Scott Schermerhorn, 31, a physical education teacher and boys’ golf coach at Clarksville High School in Indiana was arrested and suspended on April 16, when police accused him of soliciting nude photos from underage students at the school. In February, a 15 or 16-year-old girl (accounts differ) told a trusted adult friend that she had…
[Updated] A judge in the Auckland District Court will soon decide the fate of a New Zealand teacher accused of watching pornography on a school-issued computer and masturbating in an empty classroom. The report of the teacher’s alleged misbehavior came from a student who said that he had stopped by the classroom to discuss his…
If love means never having to admit you posted nude photos of your partner on an adult Web site, then romance has taken quite a hit in the Internet era. Unfortunately, the explosion of digital cameras, smartphones with cameras, and laptops with Web cams has resulted in an explosion of homemade pornography. (The “democratization of…
The world’s leading for-profit geneaology company, Ancestry.com, was founded in Provo, Utah in 1983. Thirteen years later, an 18-year-old woman named Angie Dodge was sexually assaulted and murdered in Idaho Falls, Idaho. Nearly two decades after her death, a twisting set of circumstances and rapidly-evolving technology have linked those two events in ways that have…
A couple of weeks ago, I was interviewed by writer Lauren Le Vine for a piece that she was doing on the history of naked breasts on American television. The resulting article was published by Refinery29 a week ago on April 30, 2015. Le Vine does a good job of reviewing the complicated history of…
As I discussed in detail in Cybertraps for the Young, one of the most disturbing aspects of the digital revolution is that it has empowered children to commit crimes that once were exclusively the domain of adults. There is no better example than the fact that every single day, thousands of children around the globe…
Reporter Alyssa Gambla (@AlyssaGambla) had an interesting report on Fox 32’s 9 & 10 News in northern Michigan last night. Entitled “Catching a Sex Offender,” Gambla presented a behind-the-scenes look at the resources deployed by the Charlevoix County Sheriff’s Department. One of the people she interviewed was Deputy Bill Church, who reminded people that when…
The Eleventh Circuit Federal Court of Appeals, which encompasses the states of Florida, Georgia, and Alabama, ruled Monday that police do not need to get a search warrant in order to obtain cell phone tower data from cellular providers during a criminal investigation. The 9-2 en banc decision in United States v. Davis overturned an…
This is not, strictly speaking, The Greatest Story Ever Told about computer forensics, but it is interesting nonetheless. Last month, the famous Shroud of Turin was put on public display for the first time in the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Turin, Italy. (If you are interested in seeing it in person, there’s…
From 1873 to his death in 1915, Anthony Comstock was one of the most powerful cultural arbiters in the United States. As Special Agent for the United States Postal Services and Secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, Comstock was charged with enforcing anti-obscenity and anti-indency laws for which he lobbied…
