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School Spying Scandal Gets Even More Bizarre
Several sources following the recent school webcam spying debacle are reporting that an even stranger twist has surfaced. The student in question that was disciplined for an "improper act" was apparently accused of either drug use or drug selling. Turns out he was eating Mike & Ike candy, not popping pills. While there is probably more to this story than has made it to the general public, the officials involved have done a particularly bad job of actually managing the events.
Yeah...because Mike & Ikes look just like illicit drugs. Completely ignoring the privacy aspect of this story, a school official mistaking freakin' Mike & Ikes for drugs is beyond comprehension.
http://www.illinoisnut.com/products/mainLarge_1028200752854pm.jpg
That looks quite unlike any drug I've ever heard of or seen.
Living With a Nerd
To be fair, the "Mike & Ike" claim was made by the kid. And he might be lying.
But the entire "what exactly was the kid doing" tangent is really just an attempt to justify the school's bad behavior.
The news just keeps on getting better and better. The more absurd this story gets, the more it will stand out as an example of why this sort of behaviour is unacceptable.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
I still can't believe anybody but the IT department had access to this, and better yet no one in the IT department thought this might be a bad idea...
Really doesn't make much difference. The school shouldn't be punishing kids for taking drugs at home even if they really were doing that. If they came by the information legitimately then their choices are bringing the matter to the attention of the parents, the police, social services or some combination of those. If the information was acquired illegitimately then the choice gets a little harder but I can still see an argument for "we shouldn't know this but we really should let the parents know anyway and fire whoever got us into this mess". \deciding to discipline the student for a non-school related incident though is just completely the wrong move to make.
Apparently the school administration has lost all memory of being teenagers in the 60s and 70s.
Hint: Drugs do not come in big candy colored shapes. Think powders, small tiny pills, pieces of paper, crude plant material, or crudely rolled cigarettes. FYI, Sweet Tarts and M&Ms are still legal in most states.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Wait, I thought the school made a statement saying they never ever used the laptop "security feature" for anything besides recovering lost and/or stolen equipment.
How is snapping a picture of a student, with _no_ stolen laptop, following in line with their stated security policy?
Ya, we didn't use it for its intended purpose. Ya, we did snoop around to satisfy our curiosity, but.. but.. BUT.. LOOK AT THE DRUGS!
*Facts presented so far in this case are less than facts until a court rules. I don't claim to know what happened, I'm just a sheep parroting the hearsay I come across.
And it was later discovered that none of the students broke any rules. The rule was that underwear could not be showing. The problem is people making up the rules as they go along, often in secret. Our government for example...
Ikes are good! Ikes are good! Ikes are good!
Mike and Ikes are good!
Do we know for a fact that it was factory-branded Mike & Ike's and not illegally copied or Chinese-bootlegged Mike & Ike-like candy? There's still ample opportunity to tie this story into several other perpetual Slashdot themes.
“If you give me a 640x480 JPEG of the most honest of men, I will find something in it which will hang him”
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
LOL! ... "I'm popping steroids"
Oh man... Back in high school, I routinely grabbed a box of mike & ike (pink and white flavor/version) from a vending machine and kept it in my backpack to snack on. One day in class, a kid that sat next to me in the row over saw that I kept putting my hand in my backpack and eating something. So he asked what I was eating.
Being a jackass, I replied secretly
Big white and pink pills... huge effin steroids!
He started yelling in class "Steroids! Steroids! He's popping steroids!!!!" Everyone looks over and I didn't expect that kind of reaction from something pretty comical. Luckily nothing came of it, I just replied really quickly that they're just Mike and Ikes... a few laughs later - everything was fine.
I would expect a high school student to do something like this. However, a principle of a high school should know better and this mess reeks of incompetence on his part.
"Tread softly because you tread on my dreams"
I go to Villanova University, which is 5 minutes by train from Lower Merion. One of my profs has a daughter that goes there (when I showed him the brief on Thursday, he was floored.)
The Mike & Ike thing is pretty damn bizarre, but it makes sense.
I expect the school already deleted the logs. Then again, given the tech competence of my own high school (all software and VLKs were on public shares, all documents were accessible [all users] if logged in via RDP, including passwords to the externally hosted attendance/transcript web app, etc.), it would not be terribly surprising if they just saved it all.
And I was disciplined for taking prescription medication for which the school had a proper release (i.e. I signed the right form and gave a doctor's note saying I needed to have the medication on my person). Nosy administrators "thinking of the children" and overreacting to non-issues (as well as egregious violations of privacy) would be nothing new in my book.
The School is in Pensylvania and Mike & Ike's are made in Illinois. This is obviously a case of corporate funding in public schools gone awry! Hershey's will not allow the children of Pennsylvania to be poisened by the corn syrup generated candies of Illinois!
They are just acting to protect our youth!
Think of the children.
Hint: Drugs do not come in big candy colored shapes.
I'm guessing you didn't attend a lot of Grateful Dead shows....
Apparently you don't know what it was like being a kid in the 80s and 90s. Prescription pills are the drugs of choice by most these days, easier to get by with in plain sight, generally easy to come up with an excuse for having on you or taking, only illegal if you don't have a prescription ... which you don't typically carry around with you.
and ...
Even less noticeable when you carry them around in a candy box and act completely normal with them.
You clearly were not part of the crowd who 'did drugs in school', thats probably a good thing, just stop pretending to know what goes on with the kids who do. If you have kids, I suggest you ask them about the drugs in their school rather than telling them about drugs, they'll probably already know more.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
It turns out that one of the the network administrators at the school district has a fairly large online presence, and has posted quite a bit relating to this program on his blog over the years. Some folks have started looking over the blogs and the software being used, and it is pretty interesting.
holey crap, for a school that's only been around for 20 years, they've got a remarkable number of fucked up incidents
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
What they left out is she was required to teach in a g-string.
What are the chances Mr. Schooladministrator will be asked, "Why did you watch Billy Beatnick supposedly taking drugs for 30 seconds and then watch Chelsea Cheerleader for the next 3 hours?"
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
School officials are notorious for being completely clueless about the law; it's amazing what you find in some of the case law.
You don't even have to look that far. A year ago there was a big story about a school that strip-searched a female student because another student claimed he got Advil from her . She was even suspended, even though no pills were found.
I understand the whole zero-tolerance policy of not bringing in any medication, but a flippin' strip search is uncalled for. They didn't even have law enforcement do it, one of the school admins had to do it.
WTF
What's scary is it had to go to the Supreme Court for them to say "ummm, that's illegal." They ruled on the matter in June 2009.
Yep went to the Supreme Court. The scary thing is a few of the justices sided with the school
Some guy sold me a bag of Mike & Ike for $50 and when it didn't do anything we realized it was Good & Plenty.
My girlfriend gave me grief about it and I was like, "why don't you score it next time, it's not like any of you bitches have red-green color blindness!"
What are the odds that they took one picture and it just happened to be of a kid doing drugs? Zero. The big question: how many pictures would you have to take in order to guarantee a picture of a kid doing drugs? Hundreds? Thousands? That's the crime here, all the pics they took where someone was NOT doing drugs.
stuff |
Except in this case if Rx drug abuse was the claim, the school wouldn't have any idea if the pills were legit or not.
As someone pointed out on another site, there are two big problems with the school's position:
1.) Just because they told the kids that they might activate the web cam to find it doesn't give them the right to do so. If the activity is illegal, telling someone you are going to do it beforehand doesn't make it legal. IANAL, but this one sounds pretty shaky.
2.)Even if they had the legitimate authority to use the web cam, once they realized that the laptop was in the hands of the right person, they would have been legally obliged to stop spying. Any information they gleaned from that spying would have been inadmissible in court.
From the posting at that link it looks like the school is on a serious freakout powertrip. Requiring the students to have one of these computers, requiring them to use them to the exclusion of all others and then spying on them periodically even if there was no report of the laptop being stolen.
The school board and school administration of that town should be burned to the ground with metaphorical salt sown in their professional fields.
Why? because most school administrators love overstepping their authority, and being jerks. One the things they have been trying to do is prevent students from eating "junk-food", so given their nature, they would like to try to prevent this at home. At some local schools, they ripped out all the good food and replaced it with "organic" crud. No one ate it, and all just rotted - so they were forced to go back to the "junk-food". School administrators have no checks and balances on their authority, and behave as one would expect. It's a window into what would happen if there were no checks and balances on the president (no supreme court, senate, house, etc.). It should also be noted that some students are actually sick, or were actually sick (me), and needed to pop prescription drugs, including commonly abused ones. I don't want to know what that's like in normal school.
Glad I'm a homeschooler.
Responsibility is an addiction
Virtue is a temptation
Community is a cartel
From the link above: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHu92imqJec
Basically, all laptops were set to switch to "stolen mode" as soon as they get online from anywhere outside the school['s network].
And then they start sending screenshots, camera shots and DNS and IP info on regular basis.
Apparently, their IT God thought nothing about setting up the laptops kids will be taking home so their home network is considered safe.
Also, their School's Resident High Inquisitor thought that since the "stolen mode" is on, that means that spying on kids is fair game.
Brilliant examples of stupidity. Simply brilliant.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Even if a person were crazy enough to think it was alright to secretly spy on people and then start some sort of punitive process I can't imagine someone taking screenshots really provides any real chain of custody/evidence to keep it admissible.
Hmmm, let me bust out photoshop or the Gimp, next thing you know your screwing a goat on your desk.
Real video surveillance systems have to have measures to make sure the evidence has not been tampered with.
Schools are overpopulated with kids from poor/undereducated families
Not Lower Merion School District. Lower Merion School District has one of the highest per captia income of the school districts in Pennsylvania.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Zero tolerance is not an understandable policy. It's an excuse for unhooking the brain of those in authority, an excuse for punishing kids equally for bringing a loaded automatic rifle and a keychain-sized toy gun to school, and an excuse for rampant power trips.
There has to be a way for Mike and Ikes to prybar this into an ad campaign.
I understand the whole zero-tolerance policy of not bringing in any medication
Can you explain it to me then? The world is full of shades of gray. How are we doing children a favor by pretending it isn't? If you want kids to respect authority, it has to behave in a way that's respectable. It cannot be arbitrary and capricious.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
That would be good ole Clarence Thomas:
"Justice Clarence Thomas was the lone dissenter. "Judges are not qualified to second-guess the best manner for maintaining quiet and order in the school environment," he wrote. "
I don't understand why we're even talking about what the kid did or did not do at his home.
School officials have no fucking business sniffing around in other peoples houses. This is just outrageously wrong and illegal. Even if he was taking drugs, the video should not be accepted by any court as prove. Not even the police is allowed to film you in your own home without previous reason.
Public schools don't want to kick students out. Federal funding is determined in part by the number of students enrolled, thus more students equals more funding. That's why they want your kids to go to school regardless of health on the "federal counting days". From what I've seen, they're more interested in passing kids along regardless of performance than kicking kids out (this from a father with two in school right now...)
Yes, apparently some students DID notice the webcam light coming on at odd times while using the laptop at home, and were told it was just a computer malfunction, nothing to worry about!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
in order to bring about the glorious christian theocracy of north america:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/magazine/14texbooks-t.html
of course, jesus' greatest message was tolerance. yet his most vocal advocates today only seem to advance the cause of "christianity" by extending the bounds of intolerance
I don't think you understand what tolerance is. If you think Jesus' message was about tolerance, then completely missed his point. Tolerance implies looking down on other people, put up with their flaws and feel sorry for them. Jesus' message called for Christians to not look down on the world but rather to love unconditionally. Loving does not mean that you have to accept the negative behavior of others while accepting the people themselves. This emulates how Jesus embraced a group of 12 flawed human beings and made them his disciples.
Christians are called to change the world and right wrongs rather than just sit there smugly "tolerating" others.
Tolerance is the lazy man's way because you are not helping others reach their true potential.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Alcohol is dangerous if you drink and drive, but it's legal above a certain age, certainly once they realize that trying to ban it was causing more harm than the substance itself. Contrast to marijuana...
Agreed. When the laws surrounding a substance are more harmful than the substance itself (marijuana being the current best example), there is a serious problem.
Living With a Nerd
Particularly buxom co-eds so we can post their pictures on the Usenet.
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
Mormons ring a bell?
Bell's broken. They knock.
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
Tolerance is the lazy man's way because you are not helping others reach their true potential.
Why can't you love me the way I am, rather than trying to force me to reach what you consider to be my true potential?
This in from Computerworld:
The company selling the software used by a Pennsylvania school district to allegedly spy on its students blasted what it called laptop theft-recovery "vigilantism" today.
Absolute Software said it dissuades users of theft-recovery software from acting on their own. "We discourage any customer from taking theft recovery into their own hands," said Stephen Midgley, the company's head of marketing, in an interview Monday. "That's best left in the hands of professionals."
Midgley confirmed that Lower Merion School District of Ardmore, Pa. was running Absolute Manage, formerly known as LANRev, which Absolute Software acquired last December. The suburban Philadelphia school district purchased and deployed LANRev prior to Absolute's acquisition, he said, noting that most school districts buy the software for power management features that let IT staff remotely power down systems.
Calling LANRev a "legacy" product, Midgley also said that Absolute would ship an update in the next several weeks that will permanently disable Theft Track, the name of the feature that lets administrators switch on a laptop's camera to take photographs of a potential thief after the computer is reported stolen. "It really doesn't serve any purpose," said Midgley of Theft Track.
All its theft-recovery software relies on a different model than the former LANRev, said Midgley. "We give no theft recovery tools to our [LoJack and Computrace] customers," he said. "The only truly proven model is a managed service model."
To kick off the recovery of a stolen or lost laptop, customers first must file a police report -- not a requirement of LANRev -- and only then contact Absolute, which in turn tracks the location of the missing machine via its IP address when the system goes online. Absolute employs a team of former law enforcement professionals who reach out to local police, provide them with the location information and then get out of the way. Software maker blasts 'vigilantism' in Pa. school spying case
Absolute Manage [LANRev] Automated Client Management for Mac and Windows Computers and Software
LoJack For Laptops
Zero tolerance for *anything* is pretty well inexcusable. It leads to precisely what you posted above: treating suspected minor infringements as massively illegal, threatening instances.
No, there simply is no understanding of zero tolerance, not for any element of the rules.
Tell that to Rush Limbaugh. The dirtbag got caught coming back from the Dominican Republic (home of a huge child prostitute industry) with a bottle of someone else's Viagra. While on probation. Without telling his probation officer he was going out of town. Since he's a right-wing-nut nothing happened of course, but you and I would have been in jail for a long time.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Stop using "tiny URLs" on slashdot! They are pointless here, a little disrespectful of the readers because they hide the link, and a security risk. STOP! Read how to link using HTML tags, please.
*cough cough*
No matter what the kid was or was not doing in the privacy of HIS OWN HOME, legal or not, it is HIS BUSINESS, and the business of his family. Unless a judge granted a warrant to keep the kids under surveillance 24/7 the school is 100% in the wrong. No matter how crazy kids get, if they are behind closed doors, they are good to go. Believe me - my boys did some wild crap when they were younger. Actually - they still do, sadly.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Dear Lower Merion School District,
We at the US/Chinese/UK (delete as appropriate) government are impressed at the efficiency with which you are "caring" for your students. We have plans to "care" for our entire population, and would like to employ you as a consultant to aid in our efforts.
For our glorious nation,
Des Pott.
Do as you would be done to.
Now, consider that you're talking about high-school students -- almost all of whom are going to be under the age of 18. All of a sudden, you're out of the realm of a simple class action lawsuit, and looking at a charges of 'Creation, Possession, and possibly even distribution, of Kiddie Porn'. . . .
Now, that may not do much more than garner some more interesting headlines, but if you throw in counseling charges against the high-level managers who concieved of, OKed or mandated this stupid idea, I expect that anyplace where a similar plan is in place, the programs will be suddenly stopped. -- and to be honest, I'm more interested in getting this stupidity shut down now than I am in starting a witch-hunt against stupid school administrators.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Even USA Today "Experts say school could track missing laptops less intrusively" Really?!? You don't say!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I'm stunned that no-one has mentioned the extraordinary scenes of unethical behaviour on the PBS documentary where a remote spycam feature is being used at another school in the Bronx. My jaw dropped open as I saw (at ~4m50s) the Assistant Principal spy on two schoolgirls and describe how he routinely does this with all 6th and 7th graders ("they don't even realise we're watching" -- he then takes control of the second girl's machine and takes a picture, and we see her duck out of his line of sight. His commentary as he did this had me climbing the walls, it was so unpleasant and -- hopefully -- self-incriminating: "I always like to mess with them and take a picture". What's even worse is seeing the disconcerted look on the girl's face before she ducks and listening to the interviewer laugh -- the interviewer's reaction is a perfect example of how you can get caught up in a moment and fail to maintain independence of mind. You can't be certain from the video where she is -- there's a possibility she's at home. In a beautifully ironic twist, PBS carefully blurred out some of the writing on a whiteboard at ~3m40s, presumably to protect someone's privacy! Of course, they didn't bother to blur out the name of the second schoolgirl who got spied on.
Since he's a right-wing-nut nothing happened of course, but you and I would have been in jail for a long time.
What are you talking about? Conservatives are always consistent in their morals and values. That's why they overwhelmingly voted for McCain over Bush in 2000, since they made it clear in 1992 how much they valued military service and despised draft dodgers. And why Mark Sanford was promptly impeached by the Republican legislature of South Carolina, as Sanford voted for Clinton's impeachment in 1998.