're considering buying this software, is your relationship already over?

On the other hand, what if the not knowing would tear you apart?

There's a woman in San Antonio who is trying to patch things up with her husband, and she doesn't want him to know she's being interviewed. But she says her spouse of 15 years would spend hours in fishing chat rooms and she thought, "How many hours a day can you discuss fishing?"

Then she bought some monitoring software and she figured it out--the private rooms, the sexy talk. She warned him but he returned to it, time and again, "like a giant magnet drawing him back there." One day, after watching him flirt one more time, she just took a hammer to the computer and whaled away.

"The monitor went first," she says. "The adrenaline was going so fast I didn't even turn it off. I mean sparks were flying out the back." Then: the keyboard, the glass-and-walnut desk, the color printer.

He watched in horror.

So does this woman regret the breach of privacy?

"I feel that you deserve to know if you're being lied to."

Articles appear as they were originally printed in The Washington Post and may not include subsequent corrections.

GLOBALSPIN WILL NOT HAVE AN ISSUE NEXT WEEK. WE’RE GOING ON A SECRET MISSION. SEE YOU IN OCTOBER.