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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.
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*.
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...
I recently watched a documentary (it may of been BBC's The Virtual Revolution) where they showed a principle in a New York City area school spying on what his students where doing during the day at school via their school issued laptops. He could see what they where doing on the machine and even them via the webcam. They even showed him taking a snap of a student combing her hair to get her attention as in 'get back to work'.
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.
Pedophiles?
Isn't the FBI in charge of invading our privacy, not protecting it?
One thing I've learned in my life, given the chance, many will choose to do the wrong thing. I used to be cynical so many to me used to be most, but I'm pretty sure most will choose to do the right thing, but many won't. However I also know power corrupts, if only for the reason those who seek power generally suffer from narcissism, so for those with power, perhaps the bell curve is skewed more towards most.
Did you ever wake up in the morning, with a Zombie Woof behind your eyes? -- FZ
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.
One thing I've learned in my life, given the chance, many will choose to do the wrong thing. I used to be cynical so many to me used to be most, but I'm pretty sure most will choose to do the right thing, but many won't. However I also know power corrupts, if only for the reason those who seek power generally suffer from narcissism, so for those with power, perhaps the bell curve is skewed more towards most.
I agree, but it's not so much that power corrupts, but that unaccountability corrupts. If an individual will suffer no consequences for harming another, then you are depending upon that individual's better nature. The problem is ... he or she may not have one. That, in fact, is why we have the rule of law: you may or may not be someone that can be trusted, but the system will hold you accountable. Given that the Feds are involved in this matter, I think that an accounting is exactly what's about to happen.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Here is the video on PBS. Links directly to the page hosting it. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/learning/schools/how-google-saved-a-school.html . Interesting how it says, "how google saved a school."
Not necessarily:
n = 0
n < 50
I don't see any incongruencies there.
Sewage Treatment Facilities - "Our duty is clear."
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.