This Week in Backspin: Crime and Punishment and Technology

Surely this can't be the end of it?! First of all, they tried the wrong person. And second, the punishment is so far out of line. What a travesty.

There is plenty to be outraged about in the Amero case:

1. What is the prosecutor trying to accomplish by making a mountain out of a molehill?
2. Why does the court - in the person of the judge - not throw the whole mess out as frivolous and a waste of everyone's time and money?
3. Why did management not insist that the IT folks do something to prevent this sort of thing?
4. Why did the IT folks not do something anyway?
5. Why did management and IT provide sufficient training to allow the teachers to deal with these situations (1/2 day would help)?
6. Why would a teacher or anyone else these days allow themselves to be so uninformed that they are flummoxed by a "surprise" porn site?
7. Why would a 14 year old be so careless - or that much of a wiseacre - to stumble on an inappropriate site? Or more to the point why would they be allowed to behave that way?

I suppose that there is really no way to outlaw stupidity in any form, inexperience will always be with us, and there is little to be done about youthful indiscretions. In this case there is a lot of all three. The bottom line is that you are right - this case should not be a matter for the courts.

Both the prosecutor and the judge in this case have already been promoted within the system and the victim will never be able to clear her name. Until dirtbags in the judical system and other positions of "authority", stop being rewarded for destroying people lives, we'll have to expect only an increase in these types of Nazi witch hunts. Just ask anyone with darker skin and a beard about Nazi witch hunts by those in positions of "authority".

When this problem moves to -- (Hypothetically) I have a home WiFi network that I don't secure, my neighbor also does. As a normal user -- when I go out to my deck and open my laptop and it 'discovers' the strongest signal which just happens to be the neighbors and not mine. Does this constitute an invasion?