Substitute teacher's porn conviction sparks tech debate

[Ian David]

By John Christoffersen, Associated Press Writer | February 13, 2007

WINDHAM, Conn. --Until recently, Julie Amero lived the quiet life of a small-town substitute teacher in eastern Connecticut. She can't believe that the events of one awful day at work could send her to prison for 40 years.

"I'm scared," said Amero, a 40-year-old Windham resident with no prior criminal record. "I'm just beside myself for something I didn't do."

Amero was convicted in January of exposing students to pornography on her classroom computer. While prosecutors insist she is guilty, some experts believe that the lewd images were caused by unseen spyware and adware programs, which critics call one of the top scourges of the Internet.

Amero, who claims to have little experience with computers, has become a cause celebre for technology experts around the country who say she is the victim of a miscarriage of justice that could happen to anyone.

<snip>

Amero says she chased the students away and started class. But later, she said she noticed pornographic images popping up on the computer screen by themselves. She tried to click the images off, but they kept returning.

Amero, who calls pornography exploitative, says she was under strict orders not to shut the computer off. "I did everything I possibly could to keep them from seeing anything," she said.

More:
http://www.boston.com/news/education/k_12/articles/2007/02/13/substitute_teachers_porn_conviction_sparks_tech_debate/?rss_id=Boston.com+%2F+News

[proud2BlibKansan]

1. OMG

That is horrible. I wonder if the kids put something on that computer?

[NEOBuckeye]

2. She shouldn't be punished for something like spam

It's one thing if she deliberately exposed her students to porn. It's another matter entirely if it was the result of malware and popups, all too easy to come by nowadays.

Hope she is able to find an outstanding lawyer.

[donco6]

3. This is crazy.

Who HASN'T had this happen?

I was working with a kid once who wanted to go to Harvard. Stupidly I typed, www.harvard.com, and up came not only one site, but about 100. popopopopopopopopop. I turned off the monitor, but I'm sure the kid had to have seen something.

And really, how much harm does a kid really come to if he/she happens to accidently see a picture of someone "doing the dirty"? Like you're going to be scarred for life? What?

And FINALLY, federal law requires filters on computers that kids can access. Where was that?

[proud2BlibKansan]

16. One of my special ed kids last year

googled 'kama sutra' and came up with some very graphic images. Fortunately I was sitting right next to her and managed to turn off the computer right away. When I called our tech people to report it, they said they update their blocker all the time but can't possibly guarantee that no porn can be googled from a district computer.

[donco6]

17. Yes, it's impossible.

There's some statistic that thousands of porn sites are created every day. Even with a great filter service, they can't possibly keep up. And then you've got all the grey areas to worry about - such as kama sutra. I mean, for a HS kid, probably not, but what about the public library? It just gets crazy trying to sort out "breast" as in "breast cancer" and "breast" as in "naked jiggling".

[proud2BlibKansan]

18. or turkey breast

A couple years ago, one of my kids wanted to do a research paper on Evil Knievel. He had to change his topic since our school computers wouldn't let him use 'evil' in a search.

[donco6]

19. Ha! The law of unintended consequences.

That's a new one.

I had the breast cancer one come up because one of my students' mom had cancer. We were able to open up very specific web sites for her. But everything else was clamped tight.

[immoderate]

22. Joke's on you -- it's EVEL Knievel!

--IMM

[proud2BlibKansan]

27. I know - we tried both spellings

I even tried it again the other day. Still blocks both evil and evel. But it brings up porn when we search 'kama sutra'. LOL

[immoderate]

33. It's a cuel world!

I left the school system in '95, before the net was all over. I sometimes think of going back, and I teach applications and programming as well as math. I am afraid of these "traps." :scared:

--IMM

[JerseygirlCT]

31. That's what I'm wondering. Who's in charge of those machines

at the school?

Why aren't they better protected?

poor woman.

[Missy M]

4. That poor teacher,,,

how can they possibly send her to prison. I once searched for hairstyles and porn sites popped up. No matter what I did I couldn't get out of them. My sympathies are with her and hope everything turns out OK.

[Ezlivin]

5. What if the spyware/adware had steered her to a "sensitive" gov't website?

Would she be in Gitmo right now?

That is what frightens me. Porn is one thing, but being accused of "aiding and abetting" the enemy by "cracking" a sensitive site is a whole different level of grief.

Technology means living with unintended consequences.

[Ian David]

7. She's going to do more time than Scooter Libby will when he's convicted. n/t

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

6. I find it hard to believe...

that she would have to worry about jail if there weren't a significant number of witch hunters out there who would like to see people like her in jail.

We'll see if any show up in this thread.

[piesRsquare]

8. FORTY YEARS???

Good God Almighty--FORTY YEARS?!

RAPISTS serve less time! Child molesters, embezzlers, wife/child beaters--all serve less time! This is insane!

Teachers get treated like absolute shit in this country!

[Ian David]

9. If she had turned off the computer and fucked one of the kids, she'd be free by now. n/t

[donco6]

20. Free and $200,000 richer for posing in Hustler.

Alas.

Her attorney must have really sucked, tho.

[etherealtruth]

24. That's just it ...40 years?

I do question why she didn't just shut the computer down ... regardless of instructions to the contrary ... but even IF she intentionally showed pornography to the kids ...fire her, fine her ... give her hefty community service(away from computers and kids)... but 40 years for this?????

[Goblinmonger]

40. Some of those IT guys

can be pretty emphatic about what to do with computers. And many people who aren't really savy with computers will take the "don't shut down the computers until the end of the day" suggestion/command very much to heart because they don't want to piss them off.

[Turbineguy]

10. My sister ended up with something like that

on her computer. I had to look everywhere on the hard drive to get rid of it and had edit the registry as well. It was not a simple "uninstal".

[girl gone mad]

11. Even if she had set up a slide show..

for the kids to watch, 40 years would be extreme.

I think she had a bad lawyer, and thia prosecutor is nuts. Just because you can go after someone doesn't mean you should.

[walldude]

12. She better win on appeal...

This is bullshit... Anyone who has ever touched a computer knows the risks of spam, popups and adware. She must have had the worst lawyer in history. 40 years? That is insanity.

[Ian David]

14. Her lawyer thought the internet was a series of tubes.

I've sat in court and watched cases where the judge doesn't know the difference between an email, an instant message, a log from a chatroom, and an email in which someone forwarded copies of what allegedly were chatroom logs.

Some people just don't understand SHIT.

[Ron Green]

13. The irony is that almost all computers in schools used to be Apples.

If that were still the case, I doubt they'd have the spam problems they do now.

Microsoft really bought up the whole environment, didn't they?

[HarukaTheTrophyWife]

23. Damn. You beat me to it.

I never have these "common" experiences on my Apples.

[Xithras]

26. It wouldn't have made a difference.

SPAM is email based, and Mac users get just as much spam as PC users. Popups, likewise, also happen on Mac's unless there are blockers activated. Since the web is cross-platform, this kind of stuff tends to be platform neutral as well.

Of course, it's easy to block on a Mac AND a PC. The school apparently failed to pay the bill on their filtering software which allowed this stuff through. If the school didn't disable popups on the Mac, it could have happened just as easily there.

Personally, I rank this as an IT failure. The technology wasn't being kept up, which allowed threats like this to get through. Mac, PC, Linux, it doesn't matter. If nobody is updating the software, and nobody is managing security, eventually something is going to get through.

[HysteryDiagnosis]

15. Teachers, students, lawyers, repuglicans, doctors, congressmen

and a few other trades spoke about a bj in the wh for MONTHS. None of them went to jail.

[immoderate]

21. That happened to me.

Normal virus and spyware programs would not touch it. I finally found Vundofix.exe from a tip in our own computer help forum. That cleaned it up. Before that, I had looked for days for a fix and was frantic.

--IMM

[Xithras]

25. The juror does make a good point.

I can understand that the teacher may not have had the expertise to stop a popup script, and acknowledge that she may have had no part in getting the adware installed. BUT! Why didn't she throw a jacket over the screen or push the power button on the monitor? Why didn't she turn the monitor around so the students couldn't see it?

The teacher may not have been responsible for the popups, but it would have been fairly simple to hide the computer from sight. I obviously wasn't there, but the article makes it seem like she just sat there waiting for help to arrive. It WAS her responsibility to take the initiative and prevent the students from seeing the pornography. She's a teacher, and therefore should have been intelligent enough to weigh the ramifications of turning the machine off against the ramifications of exposing her classroom to hardcore pornography. If she determined that the computer couldn't be covered, and that it HAD to be on even though it was displaying hardcore porn, she should have taken the kids out of the classroom until the problem was fixed. This would have qualified as a classroom emergency in ANY school district I've ever been affiliated with, and nobody would have questioned her for it.

It may not have been her fault that the porn was popping up, but it was inexcusable for her to sit there and allow the students to be exposed to it. I don't think I'd have been calling for her prosecution if my kid had been in her classroom, but I'd have certainly done everything possible to secure her termination. It was incredibly poor judgement on her part. And understand that I'm not anti-teacher, I teach college and my wife teaches elementary school. I'm normally on the teachers side in situations like this, but this teacher failed miserably in her obligations to protect those kids. She shouldn't ever be allowed near a classroom again.

[Junkdrawer]

28. I suspect the teacher was flustered and shocked....

"If I click this one off...Oh, No 2 more have popped-up...Click them off...Oh, No..."

[RamboLiberal]

35. Yep - as an IT person I've seen users in a total panic

when this stuff happens. And users are really afraid of turning PCs off or just pulling the plug from the back. Doesn't even occur to them. I know I've had to pull the plug just to get the damn things to shutdown.

[Zodiak]

29. maybe if she was negligent, she should be fired

but 40 years?

It's pornography, not a dirty bomb!

[Ian David]

36. Can you imagine standing in front of a class full of kids laughing at you...

going absolutely apeshit as you panic, trying to get rid of the porn?

I'm sure she lost her cool and became confused.

[Junkdrawer]

30. "Security pros work to undo teacher's conviction"...

Researchers led by the head of a Florida anti-spyware firm aim to recreate what caused a Connecticut school's classroom computer to start displaying pornographic pop-ups in October 2004, an incident that recently led to four felony convictions for the substitute teacher involved.

....

Alex Eckelberry, president of anti-spyware firm Sunbelt Software, hopes to put the case to rest. Armed with an image of the disk from the Windows 98 SE computer, the technology expert put out a call to interested security researchers and assigned his own workers to the case.

"We have had huge offerings of support from the security community," Eckelberry said this week. "Other experts in the forensics community--and these are not small players--have come to us and offered to help."

The criminal conviction would not be the first case of misunderstood technology leading to a guilty verdict. In 2002, a 29-year-old network adminstrator was convicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for sending 5,600 e-mail messages to customers of his former employer--the now-defunct e-mail provider Tornado Development--warning about a security hole in Tornado's service that left private messages vulnerable to unauthorized access. The prosecutors in the case argued, and the judge agreed, that McDanel was guilty of unauthorized access and abused Tornado's e-mail servers to send the messages. The prosecutors have since admitted their mistake and the case was overturned on appeal, but not before McDanel served 16 months in prison.

....

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/02/04/teacher_conviction/

[pitohui]

32. jesus that happens to everybody

who hasn't had a computer get tricked onto a porn site and the site keeps popping up images and won't let you back out?

somebody doesn't like this woman, because this has nothing to do with any crime committed, i'm sure the D.A. himself has had this happen on his own computer

[Ian David]

37. Or perhaps it WILL happen to his computer. Muhahaha!

IP Address: 149.101.1.32

(I'm just kidding).

[RamboLiberal]

34. As an IT person I'm outraged at this conviction

Back in 2004 I had the uncontrollable popups happen to quite a few users who weren't behind a firewall at home with their laptops or to users with old Windows Op system the management was too cheap to upgrade. Most called me in a total panic. And it is unexcusable that the firewall wasn't working at the school or that the prosecution didn't check the PC for spyware.

2-3 years ago I was spending a week a month trying to clean this crap off PCs and it sure wasn't easy. I remember one time I had to turn off my firewall on my personal PC to fix something and was infected in less than 5 minutes from the web.

[bleedingheart]

38. This is absolutely ridiculous

hello I googled a fortran extension and got loads of porn listings....who knows why but I have also accidentally hit a link and had all those horrid pop-ups come up and it is hell to get rid of them.

[manic expression]

39. Fuck criminal prosecutors

they masturbate over the misfortune of others. Fuck them.

This story is just so sad. I hope she isn't punished.

[meldroc]

41. The prosecutor's fucking SCUM!!!

Absolute shit of the earth.

The prosecutor clearly did his homework so he could outmaneuver the defense in this case. He had his experts, he had a police computer forensics guy working for him, and this probably isn't his first case, so he probably knows the difference between an actual kiddie fiddler and a computer newbie who panicked when the machine in question got hosed by malware.

And what does this prosecutor do when he sees this computer newbie who panicked when the classroom computer got hosed? He decided to put another notch on his gun and try to throw her in prison on multiple felonies for forty years! Even if she gets off on appeal, she probably spent her entire life savings on her defense, and her teaching career is permanently and irrevocably over. HOW FUCKING PSYCHOPATHIC DO YOU HAVE TO BE TO DO THIS?

I'm absolutely fucking outraged over this case, and what it indicates for the rest of this country. There are lots more psychopath prosecutors like this one, and it's only a matter of time before you or me get in some shitstorm, and the system tries to run you into the ground over petty bullshit. Justice? That was removed from the criminal system years ago. Don't count on fucking justice. Some prosecutor needs another notch on his gun, and he'll ruin you to get it.

Absolute fucking scum. Beneath contempt. If you'll excuse me, I'll be cleaning my guns. I fucking hate prosecutors.

[RamboLiberal]

42. As an outraged IT manager I donated to her defense fund tonight

http://julieamer.blogspot.com/