In all likelihood, if you are reading this you are a computer user who has a basic familiarity with the Internet and using computers, and that knowledge may serve you well as you read this.  This is a story about a 40-year old substitute teacher from Norwich, Connecticut, who apparently through ignorance of computers, is facing 40 years in jail, because of porn pop-ups on a classroom computer.

Having visited porn sites, I know full well that once you have one open, it's often quite difficult to get rid of it.  What happens is when you click the close box, either a bit of JavaScript or a piece of malware traps the "OnClose" event and opens a new porn page for you.  Close that one and it happens again.  And usually you have to close many such windows before they stop coming back.  This is standard operating procedure for most porn sites.  Usually porn sites are part of a "family" of sites all owned by the same distributor.  Thus when you click the close box on one site the next site in the family will pop up, unbidden.  And it is quite possible for this to happen even with standard IE-pop-up blocking turned on.

You can make this not-happen if you have a very good pop-up blocker, but such blockers are not reliable in my experience... they catch some pop-ups but not all.  There are other tricks (I'm told) that you can use if you are a real computer expert.  But the victims in this case were not computer experts.  They were a substitute teacher covering a computer class, and her 11 to 13 year old students.

According to Ms. Amero, in October of 2004, she entered the classroom to find some students at the teacher's computer, accessing a site about hair care.  One of them didn't belong in that classroom and the other did.  Being a substitute, Ms. Amero was not familiar with any of the students.  Shortly thereafter porn pop-ups began appearing on the machine.  Ms. Amero sought to get rid of them in a fashion typical of an average user.  She clicked the close box.

"The pop-ups never went away. It was one after another," she testified. "They were continuous. Every time I clicked the box in the corner, the red box, the red X, more were generated."

The school for its part, did what most schools do when parents overreact to something that could have happened to anyone.  They fired Ms. Amero.  Shortly thereafter, Ms. Amero was arrested--charged with four felony charges of risk of injury to a minor, a sub-clause of that violation specifically with respect to the morals of a minor.

Ms. Amero lost her court battle.  The prosecutor maintained that there is no way to get porn sites to pop up without deliberately clicking a link to open them--which is twaddle, and anyone with a passing knowledge of web surfing knows it.  Further he claimed that since Ms. Amero didn't simply pull the plug or throw a jacket over the monitor until the problem could be dealt with, then she must have intended to view those sites in the presence of children.

Ms. Amero claimed that substitutes are not supposed to disturb or touch anything in a teacher's classroom, and therefore believed that she could not shut the computer off.

I've seen inexperienced computer users when faced with an unexpected behavior--in college I worked for the school's computing services department, and one of my jobs was assisting people using computers.  Many of those people were computer illiterate, and let me tell you, the obvious solution isn't the first thing they try.  Many computer illiterate people are afraid they are going to "break the computer" and are therefore unwilling to try anything unusual.  It doesn't surprise me in the least that this substitute teacher would simply try closing the pop-ups ad nauseum.

I have read the entire record of testimony from the case, and see a number of problems here.  In my opinion this is a mistrial, and the case would need to be heard again.

With respect to the evidence, a number of the expert witnesses made claims that I know for a fact are false.  Whether or not they know they are false, I can't say, but I'm inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt and say that there are gaps in their expert knowledge.  The information services manager for Norwich Public Schools testified under oath that is was not possible to get into an "endless loop of pornography".  That's flat out wrong.  He was also asked under oath if spyware or ad-ware could generate pornography, and testified that they could not.  This man does not know what he is talking about.

The detective on the case is clearly very knowledgeable about computer crime.  And yet, at one point in the case he testified that if you click a link to a page, when you next view the link on a web page the link has changed color, but this does not happen if the page in question opened as a pop-up.  That's completely incorrect.  Your browser tracks URLs that were visited, not how they were visited.  Links to pop-up pages will turn purple just like links you clicked manually.  The reason it is important is it has direct bearing on whether Ms. Amero deliberately chose to view a porn page, or if that page appeared as a pop-up through the action of ad-ware or hokey JavaScript or whatnot.

The other, immensely huge problem with the case is the defense attorney.  The defense attorney is a self-professed computer illiterate, and should have had a computer consultant with him at all times so that when other witnesses are offering incorrect testimony as expert opinion, he could consult with his own expert and get him up there on the stand.  But the defense attorney appeared to be completely unprepared most of the time.  When the state rested the defense attorney wasn't ready to present his case, to the consternation and bewilderment of the judge.  "I wasn't expecting the state to rest right now."

The defense's first witness was a computer expert who intended to give a presentation in court regarding ad-ware and spyware he found on the machine, a presentation that would have explained the difference between clicking a link and being redirected, and which would have demonstrated how Ms. Amero could have gotten stuck in a loop of porn pop-ups without necessarily clicking on anything suspect.  He was not allowed to give his presentation (which I got the impression included slides, and ad-ware/spyware reports from the hard drive in question) because the defense attorney hadn't seen fit to give the reports and slides to the prosecution ahead of time.  If you don't disclose evidence to the other side, it can't be presented in court.  The only thing I could conclude is it was taking the defense expert time right up to the day before to get the presentation ready.

The defense expert was also dreadful.  Having only prepared to give a presentation, his responses to question-and-answer type testimony were confusing and ultimately probably seemed evasive to the jury.  I understood what he was trying to get at, having built web applications myself, but even I found myself saying "why in the hell would he choose to phrase it that way?"  He was also a little combative at times because he couldn't understand why he was not allowed to discuss his findings with respect to ad-ware and spyware on the box in question--mainly because the defense attorney wasn't doing his job.

Of course one of the big questions is, was the teacher deliberately viewing porn on the computer at her desk while class was in session?  Prosecution says yes, defense says no.  People who have been following the story have checked the haircare site in question and have discovered that it can indeed lead to a cycle of porn pop-ups (Associated Content 2/26/2007).

The other big question is, did the teacher do enough to prevent the students from seeing the porn?  From the testimony given, it seems that when students came up to the desk, the teacher tried to block the screen or otherwise shoo the students away.  But it is clear from the testimony of the students, a couple of them managed to catch a glimpse of pornographic material.  And from her own testimony, the teacher attempted to close the offending windows which kept popping up, and also at two points during the day told other teachers and the vice-principal she was having trouble with pop-ups.  She said she felt she was not allowed to shut the computer off, and upon being questioned about turning off the monitor only, said she wouldn't know how.

Contrary to the detective's claims, links recolor themselves when a URL is loaded in any fashion, and apart from redirects, it's not really possible to tell from looking at temporary Internet files whether someone visited links deliberately or though the action of spyware or some other agent.  The detective continues to say that he stands by the evidence and that people can't claim spyware or ad-ware was responsible without producing the spyware or ad-ware in question.  Which is rather convenient since the defense expert wasn't allowed to present such evidence in court due to the apparent ineptitude of the defense attorney.

The substitute teacher was in charge of the class, and it was definitely her responsibility to get rid of the porn, and if she didn't know how she should have called up to the office and explained immediately that there was a problem.  So it seems a little incongruous that she would wait until lunch to tell someone she was having a problem (while not bothering to mention that the pop-ups were pornographic in nature.)  I assume she simply made an unwise decision to try and solve the problem herself based on her own limited knowledge.  Therefore at present I can't say that this was a "willful" act (i.e. she was deliberately trying to endanger these children).  Then again, I doubt a 12 or 13 year old catching a glimpse of a nude woman is going to be impaired for life, but that's a topic for another day.

Assuming she is guilty, it seems to me that locking up a 40 year old woman (with no prior convictions) for 40 years because some kids glanced over her shoulder and caught a momentary glimpse of porn on her computer screen is a little extreme.  I think what would be more appropriate is something on the order of 4 months of community service and you can't teach anymore.  There are female teachers who have had sexual relations with their students who've spent no more than a few years in jail.  So something in this case is way out of whack with respect to the punishment fitting the crime.

What do you think?

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EDIT: spelling issues, and modified final paragraph to be less flippant.