Slashdot Mirror
Teacher Julie Amero Gets a New Trial
LazloHollyfeld writes "A New London Superior court judge this morning granted a defense request seeking a new trial for Julie Amero, the former Norwich middle school substitute teacher convicted of exposing her middle school students to Internet porn. Acting on a motion by Amero's attorney, William Dow III, Judge Hillary Strackbein placed the case back on a trial list. Amero had faced 40 years on the conviction of four counts of risk of injury to a minor. State prosecutor David Smith confirmed that further forensic examination at the state crime lab of Amero's classroom computer revealed "some erroneous information was presented during the trial. Amero and her defense team claimed she was the victim of pop-up ads — something that was out of her control. Judge Strackbein said because of the possibility of inaccurate facts, Amero was "entitled to a new trial in the interest of justice." After the brief court appearance, a smiling Amero stood next to her attorney. "I feel very comfortable with the decision," Amero said. Dow commended the state for investigating the case further. A new court date has yet to be scheduled. Amero has reentered a not guilty plea."
The Pop-up add made me do it!
s/©//g
*sings* The Internet is for porn...
Valkyrie is about to die! Wizard needs food -- badly!
One small step in the right direction for internet justice! (and the loss to quick-to-the-draw prosecutors)
40 years? For this? Good lord. Aren't there any real criminals we could lock up instead? It's insane.
I'd consider even four years to be excessive for such an offense.
i remember when teachers would have sex with the students. now they just show you internet porn. techers at public schools have gotten so lazy. Do it right or dont do it.
Indeed, I'm sure the boys were horrified when they had to tolerate pop-up porn after being able to view the stuff they'd bought with their mom's credit card....
"To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free" ~ Nineteen Eighty-Four
Amero had faced 40 years on the conviction of four counts of risk of injury to a minor.
Porn puts minors at risk of injury? Wow... I guess that means I performed a large amount of self-mutilation to myself when I was a kid... HA! Take that Emo-Kids! I'm beating you at your own silly game!
Well, at least I now know how to get a teacher I dislike into prison for 40 years.
Step 1) Install porn adware on the computer the teacher is going to use.
Step 2) Make the teacher use the computer in front of an audience of minors
Step 3) ???
Step 4) Profit!
wouldn't mozilla firefox have halted unwanted popups?
only if people listened to the nerds who know.
This whole topic makes me so incredibly furious. Forty years in jail, for being the vicitm of spyware? Even if the defendant used a school laptop in at home and visited some questionable sites, that should at most earn her a fine, as a strict warning to other educators that extremely careful to not bring a laptop into the class when it might be compromised. The only real justice here would be if the creator of that pop-up ad/spyware would be tracked down by their 1-900 number and they be convicted to forty years in jail. This is an utter failure of the justice system.
This woman was a substitute teacher.
Sounds like the regular classroom teacher had a lot of time on her hands to go surfing around.
Don't use the internet in schools!
Seriously, it may sound extreme, but what reason is there to have it when schools should have all the necessary information on whatever subjects are being taught within the boundaries of the school property? Training? It's not like the school can't just run an internal internet of their own where they control 100% of the content used on it! Current events and information retrieval? Just have the teachers pre-cache the appropriate content ahead of time for later offline viewing!
With so many possible ways to teach about the internet without actually having to use the real internet, there's no need to put yourself into positions like this.
8==8 Bones 8==8
when the Internet was getting popular and I was in school. The teacher would always have the projector OFF before surfing to a site and would close the pop ups BEFORE showing the students the website.
Seriously, why didn't the teacher turn off the projector or the monitor and then changed the subject instantly.
She should be having a new trial on the basis that 40 years in jail for showing some kids porn is insane!
Taking her panties down and doing herself with a banana in front of them shouldn't giver her 40 years! Nor 20! Nor 10! Nor 5!
I'm happily posting from an European country. I remember a handful of events like this, usually with those "videotape" thingies you hardly remember anymore...well, back to the story. Occasionally it was the teacher who made a little mistake, more often it was one of the kids who smuggled in some porn when the teacher wasn't watching. The latter happened a few times in my class. I was maybe 13. (Never was the one who smuggled it, though. Honestly!)
Now, what was the reaction, from both the kids and the parents?
Basically, "Hee hee." Maybe some frowning by those few who actually go to church (quite rare around here) but that's all. If you even tried suing over this, you'd more likely get fined for being a crackpot and wasting the court's time.
"Injury to a minor"? 40 years? This would be some great comedy if it wasn't true. Now it's tragicomedy.
on the judges computer.
Call in an expert witness to testify the computer was infected with malware which automatically displayed porn ads at irregular intervals. Nothing a non-expert like her could do about it. The whole case was an accident in my opinion.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
Injurious? How? Where are the laws against the laws that deny sexuality and discovery.
According to http://www.courant.com/news/local/hcu-amerotrial-0 606,0,4739321.story the state is unlikely to prosecute her a second time.
Also, there, it states that her sentencing was postponed 4 times this spring as the state considered new evidence. It's not clear how much - if any - time was spent in jail.
It's disturbing that the teachers unions did not come to her defense, or at least push to have more light shed on the situations that teachers face regularly in the classroom. Yeah, this girl was a substitute, but the case has a large bearing on teachers in general.
If I was sent to investigate this situation, and ran into a pregnant substitute teacher who was given instructions not to turn off the computer under any circumstances it would be hard not to take a look at the potential pop-up/spyware situation. Is there nobody that works for the police department, prosecutors office, the school, or the school board who has any real IT experience?
Here are some links to stories we did:
I used to work for NetQoS. I no longer do, but want to keep the excellent karma attached to this account.
Whenever I hear about this stuff, or when some hot female teacher has sex with a student, I know that as an adult, and a parent, I'm supposed to be upset and outraged, but... If it was me, and some hot female teacher wanted to do some extracurricular activities at her house or some hot chick from my class wanted to take me on a magic carpet ride...I don't think I'd be that upset.
Got links to back your assertions? I haven't read anything that suggests that she left those images up on the screen for hours.
I'd have to argue against even losing her teaching credentials. Certainly a reprimand is in order, but the catalyst to the situation was not only beyond her control, it was within the control of the school administration. She was under orders not to turn the computer off under any circumstance. She reported the situation (poorly, but she did report it).
Plenty of young and old teachers alike are not computer savvy.
It's very easy to imagine a person who would not know what to do in this situation. How many times during your scholastic career did a teacher or school administrator make a decision that was contrary to logic, not in the best interest of students, or altogether dumb.
I found naked pictures in National Geographic in third grade. Eventually those issues were removed from the classroom. I can't imagine that my teacher was even reprimanded. The only real difference is that those pictures weren't designed to be tittilating. They still got into the classroom under the guise of an educational tool, and my teacher didn't immediately remove the issues when she discovered what we had been seeing. I'm willing to bet that my third grade class was not the only one in the country to go through this, and I'm also willing to bet that there are National Geographic issues in classrooms today with pictures of naked women inside them.
I mean, there's definatly evidence of shady behavior, viewing pron at work, but I do believe that it wasn't intentional to show the students. Trouble is though, do you really want some pron-at-work type person teaching your child? After all, they're supposed to be a trusted role model and good influence for our youth.
Just because porn is found on a computer does not mean anyone was viewing, looking at, porn. Several years ago it happened to me, even though I didn't download or install anything recently, I found one of those dialers installed on my computer. And now many find spyware automatically installed on their computers, some of these are for porn.
FalconShould there be a Law?
does that mean grades 8 /9 when your 13 ish? you know that age at which
kids are already either sexually active or browsing their own internet at
home for hard core porn? I doubt these students were damaged. A few of the
sheltered ones may have questions for mommy and daddy but most of them are
already in the know!
Maybe they should ask the students.
Seriously though, 40 years!? I've seen murders get less than 12!
"Regardless of how the porn got onto the computer, her handling of the situation after that was grossly incompetent for a teacher. She could have simply covered the monitor."
"She could have effectively sought help. "
"That in all that time she could not come up with a single effective way to deal with the situation shows that she is totally unable to deal with being in charge of children."
how could she? porn destroys your mind, doesn't it? Isn't that the "injury" she risked inflicting on the children?
Obviously the porn had damaged her brain and thus she can not be responsible for her actions after seeing porn.
"I'd hate to see how she would do in a medical emergency or a natural disaster or a fire."
If she lit 4 kids on fire, or injected them with hepatitis I dont think anyone would find 40 years to be an absurd consequence or object to her loosing her teaching license.
I think I first saw softcore porn around when I was 10 and hardcore porn not long afterwards... I aced all the sex ed courses incidentally...
little did I know it would destroy the rest of my life.
oh how the nightmares plague me to this day
No one has a right to their *own* opinion. They have a right to the TRUTH.
with pornography is just weird, and even though I am a born and bred Scottish Lutheran - sheesh I did Grow-Up and had an education. Resident as I am on the Continent, (where the Alps are on my doorstep) I am fortunate enough to live where the local population, in general, has a very sensible attitude to sex. It occupies no more of an obsession than clothes, food, beer, balsamico, olive oil and er...George W. Bush (Okay, you can't have everything), so while this is a marginally interesting post it is really a huge load of tosh about an idiosyncrancy that is entirely peculiar to our companions across the big pond, who spent some time chucking English tea into Boston Harbour.
You know sex, drugs,rock n roll - these are just things we do.
Snowboarding is where we are at.
What we want is long powder.
Posts, MyBio or Sig, may contain satire, sarcasm, bolded nouns be sardonic or even witty & be Church of SD
I remember teachers having problems getting slide projectors to work.. let alone a computer. for all she knows taping paper on the monitor would overheat it and cause it to melt.
No one has a right to their *own* opinion. They have a right to the TRUTH.
Dude what the fuck are you talking about? what the hell is wrong with some of you americans, kids doesn't get harmed by accidentally seeing a porn popup.. Let me repeat: watching a picture of people having sex is not harmful to children ffs. Get it into your skull, no why the hell do you want her fired, its probably some of the pupils who been accessing the porn sites responsible for the popups.. geez..
> She could have simply covered the monitor. An elementary
> school classroom would have plenty of items available to allow
> that (construction paper, tape). She could have sent the kids
> to the playground or cafeteria or assembly room.
You know what's funny? You expect this woman to react appropriately in the heat of the moment. OTOH, you, who is under no pressure and has all the time in the world, failed to come up with the most effective way to prevent the images, i.e. turn off the monitor, and instead would be running around the classroom looking for construction paper and tape.
OBSimpsons: "Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true!" -- Homer
Have you read my blog lately?
*Flash*
8=================D
There' you're scarred for life! Now I'm facing forty years!
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
This situation arose because there ARE real criminals involved, and probably not this poor lady:
1. Microsoft. A monopoly that has created an enormous hegemony that is completely insecure and poorly designed.
2. The Media. A group of corporations that are misinforming the population of a democracy so that
3. The Government. Can keep allowing Microsoft and other bloatware vendors to dominate the market allowing
4. Spam Kings. To put porn all over every computer in the nation insuring that
5. School Administrations. continue to use the hegemonic monopoly products and allow their schools network infrastructure to be completely over run with porn.
I mean, let's talk about how things would have been different if the lady had been running Firefox. Or Firefox on Ubuntu. Or Firefox on Ubuntu on a reliable network that had some reasonable amount of IP protection from the get go.
There are criminals involved in this case, and this poor nit wit lady is very likely not one of them. Just another misinformed, ignorant American who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and suffered greatly thanks to Microsoft's inability to design an OS or browser that is remotely secure, and also thanks to the complete erosion of democracy and real news that has allowed that kind of moronic hegemony to take evolve.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
You're an ignorant prude. Sex is a normal thing and porn is the depiction of sex. Who cares if the children saw it?
Stupid Americans. It's no wonder you have the poorest educational system in the world with rubes like you as the end result.
For giving these students the time of their life??
Come on, I would have paid all my lunch money for this!
I'm willing to bet that this incident isn't the first time those kids have seen internet porn. Somewhere out there, kids are surfing the web at home without parental supervision. I don't know why people insist on believing that children are so innocent and naive these days.
Many states don't require a "license" to substitute teach. They pay someone about $60-75/day to babysit the kids. I know a retired engineer who subs for Math Teachers on a regular basis.
You know, if they let the kids carry guns, they could've shot shit out of the computer as soon as things went wrong and nobody would have been exposed to picture of adults without clothes, doing rude things. I guess they could've shot the teacher for her incompetence too.
Some days, I'm happy to live in Europe.
And you should lose your credibility.
How the fuck can you think about even the smallest possibility of firing someone because of that?
When do you people get it?
PORNO, SEX, FLESH, CREAM PIES and even BUTTHOLE SURFERS Does not harm children..
nor does it harm you or anyone else...
Yes, you can take everything to the extreme.. and sex between two (or even more) human beings or even animals, can be harmful for the involved.. But it does not harm you as the fucking (no pun intended) viewer...
I've never understood these points of view.. and probably never will...
Everyone should be allowed to watch sex.. have lust.. get inspiration and what have we... including children
If you're so afraid of sex.. Can you convince yourself to even breed?
But considerably less for rape or murder.
I don't care who you are. That's funny right there.
Get-r-done!
What do you mean by "in the heat of the moment"? According to her testimony at her trial, the situation continued for several hours. If she could not think of something in the first several minutes, fine, but to not be able to come up with any solution over several hours is not failure to react just "in the heat of the moment".
As for turning off the monitor, I left that off on purpose. She had been told not to turn the computer off. I'm giving the benefit of the doubt there and assuming that she did not realize that the monitor and computer might be separately powered.
That page contains links to where you can download and read the trial transcript, if you want more than that story summarizes.
100% ban on the internet in schools, only way to protect teachers... surprised the unions haven't jumped on that idea.
I haven't seen any comments to suggest: Maybe one of these kids said hey, watch this, and manually entered some tgp site into the URL bar, or googled "fuck" or something, even better used images.google.com. It could take just a few seconds to bring up a porn site with a raft of popups. I think that's the most likely scenario. No matter what, the school district is surely scapegoating Ms. Amero so they don't get sued, maybe the prosecutor or chief of police is corrupt enough to go along. A foolish and sorry business.
Spoken like someone who's never been in charge of a classroom full of kids. Rounding up the kids and marching them off somewhere else is easier said than done, and entirely appropriate for dire emergencies, but hardly for a porn pop-up on the screen.
I don't know why she couldn't have just turned off the monitor, but losing a teaching license for this, let alone serve 40 years in jail, is beyond extreme.
And, at least in NY, you don't need a teaching license to work as a sub; in many districts, all you need is two years of college.
Truth, Justice. Or the American Way.
"In fact the popups were appearing for several hours".
Unfounded, pro-prosecution claims. Belief in authority. Between-the-lines longing for official (i.e. governmental) intervention. You must be a Republican, like all the other hypocrites.
When I served on our local school board, one of our teachers had pop-ups take over his screen when a student used the PC while the teacher was logged in. He quickly responded to the situation to minimize the exposure, but some students still saw things they shouldn't, according to the district, and it was reported up the chain. When I heard about it, I was more unhappy with the IT folks who can manage to block all sorts of sites, and lock down this, and make impenetrable that, according to their boasts, but couldn't block a pop-up. I argued that if anyone should be punished, it should be the head IT guy, but, as only one voice among seven on the board, I was overruled and the principal wrote up the teacher for some infraction or another - I don't recall exactly what they settled on. I don't believe it was turned over to the police or DA, though.
Good luck with the re-trial, but if their district is anything like ours, a "not guilty" verdict still won't help her get her job back. Not that she'd want to work for them, anyway...
Truth, Justice. Or the American Way.
> "Set to be sentenced today, Amero instead entered another not guilty plea."
If the answer is war, you are asking the wrong question
The biggest problems in schools in the US today are the parents and administration. The teacher is caught in the middle.
Absolutely, any teacher that allowed something to be viewed that parents object to will be villified, investigated and possibly fired by the administration. It doesn't matter if it is pornography, white supremacy, or evolution. If the parents do not agree with the material, the teacher is in trouble for bringing it out in the classroom. And in most cases, the teacher is getting zero support from the administration.
This teacher that was told not to turn off the computer and couldn't seem to control it obviously had no business in a classroom with a computer in it. Any barrage of porn popups is going to be distracting, titilating and going to cause problems when the students talk about what they have seen. Sure, you can say "Titties for everyone" but the parents don't seem to agree. They want to control their children's access to explicit sexual materials and the school is telling them that they can. So when a teacher proves this control isn't present, the parents blame the school and the teacher.
Sex education in US schools has been watered down over the last 20-30 years so completely that it is almost pointless. The parents of even a minority of children can block this from being any meaningful exchange of information. The result is what the parents say they want - they control access to sexual information. So girls end up having sex at 12 without ever understanding this is where babies come from and yes, you can get pregnant if you do it standing up. But parents are demanding this kind of control so the school gives in.
Why wasn't this brought up during the original trial?? Seems like something that she might want to say? Especially if it did happen? It seems like they had no hard evidence that she was displaying pornography to these children.. I think the first thing I would say if accused is "it was a pop-up!". Case closed?
She's a substitute. She has no license.
The fact that this case is being prosecuted just sickens me. This prosecutor needs to stand behind the Duke lacrosse prosecutor in the line to get his license revoked.
Slippery slope. I'm glad you live in Europe too.
... what reason is there to have [the Internet in schools] ...
The internet is in schools:
- to create situations like this,
- then use them as an excuse to pass legislation censoring the Internet "to protect the children",
- then use that legislation to achieve as much control of Internet content as government functionaries find useful.
Period.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I don't mean to offend you, but I frankly doubt that you actually read the transcripts that you link to.
You claim that this happened in an elementary school, but it was in a middle school. By that you imply that the the kids were much younger than they really were. At the time of the hearings, all the students that testified were fifteen, and they said that they were thirteen years old when the incident took place. (One student said (s)he wasn't sure if (s)he was twelve).
You also claim that the kids were exposed to the porn for several hours, but in the transcripts the kids explicitly say that the students could not see the porn from their seats, as the monitor was on the teacher's desk and facing away from them. They say they caught glimpses of the "popups" when they went to the front of the room (to ask about the assignment they were working on, to throw some trash away, etc.). The real scandal began when those students talked about what they saw with other students outside of the classroom, but based on the testimonies most of those students never really saw the images.
So, people who read your comment will get their emotions manipulated, as they will think that these were dozens of pre-teens who were exposed to hard core porn being continuously presented to them for several hours in a large monitor that was facing them (a setup very common in elementary schools, where a handful of computers are placed against the walls, facing towards the center of the room). And that my friend, is a very different picture from what the testimonies say.
There is exactly one option that will, at this point, make me say "justice served." That is complete and immediate dismissal of all charges and disbarment of the prosecutor who pursued this in the first place.
If this does go to trial, my defense strategy would be this: Bring one expert witness after another to the stand to testify that this could happen on a poorly patched and insecure system regardless of what this woman may have done. Eventually the prosecution will have to stipulate that fact to which one must then say "So, why are we here?"
This just makes me amazingly angry.
One more note... don't try to wiggle out of jury duty, folks. That may be your chance to be the voice or reason and to see justice done. It may also be an opportunity to exercise your right of Jury Nullification.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
I'd be less inclined to view the prosecution as a bunch of douchebags if they'd dropped the charges instead of going for another trial. There are cases of prosecutors who, after somebody is tried, convicted, and jailed, still fight like hell to keep them there even when later DNA evidence shows conclusively that the person is innocent. I don't know what it is that leads some prosecutors to want to railroad the innocent, but I'd like to see THAT made a crime.
ummm... turn the monitor off?
Chuck
1) Name-calling to support your argument indicates you obviously aren't well educated yourself.
2) Actually, the definition of pornography includes the word "obscene". Again, I question your own education.
3) A large portion of the world population does not think its appropriate for children to view obscene images.
4) The poorest education system in the world?!? Give me a break! I suppose child soldiers in Africa, and enslaved children working as camel jockeys in Yemen have a better education than the people who made it to the moon first?
I apologize for feeding the trolls...
How about a different, more realistic headline for normal people, not lawyers:
"Teacher Must Go Through Two Trials For Being Attacked by Popup Porn Ads, Possibly 40 Years in Jail"
--
make install -not war
I'm still not sure why the teacher is being blamed. I would assume that most K-12 schools would be using some kind of proxy server to limit access to 'questionable' content. From talking to some network admins in the past who work for a local school district, they treat the students as hostile users and try to limit the access as much as possible.
Classroom puter, I would assume wasn't something the teacher lugged back and forth from home....did the substitute teacher circumvent the network? how was she able to surf pr0n in the first place?
She is a teacher, not a babysitter. If the school does not provide adequate protection for its own students, it is not the teacher's fault. The school did not provide her with her own login/password. Even then, the school should have given EACH STUDENT their own individual accounts AS WELL so as to be able to have some accountability. Since the computer was left logged in at all times, anyone could have accessed the machine be it for serious work, play, or even pranks. Even if she had enforced some sort of computer-usage policy (i.e. only allowed to use it while she was next to the computer), spyware/pop-ups might still get through, and she would look even more guilty since she would presumably be supervising the computer.
If you don't want your kids exposed to porn, either demand that the schools do more to secure their systems, or home school them. Quit sending your kids to school and expecting the teachers to babysit them. Hell, even if you took out the computers completely, there will still be kids who will sneak in inappropriate material just for pranks.
Also, your comparison of this situation to a fire or natural disaster is laughable. Lives are not at danger if kids happen to see naked photos. They may have some wrong ideas about sexuality, but then that's the parents' responsibility anyway.
my god you're an idiot. fuck off and die. seriously.
Just so long as he wasn't running with scissors - you could poke someone's eye out with those things.
A marriage is always made up of two people who are prepared to swear that only the other one snores.
Clam it, dude. You got served.
You know, this may not be a popular viewpoint, but there's a good argument to be made for the following:
When one can be jailed for 40 years for showing young people the very process that brought them into existence, you are living in an irrational theocracy. Make me a scientific argument to the contrary.
Accident or no, one should never be punished by the legal system for talking about or educating about sex. It's healthy, it's normal, it's natural, and it's inevitable. Suggesting that it injures minors is asinine and offensive.
Perhaps it is the very same leaders who seek to control our reproductive rights that it injures?
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
Hahahahahaha. That was funny, thanks.
Here's hoping that "If they would have let [this person] carry guns" catches on as a meme. :)
Like what I said? You might like my music
God, YES!
I KNEW IT!
Thanks!
It's Microsoft and the evil empire once again that are the true criminals.
And in league with Satan, no doubt!
But why do you suggest FF and Linux as salvation?
Don't tell me you've already given up on your Macintosh! But then I suppose the sexy teach would probably be bored with those nerdy pony-tailed geeks. (in spite of those cool Apple TV commercials)
That antichrist Bill Gates must be chuckling in his underworld Redmond lair (no doubt full of porn!)
Curses!
---
.
- aqk
F U
Yeah!
Think...your watching your fetish porn and you think your home alone. Then your Mum walks in - you have 500ms to consider the following:
a) Hide junior under the desk and/or zip up your pants
b) Alt Tab or close the window (hoping there's no other windows there)
c) Turn off the monitor
d) Think up a viable excuse.
Now take that situation and imagine you are just finishing yourself off. You'd panic like a biatch, possibly doing none of the above and forever scarring your mother's thoughts of you being innocent for the rest of your life.
I'm sure that this woman probably felt a similar amount of panic and shock (since she didn't even EXPECT the pop-ups...).
~Jarik
PS: Apologies for the graphic images. >_>
But...this is Slashdot - I'm sure we've all been through this situation at one point or another. =P
As we know,
There are accurate facts.
There are things we know are facts.
We also know
There are accurate unfacts.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We know are lies.
But there are also inaccurate facts,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.
Reduce, reuse, cycle
That sure fails the average penis size, but no worry, ...
.. still .. trolls don't have solutions for size problems ;)
lots of people caring about your size have solutions for cheap prices thru e-mail;
That way you can reeaallly scare someone and will be fullproof for Bubbah whenever someone gets scared enough
I have a distinct feeling this isn't taken funny but trollish
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
Lots of people still think their monitor is powered by their PC; as they used to be years ago.
There are still PSU's with an extra connector to attach the monitor; for most people the power button on the PC is also the powerbutton for their monitors (while technically not always the most feasable solution to "just cut power" like that; but that's another discussion).
How can she know the interns of a computer; how it is connected; electrically, for as far as most computer-illiterate people think the power switch on the monitor turns on the PC and not the monitor as single unit. As I've read before she was forbidden to turn off the computer so it sure makes sense this solution was not the best one in a flash of panic.
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
said teacher would, in fact, be giving a fuck. Several, in fact, to every single student.
I never spellcheck and I freely admit it. Save your karma for more worthwhile "lol erorrs" replies
'Sounds like the regular classroom teacher had a lot of time on her hands to go surfing around'
.. exhaustive independent forensic analysis of Amero's hard drive showed that the machine had been infected with multiple pieces of malicious software before she arrived at the school ">
You do realize that spyware is designed to act without the users knowledge or intervention. How long do you think a Windows 98 PC with out of date anti-virus and no firewall would last on the Internet before getting infected. If you read the rest of the article you would have read that hair-styles.org directed to new-hairstyles.com that had pornographic links that initiated pop-ups.
"Mr. Napp, the class' regular teacher logged on to the PC because Julie Amero being a substitute teacher did not have her own id and password">
"We also noted that there was no firewall and there was an outdated antivirus program on the PC. The PCwas being tracked before October 19, 2004 by adware and spyware"
"Herb Horner
was Re:Analysis of her system
davecb5620@gmail.com
Ms. Amero's attorney, William Dow III, is a big money [and well worth it] guy that's representing her pro bono. If this was fark I'd give him the "hero" tag. =)
I had a much bigger salary, the government had to leave a paper trail if it would spy on me, and we had yet to attack the wrong nation in revenge for a terrorist attack!
Blar.
MR. SMITH CONTINUING. Q. on October 19th, 2004, did you hear on that date, hear anything of interest happening in the school specifically concerning Ms. Amero? A. I did not on the 19th, no.
..
..
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.. I told her that I had gone up and looked into the computer's history and that there was pornographic images on the computer. ..
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.. Re:She should lose her teaching license
Q. Did anybody, specifically Ms. Amero, come to speak to you about anything going on in her classroom? A. I don't believe she came to me on the 19th, no.
Q. So you specifically didn't talk to her about anything? A. I don't believe so, no.
Q. Subsequent to that, meaning after the 19th, obviously, did you learn that somethting of interest had happened while she was substituting in that class? A. Yes.
Q. Okay, Without telling us what you specifically learned, the communication, how did you learn about this? A. I got an e-mail, recieved an e-mail, electronic mail from the teacher, Mr. Napp.
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Q. The day after the incident? A. Yes. Q. But prior to that you never heard anything about it, correct? A. Yes, That's correct, I believe.
A. Yes. Approximatly two to three weeks, maybe a month before I had some concerns from some of the teachers sharing that, you know, not activly teaching class.
A. I think yes, I would have said to her something along the lines that she needed to be up teaching a class and not using the computer to great excess.
Q. I understand that. You had a conversation with her prior specifically about accessing the Internet excessively as you put it? A. Yes.
Q. And she was informed of what the computer is supposed to be used for in school? A. yes. I would believe so, yes.
Q. Let me jump back to -- and that was before the 19th, correct?
A. Yes. It would have been probably some time in early October, maybe late September
Q. Did she ever come to you on the 19th to tell you that was happening? A. She did not. To my recollection, she did not.
CROSS EXAMINATION BY mr. cocheo:
Q. Good morning, Mr Fain A. Good morning
Q. Did you hear Ms. Amero state that she was having any problems in her classroom on the computer on October 19th?
A. On October 19th, did she approach me is your question? Q. Yes. A. I can't recall that
MR. COCHEO CONTINUING Q. Has any student or staff member complained about pop-ups? MR. SMITH Objection, irrelevant.
THE COURT: Well, I think if the question were framed about the classroom, in that classroom, I would overrule the objection.
MR. COCHEO CONTINUING Q. In that specific clasroom? A. Specifically over pop-ups? Q. Yes. A. No
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Now, the Puritans were not puritannical quite like we use the word these days. A few guys like Revend Michael Wigglesworth were truly odd uptight (check out his poem "I Erect a Pillar Unto God" (it's not a cigar, I tell you!) or his secret encoded diaries documenting his pedophilia). But most Puritans got married while knocked-up. But the Puritans, uptight or not, were a minority. A minority up there in the cold Northeast because even tho they weren't quite who we think they were, they were still too uptight for the rest of the folks. Go read "The Maypole at Merrymount" by Thomas Morton. It should be free somewhere; it's older than dirt. Also Jehlen and Warner's anthology of early American lit is a good book to give you a feel for the real uh deal.
The Puritan hoo-ha started showing up during the cold war and was given a big push by guys like Perry Miller who were all indebted to the Ivy League (in his case Harvard) institutions for which they worked and who were also responding with a backlash against libertine WW2 vets. Um, but I'm getting out of hand here. Basically the Puritan-America story gained credibility at the same time Thanksgiving was cooked-up and the flag pledge (written for kids by a socialist) gained the words "under god" from right Catholics. It was a load of crap intended to justify the presence of sticks up certain butts.
I teach freshman comp at a Big 10 university. Most freshmen cannot construct a productive database query. They have trouble using services like Ebscohost or Factiva because if their topic is underage drinking, to choose a typical one they'd like, they'll type in "underage drinking" and start wading through the hits. Students from wealthier schools do well at this, and when I ask them about it, they had a teacher who taught them. Of course, there are computer hobbyist types constructing useful boolean searches, but they are pretty thin on the ground.
When I teach courses in rooms with laptops for all the students, they know how to go to MyStupid or Fork.com or how to watch Homesar or pooTube, but they don't know how to insert headers in Word, create a hanging indent, much less use a stylesheet.
So I'm guessing that an intranet would be a great idea, one that relied upon a monthly or weekly distribution of data from a state, federal or some other entity's office. Then you gots your wikipedia or what-have-you. Think of the idea of popping up little clones of the Internet in remote locations for the volks using the OLPC doohicky. Don't put any fun stuff in it. I remember Oregon Trail was enough to distract me. Don't allow students go get outside the LAN. And a real plus of this for parents, politicos, and other traditional enemies of teachers is that each state could pick just how ignorant it wants to be simply by excluding information in much the same way that they currently cherry pick textbooks, cut passages out of texts, ban books, and so on.
But here's the sticking-point that means this won't happen: you need teachers with some minimal computer training that they take seriously and follow. You know, how to log out, for example. How to do stylesheets so they can pass it on. I think the current situation is like watching cavemen try to figure out what to do with an abacus. The folks at this woman's school were obviously scratching their bits with their abacus. And now even more cavemen are going to be running around afraid the abacus is a demon sent by god to test them.
The school in this case was a middle school (jr. high).
The teacher was not surfing the web for pr0n as some have suggested. The images were pop-ups ads that appeared on her computer.
Only some students saw the images in questions as her monitor did not face the class.
She informed the school of the problem but was told not to turn off the computer.
The teacher was not computer literate enough to know to turn off the monitor.
The school did not have firewalls, spyware removal tools, etc.
The state placed all the responsibility on her and did not believe that she could have received pornographic pop-ups without visiting pornographic sites.
As someone who has had to clean up many pop-up infections of other people, all it takes is one click to a shady site to get infected. One of my friends was horrified when these ads starting appearing on her computer as she was the kind of person that didn't even curse. I checked out her history and found the offending site. It was a lyrics site that she had visited to look up lyrics of a song. The ads she got were not always pornographic in nature. Some of them were general ads but the nature of these shady sites means that they attract businesses that are less than reputable. So I installed firefox and Google toolbar. I recommended she use firefox but in case she didn't like it, the Google toolbar should block most of them.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
This is part of the philosophy of the modern criminal justice system. Heavy maximum sentences are simply a bargaining chip granted to prosecutors to efficiently dispose of cases that probably don't merit a trial. Prosecutors in the real world are the de facto judge and jury 90% of the time, due to the fact that they have the discretion to pick and chose cases to prosecute with draconian penalties. The best you can hope for is to pick responsible, reasonable people for that position. Prosecutors examine the evidence, make personal judgments on their facts and the applicable law, and file a laundry list of charges totaling 40 years if they so choose. At that point defense attorneys are often forced to tell a defendant not to risk it and plead guilty to a negotiated subset of the charges. The overwhelming volume of 'justice' is handled in backrooms this way. The rules of criminal procedure actively encourage it.
That's the struggle between the principles of civil liberties and the pragmatism of limiting crime in society. On the one hand, we demand a certain amount of accuracy for the sake of human dignity (not convicting the innocent), but on the other we demand that the streets be made safe and lawlessness be tamed. The only way to have it both ways it to place regular human beings (prosecutors and defense attorneys) in a position to arbitrarily dish out justice on an informal level. All of the myriad of technical rules and protections used in trials are a great amount of overhead. Trials are only necessary in close-call cases, for most defendants it's an unnecessary waste of resources.
So, we end up with a game where ridiculously oppressively harsh sentences are always threatened but rarely handed out. That was it creates the psychological impression that a defendant (and his lawyer) should sit down, shut up, and be 'thankful' to only get a 4-year sentence. If it weren't this way, every blatantly guilty and heinous criminals would always demand their day in court. I personally object to the forced informality of it all, but it's just the reality of a real-world system.
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, however, there is. -Berra
The editors are asleep at the switch. The earlier Teacher Found Guilty of Endangering Kids Due to Spyware is a Related Story.
let the ignorant teacher go, and bring charges against the IT staff. it's a pretty fucking simple equation. Block ALL traffic = safe. Allow ONLY specific, approved traffic to specific, approved destinations through specific, approved ports = safe surfing without porn pop-ups via accidental clicks.
/rant/ It absolutely infuriates me that this teacher is being blamed for something that may or may not have been her fault, simply because of the incompetence of the IT staff. I don't care if the entire staff is made up of teachers and janitors. You cannot convince me that there isn't a single person on the face of the planet that would volunteer to implement these types of safeguards. /end rant/
Coupled with a signed AUP, there is only one way that this teacher could be held liable for any porn on that machine. Intentional circumvention of the safeguards through direct violation of the AUP.
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Interesting that the subject of sex education in school hasn't come up yet. It's somewhat on topic.
In our school, 6th grade, we were shown a woman giving birth. Yes, we saw EVERYTHING. I think it was called the Miracle of Life.
What do you mean unfounded? That was HER testimony. She states they started in the morning. She states they were still happening all day. I don't know where you live, but here on Earth, a day is several hours. Hence, pop-ups were occurring for several hours.
She could have taken off her shirt and used it to cover the monitor!
God, is a child exposed to (gasp!) pr0n so goddamn terrible? NO!! Jesus, when I was seven I used to try and raid my big brother's porn collection for fuck's sake. Am I scarred? Not by that, no!! I was scarred by my 5th grade teacher yelling at me so loud for being in the boy's washroom that I peed myself, yeah! Thanks for protecting me from penises, guys! W00t!!! Now I'm a lesbian. Coincidence???? Heheheh.
It's a sad indicator of the state of affairs when "injuring a minor" means accidently being exposed to porn, and carries a 40 year jail term, when rape, murder, and mass defraudment seem to be relatively unimportant-- blase even.
Nanny state... bah! Move to Canada. We want you here.
Of course there's a double standard regarding a male or female. The irony is that it's that way because it's a male dominated society. It'll probably change over the years. Just look at how domestic fights are handled now. Back in the day, the man always the one arrested. Now it's almost as likely that the women will be arrested (or both).
Social change is often a slow process.
Oh, and it's not the Four Horseman, it's Nazis riding dinosaurs.
Ooh its a bare breast, now they will all become insane and grow up and fake evidence and invade countries at a whim!
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating