I haven't blogged about the Julie Amero case, largely for reasons of time (several family medical problems), partly from losing a big post in a Firefox crash. But it's definitely an important story for education and technology, and a demonstration of how internet fears hit human lives.
How does this relate to the fearsome internet, a major focus of this blog?
First, the Amero case embodies the classic connection of cyberspace,
pornography, and children - and children who are tweens, albeit
minors. Notice, too, an interesting spin in the Norwich paper:
Julie
Amero, the former Norwich substitute teacher convicted last month of
exposing children to pornography, has become a cause celebre in
technology circles around the world.
Read on - are these
people also educators, librarians, civil libertarians? No, just geeks
in the technosphere, who are then opposed to jurors and parents.
Technology versus children, in short
Second, the process by which Amero was convicted - indeed, the entire setup from filters through blaming - in shaped by powerful fears, which have taken the place of practical knowledge. As one blogger summarizes Willard, the major driver behind the process is
Fear. Fear stirred up by politicians, the mainstream media and the human tendency to fear that which is not known.
Moreover,
this sounds a lot like scapegoating, depending on established structures of fear. If one accepts the filtering
model for K-12 schools, then more needed to have been done by people
other than Amero. Moreover, could parents have sued the school
district if Amero had not been prosecuted? Wired's Regina Lynn: "Julie is taking the fall, but many other people failed before a porn storm burst into that classroom." Alternet: "When lax cybersecurity meets anti-porn hysteria, an innocent computer infection can land you in jail."
Quick background: in October 2005, Amero, a substitute teacher in a Connecticut school while projecting images from a classroom computer in front of a seventh-grade class, pornographic content appeared. Amero was prosecuted and convicted of harming minors and corrupting their morals. She's due to be sentenced in about a week. The law describes a penalty of up to 40 years in prison.
A series of problems seem to render this verdict problematic, if not horribly wrong. (Nancy Willard's paper is a good place to go for these) First, it looks like Amero was caught in one of those insidious pop-up traps. These are common enough, sadly, and not everyone can escape them with ease.
Second, while Amero apparently sought help from school staff, the police did not interview staffers, nor did the latter play a role in the trial. She even tried to turn the computer around, so nobody could see the images. Interesting, the judge thought Amero didn't do enough, which is why he convicted her; another legal expert agrees. The Norwich Bulletin links the failure to turn off the computer with intent to click on porn, although another expert thinks the prosecution had no way of proving Amero typed URLs, rather than clicked on them or had pages pop up without her intent.
Why didn't she just turn off the machine? Apparently Amero had been told not to.
Third, the machine Amero used contained serious malware. On top of that (and unsurprisingly) it lacked up to date firewalls, and worse.
There was no evidence that either browser or OS had been, in any significant degree, updated, and neither the PC nor the network itself apparently had any kind of firewall...
The police detective indicated that the police never examined the school computer for the existence of Trojan horses, logic bombs, spyware, adware or other malicious code...
The IP address history logs of the school apparently were not reviewed. What is worse, it appears that nobody attempted to recreate the sessions with live Internet accounts to see whether the pop-ups actually occurred at the time. The defense expert’s request to do so in court was denied.
Is anyone out there arguing for Norwich? The blogosphere is generally outraged. There's a main blog, and a legal defense fund. This security report at least offers balance in criticizing Amero's pedagogy. A local education reporter blogged his reaction against Amero, but later pulled it and the comment thread (you can use the Google cache). The Alternet piece records the police response.
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