Linkcrime...

At item at the Wired Blog Network reports that an on-campus police officer at a middle school in Florida is facing a criminal investigation because one of the people on the officer's MySpace friends list has a link on their page to a porn site.

Or, 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."

So dig it: the officer's being investigated not because of porn on his profile (none there) or a link to a porn site (there wasn't one), but because one of the people on his friends list had a link to a porn site. (And lest anyone raise an eyebrow as to why an on-campus cop would want a MySpace account, it turns out the account was set up late last year with the school's and the police department's support, "in a laudable bid to communicate with students where they live.")

So what's the officer being investigated for? Making adult content  available to underage children.

This is, of course, principally different from the situation with the middle school's own official site, which contained a direct link to a porn site whose web address used to belong to what the article describes as "a legitimate educational site." Since this little gaffe was discovered, the school has taken its page offline and the principal has made every kind of sound of outrage, but nobody seems to be the subject of a criminal investigation.

This kind of idiocy needs to be exposed to the bright light of public scrutiny, else all of us are going to be playing the "n degrees of linkcrime" game real soon now.

Cheers...