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FBI Probing PA School Webcam Spy Case
On Thursday we discussed news that a Pennsylvania high school was spying on students through the webcams in laptops that were issued to the students. The FBI is now taking an interest in the case, investigating whether federal wiretap and computer-intrusion laws were violated in the process. "The FBI opened its investigation after news of the suit broke on Thursday, the law-enforcement official said. Montgomery County District Attorney Risa Vetri Ferman may also investigate, she said Friday." Ferman said her office is "looking to see whether there are potential violations of Pennsylvania criminal laws."
Because the absolute first thing *I* thought when I heard of this atrocity is: "Orwell would be proud."
Shh.
...of common sense.
Seriously though, as was said on the previous /. thread on this topic: who could seriously have thought that the ability to spy on kids in their bedrooms was (a) a good idea and (b) something to brag about.
Rgds
Damon
http://m.earth.org.uk/
Sometimes you're so indignent you don't get it all out the first time: Telescreens, the screen that looks back at you. Orwell'd.
Shh.
http://www.lmsd.org/sections/schools/default.php?t=lmhs&p=lmhs_today_anno&menu=lmhs_today&id=1143
Vice Principal used a photo taken by the webcam as evidence.
All people who were responsible for this should be labelled for the rest of their lives as sex offenders with all the consequences. Hey, they could have watched the children naked at home. I am not an American, but from what I hear from news, some people got this sex offender stigma for much more ridiculous incidents. In this case it would make sure that something like this would never happen again.
About damn time. I feel a bit pumped that the tide is shifting here, the things we know are immoral are starting to get called on why they're done, even with the best of intentions. There is a slight drift toward "if it's wrong it's wrong and if you had good reasons for it, we'd like to hear them. Don't worry if you need to state them at length, we'll go over them. A lot. Expect follow-up questions". I'm under no illusions that this will change that much, but I'm excited about the direction things seem to be taking and the realizations people seem to be having looking at the other options *couch*china*cough*.
Apologies and remorse are too late. Coulda-woulda-shouda. You guys fucked up big time and you are going to have your asses handed to you. Deservedly so.
I've seen both commercial and open source webcam enabled anti-theft software advertised for personal use: Prey
I don't know the software well enough to know how it is designed and marketed for business/institutional use. How many of these programs can capture full or stop-motion video.
This strikes me as a minefield for both the developer and his clients.
Slap 'em down.
Make an example of these self important fools.
Who owns your data?
If they were really interested in theft recovery why didn't they use a system specifically designed for that purpose. Lojack costs $30/year per machine and I'm sure they would have gotten a volume discount.
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
Before we all get carried away decrying this school district, we must bear in mind that almost all the information we have comes from allegations in a lawsuit. The school district are innocent until proven guilty as far as I'm concerned. I have no reason to trust the family's lawyer over the school district's superintendent. The only concrete fact that the two parties agree on is that the laptops have tracking software. The district says they've only used on stolen laptops, while the lawsuit says that it was used in a disciplinary matter. Time will tell which is most accurate.
VERY interesting.
Did the district remotely access any laptops which were not lost, missing or stolen?
No.
Aha! So why was the laptop reported lost/missing/stolen if the student had it? It seems like the administration had a legitimate reason for turning on the security software! If this is true, it complicates things. I do not fault the school system for putting security software on the system. Especially since they claim that 42 were reported lost/missing/stolen and they recovered 18 of them.
The details about this will be very interesting...
They claim its used to locate stolen computers and list that 20+ computers (out of 50ish) have been stolen. Unless the laptop is "reported" to the police, as stolen, what does a webcam have to do with locating laptops? IP Addresses, in general, would be sufficient or an embedded GPS device. All visually non-invasive. Webcams could be used as a last resort to identify a thief using a computer. In this case, it looks like this laptop was issued to the kid and the "improper behavior" was obtained from viewing webcam images. What' that have to do with stolen? All of this is easy to think out, especially the privacy issues, so putting the webcams in place was deliberate and bound to be misused. Now they are going to cover up and claim its all about stolen computers.. maybe they are the ones popping pills..
Have you fscked your local propeller head today?
Isn't the FBI in charge of invading our privacy, not protecting it?
I am not a lawyer, but I've investigated Supreme Court decisions on rights of students several times. They always start "The student doesn't shed his or her constitutional rights at the schoolhouse doors, but...." and then go on to describe rights of administrators that describe a situation where the students have no rights.
All the lawyers have to do is describe a reasonable case that the admins were trying to "keep order" in the schoolhouse and this goes nowhere. The Supreme Court has often went out of its way to make school administrators despots in their own little fiefdoms. Anyone that has attended a public school since 1970 knows this.
"Disabled" might mean "removed" Disabled means not working, removing it would stop it from working. Yes I know that's not normally how the word is used, but non-tech people might use it as such.
So, is it a case of a person using the wrong word and accidentally being misunderstood, or a person using the right word and hoping his audience misunderstands him?
considering that they official said previously that it was never used and are now admitting to less than 50 uses, they're pretty screwed.
Don't forget to charge the kid too. It's the American way.
Don't forget to charge the kid too. It's the American way.
As an American, I suppose I should be irritated by that remark ... but it's uncomfortably close to the truth. We're not handling many of these cases very well, it seems.
Sometimes you have to look at stories like this and say, "Well, we don't have all the facts in our possession, so maybe there were some extenuating circumstances." In this case, I can't really see any justification for what this school has done. It just sounds like a group of administrative types who thought they were invulnerable to consequence went too far.
When you get right down to it, the reason our schools SUCK at this point in time is because of power-mad, empire-building administrators that really couldn't give a rat's ass about the students. Teachers take a lot of the blame (much of it deserved, I agree) but just as with a staff of software developers managed by an idiot, the real responsibility lies at the top.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
>> Don't forget to charge the kid too. It's the American way. ... but it's uncomfortably close to the truth. We're not handling many of these cases very well, it seems
>
>As an American, I suppose I should be irritated by that remark
When you consider that the majority of 'offenders' prosecuted in this country under child pornography laws are 15-year-olds, I'd say that "not handling well" is somewhat of an understatement.
A.
...bringing you cynical quips since 1998
Not necessarily:
n = 0
n < 50
I don't see any incongruencies there.
Sewage Treatment Facilities - "Our duty is clear."
Hell, just plain old LOOKING without recording it is still illegal.
Plain old looking is _not_ illegal, depending on the expectation of privacy. Many people's homes sit on widely used roads, and if glancing in at someone as you walk or drive past their house is now a crime, I'd guess just about everyone is a criminal.
as a taxpayer without children, I am not welcome at PTA or other school meetings where I would be permitted to voice my opinions as to the misguided actions of educators and administrators
Well, sure, because as someone without children you might be inclined to ask where the hell all of your money is going, and the "but, it's for the children" argument most likely won't work on you. Me either ... I don't have kids but 56% (fifty six percent) of my real-estate taxes go to "education." Think about that: education overshadows all other civil services in my area: police, fire, social and medical services, everything. That just seems entirely out of proportion, somehow.
And even if you aren't welcome at such meetings, if you're not an attorney you might want to consult one. Find out if the school has any legal right to exclude you: parent or not, the taxes you pay go to support that organization, and if there's any justice at all, you should be entitled to some say in how it is run.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
But I think that accountability automatically scales down as power goes up. When powerful people do bad things, usually there are many other people around them who are complicit in some way, or who should've known better, or who should have spoken up, or who just went along because everyone else did so. Eventually you get to a point where people will give you a pass just because the alternative--admitting that everyone around you facilitated what you were doing--is just too unpalatable. When admitting your guilt involves admitting their own guilt, most people around you will insist on your innocence, to a degree they never would have if they weren't tangentially complicit.
That's why committees and "consensus" are so popular. If one decision can be tracked to one person, they might actually have to deal with personal responsibility. Very few people want that for themselves, and for that they'll collude to muddy the waters for everyone else, too.
Basically, the constructive possession doctrine in PA says that it is an equivalent situation that the administrators were physically located in the child's bedroom with a camera. This is the same law that is used to charge kids with minor possession of alcohol for simply being in a place where alcohol is present, regardless of whether the minor actually has physical possession of any. The beer may as well have been in their hand, just like the administrators may as well have been in the child's bedroom, where at some point during the constructive possession of the photographic equipment, one can reasonably conclude the child was undressed.
QED. The administrators are guilty of photographing naked minors by the constructive possession doctrine.
Another great reason to homeschool: "State Controlled Consciousness"
http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html
"""
Schooling is a form of adoption. You give your kid up in his or her most plastic years to a group of strangers. You accept a promise, sometimes stated and more often implied that the state through its agents knows better how to raise your children and educate them than you, your neighbors, your grandparents, your local traditions do. And that your kid will be better off so adopted.
But by the time the child returns to the family, or has the option of doing that, very few want to. Their parents are some form of friendly stranger too and why not? In the key hours of growing up, strangers have reared the kid.
Now let's look at the strangers of which you (interviewer) was one and I was one. Regardless of our good feeling toward children. Regardless of our individual talents or intelligence, we have so little time each day with each of these kids, we can't possibly know enough vital information about that particular kid to tailor a set of exercises for that kid. Oh, you know, some of us will try more than others, but there simply isn't any time to do it to a significant degree.
So what we do is accept and if we don't accept this we are fired or harrassed, we accept the state's prescription that's written in manuals. You do this first, and this second, and this third, and here you have a little latitude to talk to the kid. And the way the state checks on whether you've followed that diet is your standardized tests given at intervals
If your kids do badly, it does not mean that they're bad readers or anything else. It means they haven't been obedient to the drills the state set down and they're marked for further treatment later on with a mark to be excluded from responsible jobs. Perhaps some way is to be excluded from the colleges that lead to responsible jobs, in other ways from the licenses that lead to responsible jobs.
This was ALL worked out. It didn't evolve by a lot of rational people saying we'll take this this and this from the past, then the next generation says we'll take this this and this. This was set down largely in a handful of places. Prussia was perhaps the most prominent of those places. The Prussian experiment leapt into the United States almost immediately in the 1840's. Leapt into the United States; its propagandists covered the country here. Its backers, its financial backers set up the most important teacher training institutes and then financed those institutes and then no one was allowed to become a teacher who didn't more or less subscribe to the fact that experts could create a curriculum and pedagogues could administer it.
Well, that's exactly what Horace, the Roman essayist, talked about in several of his essays. He said, "the master creates the lessons, the pedagogue (the teacher) administers the lessons." But if you find the teacher creating the lessons or deviating from the direction the lessons are headed in, you get rid of the pedagogue.
But the people who gave us schooling, weren't these wealthy people, they were Utopian thinkers who believed the family and tradition were the greatest obstacles to making a perfect society, a utopia. Every utopia that survived, invents schooling, long before we had universal forced schooling for all these little neighborhood schools. They all invented universal schooling of a homogenous variety in order to reach Utopia.
Now let's shift to the basis of your question which is Rockefeller and Carnegie and J.P. Morgan. These people saw a different kind of utopia. Through solving the problem of production with highspeed machinery they saw material abundance could be created and that want - first of all, of course, they thought they could become supremely wealthy which they did - but secondarily, they weren't beasts, they thought that this material abundance, since they had abandoned a belief in a Creator or an Afterlife, this material abund
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Unfortunately, the fact that the school could and would remotely active te web cam for any reason at all, was not in an AUP or in fact any type of document that the parents and/or child signed, read, or was given.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Visible from school grounds. (Also, it makes a huge difference whether this was a public or private school. I don't know which it is.)
Actually, I don't see why it would matter if it was visible from school grounds - it's after hours, and it's *not* on school grounds. The student is not under the authority of the school at that point.
I suppose the question to the parent is, what did you do about it?
It's quite probable that 56% of the real estate taxes SHOULD go to the school.
And it's just as likely that it isn't. Matter of fact, I'm pretty sure it isn't. I've seen the overbuilt, overfunded, underutilized facilities built around here, and I'm not happy with the way public officials have been handling my money.
I'm not going to dispute the importance of education to our society, I hope I didn't give that impression. But we are spending an enormous amount of money on this, and we're not receiving enough in return. We're just not. Given the misuse of public funds that goes on in the modern "educational system", I suspect that schools could get along with a lot less money than they do if they were better managed. This is typical of taxpayer-funded operations that are run without sufficient oversight. And schools not only have little oversight, but have the political advantage of being able to say that every tax increase is necessary "for the children". No politician wants to vote against that. It's the standard recipe for misuse of public funds and malfeasance in office.
I don't even want to go into the dollars spent on educating illegal immigrants in my area. That's a whole 'nother issue, but it directly affects the bottom line when it comes to the cost of educating our children. What the word "our" means to you may be different than what it means to me, of course, but either way we are talking about our money.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
No, the security measure is not forgivable. Don't even bother with hypothetical situations ("But if we could save someone's life ... "). Student privacy is more important than a lost laptop. Grok that concept.
Once you've got that down the gullet, there are no hypothetical situations in which this behavior becomes permissible. If we can't take the photos by remote control, then there's no point discussing situations in which such a photo might be justified.
Others have pointed out that this is about the most worthless way possible of recovering a stolen laptop. True. (Yes, there are one or two anecdotal examples. Don't forget to figure these as a percentage of total stolen laptops.) But even this point is a footnote to the point above.