Attack of the Puritans

Brian Krebs, who runs the WaPo blog Security Fix, has an interesting post up today. It concerns the case of a substitute teacher from Connecticut, who was recently found guilty of "endangering students by exposing them to pornographic material displayed on a classroom computer."

Oh, the children.

As has been said elsewhere, when politicians start talking about protecting the children, you are well-advised to keep one eye on your wallet and the other on the Constitution.

Krebs interviewed the accused, and makes a very plausible case that justice was not at all served on this occasion. Apparently, the woman was using a computer that she didn't have an account on, so she was given another teacher's username and password to log on. She says that when she visited what she thought was an innocuous site, with kids watching, pop-ups started appearing, and new ones appeared every time she tried to close them. She says she had been told by the teacher who gave her the username and password not to logout or shut down the machine, so she went to get help. Some of the kids told their parents about it, and it sounds like witchhunt city was the next stop.

The defense had a computer expert testify, and he said that the machine was riddled with spyware. Further, the machine had an outdated version of Internet Explorer installed and the school's firewall software was four years out of date. The court did not allow the expert to present his full testimony. He has since summarized what he wanted to say and posted it on the Web.

Granted, I'm reacting here after hearing only one side of the story. But it's a pretty powerful side.

Further reading:

• Krebs's post
  
  
• Herb Horner's summary of his blocked testimony
  
  

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Update

Lindsay Beyerstein has a longer analysis of the computer forensics in this case, along with some valuable commentary on how ill-equipped the legal system is to handle technical matters. Beyerstein makes it clear that the teacher was not the one to visit the site from which the pop-ups emanated -- someone else had visited the site using that computer before the class started -- and that the spyware had clearly been loaded onto the machine weeks before the substitute teacher ever used it.

Update

Alex Eckelberry has a good post on this, filled with links, and wrote a column for the local paper about the matter. Among other things, it indicates the kids were the ones to start surfing. See also the top of his blog for the latest updates.