Here’s your new cause celebre

How many times have you managed to stumble into a pornographic pop-up?

With or without having visited a pornography site?

I know I have, and I take a fairly dim view of internet porn.

Enter a substitute teacher in Norwich, Connecticut, whose insidious crime of being technologically hapless could earn her 40 years in prison. [link]

Julie Amero was apparently substitute teaching a 7th-grade class when a string of pornographic pop-ups started appearing, apparently too fast to be shut down.

The school she was working at, Kelly Middle School, apparently was using a filtering system to keep such content off their systems, but had failed to properly register the software, which was expired.

The court case, which ended in a conviction after only two hours of jury deliberation is absolutely rife with problematic, biased rulings by the presiding judge, Hillary Strackbein, and could net Amero up to 40 years in prison for the crime of “risking injury to a minor”.

This is problematic on so many levels:

• Firstly, the courts didn’t allow the defense’s computer expert to fully audit the system in question
• The filtering system, which might have operated as intended, was being used after its registration had expired (ie, illegally) and as such, the school system in question has a question of massive liability, and a very actionable civil case standing against it.
• The evidence, as presented, inadequately proves whether it was the websites Ms. Amero has claimed to visit that planted the spyware, or whether it was usage by another teacher.
• The evidence fails to properly audit and detail the spyware itself, which, given the poorly-managed state of the school’s computers, could easily have invaded at one point and infected the entire network.

In short, this teacher is being railroaded by technologically-illiterate, headline-seeking politicians and bureaucrats. This teacher faces not only the end of her chosen career, but also serious time in state prisons. And the students are still at risk, the actual issue having shown no signs at all of being solved.

Hopefully, this case will get a fairer examination on appeal.

In the meantime, this should become an internet cause celebre. How can you help? Send an e-mail, blog it on your own blogs, seed the links around as best you can.

It’s our job to show the Norwich courts, school administrators, and board of education what an embarrassment it has allowed itself to become in the eyes of everyone but themselves.