Teacher says porn sites not her fault

Published 9:00 pm Tuesday, February 13, 2007

WINDHAM, Conn. – Until recently, Julie Amero says, she lived the quiet life of a small-town substitute teacher, with little knowledge of computers and even less about porn.

Now she is in the middle of a criminal case that hinges on the intricacies of both, and it could put her behind bars for up to 40 years when she is sentenced March 2.

She was convicted last month of exposing seventh-grade students to pornography on her classroom computer. She contended the images were inadvertently thrust onto the screen by pornographers’ unseen spyware and adware programs.

Prosecutors dispute that. But her argument has made her a cause celebre among some technology experts, who say what happened to her could happen to anyone.

“I’m scared,” the 40-year-old Amero said. “I’m just beside myself over something I didn’t do.”

It all began in October 2004. Amero was assigned to a class at Kelly Middle School in Norwich.

Amero said that before her class started, a teacher allowed her to e-mail her husband. She said she used the computer and went to the bathroom, returning to find the permanent teacher gone and two students viewing a Web site on hairstyles.

Amero said she chased the students away and started class. But later, she said, pornographic images started popping up on the computer screen by themselves. She said she tried to click the images off, but they kept returning, and she was under strict orders not to shut the computer off.

“I did everything I possibly could to keep them from seeing anything,” she said.

Prosecutor David Smith contended at Amero’s three-day trial that she actually clicked on graphic Web sites.

Several students testified that they saw pictures of naked men and women, including at least one image a couple having oral sex.

Computer consultant Herb Horner testified for the defense that the children had gone to an innocent Web site on hairstyles and were redirected to another hairstyle site that had pornographic links. “It can happen to anybody,” Horner said.

The defense argued that the images were caused by adware and spyware, programs that are often secretly planted on computers by Internet businesses to track users’ browsing habits. They can generate pop-up ads – in some cases, pornographic ones.

“It’s absolutely plausible,” Ari Schwartz, deputy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, said of Amero’s case. “It’s a huge problem.”

Principal Scott Fain said the computer lacked the latest firewall protection because a vendor’s bill had gone unpaid. “I was shocked to see what made it through,” he said.

But Fain also said Amero was the only one to report such a problem: “We’ve never had a problem with pop-ups before or since.”