Teacher faces 40 years for spyware opening porn sites to her students
[ratings]
A female teacher in Norwich currently awaits a possible 40 year sentence for being found responsible for spyware allowing 10 minors viewing porn in her classroom. This is a strange one.
Julie Amero was acting as a substitute teacher when pornographic pop-ups started appearing on the screens of a computer in her classroom. I’m sure you’ve all had spyware problems at some stage, you know the pop ups that when clicked, open up 10 more pop-ups. Since spyware runs in the background and can be initiated but a number of things you do on your computer Amero obviously had no control over when this was going to happen. In fact, having noticed spyware on the pc, she had put in a number of previous requests to the school administration to have them fixed but was ignored. In fact, the school did have content filtering software but when the pop-up frenzy ensued, the license had expired.
The prosecution even admitted that they had not made a search on the pc for spyware of any kind. They just presumed that Amero had been viewing pornographic websites, which is where she had picked up the spyware and therefore was responsible for the spyware opening more pron websites when the kids were around. It is such a flawed case it appauls me that this woman has been convited and faces a possible 40 years behind bars. Had she had a more tech savvy lawyer in her defence he would have eaten holes in the prosecutions case. Oh, and one of the pupils mentioned how Amero had pushed his face away from the screen whe nhe tried to look at it, hard damning evidence :/
Having said all this, she may or may not be guilty of viewing porn sites on the school property. How a jury found enough fact in the prosecutions case to convict in this case is beyond me.
With so many free spyware programs available, its surprising the school hasn’t taken some of the wrap for this.
Update: Amero is not the only person to hit the headlines for spyware leading to a false accusation.
[ratings]
on January 16th, 2007 at 8:42 am
…. that’s just crazy.
on January 16th, 2007 at 11:54 pm
[…] This is what you might expect from any authorities when dealing with such a serious crime. Unfortunately, much like Julie Amero, the UK primary school teacher, Bandy appears to have been the victim of both spyware and hacking. Once again, as with the Julie Amero case, the prosecutions only arguement were that the images were found on his pc, therefore he must be guilty. […]
on February 6th, 2007 at 7:27 am
Yeah for americas f**k*d up legal system