Be afraid, my compu-savvy legal friends, be very afraid. There are people running our governments, police, and courts, not to mention teaching and administering our schoolage offspring, whose cluelessness about the cyber ocean in which we all now swim has reached depths more profound than the Mariana Trench. I had to decompress myself after reading this article just to avoid getting "the bends":
"Was Julie Amero Wrongly Convicted?" _The_Register_, 14 Feb. 2007:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/02/14/julie_amero_case/
You can find lots of other dead-tree-media stories and blogifications about Julie Amero by typing her name into your favorite search engine, but IMO most of them are merely reporting, or bemoaning, that this substitute teacher was convicted in Norwich, Connecticut, USA, of felony "endangering the morals of minors" by allegedly exposing her students to internet porn on her classroom computer. I knew nothing of the case until coming across a brief article this morning in my local legal newspaper, the Maryland Daily Record, which got me Googling for other stories to find out what really happened. IMO the URL cited above dissects the computer forensic evidence presented at the case in full detail and with more understanding than most of the other blather you'll likely find.
Of course, the way both sides botched the investigation, perhaps we'll never really know. My own gut feeling after reading the article is, the probability of this 40-year-old, non-computer-savvy female teacher being so obtuse about the current witchhunt legal climate re: kids and porn, that (while in a classroom full of eagerly watching 7th-graders) she would intentionally and openly access websites plastered with (tiny)* photos of naked people having sex, is next to nil, compared to the far more likely cause, malicious adware. But she got convicted and may face a sentence of up to 40 years in the pokey along with being branded for life as a registered "sex offender".
* (According to the cited article, none of the JPGs found by the forensics exam of the classroom computer were larger than 10-15kb, about the size of the images in a pop-up ad, not the real full-size stuff an actual websurfer would be looking for; and there were other very strong indications of automated adware, not intentional typing of URLs by the teacher, being the source of the pop-up pages -- which somehow never really got brought out at her trial)
Meanwhile, of course, the real offenders for throwing this stuff in the kids' faces IMO are the Russian and Ukranian porn websites discussed in the article, which load malware and adbots on unprotected computers; and as accessories-before-the-fact to their crime, the brain-disconnected school administrators in the quaint, old-fashioned burg of Norwich, whose in-classroom, internet-connected school computers were running the now-unpatchable Windows 98, had no firewalls or antispyware/adware busters installed whatsoever, whose multi-user hard disks were crammed with enough active junkware to choke a horse, and whose antivirus patches were about 3 months out of date because of unpaid vendor bills. On top of which, they gave the sub strict instructions NOT to turn off the classroom computer under any circumstances because she didn't have a password (it was logged on under the name and account of the regular full-time teacher) and therefore would not be able to turn it back on.
So maybe poor Julie was also not running on all cylinders when, as the pop-up barrage began shortly after she took over the class at 9 am and chased away from the computer a group of pubescent girls who had been accessing what they thought was a "hairstyles" website, she didn't recognize what was happening and (a) unplug the computer anyway, finding something else to teach her kids for the next 6 hours (and hoping she didn't fry the school's hard disk by doing so), or (b) just turn off the friggin' monitor to immediately end the unwanted visual exposure and give herself a breather, buying time to consider other options without any need of rebooting the system, or (c) "throw a sweater over it" fer krissake, as one prosecutor suggested she could have done, to protect the tender eyes. (The "cashmere defense"?) But by all accounts, the porn storm only lasted a couple of minutes, and the rest of the class day was spent normally, including continued classroom access to a variety of harmless websites -- until the kids went home and gleefully told their parents, "Guess what Ms. Amero let us watch in class today?" Firing, and indictments, soon ensued.
Maybe Julie should have done more to prevent the kids in her class from seeing the smut that popped up even if she had nothing to do with it being there; or maybe she did do all she could, and it worked. But I don't think she should be branded a sex felon. Who knows? Read the article.
Comments welcome.
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This posting is for discussion purposes, not professional advice.
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Mike Jacobs
LAW OFFICE OF W. MICHAEL JACOBS
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