On January 5, a six-person jury found former Kelly Middle School substitute teacher Julie Amero guilty of four counts of risk of injury to a minor. The charges stem from an October 19, 2004 incident when the computer in the classroom in which Amero was teaching started displaying pornographic pop-up advertisements. Prosecutors argued that Amero surfed porn sites while in class, causing the pop-up advertisements, while the former teacher's defense attorney argued that spyware installed from a hairstyling Web site caused the deluge of digital smut.
The case has attracted an enormous amount of interest, because the reported details of the trial appear to indicated that a lack of understanding of the technology involved and not solid digital evidence, led the jury to convict the teacher.
Alex Eckelberry, president of anti-spyware firm Sunbelt Software, hopes to put the case to rest. Armed with an image of the disk from the Windows 98 SE computer, the technology expert put out a call to interested security researchers and assigned his own workers to the case.
"We have had huge offerings of support from the security community," Eckelberry said this week. "Other experts in the forensics community--and these are not small players--have come to us and offered to help."
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In the latest case, a regular teacher logged into the classroom computer, because Amero did not have credentials. The substitute teacher was told not to log out or turn off the computer, according to media reports.
What happened after that has become the main point of contention.
A detective on the case using off-the-shelf recovery software argued that Amero clicked on pornographic Web links and caused the computer to display pornographic pop-up advertisements. However, the defense's forensic expert, Herbert Horner, stated that a more complete analysis showed that a harmless hairstyling Web site had actually redirected the PC's browser to pornographic sites, setting off the deluge of offensive ads.
Horner, the principal at Contemporary Computer Consultants, had walked into the courtroom to discuss his analysis but was prevented from doing so in detail because the prosecution argued that they had not had full disclosure of his testimony.
"It is kind of like you have a fire truck and a full tank of water and you can save everybody, but someone said you can't do that because the container you put the water in is against the rules," Horner said.
Prosecutors have also focused on the fact that Amero did not turn off the computer, though she did go for help during a class break, Horner said.
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The team of security professionals analyzing the forensic evidence are not yet ready to release an opinion, but one thing is clear, Eckelberry said: The classroom's machine was infested with spyware and the school did not have adequate protections in place.
It's an issue that has refocused some of the debate on administrators at Kelly Middle School. School officials recently told parents that the incident could never happen today, because the district has installed security software and a filtering system.
"This was a Windows 98 SE machine with IE 5 and an expired antivirus subscription," Eckelberry said. "It hadn't been updated since August, and there was no anti-spyware, no pop-up protection, no firewall and no content filters. Regardless of whatever happened, this machine was a machine that should not have been on the Internet."
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I have talked to Alex about this case in the past month or so and the whole thing just makes me sick. The rules, policies and actions of the school set the stage for this to happen in the first place....but it is clear they rather us focus our attention on Amero instead of the conditions that were in place long before Amero was around. Those conditions allowed it to happen and unless those conditions are changed, it will happen again in the future.
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