FBI Probing PA School Webcam Spy Case 312
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."
Damn Good. (Score:4, Interesting)
Label them as sex offender (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Good deal (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Damn Good. (Score:3, Interesting)
The easiest way to create child porn is giving free cameras to teenagers.
Obviously, the school wants to promote the creation of child porn by giving webcams to their students.
Re:Telescreens (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Update from Dr. McGinley, LMSD, 2010/02/19-10PM (Score:4, Interesting)
considering that they official said previously that it was never used and are now admitting to less than 50 uses, they're pretty screwed.
Re:Label them as sex offender (Score:4, Interesting)
That's the part that tickled me - while there may be some (flimsy) justification for using the AV for tracking down lost laptops, where is the justification or authority for disciplining children for activities off school grounds? Amazing how some educators think that they own kids 24/7, just because they sit in their class for an hour a day.
Simple immediate solution for parents - refuse the laptops. Tell the school that you don't accept spyware in your home. And be vocal about it - school boards will let stuff rot in court for years, but a few weeks on the front page will change their minds ASAP.
Re:Very interesting... (Score:2, Interesting)
Personally I don't buy their story. The odds of catching someone doing something "interesting" (as was reported earlier) when taking a single snapshot have gotta be astronomically low. They also claim that no student was disciplined or this brought up—if so, how did they learn of the tracking software?
Re:FIST... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:FIST... (Score:3, Interesting)
One thing I've learned in my life, given the chance, many will choose to do the wrong thing.
And I've learned that choosing "the wrong thing" frequently leads to no deleterious effects, so it's not necessary to catch and severely punish every instance of "the wrong thing"; most all of it is self-correcting over time.
Re:FIST... (Score:2, Interesting)
They even showed him taking a snap of a student combing her hair to get her attention as in 'get back to work'.
I can't help but wonder what sort of paranoia and acceptance of privacy violations these practices are going to foster in both current and future generations of school children. I'd like to think that it will create loathing and a strong backlash, but I somehow don't think that will be the case.
Re:Very interesting... (Score:5, Interesting)
So why was the laptop reported lost/missing/stolen if the student had it?
Yesterday's news quoted parents, and they say that the laptop was NOT reported stolen. They obviously wouldn't file a lawsuit otherwise.
The latest missive from the school is just building their defense. IMO, when FBI or court checks the computers and it turns out that there were other, unauthorized activations of cameras, or a way to bypass logs alltogether, then the people who claimed otherwise can say "we didn't know" and will blame someone who isn't important.
The school was within their rights... (Score:0, Interesting)
I know that this will upset many people on /. but I think it needs to be said.
A school like any other corporation or enterprise has the right to install what ever software they need/want to on their school owned computers for productivity, management and monitoring. When the students signed the AUP (acceptable use policy) to take the laptops home they consented certain behaviors when using the school owned computers. This schools AUP specifically states that the computers can be used for educational use only. Both the student and parents of the student had to sign the AUP. So if the student was using the school owned computers the way they said they would when they signed the AUP there wouldn't really be an issue.
Another point. I wonder if there would be similar outrage if this were a corporation and a employee. I don't think any employee expects to have any privacy when using a work laptop. http://www.privacyrights.org/fs/fs7-work.htm#computermonitoring Just like when using work email that email is almost always archived and often searched for improper use. http://www.privacyrights.org/fs/fs7-work.htm#4a The key is you are using a system that is not owned by you.
Long story short. The student had no expectation to privacy when using the school owned equipment or services. Just because they choose to take the school owned equipment home doesn't change things. If the student wanted their computer use to be private. They should have purchased their own private computer and not used a school owned laptop. Just because the students computer was reported as missing and the school in the process of trying to track down a missing laptop found evidence that the student was not using the equipment in the manner that they said they would when they signed the AUP and then cried foul when caught should not make this a legal case involving the FBI and national coverage. The student should have been following the guidelines they they agreed to. But when they got caught mommy and daddy called in the lawyers. The school did nothing wrong here as far as I can tell. They were within their rights to monitor their school owned equipment. The have done so in the past to save the taxpayers roughly $18k in lost or missing equipment that was recovered. Next time the student should just by their own computer for no school related use.
PA's "Constructive Possession" laws (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Damn Good. (Score:4, Interesting)
"The claim in the class action doc directly refutes the claims by the school."
Honestly, I think I can read between the lines of the school statement and see how they could be technically correct, although highly misleading (note that it's a rich district, and everyone involved has hired high powered lawyers).
Did the assistant principal "have the ability to remotely monitor a student"? Well, no, the monitoring was actually done by an IT staff member who then handed off the picture to the assistant principal. (Note that the FAQ question is NOT "does any staff member have the ability to remotely monitor?")
Did she utilize a photo to discipline a student? Well, technically no, if there was no school-based punishment, suspension, etc. handed out... according to the report she met with the parents and just threatened future disciplinary measures. (Note that the FAQ question is NOT "did the assistant principal ever produce a photo taken by a school-issued laptop?")
So I can kind of see this as carefully-chosen weasel words.
Gatto: Schooling is a form of adoption... (Score:4, Interesting)
Another great reason to homeschool: "State Controlled Consciousness"
http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html [the-open-boat.com]
"""
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
Re:Go for creator of child pornography (Score:3, Interesting)
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.