3/6/07 The following open letter to Connecticut's Chief State Attorney appears in today's printed version of the Hartford Courant on page four.

The Julie Amero case has created outrage in internet forums and among computer experts all over the country. Briefly, Julie Amero was seven months pregnant and acting as a substitute seventh grade teacher in Norwich, Connecticut. She left the classroom briefly, and while she was gone some of her students used the class computer to surf the web. When she returned a stream of pornographic pop-up ads began to appear. She panicked and tried to stop the pop-ups but did not turn off the computer because she had been firmly instructed not to do so. She was charged with exposing her students to pornography and convicted in January. She now faces up to forty (40) years in prison.

Many computer experts believe that the stream of obscene pop-up ads were caused by malicious spyware and adware programs which users seldom know have infected their computers until too late - after they have done their evil work. It is most troubling that the computer had no firewall protection - apparently because a vendor's bill went unpaid - and that the prosecution did not make a search for spyware.

An excellent suggestion has been offered by Mark Rasch, former chief of the U.S. Department of Justice's cyber crime unit: "Find an independent investigator with no preconceived notions at all and find out what happened." We the undersigned computer science professors at Yale, UCONN, Wesleyan, Trinity, the University of Hartford, and the State Universities urge you to take up Mark Rasch's suggestion, and to delay sentencing Julie Amero until the investigator has filed his report.

Drew McDermott Yale
James Lipton Wesleyan
Ingrid Russell U Hartford
Sarah Tasneem ECSU
John Ridgway Trinity
Brian O'Connell CCSU
David Ahlgren Trinity
Stan Kurkovsky CCSU
Irena Pevac CCSU
Passent El-Kafrawy ECSU
Thomas J. Peters UCONN
Ralph Morelli Trinity
Chip Neville CCSU
Heidi Ellis Trinity
Todor Ivanov WCSU
Jian Lin ECSU
Kehan Gao ECSU
Rathika RiVarma CCSU
R. White CCSU
Neli Zlatareva CCSU
Dong-Guk Shin UCONN
G. Ganchev WCSU
Bradley Kjell CCSU
Huan-Yu Tu ECSU
John Mertens Trinity
Taikang Ning Trinity
Joan Calvert CCSU
Zdravko Markov CCSU