How poor web security nearly lead to a jail term

The Julie Amero trial highlights the importance of security and making courts understand how the internet works.

By Asavin Wattanajantra, 4 Mar 2009 at 16:03

As a result of the evidence Eckelberry and his teams of experts submitted a document resulting in the judge calling for a new trial in June 2007.

Amero, who was sick with heart problems and stress, was given the choice of defending herself or accepting a less serious misdemeanour charge. By this time she was too tired and wanted to get the case over with, so she accepted the charge, paid $100, and revoked her teaching credentials for life.

“It was unfair,” Eckelberry said. “But on the other hand- she’s done.”

The fallout

Because of the publicity surrounding the case, and the embarrasment to Connecticut’s court, Eckelberry hoped that the case would make a difference to people’s understanding of the issues. He believed that it had woken people up to the fact that technology wasn’t always black and white. People could easily visit sites where you get porn pop-ups or obscene spam.

He said: “The images may get saved in your computer and someone could point accusingly at you. We know that there’s spam and nuances, and you need real computer expertise.

“At this point it’s like screaming witch, witch, witch! When you don’t really know all the details,” he adds. “Fundamentally it’s what occurs in society when you have fear and ignorance in a situation.

According to Eckelberry, a big lesson from the case was that teachers needed to be trained in the IT skills of a modern technological world. Amero wasn’t trained in computer skills and no idea what she was doing. Indeed, some would ask why, when faced with a barrage of pornographic popups in front of a class of children, didn’t she simply turn off the monitor. She didn’t because she believed that this would turn off the entire computer.

He said: “The woman is sitting there, trying to turn off these pop-up windows. At 10.30am she goes to the faculty building and asks if someone could turn off the windows. ‘Don’t worry about it’ is the reply. We’ll send somebody. No help ever came.”

“Julie Amero’s crime was to be extraordinarily computer illiterate. She was one of the most computer illiterate people I know. Except for my mother,” he says jokingly.

An ABC News audio interview with Julie Amero about the case is here.

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3 comments

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Got the wrong person

Mistype a URL, and it's easy to end up with a sea of offensive junk. The person to blame is the one who was (not) maintaining the system.

By Ip_nonsense574f8 on Friday Mar 6

Computerworld blogger - out of order

What a horrible, petty and spiteful little man. I'm not talking about any of the players in the case itself, I'm describing that moronic, self righteous waste of bandwidth who blogged first, looked beyond his own nose second and after being corrected couldn't even apologise for furiously condemning an innocent person and for being utterly, utterly wrong. http://blogs.computerworld.com/node/4346 What a jerk. That's one "author" I'm never going to support.

By steviesteveo on Tuesday Mar 10

He changed his mind, with some "ifs"

http://blogs.computerworld.com/node/4358 - Many tech related trials are impaired by a lack of basic understand of not just how it works normally, but how it can be made to work. One glaring example, the link was redbecause it was visited - no, it was red because it was coded to be red. If you looked a wikipedia, for instance, and assumed all red links to be visited, you would have a very strange picture of things.

By Ip_nonsense574f8 on Tuesday Mar 10