Woman Faces 40 Years for Porn-Infected PC (Crazy, but True)

I live in the same town as this woman. It seems to me that she is getting burned for something that is not her fault. Porn with a bunch of 7th Graders? That says it all.

I think that this Stinks. She should have another day in court, with
a Better Defense.
D

An incident like this lies squarely on the shoulders of the System Administrator of that school system's network. What filtering software is installed and is it configured to keep the network PC/MACs from "seeing" porn sites? Why isn't the router and firewall configuration set up to block porn and other "non-educational" sites during school hours? Where I'm from it's the System Administrator's butt that will be swinging from the mast for allowing this to happen in the first place. Teachers have enough to worry about teaching without having this placed on their shoulders as well. Someone should find out who this so-called Administrator is and give him/her their walking papers!!!

This is nothing but a return to the witch trials in New England. The procetcution is using this sensationalizism for their own political aspirations and to further their own careers by knocking down and kicking this subsitute teacher. Why don't they go after the schools administration and the school board who has the responsibility to make sure the correct filters were in place on their computer system for their schools.

This is hypocricy - the ALA allows and defends this everyday in thousands of public libraries across the country. I don't even have the right to know what my children check out of the library unless my children give me permission to know. Several years ago I was in my local library and I witnessed the same porn popup scenario. As I was checking out, I noticed a young boy, perhaps ten, looking at hard porn on one of the computers. He looked too innocent and shocked to have sought this out himself, and I quickly helped him close the multiple browser/popups. When I approached the library administrator, they simply shrugged it off as having mistakenly allowed the boy to use an adult computer, of which they had neglected to clear the cache/history. I couldn't believe how brazen this person was, showing no concern for what harm had just been done to this child. That boy will always remember those pictures, whether he wants to or not.

Even with the most current filtering software available today, porn still gets through to a large % of school computer systems. The technology is antiquated and has not kept up with an online porn industry worth 12 billion annually in the US alone.

These guys stay ahead by throwing dollars at the latest technologies.... in fact that's where most of these technologies come from.

First out of the box is always the porn industry looking for yet another delivery mechanism for the filth they invasively project at our children.

Our kids can now get porn downloaded directly to their IPods and cell phones. If a teacher can get 40 years for "displaying" porn to a child, why aren't the prisons full of the real criminals arbitrarily dispensing this stuff into cyberspace.

Try and put up a billboard of a hardcore porn image, and off to jail you go. Pop up the same on a child's computer and someones getting piad!

Let's put blame where it belongs, on the porn industry!

I feel that this is BS. I don't understand why she is being sent to jail for something that could happen to anyone. Maybe the spyware companies paid the judge to give her the 40 year sentence. This way, people will actually pay for brand name spyware instead of getting a mediocre freeware. Meh just a guess. But I am absolutely shocked at the punishment. The most I would expect was maybe a suspension from work. When I was in grade seven, I was already exposed to porn. It is an inevitability. It's not like she is trying to seduce the kids.
Well, I am just throwing out there what I think of this outrageous event.

Imagine what it's like to be a substitute teacher, walking into a strange classroom where you don't know the students, the building, the administrators, or where to find anything you may need, much less the particular technology configurations of the school's network. And that's after waiting on pins and needles each day, hoping to get a call that there's work for the day. (Subs know that if you do anything wrong, you may never get that call again.) I've been there, and computer access situations can be a big stumbling block, even to a geeky type. BIG ditto to the comment about it being the sys admin's tail who should be on the line (or in the pokey).

There are too many ignorant sytem admins in school now. Do you really think they know what they're doing even though most of them are not even technically savvy? Schools don't employ IT departments to tend to the networks 24/7 they use the staff they have on hand.

My nephew was given a laptop but he can't install software on it and it is very limited in what he can do. He cannot update Norton's nor run Windows Update!!! How's that for school management?! Haha

What a bunch of ignorant tools. They should've just given the kids Macs.

To get back on topic, the Prinicipal and the Superintendent need to serve time next to the sub if true justice is sought.

"My nephew was given a laptop but he can't install software on it and it is very limited in what he can do. He cannot update Norton's nor run Windows Update!!! How's that for school management?! Haha"

It's because of this very problem that PCs are locked down and students are unable to modify the registry themselves. I work IT for a Connecticut district, and if we didn't have our computers locked down, I'm sure this same scenario would have happened here as well.

About filtering - it's not as easy as you all think. If a school district doesn't give the money needed to employ a state of the art filtering system at the gateway level, a lot of stuff is going to sneak by. I'm sure it sneaks by here, too.

Also, Connecticut has an educational network, with filtering provided by the state. This is all free to public schools, and is what we use. I don't see why Norwich isn't using this as well.

@jarthur31

This coming from someone who obviously believes that the pop-ups can be stopped, give me a break. Most of these sites used for this purposed are linked to in a round robin style ‘get’. This allows them to host the content on 10's and sometimes 100's of IP addresses (not dirtydirtyname.com). It can't be stopped with out changing internet access to only allow you to view a few specific sites which would be a full time job. If parents are scared of their kids seeing porn, they sure as hell shouldn’t be allowed to be on the internet. I can’t believe these parents pressed charges, they are obviously looking to make an easy buck. How many of them do you think sat down and talked to their kids about what they saw? To laugh…

I always find these kind of stories funny coming from Belgium where porn is found on cable TV (late at night) and my 7th grade nephew sends me adult content jokes on his cell phone. He is a perfectly normal kid, although mature for his age. I lived in Texas for a while, the prude capital of the world from what I could tell. In my time there, I saw alot of stories about very bad people in the local news. This was in Texas where porn is almost censored out of existence. All Im saying is I think this young ladies possible sentence is a tragedy. Her life could be destroyed even if she only receives half the max. And why, because she exposed some 13 and 14 year old teenagers to some explicit pictures. Even with the possibility that the average American 13 year old has the maturity of a 9 year old, I must say, in this, America even tops IRAN in ridiculousness.

For the Love of all that sane let that woman go.

It's so easy to click the wrong thing, just typing a link wrong sends you to these porn sites, they are everywhere.

And to top it off, even if she did go to a porn site... 40 years? Are you kidding me?

We had a similar incident at the tech college where I teach. One of the students was helping with a night study session. He was showing the others how to access downloads.com, but he mistyped it as dowmloads.com. This unleashed a stream of linked porn sites, and would not allow him to close out. Fortunately, it was only visible on his monitor, as he hadn't turned on the projector yet. When he told me about it the next morning, he was still shaken. I'm just glad the cops didn't show up and haul him off to jail.

Unless there is strong evidence that the sub purposely visited porn sites she should be set free. I've used malware infected computers which not only popped up porn sites and ads but would even launch IE on their own.

The I.S. manager, however, should not be facing jail time or loss of his job either in my opinion. He has the impossible task of keeping some 2000 PCs across 15 buildings 100% free of viruses, adware/spyware, trojans access to porn sites and spam email. At the same time he needs to keep them working and updated and able to perform the tasks required by students and teachers. With literally millions of porn sites popping up monthly NO solutions except white-listing safe websites is 100% effective.

The community has a right to demand to know what steps have been taken to reduct the risk of a repeat. (FireFox web browser with pop-up blocking? AV updates? New filters?) However, lynching Mr. Hartz won't help the anyone.

I'm not surprised to discover that only one person remarking on this issue had any clue as to what the fundamental problem was. This is a nation of sexual imbeciles. We have been living in an erotic dark age. Our appreciation of the profound importance of human sexuality and its variety of expressions has never been accepted in our culture. Sex has only one expression and that's in the marriage bed, in the dark and under the covers, and God forbid that the children should hear. The fact that Jesus himself often went to sleep at night to the rythmetic pounding of Joseph and Mary on the next pallet, while the neighbor's rams were humping the local rams and ewes with equal interest has never found its way into our dinner conversations, pulpits or school board meetings. Too bad. Because, what happened to this woman was a crime perpretated by an ignorant court, an even more ignorant prosecutor and a thouroughly deranged school administration. Too bad. Too bad. Too bad.

The ultimate preventative would be to remove all of the keyboards so that neither kids nor teachers could mistype an address to a web site. This, of course, would limit educational benefits of the computers.

The systems officials should not only have current filters continuously in place, but should run scans at startup on all machines, automatically, before keyboards are enabled.

The teacher is being lynched. I fear for the teaching profession, for only foolish people will expose themselves to such risk, and we don't want fools teaching, do we?

And if a student said "hey look at this that I found on-line", will he/she dare to confess it with this sort of punishment being meted out?

Why is everyone razing the teacher or school officials. I wonder if anyone looked to see if one of the kids did not do it. She is a substitute teacher so who was the main teacher. The other teacher or a student could have accessed a porn site and the next day the substitute comes in and gets caught on her watch. Of course, no one would think a darling 7th grade kid would access a porn site. Think again. Just a witch hunt to cover the school officials negligence and the police look good catching a child predator, supposedly. The truth might hurt that a 7th grade student did it. Or the teacher with 20 years and an outstanding family man would do it. Get real. Both types have got caught before here in San Antonio, Texas.

How the hell can this teacher face years in prison when corporate CEO rip off the companies screwing the workers out of pensions and stockholders out of earnings but giving themselves astronomically huge firing bonuses, incidents like the Keating Five, the outting of Valerie Plume, George Bush lying about the facts and consistently sending other kids but not his own to die, Chaney's involvement with Halliburton, and none of those a******* face charges? Her prosicution would be a sad sad sad day in our american justice system. Clinton did an intern but bush screwed the nation as well as caused kids deaths for lies, and we really wanna go after this teacher, yea right.....

A substitute teacher is usually not given a username or password to gain access into a school's networked computer. Did anyone check to see whose account was being used? Was it a student's? Or the absent teacher's? Or one of the administrator's? It is true that schools are plagued with pornographic material coming from the Internet, but it also comes from the contents in students' backpacks/lockers. I have been a teacher since 1968 and know the hard-fought battle to "Keep America Clean." Parents need to train their children to avoid the "GIGO" complex. No one argues the result of "garbage in" is "garbage out"--yet, how many of us out there are really trying to eliminate the culprit's stinch? That poor substitute teacher has been given the lowest of all blows: a non-supporting administration and community!!

Do the words "substutue teacher" mean anything to her defense.
substute means replacement, there fore as a result she was replacing someone else.
Who else had access to the computer ?? students, other teachers?
Where is the proof that Julie was the one that loaded the computer with porn ??
A person where I work accessed my terminal to search for porn, this terminal is used by me and my boss, and there are days there is only one person in the office.
She was sacked because even though it was on my computer, I was on 2 days off when the computer was loaded with porn sites.
Is it not possible the same thing happened to Julie ???
Simon
Brisbane Australia

I live in Schuylkill County Pa. Our Local High School has a serious drug problem and principal has head in sand. Besides regular students on drugs, the girls HS team had a New Years Eve party this year and bought $180 worth of cocaine for it. It was at the starting centers house, a Junior. Everyone in town knows of it. One player did not go to the party and her parents questioned why. She told them about the drugs and she did not want to be involved. The athletic director and coaches ignore the issue and people are afraid to go to the board about it because if they do the coaches etc will retaliate against their kid. Never see playing time again. Neither is good but my kid would be less likely to get pregnant by some loser in a drug induced gang bang than if she watched porn by accident. When one sees Mick Jagger on stage running for hours like a tri-athlete it's no wonder these drug hyped girls are at the top of the basketball standings to the detriment of honest teams.

The teacher is innocent, any conviction should be overturned.

Who is guilty,

Number 1 is the school system that felt that spending money for other things was more important than to provide security for their computer system. Having a computer IT who either lack the knowledge or power to implement the corrective actions. Lack of knowledge of computers, how they work, in this age and time, plane stupidity. Makes me wonder how qualified are these educators???

Number 2 Prosecution for not being prepared for court by knowing all the facts of the case, all the facts including the how easy it is for things to happen in an unsecured area - school computers

Number 3 Judge who threw out the computer information that the defense presented on the bases that the prosecution failed to identify. To me that is a very lame excuse. If the prosecution was not prepared to present a case with all the information available, the whole case should have been thrown out.

lobo