My Left Nutmeg interviews Julie Amero
Maura of My Left Nutmeg spoke with Julie Amero the Connecticut teacher who was convicted of four felonies because a malware-infected school computer with an expired content filter flashed pornographic popups at a seventh grade language arts class in 2004.
Maura's post is an example of the kind of coverage that make regional blogs like My Left Nutmeg so valuable.
Several people have asked if there were any kind of fund to help Julie in her ongoing struggle to clear her name. I'm happy to report that there is. Maura was able to confirm that all donations to the Julie Amero Fund go directly to help Julie.
This absurd miscarriage of justice, dumb laws applied by dumber officials and severely uninformed outrage of a few parents, has been chewed on quite a bit over on /. That is not a crowd to chip in much and the eds are probably sick of the story but it would be a great exposure for the existence of this fund.
It all could have gone so differently. Amero could have immediately turned the moitor to the wall and called the principal on the spot to demand the school's IT staff come to the classroom and see the fruits of neglecting to provide security software on the computers. Unlike rapidly changing viruses, adware needs a little more time to burrow into its victims. That is why the better anti-spyware tools are pretty effective. It can't be the responsibility of users to maintain the cyber-hygiene of a school's computer systems. Unfortunately Amero was not enough of a nerd to realize at the moment it was happening that it was a problem you can only prevent proactively while reactive options are few and weak: even turning the computer off would clean nothing up and the unwanted displays would be back as soon as the computer was turned on again or the next the browser started. She has been railroaded because of the way parties more guilty than she have managed to frame the blame.
Posted by: greensmile | February 15, 2007 at 12:46 PM
really, the /.ers were quite in a lather about this case.
Posted by: greensmile | February 15, 2007 at 12:53 PM
Contact information for nearly everyone responsible for putting this woman through this is (short of the jury) is located in the comments section of the washington post.
https://blog.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2007/01/substitute_teacher_faces_jail.html
Posted by: Injustice | February 16, 2007 at 06:31 PM
https://blog.washingtonpost.com/
securityfix/2007/01/
substitute_teacher_
faces_jail.html
Posted by: Injustice | February 16, 2007 at 06:32 PM
My Left Nutmeg is the best blog name I've ever seen.
Posted by: ChrisR | February 17, 2007 at 04:58 PM