This commentary from Wired News columnist Regina Lynn caught my attention (See also this commentary from Mark Rasch of Security Focus). Basically, a substitute teacher from Connecticut is going to jail for 40 years because she was surfing the net on a classroom computer, and thanks to an attack of spyware, there were hardcore porn popups, and some of the kids saw them because their parents heard about it and demanded swift and terrible retrobution.
I’ll get to my main point in a second, but let’s start with this basic thought. The woman in question was a substitute teacher. In order to get on the computer in question, she had to use someone elses credentials, because substitutes were not given usernames or passwords to log onto the computers. While most spyware gets onto computers without any user interaction, you usually have to go to a website that will download it onto your computer (so-called drive-by spyware). How do we know that the other teacher who logged her onto the computer wasn’t visiting inappropriate websites that could have put that spyware on the computer? You would think people would know better, but from working in the IT field for a while now, people are still dumb enough to surf to inappropriate sites with their work computers, even though internet usage is monitored in most places. If that was the case, this woman has suffered an even bigger injustice for the fact that it wasn’t even her fault the popups were on there in the first place.
My main point, however, is this. We live in a society that is so sex-phobic and so consumed with “protecting the children” (when I hear that phrase, I always think of Helen Lovejoy from The Simpsons) that we make any sort of incident involving sex and children into this massive black-and-white, right-and-wrong scandal that we fail to see the reality of things clearly. In this case, this poor woman might have broken the letter of the law, but not the spirit of it. Yes, the kids accidentally saw porn, but both commentaries make note of statistics that show that over 40% of kids accidentally see porn at some point. It happens. This woman may have been dumb for surfing personal stuff in the classroom, but she shouldn’t be going to jail for 40 years because of some popups. By all accounts, she appears to have tried to shield the children from the graphic content, although it would have been easier to just shut down the comptuer and call it a day. Administrators didn’t seem to think it was an issue, it was only a small set of parents (isn’t it always?) that turned this into a capital case that their children were irrevicably ruined by seeing this stuff for a minute or two.
Beyond all of this, cases like this take time and resources from what these laws are meant to protect against. While authorities ran around like chickens sans heads convicting a woman who is guilty of little more than checking her email when she shouldn’t have, there are thousands of real internet preditors who are doing their best to persuade impressionable kids to meet them and really, really fuck up their lives. Where are the priorities, people?
By the way, this isn’t just happening to teachers. This young man was on his way to being a college football star when the same letter of the law came and threw him in jail mercilessly. In his case, even the prosecutor and the victim think that he shouldn’t be in jail.
I would hope that at some point, we could have an honest and fruitful debate about these sorts of cases and why the spirit of the law needs to prevail. We have examples of people who did some dumb stuff and are now serving (or about to serve) major time because some people can’t realize that life isn’t always black-or-white
Well said. And you used “consumed,” “sans,” and made reference to The Simpsons. You are my hero.