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Teacher Found Guilty of Endangering Kids Due to Spyware
nursegirl writes "Norwich, Conn seventh grade teacher, Julie Amero has been convicted of four counts of risk of injury to a minor after her classroom PC displayed pornographic pop-ups in class. While an expert for the defendant said he had discovered spyware on her PC that had been downloaded from a hairstyling site, the local police investigator claimed that the spyware had been downloaded from actively visiting porn sites. Amero testified that she had told four other teachers and the assistant principal about the popups, but received no assistance. The school's internet filtration software was not working because it's license had expired. Amero faces up to forty years in prison."
The other sad thing (That is, other than a jacked up jury, and the defendant not having a tech-savvy lawyer...) is that this could probably have been easily prevented.
When I service customers' computers, I like to install Spybot, configure it to auto-update, auto-scan, and set its scan priority to "Idle", so it doesn't interfere with the user's activities.
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It's not the punishment that's cruel or unusual, it's the charge. "Risk of injury to a minor" can stem from accidental viewing of a porno ad?
Injury? It's not a financial loss. The kids weren't physically harmed. The only potential injury is to the parents plans for educating their children. The children themselves certainly weren't scarred for having seen it. If they're scarred at all, it's because they were raised to take offense to the material.
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Risk of injury? Are the popups jumping out of the screen and choking them?
Seventh grade. I'm sure some of the kids have seen their fair share of porno popups already...
40 years is ridiculous. No kid will be "damaged" in any real way, there's no need for a moral panic here just fire the teacher and you're done.
I don't see this is the teacher fault, it is well known that spyware can install it self with viruses and other nasty things. It is also interesting to note that the software that is meant to keep this out was not working, becose it's license was expired. That can only be the schools fault. But I don't expect conviction greedy Prosecutor to understand that. Since, based on the news I am reading here. He is a total idiot, and rightly so. Who the hell sues over spyware, even if these kids did see some porn on the computer screen, I would think that the Tv is twice as worse then that.
I guess few people in the US needs to be connected back to reality.
Err... it depends on what kind of porn it is. There's lots and lots of mentally scarring porn out there. Take the goatse man, or tubgirl, as an example. There's plenty of stuff on the Internet I wish I had never seen as an adult, much less as a child. I agree with you that the charge is unreasonable, however.
Nice fantasy you have there. School teachers are public enemy #1, they are seen as more of a threat to America than terrorists. Plus there's the thousands of cases that prosecutors take up every year in which they don't have good cases. And then there's the politicians and police wanting to look "tough on pornography" for the votes and funding.
... and then they built the supercollider.
40 years?! Gangbangers on the street get less than this! This is completely fucked up. Besides , if the software did come from porno sites, how do we know it wasn't one of the kids, or another teacher
that went there? And the fact that she asked *4 times* and no one helped her seems to indicate that the responsibility belongs to those who are in charge of this system.
Amero faces up to forty years in prison.
With laws like that... why don't you let the terrorists win?
Does anyone know what the sentence would be if she actually attacked one of the kids? I'm guessing even that would be a lot less.
Guy asked me for a quarter for a cup of coffee. So I bit him.
It is trivial to write a piece of software that, when installed on a person's computer, will visit web sites of the attacker's choosing. The software could be programmed to do this covertly and with the specific intent of incriminating the victim, e.g., by only visiting illegal/immoral sites at such times when the person was using the computer to browse the Internet. The offending sites would be in the victim's browser history, having been visited at times when he/she was using the computer. The software could be programmed to destroy itself after a duration, with the attacker then providing information to authorities with regard to the victim's illicit surfing habit. Getting the software onto the victim's computer is also trivial, given the number of exploits available, open wireless networks, etc.
I'm expecting this to happen soon, if it has not already. Perhaps even as targetted attacks rather than simply random misanthropy.
What has *science* done?!? -- Dr. Weird (ATHF)
Attacked?
It'd probably be less than 40 years if she'd have murdered one of them.
except it's NOTHING LIKE THAT, it's not her pictures, they were from software installed in secret without her knowledge, and when she discovered what had happened she attempted to get them removed and recieved no assitance. you can not remove the technology from the argument simply because your too dense to understand it, it's intergral to what happened.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I get so fed up with the duality of American society where, on the one hand you are so exceptionally uptight when it comes to nudity, tolerance of other peoples sexuality etc - and on the other hand you are the worlds largest producer & market for pornography.
This leads to sad, sad examples like this where Prosecutors need to find a guilty party or person at any cost to pin the blame on for having some kids unintentionally see some porn pop-ups. I feel really, really sorry for the poor teacher for getting caught in this mess.
Its tragicomic for us living outside your country watching this - I sincerely hope you are able to fix these issues in a fundamental way.
--
It's high time conservative Americans got over their problem with sex. It's clear these hypocrites have sex, otherwise they wouldn't be breeding the children that need to be "protected" from these images. No-one can be harmed by viewing pornographic images, certainly not grade seven students.
There is nothing wrong with sex. There is nothing wrong with nudity. There is certainly nothing wrong with naked female breasts - those of us in the rest of the world were left laughing our heads of at the utter ridiculousness of the outcry over the Janet Jackson "wardrobe misfunction". In fact, women should be free to walk around topless, as men can, if they so desire. The double-standard is simply mind-boggling.
I wouldn't mind betting that the same children that saw the images on this poor woman's computer also saw a number of acts of mindless violence on television that same evening, and not a soul complained. How's that for stupidity?
-- Even if a god did exist, why the fsck should I worship it?
An important difference between the case and your analogy is that it were not her private pictures.
In my opinion a better offline analogy would be if she was responsible for collecting the school's mail. On the way to the classroom she emptied the school's mailbox and during her lesson some sex advertisement slipped out from that stack of letters.
Suing a teacher for something like that is unbelievable. It ruins your education system in the long term for sure if you have to work in such a climate.
I can't see her getting any serious jail time. America is crazy but not that crazy.
Doesn't matter if she gets ANY jail time. She is now officially a "sex offender", and her life is over.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
ror allowing Windows computers in the classroom in the first place.
t .html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print
Botnets are huge and well known to anyone who ever glances into their spam box.
Some collection of security experts claim that they are tracking 400,000 infected machines
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/07/technology/07ne
These machines are sending out spam, and a fair amount of it is porn spam. The obvious conclusion
is that most every Windows-using school in America has porn on the disks of its classroom computers.
Actually the percentage of infected machines in schools is probably higher than the general percentage,
because schools typically don't have much budget for IT staff, and they often have older computers.
so i could go buy a car, and get put away for 'risk of injury to a minor' or to anybody for that factor, who knows who is going to step out on to the road, or even if something is going to go wrong.
i definitely blame the support engineer (damn techies, giving techies like me a bad name)
just like if i was lied to when my car had apparently past it's mot, but hadn't, and malfunctioned.
that computer should not have been allowed on the network, the suort should have been there, as should the protection.
just for the record, i don't drive (can't) perhaps it was a bad choice of analogy.
for anybody who's seem monkey dust, driving a car = murder
however i do like norwich, i think there might suddenly be a job opening or two.. woo!
The children themselves certainly weren't scarred for having seen it.
I take it you didn't get the memo.
If they're scarred at all, it's because they were raised to take offense to the material.
There is that, of course, but there is the corallary as well. It is my observation that kids that are scarred by the experience get this scarring from having to deal with all the fucked up grownups around them going completely apeshit about their having seen a little exposed skin.
It's a self fullfilling prophecy that kids are harmed by it if you insure they come to harm yourself.
Yo! People. Under our clothes? We're naked. Get used to the idea, 'k? I'm getting a bit tired of living among psychotics.
KFG
If it's already there, the last thing you want to do is to publically say that it's already there.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
We all make the supposition that pornography is "bad for kids." But where are the studies showing it's harmful? Physically, we don't need to go far to demonstrate that fire and razor blades are potentially harmful to children. But when it comes to emotional or mental damage, I think we're going to need some proof because all the variations involved there. A good defense lawyer would be able to bring those ideas out in demanding that proof of damage be presented.
I'm sure counter claims could be presented such as pulling in case examples, etc, but I get the feeling that there's invariably a lot more going on with the "troubled" kids and that generally healthy kids, while being embarassed at seeing such material, aren't going to launch any rape or 'Columbine' campaigns as a result of pornographic pop-ups.
Now that said, the schools should be suing the HELL out of the companies profiting from this form of advertising and in many respects there are plenty of grounds for other legal action against parties outside of the school. I say they should direct their anger and outrage against the REAL parties responsible.
I don't think much needs to be said about "prevention" though. But I will say this: teaching in school is a presentation. And as such, presentations should be fully prepared in such a way that "unpredictables" are kept to a minimum. Live internet in a classroom at a grade school level is just a bad idea.
You touch upon that strange thing in western society (or perhaps everywhere, I am not sure). Why is seeing sex considered so harmful to children, compared to quite disgusting violence (that can and will give nightmares, etc)? I have a hard time seeing how seeing sex could really harm a human child... especially such a short exposure such as this. I mean, many children must at least have walked in on their parents having sex at some point... and I think most of those children turn out ok anyway. And I'd wager any healthy boy (and girl more likely than not) have seen some kind of porn at 10 year old (and said "ewwww", too).
I just don't see the reasoning there. Anyone know why or how this "sex is harmful to see for children" came about?
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
No this could not easily have been prevented. There is no anti-spyware or anti-virus software that will stop all possible infections on a Windows box. As to the morons in court convinced that the teacher "had to physically click" on the porn links to make them show up in some way in Windows... give me a break please. That is so not right. It sounds like this teacher may be railroaded to the jail house over computer issues that the persons running the court are clueless about. Just one more reason to toss Windows and learn to use a real OS.
Lets replace the woman in this story with you, would it be ok to push the same line then? It's easy to respond with 'sure', but deep down, would you mean it with real conviction?
I see this as fairly huge. If I was a schoolteacher, as soon as I heard about this, I would immediately stop teaching anything to do with computers or the internet in my classroom. Setting aside the question of whether or not the images in this case resulted from the teacher's actions or from spyware, the case sets a precedent that if students are exposed to pornographic images in your class, you become responsibly, criminally. And, just for gravy, you get to be a sex offender. The cost of this is way too high to make it worth the risk of an accident (say, if a malicious student installed something nasty to set me up), so I would just treat my class as if computers and the internet didn't exist. And so my students wouldn't gain the benefits of these tools, nor any education in their use.
One would think the possibility that the images were the result of spyware would create reasonable doubt, but since it doesn't...
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
She is most likely not allowed to use work computers for private purpose (although everybody does), and using it for porn is worse as the risk of malware is higher. This is something that would in a sane society be a cause of a "serious talk" at the boss office. So how did this get this far?
1) Someone, either the school principal or a parent, must have decided that watching porn pop-ups constitute injury to the pupils.
2) The prosecutor must have agreed.
3) The jury has agreed.
This point to a society whose norms are seriously sick, not just a few twisted individuals.
It looks like this person is being scapegoated. Lets concentrate on the fact that it was the school that was negligent in having the license expire on there content filtering software. Even if she was viewing porn and got spyware installed on her computer it looks like she already asked for help in getting it removed and was denied. The school was negligent in letting its content filtering expire and in preventing popups on a teachers workstation causing students to see the dirty. Why is the school not on trial? Answer: Because she is. Why not be as harsh as possible and burn her at the stake along with all the rest of our teachers and all the books in the library?
Even if she intentionally showed porn to children, a more appropriate response would be to fire her. A felony charge for multiple counts of endangerment of children is very far over the top. Forty years in prison, for accidentally exposing some children to dirty pictures is just insane. That's a roughly equivalent to a murder conviction. It this, even if it were intentional, really as bad as murder?
The gouverning elite has a very high incentive to keep the status quo, or even widen the separation between the 'classes'. If the poor underclass is big, that means more options for the upper class to exploit that. The method to produce more poor is to make prevent less children from middleclass families to establish themselves as such, and to keep the children from poor families from rising the social ladder. (Talking about groups and averages here, not induviduals). Good teachers that teach to these classes of kids actually stand in the way of these objectives, as their aim is to have their pupils to achieve the best they can and get the best follow-up education, essentially raising their social status. So what needs to be done is to frustrate those teachers so much that they give up.
Cynical? yes.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
So let's assume two reasonable worst case scenarios about this case.
...and laughter/ridiculing of the teacher ensues, the story is told behind the teacher's back for a few weeks and then everyone forgets about it.
1. The teacher was viewing porn on her computer, but she intended it for her own eyes only, messed up and the kids has seen that she viewed porn. She lied to the kids covering up the situation...
reasonable reaction:
2. The teacher was viewing porn on her computer and was showing it to kids because of pedophile intent or as an inappropriate sex-ed.
reasonable reaction: teacher fired, putting her on a list that she can't work with kids anymore. I find the sexual offenders list an overkill though. Disclosing the location of people like this teacher, not letting her go near schools or some such restrictions are an overkill, she is just not fit to be a teacher. She's 40 years old, must have been teaching for a long while now, so you just have to dig in her past to check whether something associated with paedophilia turns up. If yeah, hell sentence her criminally, but if not then there isn't a cause for stronger measures than firing her and not allowing her to work as a teacher anymore.
Criminal prosecution should only come if there is actual harm to children, and viewing a couple of porn pictures is not harm, it's just bad conduct on the part of the teacher, so it should mean loss of job.
Personally I think that criminal prosecution in this case is a joke, even more so the 40 year sentence. What's next, execution for giving "the finger"? When I was 12 I was looking for serial keys on astalavista if my memory serves me correct when a porn popup popped up and it displayed a monster cock. The IT teacher walked up behind me and just told me to turn that off and walked away again. Other kids were directly looking at porn when the teacher wasn't looking and noone made a big deal about it. If the teacher's screen would have flooded with porn popups we would have been laughing at it. I'm not from the USA so I don't get the whole obsession with trying to hide sex. I also received proper sexual education from the school, so I can't complain.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
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The only way this would have merit IMHO, would be if her home PC was full of pornography and had several bookmakrs for porn. Her best defense would be if the spywareand related porn in question WASN"T on her home PC.
How was it determined she was visiting porn sites?? Just because it was in her history? The advertisements come off of THE porn site, so of course the "computer" visited the porn sites. And what, they went to the index? Sure, popup comes up right as you are about to click, and you just accidentally visited a porn site. The school should be held accountable for not having a good solution for keeping that stuff off, and for not keeping it's software up to date. If I was a parent there, I'd be extremely pissed at the school (and selling them some hardware to make sure it doesn't happen again).
Kernel Krunch - Part of a Complete OS
is that people are thrown into jail for 40 years just for accidentally displaying "pornography" to
kids. I suppose it isn't really a "proper" thing to do but what I wonder would she get for
flashing her tits to the class?
10 years of solitary confinement on death row, breast amputation and then being flogged with rubber hoses to a
bleeding pulp and hung from a construction crane??
Police get rewarded for arresting people and prosecutors get rewarded for convictions. Because of that, they'll tailor thier processes to that end. The fact that computers and the interenet are not secure, and unfathomable to most people is irrelevant. They can't arrest the interent or convict your computer. But they can arrest and convict some poor sap who has no idea what a root-kit is or how his computer can be made into a zombie. So they will.
Police and prosecutors don't care what really happened because their job is to arrest and convict - that's what we reward them for. We'd be silly to expect anything different.
and knows nothing about computers. She doesn't use the internet at work, so she's safe. One of her fellow teachers' computer is riddled with spyware, simply because she knows nothing about how to use it or how to block unwanted spyware from being installed on her computer. Should her fellow teacher be put in prison for not knowing the ins and outs of spyware????
Anybody with a little knowledge of the internet knows that, especially with IE, you don't have to click a link to get spyware on your machine. The police "expert" probably has been living under a rock the last few years!
We agree on that. I just don't think it's even her responsibility to secure the computer; she's a teacher, not an IT tech. It's like asking her to make sure the sink drain doesn't suddenly smell like sewage during class. It's just not her job or something she knows anything about. In these days. In 30 years everyone *should* have a basic understanding of these things.
It would, of course, have taken the school/district's IT people 10 minutes to install AVG, Adaware, and and Firefox. And that is their job, while she is busy teaching or making lesson plans... (or surfing for porn, which would be extremely hard to prove, especially if students were on the computer.)
I don't see how she had poor judgment since she did seek help to remove it.
Another thing would be the school policies to consider. She might have gotten in trouble by cleaning the hard drive herself. And as to which sites actually installed scripts to allow porn pop-ups, the sites could be very innocent on the surface but could intentionally have those scripts in the background or they could be sites that they themselves have been infected.
If she isn't a techie type person, she might have been scared to try to do anything to remove the problem without help for fear of damaging the computer.
This idea that she could have been found guilty of porn pop-ups is crazy since it really not her fault, especially since she did seek help to get it removed and was ignored by peers and higher ups.
I do hope this is appealed and a good lawyer (ACLU or another techie savvy group) steps in so a bad precedence isn't put into place and used to convect other innocent people.
Injury? I bet the kids started to laugh their asses out when the first tit appeared on screen. I can see what happened here.
*DINNER TIME*
LOL LOL MOM IT WAS SO FUNNAY AT SCHOOL THE TEACH0R'S COMPUTER SHOWED P0RNS
OH DEAR GOD NO MY CHILD!!!!!!! SOMEONE HAS TO PAY!!! (I need a new car too)
Repeat in three more houses and you're done.
Bah, kids nowadays know what porn is from seven years old onwards, not like they are going to get a life-lasting trauma or become terrible perverts for that.
The years where kids used to play ninjas vs cowboys vs pirates are over. (pirates won, obviously, specially if piratebay gets its own country yarrr)
Personally, I have been to hairstyling sites that have tried to DL spyware. I beleive this is truie from the teacher. I also believe that the spyware went to the porn sites -not the teacher herself per se. I feel the school is at fault for letting the filtering software expire. It also states the teacher had told others about it, but received no assistance. All teachers are not tech savvy.. thats why they rely on the schools filtering system to help out with blocking. I feel the injustice starts with the school letting the filtering system expire. Filtering systems can also be acquired free for schools.. I do not see any excuse by the school to have let this have happened. Also, the school computers schould have been cleaned regulary to check for new programs - spyware - installed on them. Many workplaces have software that will check all computers on the network to see if new programs have been added.
I read this story earlier on el reg, and since then I really feel sick for this teacher. Facing 40 years in jail for what appears to the most casual internet user as bad luck is so way out of reality touch it's totaly unbelievable.
Her case desserves the world's attention and help ; I'm wondering wether it couldn't be brought to some NGO attention such as Amnesty international, for it looks like a violation of her human rights. This could help her finding a competent lawyer.
I'm really upset a person's life can be shred to pieces that way, just to fulfill some obvious political ambitions.
My son found a copy of penthouse in my bureau, I guess I can go to prison for that.
I just don't see the reasoning there. Anyone know why or how this "sex is harmful to see for children" came about?
I have been thinking about this too after I saw stupid story about how kids might use their Wiis and PS3s to look at porn on the internet. The mother in the story talked about how her childrens "innocence might be destroyed if they learn something they aren't supposed to know" (I paraphrase) That sure sounds like the garden-of-eden tree-of-knowledge story.
The word innocent is often used to describe ignorance of sexuality. The opposite of innocence is guilt. From a christian standpoint people have original sin and are supposed to feel guilty about their natural desires.
I think it's sad that this artificial self-hate governs the way so many people think.
there is a shortage of people willing to be teachers in many parts of the US!
Here's the checklist of benefits of becoming a teacher:
-Relatively low wages
-Dealing with spoiled kids
-Dealing with the parents of spoiled kids
-Facing 40 years in prison because your school has an IT department consisting mostly of monkeys
Where do I sign up?!
...///...
What you're seeing on this article is common sense. Even if she got to work at 4am and browsed hardcore bestiality porn for 4 hours before work there's no reason to put her through this. It's ridiculous, it's Kafka-esque. If she browsed porn at work and it can be proven, simply fire her. See how easy that was?
So God made humans have these "urges and desires" all the time, and yet it is wrong if you act upon them before marriage? What a bastard! That's like giving a thirsty man a bottle of water and telling him he cannot drink it. Or a great painter a set of brushes and forbid him to paint.
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
So, what you're saying here is... the Porn industry is like the Diamond Industry? The product (breasts and diamonds) are extremely common, but when you cut people off from the supply (by shooting people who take them or introduce rape/sexual offense laws) the price skyrockets? My God, it makes so much sense now! The Courts are merely a puppet of pornographers!
It has nothing to do with prosecutors being tech-ignorant.
It has to do with prosecutors seeking to make a name for themselves by jumping on the "child porn" bandwagon - a guaranteed way to get re-election.
It's a career move, nothing more.
It's what you get when "law creates crime".
Look at the "Drug War" sometime. It's a way for the Feds to get money and power while suppressing minorities - nothing more. The Feds regularly arrest people for things that shouldn't be crimes in the first place, threaten them with massive jail time in exchange for ratting out all their relatives and friends with lies, then arresting everybody else and repeating the procedure ad nauseum. This is how they get their 98% conviction rate - and their budget money and career path in the DoJ.
This is why the US has the most incarcerated population in the world.
The entire system has utterly NOTHING to do with the vague abstract term "justice".
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
I'm a highly technical and certified computer network geek. My own server was compromised twice last year. My laptop was compromised. My eBay account was compromised. My main home PC was infected twice and I had AVG on it. Now if I as a highly technical security nut can have that many problems in a single year imagine how many problem the average Internet user has. Besides that person having way more problem than I because of their inherent insecure practices, I actually noticed when I had a problem. I have to wonder how many problems I missed.