A cautionary tale about Facebook, porn, extortion and punishment

Teenage guy poses as a girl online, collects nude photos of dozens of male, underage classmates. He blackmails some of them into having sex with him. Police bust him for a bomb threat and find his photos, etc. Sounds simple at first: he's up against nearly 300 years in jail, case closed, right? Wrong.

It will be awhile before we know how many of these victimized teens end up being prosecuted too. Clearly there's one bad guy and lots of victims, but the law is not completely on the victims' side, unfortunately.

The number of teens being prosecuted as sex offenders for trading nude photos of themselves with other kids is skyrocketing. In a better world, the law would discriminate between a little skin among friends and child porn, but it doesn't yet. Some teens have even been prosecuted for statutory rape for simply having consensual sex with their teen friends. Peeing in public is even a sex offense now. We're deep in Crazy Land here.

Sex offender penalties are awful and they are apparently forever, so if you have any photos of the naughty bits belonging to you or your friends, do yourself a big favor and delete them before they ruin your life. And ... of course ... never send racy photos of yourself to anybody. Never. Your friends today could be your enemies tomorrow, and photos on the Internet never die. Ever.

Plus you won't have encrypted them, so the NSA and all the sysadmins at your ISP and at school and at work will all have a chance to scoop your photos up in transit. Gmail and other webmail systems will save them (possibly forever). And as always, lots of the apparently teenage girls you may meet online are actually boys, sex offenders or FBI agents, so it really pays to be paranoid.