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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."
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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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.
I know on average it will probably help. But 'on average' and 'probably' are not good enough as-and-when Spybot makes a medical imaging machine behave in a way other than designed, for example.
Get that permission, and if it's not given then do not put any software on.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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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.
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.
Do you seek permission from the customers before putting this software on ? I know on average it will probably help. But 'on average' and 'probably' are not good enough as-and-when Spybot makes a medical imaging machine behave in a way other than designed, for example.
Don't be ridiculous. Anyone who is using a "medical imaging machine" isn't going to hire out to a small shop for IT support. They're going to be part of a hospital or other facility that has their own IT support. And most likely there will be a special department dedicated specifically to support of the medical imaging systems. I know this because supporting PACS systems is been part of what I do for a living.
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.
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?!
...///...
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!