Earlier this year, I wrote about the case of Robert Emmett, who plead guilty to charges of filming up the skirts of students at his school, St. Andrews Cathedral School in Sydney, and to possession of child abuse materials. Last Thursday, Judge Ian McClintock of the Downing Centre District Court imposed a sentence of two…
One of the interesting questions associated with the rise of mobile technology is this: How long it will it take all of us to fully internalize the awareness that our actions can be recorded almost anywhere, at almost any time? That is a question that celebrities, politicians, and star atheletes have had to consider for…
2015-09-10 Cybertraps for Educators from Frederick Lane The Hawai’i Teacher Standards Board, in collaboration with Educational Testing Service and the Hawai’i campus of the University of Phoenix, convened an “Ethics Summit” to discuss the newly-proposed Model Code of Ethics for Educators. The summit was also designed to highlight the technological changes that contribute to ethical…
Laws prohibiting the possession, production, and distribution of child pornography are of surprisingly recent origin in the United States. It was not until 1982 that the United States Supreme Court unanimously ruled that sexually explicit images of persons under the age of 18 are not entitled to legal protection under the First Amendment. See New…
Joke or threat? That’s the question raised by an Arizona high school student’s ill-advised, reckless, fooolish Snapchat post showing a crowded hallway in the Sierra Linda High School in Phoenix. The male student captioned his photo “Planning the school shooting,” followed by three smiley faces. A 16-year-old student in Northglenn High School in Colorado named…
In April, Charles Clay Dawson, a teacher at Wanette Public Schools in Pottawatomie County, was charged with soliciting nude photos from two female students, one aged 16 and the other aged 15. According to the investigative report, the 43-year-old Dawson solicited the photos from the students using standard text messaging and the KIK messaging app.…
Earlier this summer, I was interviewed by by Becky Yerak (@beckyyerak), the Business Reporter for the Chicago Tribune, about a patent issued to Allstate Insurance Company under the innocuous-sounding name “Motor Vehicle Operating Data Collection Analysis.” As I wrote at the time, the patent raises significant privacy issues. If you want to get the most…
In a brief, one-sentence order, the United States Supreme Court rejected a request by a Kentucky county clerk to stay a U.S. District Court ruling that ordered her to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. In the months following the Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, which held that same-sex couples have a constitutional…
For several weeks over the course of the early summer, former Oklahoma teacher Jennifer Caswell and former Utah teacher Brianne Altice waited anxiously to find out what their punishment would be after entering guilty pleas to charges of sex with underage students. Their wait is now over. Earlier this spring, I wrote about Caswell’s case…
It has been difficult to concentrate today, following the horrifying news that 24-year-old reporter Alison Parker and her 27-year-old cameraman, Adam Ward, were assassinated on live television by a disgruntled former employee of WDB7, the local Roanoke news station for which they worked. It has been difficult to concentrate because I have worked as a…
