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."

i dont see

[TheCybernator]

how that is teachers fault? Unless the teacher installed the spy-ware intentionaly, which is probably not the case.

40 years ?

[Cygnus78]

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.

Re:The other sad thing.

[Short Circuit]

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 [grc4.org]. 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.

Re:The other sad thing.

[EvilIdler]

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?

The sad thing is

[ahuard]

that prosecutors are allowed to get away with this sort of abuse in the first place. If for every case that is overturned the prosecutor is required to pay a hefty fine to the defendant for wasting their time and messing with their reputation, we might not have to deal with these kinds of cases in the first place. The D.A. in the Duke rape case needs to be strung up by the balls and give those boys everything he owns in restitution.

We all agree that the prosecution has wronged the teacher in this case, so the question is--what do slashdotters think should be done about it?

Re:The other sad thing.

[jawtheshark]

Do you have a technical reason why this is? I don't see why this should happend. Have you filed a bugreport? Just wondering....

Re:you know....

[jawtheshark]

Is that so? As a kid I once saw a blowjob picture and I found it exceedingly gross. Did I recover? Sure... Even goatse, bestiality and tubgirl do nothing to me anymore. Would I enjoy doing anything of those things? Hell, no! But, hey, other people can do what they want.... Tolerance is something you learn over the years.

You want to know the one thing that scarred me as a kid, which I still remember with disgust to this day? I saw a charred corpse on TV. (I think it was on the news) I had nightmares for months after that. Still today, I ca't stand watching pictures of charred corpses.

Re:40 years ?

[penthouseplayah]

And in Denmark, in my freshman year of high school (equivalent to 10th grade, youngest pupil 15 years) at a school meeting some of the seniors set up a TV with a Peter North video and let it run for 5-10 minutes, before the teachers demanded it stopped. Not because of the porn, but mostly because we had to get back to class. Note that the principal and almost all teachers were present those 5-10 minutes.

The US seriously needs to prioritize.

Re:40 years ?

[vidarh]

In Norway, murdering the entire school class would have gotten her 21 years, with reporting requirements to the police for the following 10-20 years at most. It's the maximum sentence allowed for any crime if I remember correctly.

Re:The ONLY sad thing.

[Wwhispers]

Windows is a real OS! When linux comes to having as many people using it as MS, you will find attacks against it increased a 1000 folds. As for security, it has many many flaws too.The last time I install Ubuntu( the latest release ), I had 63 patches... It's bad IT workers that allow pc's to get hacked.

wrong purp!

[MadCow42]

Why the fuck are they going after the teacher when they SHOULD be going after the Spyware writer/vendor??? Even if the teacher did get the spyware on the computer by visiting a porn site, that doesn't ruduce the culpability of the spyware company/individual in exposing the kids to porn. I'm assuming the teacher didn't visit porn sites WITH the kids (or in front of the kids) of course.

So, fire the teacher for visiting porn in her off hours, and put the spyware guy in jail.

MadCow

Re:malware can drop child porn , not just reg. pr0

[__aavonx8281]

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.

Re:I deal in worst case scenarios

[Anonymous Coward]

Criminal prosecution should only come if there is actual harm to children

Right, but unfortunately that's not how the law works in common law countries AFAIKT. Otherwise prosecutors would have a hard time winning cases since there is no real balance of evidence either way concerning the alleged "harm" of exposure of children to pron. Instead, countries just legislate vaguely about indecent materials, broadly and poorly defined or not defined at all. The 2nd Protocol on Prevention of Child Trafficking and Prostitution has been forcing a definition of child pron on countries that have ratified (or perhaps only signed) this treaty, and it is extremely sweeping, criminalizing much that was formerly legal. People don't actually care about the evidence: they just want to criminalize that which offends them within their highly changeable moral framework. => 40 years for even thinking the word "children" in the same sentence as pornography".

Re:A clear case of US double morale?

[roaddemon]

How was this bigot modded up to insightful? Of course there is going to be double standards in any country, especially so in one as large and diverse as the US. I'm a Canadian living in Boston right now. There is very little difference politically between Vancouver and Boston: Everyone smokes pot, gay marriage is legal, everyone hates Bush, and I have yet to find a single person that will argue against Darwin's theory of evolution. If you want to find a country where people don't have different opinions, maybe you should move to cold war era russia or something. Or just stay in the shell you live in now. As for being the world's largest producer and consumer of porn, please supply some references. I can't even find a good strip club around here.

Police Accountability

[phuleish]

This is yet another example of the Police powers being abused a user at the school the I work at was accused of a very similar crime the authorities assured the Administration that the could PROVE who had or had not been accessing the purported material. Th specialist in internet crimes went to the local machine and pulled a hard drive and scanned it for information using very good software. However this agent was completely clueless. and the search was ridicules because. 1. Our network uses profiles all user data was on the server not on the local machine 2. Even so he did not pull the correct drive there were three hard drives on this particular machine since it was used to do system backups. 3. Just 1 week prior we had discovered that students had gotten hold of staff passwords and were signing on as staff although this had been corrected any data that might have been discovered could not have been proven only a very careful screening of access times and pc's could have shown a probability not a certainty of association. We live in a new age of the Salem Witch Trials. An accusation is enough to establish guilt.

Re:malware can drop child porn , not just reg. pr0

[SMS_Design]

Counter-point to that.. I'm a part of the OKC2600 crew, and we have monthly meetings that are open to the public. At one such meeting, there was a really creepy guy who kept asking questions about how people could push files onto a computer and such. Being wary of this guy, I did some research. Turns out, he was facing charges for having kiddie porn on a university computer. He was a professor at a community college. He MAY have been able to build up a good BS defense.. were it not for the fact that he had backed up large stacks of disks full of kiddie porn.

what to expect next

[3seas]

Underage kid walks in on parents having sex. kid turns of age and sues parents.
Parents claim they were making a little brother or sister for the youngster.
Court upholds Kids side, claiming parents should lie to underage kids about how
little brothers and sisters are made.

So if you want to get a teacher busted and sent to jail, you now know how to do it.
And only a fool would think kids today don't know about computers.

Remember, santa and the easter bunny exist until you are old enough to be told the
truth. What better way to prepair the next generation for believing the political,
war monging and religious BS.

Re:malware can drop child porn , not just reg. pr0

[Artifakt]

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.

Re:malware can drop child porn , not just reg. pr0

[Guido von Guido]

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.

Re:USA: Get over your problem with sex.

[hyfe]

I actually agree with most of what you said, I just find your arrogance astounding. You speak as if your beliefs are the One Self Evident Universal Truth, and that all Americans are fools because some of them disagree with you, even though on a global scale your views are the the minority by a long shot.

Yes, his belief actually is part of The One Self Evident Universal Truth. Nipples are not dangerous and people like sex.

I'm not sure you really want to make this into a numbers game though. Africa is for the most part really open about sex, and most Latin Americans have a fairly relaxed attitude to it. Most of Asia seems to not make such a big deal about it either; it's just not an issue. The only countries I've heard of punishments like these are in fact Middle Eastern ones and the US (coincidently, not too far from the list of countries that still allow executions).

Re:The other sad thing.

[ColdWetDog]

Yes, we do this at our small, rural hospital. The data is dumped through a VPN - it's fairly well locked down although I still bridle at the fact that the PCs in the general hospital network are pretty open.

The system was set up by the radiology group that interprets the image. I talked with one of their techs during the install. They're quite cognizant of the issues facing a remote medical imaging site. The PCs are scanned remotely on a regular basis. The point being that it's not set up by a bunch of kids in somebody's basement....

Re:The other sad thing.

[megabyte405]

That is a bit of hyperbole. If you're goofing around on a MEDICAL IMAGING machine because of spyware, then someone already didn't have permission - things like that should never be connected to the internet, full stop.

Re:malware can drop child porn , not just reg. pr0

[Rick17JJ]

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 [nytimes.com]. 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 [go.com]". 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 [linux.com] 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.

Quite right-- I have seen this

[einhverfr]

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.

Re:malware can drop child porn , not just reg. pr0

[Rick17JJ]

I have on several occasions tried to give several security tips to average computer users about using WiFi host spots. In two instances, I barely got started before they complained that I was talking way over their head and had used unfamiliar jargon such as browsers, IE, cookies, packet sniffing, encryption and phishing. It was clear that they did not not even want to try to understand what to understand what I was trying to warn them about. They just wanted to access their email and do their on-line banking. It would be scary having some people like that in a jury in a case like that. They could easily understand the idea of someone illegally downloading child porn but not the alternative explanations of how the files got there.

That reminds me of some scenes in the movie "Idiocracy [amazon.com]". In that movie, for the last 500 years, the dumb people in the world have been having more children than the smart people. The smart people would postpone marriage and children until they complete college and establish their careers and can afford children. By then in many cases they are less fertile. By contrast the dumb people supposedly don't worry about when they can afford to have children and frequently forget to use birth control methods so they out breeded the smarter people. After 500 years, the average IQ has fallen to an amazingly low level.

In a forgotten suspended animation experiment conducted by they Army, a soldier and a civilian hooker were test subjects who accidentally end up in suspended animation for about 500 years. After waking up, he went to a hospital but was not able to pay the hospital bill because he did not have a bar code on his forearm. He was arrested and put on trail for being un-scannable and for not paying his hospital bill. In court, he said that he was not guilty and tried to explain the Army suspended animation experiment that that he had been part of. They did not even understand much of anything that he was talking about. The prosecutor used a more effective simplistic emotionally charged strategy with little consistent logic. The jury found him guilty but he soon managed to escape from the poorly run jail.

After being recaptured and booked in jail again they discovered that he was the smartest guy in the world, so he was released and sent to the White House to become secretary of the Interior and was asked to figure out why the crops weren't growing. With the help of the hooker, they came up with the outlandish idea of watering the plants. One week after trying that, the plants had not yet grown noticeably. For reasons that I won't bother explaining, watering plants with water resulted in millions of employees of the Brondo sports drink corporation being laid off. Mobs of angry unemployed people soon appeared and he was placed on trial. He used his best logic to try to explain everything in the televised court trial. He was sentenced to death by being crushed by monster trucks on live TV, but fortunately the plants finally started to grow just in time. He soon learned to to talk dumb and properly connect with average voters and was elected president of the United States. Rita the hooker became first lady.

It was a good movie with many that in many ways reminds me of how advertising, politicians and perhaps even the courts sometimes act in real life.