A diverse lot from all over the world, they seem to have jobs, go to college, enroll in graduate schools, take vacations, play with their kids, read books, go food-shopping. Hardly any of them ever mention using the Net for sex or drugs, or even encountering either there. There's a wild world out there, just a Web-search away. People curious about the genesis of stories like this have to step back and try to understand how journalism and politics collaborate to produce our social and political agenda, independent of common sense, rationality, or truth. A politician like McCaffrey needs a story like this in the same way that J. Edgar Hoover used to need murderous bank robbers.
Danger means purpose, budgets, publicity.
The Internet is a gold mine for bureaucrats, since few reporters or politicians seem to have a clue what goes on here, and many are eager to trumpet the save-civilization warning of the week. Nonprofit crusaders for decency need these alarms as badly or worse, since they aren't on the government payroll and have to continuously justify their existence. Without stories like this, they'd have to leave the capital and go get real jobs. And even worse, reporters would have to leave their offices and talk to human beings, something that only happens in Washington journalism every four years, when the first wide-eyed scribes hit the snows of New Hampshire and are stunned to learn that the simple folk there are worried about money and jobs. So the system works symbiotically and well, at least for them.