Teacher Faces 40 Years Over Porn Conviction - pop up porn during class, says not her fault

[The Straight Story]

Teacher Faces 40 Years Over Porn Conviction
Woman Claims Graphic Images Appeared After Students Visited Web Site

POSTED: 2:59 pm EST February 13, 2007

WINDHAM, Conn. -- Until recently, Julie Amero said, she lived the quiet life of a small-town substitute teacher, with little knowledge of computers and even less about porn.

Now she is in the middle of a criminal case that hinges on the intricacies of both, and it could put her in jail for up to 40 years.

She was convicted last month of exposing seventh-grade students to pornography on her classroom computer. She contended the images were inadvertently thrust onto the screen by pornographers' unseen spyware and adware programs.


Prosecutors dispute that. But her argument has made her a cause celebre among some technology experts, who say what happened to her could happen to anyone.

"I'm scared," the 40-year-old Amero said. "I'm just beside myself over something I didn't do."

http://www.local6.com/spotlight/11001724/detail.html

[damntexdem]

How did they actually get a conviction?

The jury must not have been very net savvy.

[mcscajun]

5. Most likely not. I am still explaining to friends and co-workers, even now,

how viruses and trojans spread, and why; why it's important to have anti-spyware and anti-adware software in addition to anti-virus and firewall programs.

There are plenty of people out there on PCs, using the 'Net, who are technically clueless, and for the most part, unprotected.

:(

[Cobalt Violet]

14. I wonder what kind of defense a substitute teacher can afford.

Probably not much. How sad.

[RC]

1. Images will get you 40 years

Killing 10's of thousands will get you rich.

[Bluebear]

2. USA! USA!

[Auggie]

3. So unfair...

[mcscajun]

4. Geeze. How'd they manage to convict her in the first place?

This certainly could happen to anyone, especially an "anyone" who had the kind of old computer that was in this classroom, lacking basic anti-spyware software, and left unattended in the hands of preteens.

Good lord I hope she is spared prison. She appears to have been through enough already.

[meldroc]

6. Nobody's safe from this.

Sometimes the cops & prosecutors use common sense, sometimes they don't. I remember reading about a case where the cops logged an IP address to which child porn was downloaded, dug up the end-user through the ISP, and raided the user's apartment, and it turned out the only resident of the apartment was an 80-year old woman who was totally clueless about computers. Turns out she had a wireless router in her apartment, which wasn't locked down, and the real culprit was using her router to avoid being traced. Thankfully, in this case, the cops were smart enough to not file charges.

There are cases of child pornographers using malware to cover their tracks - they're now using innocent people's machines as proxies, so if the IP is traced, it's not traced to them. In some cases, innocent people are being jailed.

[MountainLaurel]

9. That was in the WashPost last week

I believe the case in question happened in Arlington, VA.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

7. She should be thankful it's only 40 years.

They used to hang people in Salem for this sort of thing.

[MrSlayer]

8. 40 fucking years?

For a mistake? That's absolutely insane.

[pretzel4gore]

10. some guy in n carolina got 10 yrs for a drawing...

apparently in his diary, he drew pics of what the nazipoohs/prosecutors said was underage children; he pleaded out to avoid life sentence (this was a few yrs ago)
the drawing were stick figures, but, well it's the usa

[Pugee]

12. That was a weird case.

They did prosecute him on his private diary entries, but it was because his parents had turned them into police, hoping they could get help for his pedophilia even though he had not acted them out.

---His own mother calls him "a lonely misfit kid," a 22-year-old high school dropout with a nasty case of attention-deficit disorder and lousy job skills. The tragic topper, though, is Dalton's pedophilia, an obsession that netted him a 1998 child porn conviction for downloading verboten pictures. Despite that legal scrape, he has yet to squelch his truly stomach-churning fantasies, which involve the caging and rape of 10-year-old girls.---

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0135,koerner,27654,1.html

[pretzel4gore]

18. surely they could use mental health act to control him?

thanks for info. the big thing that stuck out in NC case was the fact he was convicted for hand drawn pics.

[karlrschneider]

11. "she was under strict orders not to shut the computer off."

:wtf:

Something don't make no sense here...
:eyes:

[etherealtruth]

15. That is certainly a very questionable part of the story ...

If this was purely accidental i cannot imagine why she did not immediately shut down ....instructions to the contrary or not. I am sure I would have chose to disregard that instruction (as I imagine any reasonable person would)

On the other hand ... even IF she intentionally showed pornography to a room full of kids ... how can a reasonable punishment for this be a prison sentence of 40 years?

[karlrschneider]

16. There must be more to this story. As you correctly note, 40 years

isn't even within the realm of sanity. Maybe we'll find out more as it plays out. :eyes:

[mongo]

13. This is so fucked-up

I have to wonder about how rules of evidence played out in this case.

Was the defense allowed to talk about what malware is and how it gets on a PC?

Were they allowed to mention that the school had no firewall because they school didn't pay the bill? In violation of Federal law?

How the hell any informed jury could convict is beyond me -- but in so many cases important facts can't even be mentioned in court.

[Junkdrawer]

17. "Security pros work to undo teacher's conviction"...

Researchers led by the head of a Florida anti-spyware firm aim to recreate what caused a Connecticut school's classroom computer to start displaying pornographic pop-ups in October 2004, an incident that recently led to four felony convictions for the substitute teacher involved.

....

Alex Eckelberry, president of anti-spyware firm Sunbelt Software, hopes to put the case to rest. Armed with an image of the disk from the Windows 98 SE computer, the technology expert put out a call to interested security researchers and assigned his own workers to the case.

"We have had huge offerings of support from the security community," Eckelberry said this week. "Other experts in the forensics community--and these are not small players--have come to us and offered to help."

The criminal conviction would not be the first case of misunderstood technology leading to a guilty verdict. In 2002, a 29-year-old network adminstrator was convicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for sending 5,600 e-mail messages to customers of his former employer--the now-defunct e-mail provider Tornado Development--warning about a security hole in Tornado's service that left private messages vulnerable to unauthorized access. The prosecutors in the case argued, and the judge agreed, that McDanel was guilty of unauthorized access and abused Tornado's e-mail servers to send the messages. The prosecutors have since admitted their mistake and the case was overturned on appeal, but not before McDanel served 16 months in prison.

....

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/02/04/teacher_conviction/