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FBI Seizes Los Angeles Schools' iPad Documents
An anonymous reader writes: The Los Angeles Unified School District had a bold (and expensive) plan to outfit its students with top-of-the-line technology: its 650,000 students will be given Apple iPads to use for school work. The cost? $1 billion. Unfortunately for them, the project has been plagued with problems. Now, the FBI has seized 20 boxes of documents regarding the district's procurement practices and confirmed an investigation. "Hundreds of students initially given the iPads last school year found ways to bypass security installations, downloading games and freely surfing the Web. Teachers complained they were not properly trained to instruct students with the new technology. And questions were raised after emails were disclosed showing that then-Superintendent John Deasy had been in communication with vendors Apple and Pearson before the contracts were put to bid."
We may never know what they're investigating, or who, or why, or how it will cause or affect any criminal prosecution. There's certainly no integrity to the process.
Remember when a school was caught installing malware on students' macbooks that covertly took pictures of the children in their bedrooms, almost certainly producing child porn? And we even had correspondence that showed faculty used this capability for entertainment?
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The feds investigated but simply decided not to file charges against the school for illegal surveillance, hacking, peeping at kids, etc. I guess that would have set a nasty precedent for the NSA activities that were going on, but only discovered a few years later.
Government purchase procedures for purchases over a small amount typically require large amounts of paperwork from vendors, submitted in various stages to ensure transparency and fairness. "Run down to Walmart and get it for one-third the price" isn't an option specified in the procurement process.
The idea is to make sure they don't just run down to their brother's shop and pay five times the going rate. Unfortunately, it means buying mainly from middleman companies who are in the business of getting government contracts. It can be REAL lucrative to contract for computers - you put in a bid for to top of the line computers at $3500 each, installed. The process takes 18 months before you win the bid. You meet with the government agency and the start planning their migration process. Eventually delivery is scheduled, around six months after you won the bid. At that point you buy some computers that meet the specs you bid two years ago, paying $600 each. Six months after that you collect the $3500 each from the government.
Only android allows you to maintain your own app store and properly lock down a device (in theory). Ipads require every parent to put a cc into apple's system or do some sort of gift card work around. This alone should make them untenable in a school or corporate setting.
Cheap storage VM.