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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!"
That's like saying do not push the big red button!
While the students should face some kind of consequences, in my opinion, the sheer stupidity puts this at the fault of those "victims" rather than the students.
The Computations of AdamR
http://www.adamreyher.com
Where I work, I seem to get three levels of password security. The worst are the ones who write their password on a post-it note and stick it on the monitor. The second level are the ones who write it in a notepad and put it in their desk drawer. The really smart ones write it in a notepad and put that in their bottom drawer. Sometimes I wonder why I bother.
I might not be a wit, but at least I am more than half way there.
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.
Visit www.cutusabreak.org
The kids are protesting and even selling T-shirts.
A *felony* for something that, for any non-police-state-oriented mind, should result in reduced computer privileges? Outrageous.
Make sure to slap the hungry monkey's wrist that sees a stick next to an ant hill. Does wonders for intellectual development on a macro- and microscale.
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?!)
Really, can't we get the media to stop using the work Hack in this way? Finding a password taped onto a notebook isn't hacking.
Sure, they may have used the computers in way which they shouldn't but, they didn't have to hack them.
I know, I know... the average Joe couldn't tell the difference between anything remotely technical but the media shouldn't be encourage it.
I think I'll go let Windows Hack into my neighbor's unsecured wireless access point.
I think I think, therefore I think I am.
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.
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....
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Or you could just call and complain:
l
:D
http://www.cutusabreak.org/Pages/policeletter.htm
Hmmmm can just see the police switchboard getting slashdotted now!
-={ Security does not exist - give up }=-
"They were punished multiple times and they still continued to do it."
So a rational adult would simply take the laptop away from them. Either play by the rules or take it away.
To me, this is the equivalent of sending your kid to reform school because he talked back one too many times. Its overreaction and really, its an admission of failure by the school authorities.
Everybody in Kutztown should be ashamed of themselves.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
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.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
I completely agree with you that our culture has an issue with young people growing up irresponsible and disrespectful. I am 18 myself, and I am regularly disgusted and appalled by the behavior of my so-called "peers" and other young people.
However, I disagree with your assessment of how to respond to the issue. Over and over again you are talking about "controlling" children - about "respecting authority". You bemoan the demise of spanking and complain that you can't "talk mean" to kids.
Now, I am not a psychologist nor have I studied child rearing - as I said, I'm only 18 myself. But what I would like to suggest, for whatever it is worth, is that respect isn't something that is instilled by control. It's something earned and taught. My parents never tried to control me and my siblings. We were never spanked, punished, or yelled at for things we did "wrong". Rather, they gently explained our error and, if necessary, had us make amends. Our parents raised us with respect for *us* - and helped us learn to respect others as well, by being living examples. I am not saying this approach necessarily works with all children (or all adults - some of y'all need to to think about the example of respect you're setting!). But I was dismayed by your advocacy of what is essentially parental authoritarianism, and I felt that a counter-example might be worth writing.
I would also dispute your statement that Respect for authority is a critical lesson in life that needs to be learned. Why? I agree with you that respect is an important lesson, but I would argue that respect should simply be for people and for property in general. Why should we respect authority? Teach kids to think for themselves, and educate them in moral principles so that they can make responsible decisions in their own right.
In closing, your post states:
Respect, in general, should be restored as a key value in our culture and at the core of respect is fear of what might happen if you don't.
I cannot say loudly enough how much I disagree with that. Respect isn't about fear at all. It's about doing what is right. It's about holding others in high enough esteem to want to treat them well. Heck, the good old "golden rule" is a simplistic but reasonable enough definition of respect - treat others the way you'd want to be treated, set their rights equal to your own. But fear of retribution? Where is the moral strength in that?
My 47.5 cents.
I'm really not surprised that you didn't RTFA, but if you had, you'd see that:
"In addition, they're accused of using hacking tools to find the new admin password when it was changed from the password that was taped on the back of the machines."
Si vis pacem, para bellum
The only thing more annoying than a Libertarian is an (un|mis)informed Libertarian
When I was 11 or 12, in public school, we got computers (TRS-80 CoCo's, which dates me I guess). The first day we had them, the teacher told us to turn them on, then don't touch anything until she told us to...
Well, I turned mine on, and the monitor just showed a black picture. So I turned up the brightness (it was down all the way), and fixed it. It never occurred to me that "don't touch anything" included the brightness control; I'd had one of those on my TV for as long as I could remember. I thought she meant "don't type anything"...
So I got suspended from school for a week. For turning up the brightness. Looking back on it now, I can see that I deserved *something* for disobeying a direct order... detention perhaps, or losing computer privileges for a week...
Of course, back then I thought of being suspended as a great vacation. I got to stay home and play with my computer (Atari 400, which I liked better than the CoCo anyway).
The thing was, when the teacher saw me tweak that knob, the expression on her face was one of *terror*. Not surprise, or anger... Utter, abject fear. I can only assume it was the machines she was afraid of, not me (I was big for my age, but not known for beating people up, especially not teachers).
Then and now, the teachers and administrators probably resent having to have the computers at all. They don't understand computers (well, OK, most people don't), but they *do* understand that the kids know more about computers than they ever will, which makes the adults feel like they're not in control. The type of person who becomes a school administrator is the type who hates being out of control, so they use (or abuse) their authority to make sure the kids are too terrified to step out of line.
Not too long ago, I did a contract job for a school system, setting up routers and proxy (censoring) software. One day the boss (former English teacher who was put in charge of the school's IT dept) asked me what I was doing, so I told her. I don't remember exactly what I said, but it was probably something like "I'm installing Apache so you can use this CGI script to configure your whitelist and blacklist for the squid proxy". Her response was, "Don't use all those technical terms with me! How would you like it if I used educational jargon when talking to you?"
It almost made me crack up laughing... but she was dead serious. So I calmed myself, and I told her (and not in a smart-assed way either): "Well, if you used words I didn't understand, I'd ask you to explain them. You're a teacher, so you're probably pretty good at that. I was trying to communicate with you, not confuse you, so tell me what I said that you didn't understand, and I'll try to explain it."
She got *pissed*. I mean red-faced, white-knuckled, and shaking. She stormed off...
A week later my company was officially fired from that contract (possibly *only* because of that incident, but probably not: we were behind schedule, partly because we kept having explain basic networking concepts to the school's IT employees, who were supposed to be supervising us). Since then, I've avoided public schools like the plague, and been happier for it. If I ever have kids, there's no way I'd send them to a school where people like that English teacher have authority over them.
If these "hackers" were my kids, I wouldn't punish them, but I would take them aside and explain that the mundanes are terrified of them, and ask them to hide their brains when in such company. I'd tell 'em not to worry, the cream always rises to the top... I'd also send 'em to a good private school, even if it meant a second or third mortgage on the house.