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Law enfarcement

From School Cop Investigated for Porn Link on Friend’s MySpace Profile — Updated:

  as the St. Peterburg Times puts it, “kids could navigate from Officer John’s page on the social networking site to ‘Amateur Match Free Sex’ in just three clicks.”
  You’re reading correctly. Gulf Middle School resource officer John Nohejl didn’t have porn on his MySpace profile, and he didn’t link to porn. But one of the 170-odd people on his friends list, which seems mostly populated by students at his school, had a link to a legal adult site. Now the New Port Richey Police Department and the Florida attorney general’s elite cyber crimes unit are investigating him for making adult content available to underage children.

Read on. It doesn’t get better.

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Doc Searls

4 responses to “Law enfarcement”

  1. Badger Gravling Avatar
    Badger Gravling

    Just how many idiotic prosecutions by people completely ill informed about the internet will there be before laws are changed to protect innocent people?

    Reply
  2. Mike Warot Avatar
    Mike Warot

    Changing the law won’t protect anyone against stupidity. Google will get you to almost anywhere in the net in a few clicks… they could have been killed early on by a single LDOS (Legal Denial Of Service) attack when they were young.

    The RIAA contiues to try to use LDOS to prop up their failing business model.

    Hey… I like my new acronym… 😉

    Reply
  3. Badger Gravling Avatar
    Badger Gravling

    I should have probably explained my point a little better. The laws need to recognise that, for example, a substitute teacher encountering a spyware-infested PC filled with adult pop-ups is not peddling anything to pupils – and that a police officer can’t control the links that someone puts on a linked profile.

    If I link to Google, and someone can then do an image search and find something adult, should that make me liable in any way?

    What scares me is how many ‘elite’ cyber crime units seem to either be completely clueless about how the internet works – or forced into appearing that way by their superiors or the current legal framework.

    Reply
  4. Karoli Avatar
    Karoli

    What scares ME is that this officer was never alerted directly until he was already under investigation, because some hysterical parent called in an anonymous ‘tip’ to the newspaper instead of simply going to the principal and the officer and asking about it.

    The ignorance and fear-mongering astounds me.

    Reply

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