Boing Boing has an interesting piece on a Connecticut teacher who faces up to forty years of prison time for exposing students to Internet pornography. According to news reports, Julie Amero was convicted of four counts of risk of injury to a minor because, prosecutors claim, students viewed pornographic websites that Ms. Amaro accessed. Ms. Amero maintains that the sites were accessed by adware on the machine in question.
The reader comments at Boing Boing are informative and unsettling, noting that the prosecution's case against Ms. Amero may have been built on a false understanding of how browsers save information about visited websites, and that the school's culpability for having had expired licenses for their filtering software should have been addressed.
This case, which goes to sentencing next month, could prove to be an unfortunate precedent not just for educators, but for parents as well.
