Saturday, February 24

Julie Amaro

This was one of the most dugg items on digg.com today and there's over 52,000 blog posts on technorati. The outrage continues to grow as it should.

From: Police, school get failing grade in sad case of Julie Amaro - USATODAY.com

Which of these scenarios makes more sense to you?

Scenario A: In the middle of class, a substitute teacher decided to surf for thumbnail-size porn images (an analysis of the hard drive showed that's all that ever appeared on the screen — tiny pictures).

Scenario B: A classroom computer running Windows 98 with outdated anti-virus software, no Internet filter, and no anti-spy ware software began displaying pop ups after some kids visited the wrong site.

[...]

Julie Amero was a victim of a school that couldn't be bothered to protect its computers, of a prosecutor without the technology background to understand what he was doing, a police "expert" who was not, and a jury misled by all of them. "Miscarriage of justice" doesn't begin to describe it.

I've heard plenty of people try to defend this "miscarriage of justice" saying that all the responsibility was on the teacher... that she could have "thrown a coat over the computer" or turned off the monitor but this is pure B.S.

According to all the testimony the kids had already seen the porn before she even had a chance to react. If getting help from another teacher immediately or next to immediately isn't protocol I'd like to know what is.

Sadly I smell a HUGE lawsuit against the school for negligence. Unfortunately this won't help the situation at all. This whole lawsuit is a lose, lose situation.

At the center of it are the public defender and the judge, both of whom must have been completely technically inept if not completely incompetent. In fact out of every single person involved in this case the most competent people sound like the students, whom it's more than likely got a good laugh out of the event as it's probably nothing most of them hadn't seen before. Hypocrisy and incompetence all around.... with a dash of techno-phobia for good measure.

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