If everything seems under control, you're not going fast enough. - Mario Andretti

Big Education Brother

by Hal_10000

This is a little disturbing:

The FBI is investigating a Pennsylvania school district accused of secretly activating webcams inside students’ homes, a law enforcement official with knowledge of the case told The Associated Press on Friday.

The FBI will explore whether Lower Merion School District officials broke any federal wiretap or computer-intrusion laws, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to discuss the investigation.

Days after a student filed suit over the practice, Lower Merion officials acknowledged Friday that they remotely activated webcams 42 times in the past 14 months, but only to find missing student laptops. They insist they never did so to spy on students, as the student’s family claimed in the federal lawsuit.

This is why the idea of school districts giving out laptops makes me nervous.  Hell, I’m nervous enough about free laptops that I decided not to have my employer buy me one (my current Macbook Pro is perfectly serviceable).

(True story: a friend of mine’s employer secretly put a mail monitoring program on his computer once. But the employer didn’t install it right so he kept getting error messages.  In response, he found the code, debugged it, put in a comment letting them know what he’d done and went back to work.  They were not amused.  Or at least they couldn’t admit they were.  They eventually removed it when it became obvious he wasn’t doing anything wrong or illegal.)

Remote-activation software can be used to capture keystrokes, send commands over the Internet or turn computers into listening devices by turning on built-in microphones. People often use it for legitimate purposes — to access computers from remote locations, for example. But hackers can use it to steal passwords and spouses to track the whereabouts of partners or lovers.

The school district is claiming this was only used to find lost laptops.  I’m not sure how that works if a laptop is closed up or turned off.  But the potential for abuse—especially when they didn’t bother to tell anyone about this—is enormous.  Note this ominous statement:

According to the suit, Harriton vice principal Lindy Matsko told Blake on Nov. 11 that the school thought he was “engaged in improper behavior in his home.” She allegedly cited as evidence a photograph “embedded” in his school-issued laptop.

The handing out of laptops—in schools, in colleges and in businesses—has opened the door to this sort of thing. Teachers, principals and employers can’t resist finding out what their students/employees are up to on their spare time and whether it’s appropriate.

I don’t know that there’s a solution—I fear some idiot legislature will pass an ill-advised “Laptop Bill of Rights”.  But I don’t like where this is headed.

Comments

Posted by JimK on 02/21/10 at 09:37 AM from

$0.0003 worth of black tape and from a practical standpoint the problem is solved. Turn the camera on all day: it can’t see through tape. :)

Which goes to show you that you cannot, under any circumstances, count on technology to stop thieves.
Also, this story illustrates that every time you give someone something which can be abused, you can rest assured that it will be abused.

Nobody ever went broke betting on a human being’s penchant for abusing whatever power they get.

Posted by on 02/21/10 at 09:47 AM from

It is my fervent wish that all involved, particularly the assistant principal, spend a few years in a federal pen getting gang-raped on a nightly basis....

Posted by on 02/21/10 at 02:51 PM from

Expanding upon JimK’s idea, you would also want to disable any microphone as well.

Posted by HARLEY on 02/21/10 at 07:48 PM from

im willing to bet that some child porn charges will result from this too.

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