Teacher Granted New Trial in Porn Pop-Up Case: "

A judge has granted a new trial to Julie Amero, a former substitute teacher in Norwich, Connecticut who was convicted in January on four felony counts of risking injury to minors after she was unable to prevent pornographic pop-ups from showing up on a computer in a classroom in 2004.

The city's prosecutors did not oppose the motion for a new trial, raising the possibility that Amero will not be tried again.

The opportunity for a new day in court marks a reversal in fortune for Amero who faced sentencing this week that could have landed her in jail for forty years.' Amero was convicted of endangering children after several students saw pornographic thumbnails on a computer screen.

Despite testimony that the monitor did not face the children, that Amero asked for help from other teachers and a vice principal, and that the schools IT administrator allowed the school's filtering software to expire, Amero was found guilty.'

Security experts around the internet have rallied to Amero's defense, arguing that it is clear that the computer Amero was using was infested with pop-up software, but the school's IT administrator told the jury he'd never heard of such software.

Judge Hillary B. Strackbein granted the motion for a new trial filed by Amero's new lawyer, William F. Dow, after a state laboratory's examination of the computer's hard drive after the trial contradicted evidence presented in court.

'The jury may have relied, at least in part, on that faulty information,' said Judge Hillary B. Strackbein, according to the Associated Press.

Eric Sites, the CTO of the security software company Sunbelt who examined
a copy of the hard drive for the defense, hailed Wednesday's ruling.

'For a real computer expert, it was easy to see there were inaccuracies
in the testimony given by the prosecution's expert witness, and I think
the pros was truly led astray by the assertiveness of their witness,'
Sites said.

Sites analyzed a copy of the hard drive provided to him by Amero's first expert witness, and found that computer was infected.

'There was definitely adware called new.net,' Sites said. 'It was
downloaded by a screensaver installed for Halloween by the teacher
Amero was subbing for.'

Sites said the adware would intercept terms typed into a browser
address bar, redirect them and then 'you are down the rabbit hole.'

Amero's original expert witness, Herb Horner, wasn't able to present at trial his prepared findings on the contents of the hard drive because Amero's original lawyer forgot to provide it ahead of time to the prosecution as required.

Spyware isn't just about pop-up ads and browser hijacking -- there's an X-rated component as well, according to Ari Schwartz of the Center for Democracy and Technology.

'More people are seeing porn that they don't want to see than in past, and when you put those numbers up against spyware studies, that spike directly correlates to spyware distribution,' Schwartz said.

Associated Press story.

Related Stories:

• Wired's Regina Lynn wrote about the case
• Washington Post security blogger Brian Krebs has more including questions about why teachers unions didn't get involved
• Alex Eckelberry of Sunbelt Software, who rallied the security industry to Amero's defense, explains a bit about Amero's new legal team.
• Mirror of OCRed court transcript (10mb pdf), courtesy of Bob Johnston who has been covering the case here.

(Read Original Article - Via Threat Level.)