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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."
Amero testified that she had told four other teachers and the assistant principal about the popups, but received no assistance ... Amero faces up to forty years in prison.
If only we had some... amendment... a "bill of rights" if you will... that ruled out "cruel and unusal" punishments like this.
Nah, that's crazy talk.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
how that is teachers fault? Unless the teacher installed the spy-ware intentionaly, which is probably not the case.
Eclipse PDE and Me
There we go, slash the budget for Personal Health and Development classes. The kids have already gotten all their ill-advised Sex Ed from the friendly people at Backdoorsluts9.com.
Ninjas use italics.
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?
Here in scandinavia you would not even get such a hard punishment even if she had murdered the entire schoolclass.
I know she will not get that much, but even to consider it is laughable.
40 years prison for not installing Firefox... duh!
Yes. We ask them before we install antispyware and antivirus utilities, through our intake process.
As for undesired behavior...I run a free PC Clinic. People bring in their desktops and laptops for cleanup and repair, and we send them back the same day. With a good number of volunteers, we've fixed as many as 35 computers in a six-hour period.
Since they're peoples' personal machines, there's not a great deal of risk of adverse behavior from the tools we use.
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What sort of medical imaging device is connected to the greater Internet, rather than a secure WLAN
of some sort, if it actually needs networking?
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)
i used to work in pathology, and the answer is ALL OF THEM.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Its license. Its.
Seriously...
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?
She's a substitute, which means she was only in that class a day or so. For her to have installed spyware and be duped into clicking on it multiple times may be feasible, but is it likely? Besides when you read TFA, the investigator also points out that the jury viewed a list of sites accessed, many of which could not be reached without actively clicking on the ads:
Hitting one or two could be a mistake, but several? It really sounds more like she was surfing for pr0n in the classroom, and using "teh spyware" as an excuse. And of course, Slashdot fell for it. Again.
Well if she was actively looking at porn that changes everything, why a 40 year sentence is too lenient I say!
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.
How old are we talking about here?
Around 12-13 years old.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
And, this isn't the only case where this has happened before (2003)
I have personally give a porn linking website to a 13 year old
Gasp! How dare you! Little Johnny doesn't think about sex, and never will, until the day he gets married. Then he will have sex only in the missionary position, and only in order to have children. And he will NOT ENJOY IT.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Well, I believe they should weigh her, and if she weighs the same as a duck, she's guilty...
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.
*** Topic in #doghouse is 'Our hearts are extended to the 17 victims of the recent internet fraud'
* Anubis has joined #doghouse
<Anubis> what fraud?
<Kadmium> You haven't heard about it?
<Anubis> no?
<Kadmium> You can read the full story at http://www.tubgirl.com/
<Anubis> omg wtf!
*** Kadmium changes topic to 'Our hearts are extended to the 18 victims of the recent internet fraud'
from bash.
If noone rtfa, then what's the slashdot effect?
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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
By 2012, children in the US will be fully protected from sex. At birth, their genitals will be removed and stored on ice. The genitals will be reattached once the children have grown up and married. This will ensure that they learn about sex when they really need to. Any parents refusing to allow this process shall be brought before the elders who shall smite them sorely with stones until they be dead.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
I don't think it's so much a problem of the legal system being behind the times technologically as it is a 'problem' with our legal system's greatest strength also being its greatest weakness. Trial by a jury of your peers means that you will often have lay people deciding highly technical cases. This is a situation where a better voir dire would have resulted in a better informed jury. The problem is that you have to explain highly technical language to people that may have no clue. I'm not sure how this case will turn, but you also have to remember that the judge (who supposedly is a highly educated person) is the final arbiter in the case. The judge may decide to toss out the verdict in the end. Also, there is the possibility of appeal in this case. Unfortunately good expert testimony (the kind that is more likely to convince a jury) is often expensive - and it is this caveat that often leads to these sorts of verdicts.
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.
The most important distinction, however, is that it's not some hairbrained idiot at the school that decided to levy these charges. Anybody can sue anyone at any time for any reason. No, this charge was levied by the people. By people representing you and me. The real responsibility for this miscarriage of justice rests on the prosecutor that was elected by the people, and who decided to prosecute this case. He or she needs to be held accountable for ruining the life of another human being.
Don't talk about this like it's something that could really suck for this woman. It already does suck. She's already been convicted. Sure, she can appeal, and based on what I know from this case, she stands a chance of winning, but that black mark is on her record forever. Appeals are not based on the merit of the original conviction, but rather on the fact that she had a fair trial. Until you are convicted, you are innocent until proven guilty. Once you are convicted, you are guilty until proven innocent. It's a whole different ballgame.
As someone who regularly uses a computer in front of children as an educational tool, and as an IT professional, this story scares the hell out of me. Although I know how to keep my computer free of spyware, there isn't one person on
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
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.
There's your problem. The person going to jail for 40 years should be the one who decided to let Windows into a classroom. Won't somebody think of the children!
The road to hell is paved with Cat 5 cable.
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.
You would be surprised. A lot of imaging in smaller hospitals and clinics are read by radiologists off-site though a service firm and the reports are sent to the doctor via email. It would be insanely expensive for a clinic or small hospital with an Xray and a CAT scan that is used perhaps 3-4 times a day to hire a radiologist.
"I don't necessarily agree with everything I say." - Marshall McLuhan
This is one reason why 'malware did it' defenses should be taken seriously by the courts. Most pedophiles are collector types. For example, the FBI profiling guidelines for law enforcement officers who have discovered child porn, whether on or off a PC, just assume the perp is sn obsessive collector, likely to have dozens of CD photo collections burned, whole cabinets of VHS tapes, or similar sized caches in whatever forms they collect. Pedophiles almost invariably want tens of thousands of photos and hundreds of films, perhaps to validate their orientation ("See, lots of people do it, so I'm not a lone weirdo!"), or perhaps from a fear that the supply will dry up and whatever they have managed to collect will be all they see for the rest of their lives. That really creepy guy you mentioned is very typical.
If all the material is on the PC, and good searches of the suspect's home or workplace don't find back ups and additional material, it's time to look at the alternatives before rushing to convict. Conversely, local law enforcement ought to be trained that finding a back up cache or other off device child porn is one of the best ways to ensure solid convictions.
Who is John Cabal?
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 father's advice (possibly misremembered) was to opt for a trial by judge if you were innocent and a trial by jury if you were guilty. Now, he actually was a lawyer, but he was definitely not a trial lawyer, so take that with a very large grain of salt.
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?!
...///...
Prosecutors, police and lawmakers all seem to be making the assumption that computer owners should be responsible for everything that is sent to and from the Internet. Yet, we have average people with little knowledge of computer security who are using hard to secure Windows computers. A large percentage of all Windows computer have been infected by spyware or browser hijackers or have had back doors placed in them my hackers or the malware itself. A recent New York Times article was titled the Attack of the Zombie Computers Is Growing Threat. It says that "botnet programs are present on about 11 percent of the more than 650 million computers attached to the Internet". Most of those zombie computers are probably spewing out spam for porn, pump-and-dump stock schemes, or illegal activities such as phishing schemes that steal peoples charge card numbers or passwords. Should those 70 million Windows computer owners around the world also be arrested and sentenced to years or decades in prison?
Last night on ABC, on TV, I saw a 20/20 segment about "Prison Time For Viewing Porn". In that case a teenage boy was facing the possibility of 90 years in prison because several child porn files that were found on the family computer. Police pounded on the door of their Phoenix home at 6:00 a.m. and seized the family computer. The sixteen-year-old boy offered to take a lie detector test and passed the test, but prosecutors continued to press charges. A computer expert later looked at the hard drive and found more than 200 infected files and back doors that allowed hackers to access the family computer from remote locations. Most likely someone else used the insecure Bandy family computer as a place to store the files which they did not dare store it on their own computer.
I have heard that many computer repair people spend much of their time removing spyware from computers belonging to people who complain that computers are running slowly. Prosecutors and police should take into account that these people were not using a more secure operating system such as MAC OS X, Linux or BSD. However, security problems or other misleading circumstances can occur when using Mac, Linux, or BSD. For instance, I use Linux and when I find an interesting website with various interesting Linux, ham radio, solar energy or nutrition related files, I occasionally use the wget command to download most of what is on that web page. I latter frequently am surprised to discover that the wget command also downloaded hundreds of pictures of New England covered bridges or family photos too. I most would most likely not notice if child porn photos had also automatically been downloaded into an obscure subdirectory.
How can law makers, police, prosecutors and child protection supporters seriously suggest holding people accountable for what is found computers without outlawing the use of Windows first? Furthermore, where I live the local cable companies provide their customers with broadband routers which are wide open to being used by nighbors by default. The telephone company where I live provides wireless routers which by default use insecure WEP encryption method. About half of all wireless networks do not have any security enabled and many of the others just use WEP or are still using the defalt SSID and password. Many people also do not use antivirus software, spyware removal software, properly secured firewalls or the latest security updates. Even with Windows security patches installed there are frequently unpatched zero-day exploits out there such as the one for Word documents that Microsoft failed to patch earlier this week on "patch Tuesday." How can police and lawmakers seriously suggest holding people accountable for what is on people computers in these circumstances.
When I worked at Microsoft's technical support division, on at least one occasion I answered a call from someone whose computer had been compromised and was being used as a distribution point for child porn. At the time, I told her it was better that she go to the FBI and seek their assistance, but sometimes I wonder if that was really the best advice.
I don't know what ever became of it.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
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!