Kutztown Students get Felony Charges

gone6713 writes "The 13 students from Pennsylvania who were accused of hacking the iBooks provided to them by the school (Slashdot had a previous story on them back in June) have offically been charged. It seems that the admin passwords were taped to the back of the iBooks!"

Comments

What happened to the Administrators?

[dubiousx99]

If your going to charge the kids with felonies, then you should charge the IT administrators with aiding and abetting for leaving the password there.

Funny, isn't this the American Way

[rolfwind]

Isn't it? To make example of certain people to buy the compliance of the rest of us (sheep)?

Especially in highschools. Or maybe just PA (I live 20 minutes from Kutztown). I remember a girl getting treated like a drug dealer because she a)bought aspirin to the school and didn't hand it over to the school nurse (so that she could subsequently go back to the school nurse when it's time to take them - talk about being treated like a 5 year old) and b)giving one to her friends that had a headache.

IIRC, she was kicked out of the district.

Variations of this heavy-handedness happens so often everywhere that I'm surprised it makes the news anymore. I think Columbine made it worse because now the administrators are going apeshit over every little thing - turning the schools into a sort of police state.

What would be news would be the punishment fitting the crime. But then the school administrators would have to admit that they are mostly at fault in this case (really: taping the passwords to the back of the computers?!)

Re:Funny, isn't this the American Way

[glitch0]

It's worse than that. I'm 17 and in a high school in Florida. Someone could walk up to you and punch you in the face, and even if you just stood there and did nothing you would both get suspended for 5 days.

It's horrible because the kids that come from shitty neighborhoods do this to the kids that come from the good neighborhoods all the time because the shitty neighborhood kids get a week long break from school (their parents don't care, they have other things to worry about) and the good neighborhood kids get screwed by their parents.

A friend of mine was recently expelled for a conversation that went something like this:

Friend 1: "oh you won't believe what john did at lunch - he told everyone about your crush on cindy!!"

Friend 2: "ugh he did? *in a joking playful tone* i could just kill him sometimes!"

Teacher heard this whole conversation, told the dean, next day kid gets pulled out of class and is never seen again. And I was there for all of this - there is NO WAY that anyone could mistake him for being serious when he said that.


Also recently at my school I witnessed a gross exercise of power by the principal. Food and Drink are not allowed in any buildings (except cafeteria) including water (yeah, i know, its florida. they do this to "reduce bathroom breaks." i'm not kidding either.) So, a kid runs 7 miles in the morning (cross country team) and buys a gatorade from one of the machines on campus. He's heading towards his locker and the principal is outside the building his locker is in. The principal tells him that he can't go inside with the drink. He tells the principal in a calm non-condescending tone "I don't agree with this rule, but I respect you enough to obey it and not bring this drink inside." and calmly waits outside periodically drinking his gatorade and talking to friends (keep in mind that this was like 20 mins before school starts, so he wasn't going to be late to class or anything.) With the principal still there, a teacher comes over and tells my friend to move out of the way because he is blocking traffic. Now, he is standing about 5 feet to the left of the door, and is clearley not blocking traffic, but he does as he is told and moves about 5 steps off the wall. About 10 seconds later, the principal begins yelling at him for moving from the spot. My friend tries to explain himself calmly and without attitude, but the principal will not have it. He then tells him to go to guidance and wait there. My friend went to guidance, waited an hour and no one showed up so he went to class.

You would be suprised what goes on in public schools. Yesterday my history teacher who was giving a lesson on religions around the world did not know if Budda was fat in real life and when I asked about it I was told that it was of no significance anyway. I told him that in fact it could be rather important, as he had just taught us that Buddhism promotes freeing yourself from useless indulgences and possesions and that if Budda was actually fat then it would be contradictory to what he taught (as fat people are usually observed to be grossly indulgent.)

I was then yelled at for "interuppting class" despite the fact that I had raised my hand and been called on as per procedure specified by him. Basically he tried to blame me instead of just saying something like "Actually, I'm not sure. If we have time at the end of class we can look it up on the internet."

Anyway those are just some of my observations spending 12 years in the public school system.

This is my Hometown...let me tell you something...

[BiO_FeNiX]

I went to this high school and grew up in this town. Let me tell you this...The system administrators never had a firm grip on the students, I assure you...and they had been outdone several times before this. Suffice to say, the school tends to overreact about things that they don't understand...and Computers is one of those topics. I work in IT now and now that I understand security and such, I realized how much my high school sucked about security...they never really thought about it. Anyways...its kind of amusing to find my hometown on Slashdot...its little more then a farming town with a college in it. My graduating class was 140 people.

L8tr all.

Re:Moan ...

[einhverfr]

It's shit like this that makes me want to leave the country.

I sympathize to some extent actually. Read the district press release:

"Unfortunately, after repeated warnings and disciplinary actions, a few students continued to misuse the school-issued laptops to varying degrees. The disciplinary actions included detentions, in-school suspensions, loss of Internet access, and loss of computer privileges. After each disciplinary action, parents received either written notification or telephone calls. Some parents felt that the disciplinary actions were ridiculous and even expressed the feeling that their son/daughter should be able to do non-school activities and use the laptop without restrictions. Some students acknowledged that they used their school-issued laptop inappropriately at home rather than their home computer for fear their parent would catch them."

There is a simple way to fix this problem. If you don't want them to use the laptop at home, don't let them take it home.

My concern about the trend towards computerization in our schools is that students will not have the oportunity to opt-out of restrictions (say, by providing their own laptops). This is not that different from a world where everybody would be unable to opt-out of a trusted computing world, or even a Microsoft Windows world.

A second thought (IANAL) is that such heavy-handed punishment as a felony charge in this case might very well seem like cruel and unusual punishment and it might be possible to challenge the constitutionality of the law as applied to this case. Charging minors with felonies for using passwords taped to the back of the computers they were issued seems both cruel and unusual to me. However, where exactly one draws this line in this case might be fairly difficult to answer.

Finally, students have some privacy rights even regarding school lockers. It seems to me that constant monitoring might infringe upon those legitimate rights. IANAL, again though....

Re:Human error

[ZX81]

Or you could just call and complain:

http://www.cutusabreak.org/Pages/policeletter.html

Hmmmm can just see the police switchboard getting slashdotted now! :D

Re:Human error

[aussersterne]

I didn't mean to suggest that the whole thing, bottom to top, was a scheme. I mean to suggest that the laptops were going to go to students anyway, and when the IT contractor asked the administrator, "Where do you want me to file the passwords away?" the administrator responded with, "Put them on the backs of the machines and we'll see who..."

Something nearly the same happened when I was contracting for high schools. The DOS machines they used (this was a few years ago) could have been configured to start students into a menu system that was uninterruptable (i.e. turn machine on, get menu of available applications, no alternatives, no way to break out of the menu structure).

Instead, they wanted me to use the AUTOEXEC.BAT batch file to launch the menu system rather than a menuing application started directly on bootup. Why? So that they could watch and see who hit CTRL-C at boot to exit the batch file. Those students were then expelled for "hacking" (even though these machines weren't on a network at all, this was ca. 1992) and they lost their computer priveleges at the high school for the rest of their high school career.

Why? That's a question that was never satisfactorily answered to me. I can tell you that the answer was something along the lines of what I mentioned in my previous post: such students were basically believed to be "too big for their own britches" and it was thus basically one more way to find a few more kids with "no respect for authority" and push them out of the system.

While I was still contracting there, I saw two kids expelled for hitting CTRL-C to dump to DOS and explore the C: drive. Both ended up enrolling at a local private high school, to my knowledge.