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Throw a Coat over It: Teacher's Porn Conviction Debate

by jordan | February 13, 2007 at 05:16 pm | 569 views | add comment

This is a follow-up to my earlier post. If I may correct Mark Steinmentz, throwing a coat, or any other article of clothing, over a computer will not remove malware. The machine must be erased and the operating system reinstalled, which is beyond the DIY comfort level of most computer users. Also, to the user of the infected machine, pop-ups would appear seemingly at random once the Internet is accessed, and one computer in a network could be infected whilst the others remain clean.

What distresses me about this case is that nobody at an administrative level bothered to educate themselves about any of this, nor did they even check the offending machine, even though a teacher faces prison time over something very unlikely to be her fault.

Until recently, Julie Amero says, 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 behind bars 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."

It all began in October 2004. Amero was assigned to a class at Kelly Middle School in Norwich, a city of around 37,000 people about 40 miles east of Hartford.

Amero says that before her class started, a teacher allowed her to e-mail her husband. She says she used the computer and went to the bathroom, returning to find the permanent teacher gone and two students viewing a Web site on hair styles.

Amero says she chased the students away and started class. But later, she says, pornographic images started popping up on the computer screen by themselves. She says she tried to click the images off, but they kept returning, and she was under strict orders not to shut the computer off.

"I did everything I possibly could to keep them from seeing anything," she says.

Prosecutor David Smith contended at Amero's three-day trial that she actually clicked on graphic Web sites.

Several students testified that they saw pictures of naked men and women, including at least one image a couple having oral sex.

Computer consultant Herb Horner testified for the defense that the children had gone to an innocent Web site on hair styles and were redirected to another hairstyle site that had pornographic links. "It can happen to anybody," Horner said.

The defense argued that the images were caused by adware and spyware -- programs that are often secretly planted on computers by Internet businesses to track users' browsing habits. They can generate pop-up ads -- in some cases, pornographic ones.

"It's absolutely plausible," Ari Schwartz, deputy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, said of Amero's case. "It's a huge problem."

But many remain skeptical, including Mark Steinmetz, who served on Amero's jury.

"So many kids noticed this going on," Steinmetz said. "It was truly uncalled for. I would not want my child in her classroom. All she had to do was throw a coat over it or unplug it. We figured even if there were pop-ups, would you sit there?"