Pornographic Pictures of Texas Probation Officer Karla Escobar

Once something is posted on the web, there's chance that it will come back to haunt you, even years later.

Case in point, Texas Probation Officer Karla Escobar. After posting some explicit pictures for pay on a porn website, she later moved on to a more respectable calling. It's years later, but she can't remove the images because she doesn't own the website or the images.

Her job is now in danger.

The website is actually legal, but many employers (especially in government and teaching positions) have a morality clause built into the contract. Even though she's not engaging in the activity now, it can still cost her the job.

The real question is, do they really care about morality or simply the appearance of morality. I'd argue for the appearance of morality because the clause is in place to protect institutions from a PR nightmare.

The lines between our personal lives, our past and our jobs have begun to blur since the advent of the internet. But employer policing of our lives outside our jobs isn't a new idea, just one that's been reborn.

When Henry Ford was first churning out cars, he actually had a division called the Sociological Department. The members of this department investigated employees by finding out their social habits and even scrutinizing their homes. They even tracked the employees spending and saving habits.

We had fallen away from that business model somewhat, separating business lives from private lives, but now an employer can do everything that Ford did, and more.

But how much should a naked picture matter? Private lives are on display, from credit reports to private birthday party pics posted by friends. What she did was legal, like this poor teacher in Millersville University in Millersville, Pa.,

Her photo, preserved at the "Wired Campus" blog of the Chronicle of Higher Education, turns out to be surprisingly innocuous. In a head shot snapped at a costume party, Ms. Snyder, with a pirate's hat perched atop her head, sips from a large plastic cup whose contents cannot be seen. When posting the photo, she fatefully captioned her self-portrait "drunken pirate," though whether she was serious can't be determined by looking at the photo.

Millersville University, in a motion asking the court to dismiss the case, contends that Ms. Snyder's student teaching had been unsatisfactory for many reasons. But it affirms that she was dismissed and barred from re-entering the school shortly after the high school staff discovered her MySpace photograph. The university backed the school authorities' contentions that her posting was "unprofessional" and might "promote under-age drinking." It also cited a passage in the teacher's handbook that said staff members are "to be well-groomed and appropriately dressed." Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/business/30digi.html?pagewanted=print

Well-groomed and appropriately dressed? When? At work or while at a costume party? It seems that they were already unhappy with Synder and simply used the picture as a thin excuse.

Something that someone does outside of work is not automatically considered a problem until the individual's work identity is connected with their personal identity. Because there was a news story about it, that's exactly what happened in Karla Escobar's case.

This situation has come up before with teachers but not necessarily with a competent government employee. The people she deals with are all adults, not underage kids.

Even stranger, Escobar claims that her immediate superiors knew about the naughty site. She says that she told her interviewer when she went for the position that the pictures were out there.

They hired her anyway.

The head of her department, though, claims that he didn't know, and although she's a good worker, she's currently on administrative leave. Since she was on pregnancy leave anyway, it's a bit of a moot point. He says the matter is "under investigation."

I have no idea what that means, except that they haven't decided what to do, or they'd like to have her back but they can't, because of the media hounding.