Sub May Spend Her Life in Prison

We haven't been following this story, but it really should be on our radar screen, if only because it shows how out of control things can get.

The story in today's Norwich (Connecticut) Bulletin sounds plain enough:

NORWICH -- Sentencing could be postponed for the former substitute teacher convicted of exposing her seventh-grade students to pornographic images on a middle school classroom computer. Norwich porn case may be delayed

Do you know this case?

Here's a wrap-up from last week.

NORWICH -- State Prosecutor David Smith said he wondered why Julie Amero didn't just pull the plug on her classroom computer.

The six-person jury Friday may have been wondering the same thing when they convicted Amero, 40, of Windham of four counts of risk of injury to a minor, or impairing the morals of a child. It took them less than two hours to decide the verdict. She faces a sentence of up to 40 years in prison.

Oct. 19, 2004, while substituting for a seventh-grade language class at Kelly Middle School, Amero claimed she could not control the graphic images appearing in an endless cycle on her computer.

"The pop-ups never went away," Amero testified. "They were continuous."

The Web sites, which police proved were accessed while Amero was in the classroom, were seen by as many as 10 minor students. Several of the students testified during the three-day trial in Norwich Superior Court to seeing images of naked men and women.

Computer expert W. Herbert Horner, testifying in Amero's defense, said he found spyware on the computer and an innocent hair styling Web site "that led to this pornographic loop that was out of control."

"If you try to get out of it, you're trapped," Horner said.Teacher guilty in Norwich porn case

If you're reading this, you're on the Internet, and if you're on the Internet, you've seen those pop-up windows that, when you close one, it opens another one. I once had to replace my hard drive, it got so bad -- sites for kids are especially likely to have this sort of thing, and a lot of it is porn.

This substitute teacher was in front of the class when this started happening. And now she may go to prison for forty years.

Here -- a Washington Post reporter talked to her, see if this sounds like any teachers you've seen:

I had a chance this week to speak with the accused, Windham, Conn., resident Julie Amero. Amero described herself as the kind of person who can hardly find the power button on a computer, saying she often relies on written instructions from her husband explaining how to access e-mail, sign into instant messaging accounts and other relatively simple tasks.

On the morning of Oct 19, 2004, Amero said she reported for duty at a seventh grade classroom at Kelly Middle School in Norwich, Conn. After stepping out into the hall for a moment, Amero returned to find two students hovering over the computer at the teacher's desk. As supported by an analysis of her computer during the court proceedings, the site the children were looking at was a seemingly innocuous hairstyling site called "new-hair-styles.com." Amero said that shortly thereafter, she noticed a series of new Web browser windows opening up displaying pornographic images, and that no matter how quickly she closed each one out, another would pop up in its place.

"I went back to computer and found a bunch of pop-ups," Amero said. "They wouldn't go away. I mean, some of the sites stayed on there no matter how many times I clicked the red X, and others would just pop back up."

Amero said she panicked and ran down the hall to the teacher's lounge to ask for help. "I dared not turn the the computer off. The teacher had asked me not to sign him out" of the computer, she recalled. Amero said none of the teachers in the lounge moved to help her, and that another teacher later told her to ignore the ads, that they were a common annoyance. Substitute Teacher Faces Jail Time Over Spyware

Now ... I just did an experiment.

I just went to new-hair-styles.com and looked at it. I didn't get any pop-ups (yet), probably because I'm behind a firewall and I run a special popup-blocker.

This is sneaky, all right. Like, if you look at the page, you see a list down the left side that says "Woman's hair galleries," "Men's Hair Galleries," etc. Under "Man's Hair Galleries" their is a subheading ">> Short hair styles." If you click on the words "Short hair styles," you go to the next screen, which shows you ... short hair styles. But IF you click on the ">>" part, it sends you to this link: sweet.sweetmeet.ru/sex_hot_story/story67/woman69/woman_story104.html -- a Russian porn site. Links like this are hidden all over this web page. It's like a minefield.

This teacher was running Windows 98 with Internet Explorer 5, obsolete software seriously lacking in security features. The antivirus software subscription had expired. The computer was found to be infected with spyware and trojans. There was no firewall, no content protection, and no pop-up protection.

On the other hand some children were exposed to nudity, so this substitute teacher just might be spending the rest of her life in prison.

(If you'd like to donate to her defense, the family has set up a web site HERE.)