Remember Julie Amero? Well, The Julie Group may have to start evaluating another project.
This time, the story is in Florida — and at a school that’s not too far from our own Sunbelt headquarters.
A school cop at Gulf Middle School, John Nohejl, created a MySpace page to educate kids about safety (with the support of the school). Well, as Wired puts it:
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.
From press reports, the adult site linked seems to have been Amateur Match Free Sex, an Adult Friend Finder type of site. It’s well known to anyone on MySpace that affiliates of these types of outfits have been known to do bad things on MySpace (AFF recently settled with the FTC for such behavior). It could have even been a link in the comment of a Friend.
Oh, and after this broke, it was found that the school’s site itself had a link to gay porn. The principal is “outraged”. As Kevin Poulsen at Wired points out, does that mean he gets criminally investigated as well?
This is silly. To criminally investigate an officer because three clicks away from his MySpace page there’s a link to an adult website? (Incidentally, the principal is Stan Trapp and a list of school staff member emails is here.)
At least one thing is heartening — the good folks over at the Florida Cybercrimes unit have their own MySpace page. They may quickly see how ludicrious this whole thing is.
Alex Eckelberry