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Bringin' Home the Bacon writes:

Pornography, though prevalent in the modern world, still isn't the sort of thing one expects to see while waiting in traffic behind a cop car. [arstechnica.com] That's especially true at the busiest downtown intersection of a wealthy Chicago suburb like Wheaton, Illinois (and by extension Fapp Circle [google.com]) best known for being the home of an evangelical Christian college once attended by Billy Graham.

A citizen's angry complaint led to an internal forensic examination of the squad car's computer, and "25 pictures depicting nudity and/or graphic sexual activity" were subsequently found in unallocated hard drive space—suggesting that they had been deleted but not actually purged from the disk. This pattern of activity was so extensive that the Burr Ridge forensic analyst wrote, "The sheer volume of information discovered was too voluminous to include in this report. This report is a mere sample of the conduct and violations of Officer T. Sommerfield."

Technology didn't suddenly make porn in the patrol car possible, but it did make it far easier to access. Thanks to the Internet, the distance between idea and action has collapsed almost to nothing. Ruining your life, which used to take serious effort, can now be accomplished with one simple misclick, as with the Connecticut soccer coach who accidentally sent a smartphone video of himself masturbating [arstechnica.com] to several members of his high school girls' soccer team, lost his job, and now faces criminal charges.

Officer Sommerfield's story shows just how the Internet's ease of access to pornography affected someone already suffering from other issues.

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