The long, drawn-out persecution of Julie Amero in Norwich, Connecticut, US, has highlighted the critical importance of computer security and the responsibilities of organisations to protect their employees.

Ensuring a computer system is secured from the myriad number of viral ‘nasties’ is the responsibility of the employer, not the employee. Effectively, companies have to ensure the safety of staff from inadvertently getting involved in an activity that could lead to dismissal or criminal charges when using work PCs.

Amero was employed as a substitute teacher on 19 October, 2004 at Kelly Middle School with a seventh-grade class (12 to 13 year olds), when the PC in the classroom displayed some pop-up ads for hard-core pornography sites.

She reported the incident to the assistant principal and was told "not to worry". However, the pupils who had seen the pop-ups told their parents who complained. The school called in the police and Amero was arrested, indicted, tried and convicted of four counts of risk of injury to a minor.

An excellent article on the securityfocus website acknowledged that Amero was guilty of surfing the net when she should have been supervising the class and when the popup porn appeared she followed the verbal instruction she had received to not turn the computer off as she did not have a logon id. But that’s all.

At a school board hearing in January 2007 information services director for schools in Norwich, Bob Hartz, is said to have established that although Kelly Middle School was running security software, the automatic update feature was not activated. For three months the system was not blocking the pornographic websites. He told the school board the automatic update was switched back on after the incident, though that was of little help to Amero.

She was a victim, not a perpetrator. I quote from the securityfocus article:

"The machine’s Internet history showed that a previous user had been accessing the kind of sites likely to plant pornographic malware, such as dubious dating sites. The forensic examination also showed a host of adware and spyware on the machine, much of which had been in place and operating well before the porn incident - including one designed to hijack and redirect the browser. And on this evidence, she was convicted?";

What is really staggering is that she was even charged.

The state attorney prosecuting the case, Michael Regan, has expressed surprise, saying, "For some reason, this case caught the media’s attention."

Well, the prospect of an innocent woman going to jail - along with being branded a sex offender because of his prosecution - does upset people. Particularly, those of us who are IT-literate and do understand the vacuous-nature of the original indictment bought against Amero.

The original conviction was set aside by a second judge on 6 June, 2007, who said it had been based on "erroneous" and "false information", after being shown evidence compiled by forensic computer experts on behalf of Amero.

The felony charges were dropped on 21 November. State Attorney Michael Regan ‘graciously’ said the state was prepared to go to trial again , but because of Amero’s ill health agreed to the reduce the felony charges to a misdemeanor. [The expression down here in New Zealand is ‘weasel words’.]

To have taken her to trial again would have resulted in a not-guilty verdict. Such a dismissal would have opened the door for a hefty potential civil suit from Amero. Instead, she pleaded guilty to a disorderly conduct misdemeanor, paid a $100 fine and had her Connecticut teaching licence revoked.

"Oh honey, it’s over. I feel wonderful," Amero is reported as saying a few minutes after pleading guilty to the disorderly conduct charge. And who is to blame her for just wanting to get on with her life and for pleading guilty to a misdemeanor that she never committed.

There is an interesting echo to this case of Information Technology Ignorance and that’s DNA evidence.

As the technology for identifying individuals from DNA evidence found at crime scenes became more exact in the 1980s, while public understanding of the science was still sketchy, back then lawyers for the prosecution would spend some time in the course of a trial educating juries on precisely what DNA is and how, like fingerprints, an individual’s DNA is exactly that; individual.

Similar education on how PCs can be hijacked would, at this stage, appear to be mandatory by defence lawyers for juries called to judge cases such as that of Julie Amero.

Though, I think a basic education in the viral nature of Web 2.0 would be better directed at US state attorneys. Two ‘braindead’ examples of flawed prosecutions that have secured media attention are below. I suspect there are quite a few other innocent victims fitted up by information technology-challenged US state attorneys.

Michael Fiola

Matt Bandy

Information Technology Ignorance (part 1)

Posted by Rodney Fletcher November 26, 2008 3:13 PM | Comments (1)

You remember that cliché about change being the only constant? Well, it applies to writing about technology as it does to everything else. Sometimes the only way to make sense of change is to be a dispassionate observer. At the moment, few of us have that luxury; change touches everyone.

As some of you may have heard, I've just taken over as editor of NZ Reseller News from the extremely capable Louis van Wyk. It's been the expected steep learning curve so far. I readily admit I don’t know much about the technology channel. I do know a bit about being an editor.

For a start, I know what I don’t know. I know that one of the most dangerous traps is trying to second-guess your readers. So I want to know what you think: about your industry, global technology trends but, most of all, what you think about Reseller News. You can even tell me what you think about me, if that’s something you feel strongly about.

While I cannot claim to have picked up any important trends in these few weeks, I’m seeing something I have previously only read and heard about. Now it’s starting to feel real. It’s a sense that existing rules don’t apply any more. You cannot even cite those rules without sounding like a dinosaur. It isn’t only a fashion thing. The markets and the way they work (and at times stop working) have changed shape. You can attribute that to globalisation, if you like, but perhaps there’s something even more fundamental to it.

There’s an interview with Malcolm Gladwell, ‘geek pop star’ and current saviour of the US publishing industry, in the latest issue of New York magazine (www.nymag.com) in which he talks about his latest book, Outliers. His book and the interview touch on the phenomenon that much about life in the 21st Century is determined by things beyond our control.

What four years of working as a freelance editor and writer has given me - as well as a feeling of being an outlier in the sense of being an observer (rather than, sadly, in the Gladwellian sense of being Bill Gates, a Beatle or Mozart) - is the need to question. I won’t be able do this job well without asking the right people lots of good questions.

You’re the right people.

The fact that there are forces outside of our control doesn’t mean we shouldn’t attempt to understand them and resist those that threaten to confuse and overwhelm us. In another article, this time in the New Yorker, Gladwell recounts how Sidney Weinberg, aged 16, with a life of deprivation and poverty stretching ahead of him, walked down Wall Street, looking for a "nice-looking, tall building";. He chose one and bluffed his way into a job in a small brokerage house, assisting the janitor for three dollars a week. It was Goldman Sachs. From there he was promoted to the mailroom and eventually became a partner then a senior partner, turning the brokerage "from a floundering, mid-tier partnership into the premier investment bank in the world".

That kind of professional tenacity in the face of adversity is rare; possibly extinct. A job is often just a means to an end. Security - the kind that was once virtually guaranteed for good workers - appears to have gone forever. But things change in unexpected ways, otherwise change wouldn’t be so hard so handle. And Weinberg’s brand of commitment may be coming back into style, thanks again to adversity.

I admire persistence the same way I admire risk-taking because the kind of change I’m most suspicious of is change for change’s sake.

There’s a real community out there and Reseller News hasn’t become what it is by accident. I want to know what you’d change about the paper if you could. Is there anything that makes you angry, that’s hard to digest or that you’d love to read? Does reading this paper add anything to your life? Does it make your job easier?

I realise asking these questions is not always helpful and that readers don’t think about their reading matter in the way an editor or journalist does. You may not have been asked to articulate what you think about this paper before, but I still want to hear from you.

We’ll soon be running an online reader survey, but there are other ways of making your voice heard as a reader. Listening is the way to start coping with change: cbell@fairfaxbm.co.nz.

Posted by Chris Bell November 19, 2008 5:10 PM | Comments (0)