Julie Amero ‘classroom porn’ farce
p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- It looked as though American school teacher Julie Amero would wind up in jail for allegedly letting her students see online porn during class.
She’d been convicted of four felony counts of “risk of injury to a minor,” but a Connecticut Superior Court judge in charge of her sentencing set aside a guilty verdict, said the IDG News Service.
Lawyers and a team of computer security experts banded together to disprove the state’s evidence, said the Norwich Bulletin, going on:
“Most of them immediately argued the porn was the result of adware-generated pop-up ads on a computer lacking adequate filtering software.”
Sunbelt Software president Alex Eckelberry helped organize the computer team and, “As you can imagine, I’m very pleased at the outcome of Julie Amero’s sentencing today,” he posted on his blog when it was learned she’d get a new trial.
Amero, formerly a substitute teacher at Kelly Middle School in Norwich, Connecticut, was charged after an October 19, 2004, incident when, “a classroom computer exposed Amero’s seventh graders to pornographic images,” says IDG.
“She was facing up to 40 years in prison after her Jan. 5 conviction.”
Now, “Whatever you thought of the Amero story before, the reality is far far worse,” says Dan Tynan.
“Since I posted my screed last week about Julie Amero, the Connecticut middle school teacher who almost did hard time because a computer in her classroom was infected with malware, I heard from many readers — including a handful of people with intimate knowledge of the case,” he says on Tynan on Tech, going on »»»
It was a perfect storm of almost farcical proportions. Almost anything that could go wrong, did go wrong: Kids who exaggerated what they saw on Julie Amero’s screen. A school principal who overreacted and called the cops when an administrative rebuke would have been sufficient. An IT administrator who was dangerously out of touch. A DA who overreached in applying a felony charge to what was at worst a misdemeanor. A police computer forensics “expert” who was anything but, and a defense expert who was even worse. And Amero herself, more clueless about technology than the students she was supposed to teach.
Alex Shipp, a security researcher who volunteered to help Amero, says the school district’s IT admin was …
… an ex-IBMer approaching retirement who appeared to know little about PCs and networks. He let his firewall subscription lapse. He was running a trial version of an anti-virus program (Cheyenne) which was bought out by Computer Associates and discontinued in favor of their product over 6 months earlier. He did not update signatures regularly anyway. From his trial comments, he know little about malware or adware. He knew nothing about pop-ups. To me, it looks like he threw Julie to the wolves to cover his failings.
Security wonks who volunteered to help Amero obtained a ghost image of the computer’s hard drive but were inexplicably denied access to the full firewall logs. Still, that was enough to determine what images were on the PC (no hard core porn, but a number of nude lesbian scenes) and the malware program that was delivering the pop-ups: NewDotNet. (The team published its findings here [PDF].)
On that fateful morning in October 2004, Amero was searching for new hairstyles on a Windows 98 PC described by another security wonk as a “pile of living dog **** with absolutely no protection on it” when the popup storm hit. Without the complete logs, it’s impossible to know exactly what triggered the pop ups. We do know she didn’t turn off the machine, a point that was hammered home by the prosecutor throughout the case.
Meanwhile, Amero’s defense counsel was suffering from severe health problems, which got worse as the trial dragged on. His own forensics “expert” who was little more than a guy who played with computers as a hobby and got shredded on the stand. Per Shipp:
I think the police were incompetent. They believed the stories told to them by people with ulterior motives, and made no attempt to look at the digital evidence to see if there was any conflicts…. The police expert witness was a dangerous buffoon. He sent threatening emails to people involved in the pro-bono work, and during the trial made elementary technical errors.
I’ve seen an email sent by the police expert to a member of the security team, and it was troubling to say the least. Note to residents of Connecticut: Your tax dollars pay this man’s salary. Just something to think about.
“This case was a total breakdown in jurisprudence,” says Alex Eckleberry, the Sunbelt Software CEO who helped organize the team of security volunteers. “Nobody understood the technology.”
[The post above originally appeared on Infoworld's Notes From the Field blog.]
Dan Tynan - Tynan on Technology (beta)
[Tynan slugs his personal blogm 'Tech talk without the usual BS.' He's been writing and editing stories about technology and its discontents for more than 20 years. During that time he's been an editor in chief and an executive editor for national magazines, written for more than 50 publications, and taken home a closet full of awards. He's also the author of Computer Privacy Annoyances.]
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wind up in jail – Online porn teacher reprieved, June 7, 2007
IDG News Service – Teacher in spyware case granted new trial, June 6, 2007
blog – Some comments on the Julie Amero case, June 6, 2007
new trial – Julie Amero to get new trial, June 9, 2007
Tynan on Tech – The Julie Amero case: A dangerous farce, December 1, 2008
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December 2nd, 2008 at 11:24 am
lol!! Wait Wait
If malware was the cause of the popups that means a person before her must of previously visited malware-ridden porn sites
I hope she wins and claims damages from an iggnorant defense
December 2nd, 2008 at 2:35 pm
Rate the “police expert” at the website THEY couldn’t close: RateMyCop.
December 2nd, 2008 at 2:56 pm
“Amero was searching for new hairstyles on a Windows 98 PC…”
That is criminal.