School secretly snapped 1000s of students at home A suburban Philadelphia school district secretly captured thousands of images of students in their homes, sometimes as they slept or were partially undressed, according to documents filed in federal court. Using a system to track lost or stolen laptops, officials from the Lower Merion School District also covertly surveilled …
Haven't you ever faceplanted your keyboard during a long and late assignment as a result of failing to keep the caffeine levels up?
The keylogger data would've been intriguing:
Admin: "He keeps going on about this 'dsgfsjkhhhhkjweeeeeeeeellaanasanswrrrrrr'. D'you think it's a new drug?"
Quote from article:
"Viewing the images was like watching "a little LMSD soap opera," one of them said, referring to the initials of the school district.
"I know, I love it!" technology coordinator Carol Cafiero replied."
I know we shouldn't get all frothy at the mouth over paedophile danger, but when we actually find one, we chop off their private bits, right? Even if it's a woman? Where are the pitchforks?
Prove your laptop is off, assuming you didn't install it and don't have admin rights.
Do you take the battery out everynight, put it in a lead-lined box?
I used to work in an environment where, for security, you were allowed nothing electronic - even car alarm fobs were suspect.
But this was for a lab where "prompt criticality" wasn't a management buzzword - I wouldn't expect the same thing to apply to my kid's bedroom.
I think I've become deaf to the concern about paedophiles supposedly on every street corner thanks to the tabloids' unhealthy obsession with the subject, but for the sheer scale of the disregard for other people's privacy, I hope they throw the book at the scrotes responsible.
What happened to like reformatting and installing a different OS?
Or assuming that would have caused problems how about a bit of blacktape over the webcam & mic when your not actively using it? I mean its not like its rocket science & provides you with reasonable security against a remotely activated camera/mic.
Daft kids & insanely stupid school administrators, who deserve the book throwing at them over this. In any other setting the person activating the 'security' software would be labelled a right perv and the tabloids would have a field day with them.
The state of Pennsylvania has a number of good ideas. Since budgets don't matter until election time the states' larger citys are putting up cameras so we can be more like Europe watching people get raped, mugged, and killed on the streets rather then simply having the proper police force to deal with the problems.
We have GPS on most of state police trooper cars (unsure of the unmarked ones) which can be beneficial to cops during a trial. However this technology has also been shown to be a fork in road as well since as we all already know cops are allowed to lie to get you to say something however when you lie you lose your credibility. Hard to lie about where you were at when the GPS says hey your right there!
They tinkered with the notion of having GPS in the cars of our great honest politicans here drive but it was said to be a security concern. Yeah it's a security concern that they get caught in their taxpayer supplied escalades out at the truck stop picking up suitcases from lobbying firms.
These kids that had this happen to them deserve whatever they can get from this school district and also the department of education for allowing it to happen.
We know a pedophile is currently running the doe, god knows what he's doing with these pictures.
If they snapped images of students who were "in various states of undress", they should be charged with production, (and maybe distribution) of child pornography.
Yeah, I know intent has a lot to do with it, but I've seen people in the US convicted on nothing more than cached thumbnails that may have been of someone under 18.
Do they no longer teach what "unreasonable searches and seizure" and "due process" mean at the highschool level? I guess that's fairly rhetorical ... One of the problems[1] of reducing school budgets is that the kids don't learn little details like this.
The idiots who signed off on this need to do jail time.
[1] I know, to the politicians it's a feature, not a bug.
of a lying scumbag as president, who thinks of the Constitution as "just a piece of paper," ideas like unreasonable search and seizure are probably out of fashion now.
When your goverment can listen in on the whole country's phone conversations and never have to show due cause, when anything goes in the name of catching "turrrists," when the One Commandment is "Thou Shalt Not Get Caught," it probably gets a little murky sorting out right from wrong.
this is why there is tape over the webcam on my laptop.
also if you're dumb enough to trust a school supplied laptop you get what you deserve, without a doubt i'd be booting it off some sort of live disc or better yet sticking an extra partition on there.
also anon coward, never left bittorrent running over night?
Apart from security, I find built-in webcams to be a PIA - much rather plug one in as I need it, and be able to place and adjust it as I please. They're becoming fairly ubiquitous, so I may not have a choice in future - but I wouldn't touch a machine without a hard-switch control for the cam.
Also .... quite an amazing number of people do not use their computers for BitTorrent and the like, and actually switch them off occasionally. Strange but true.
Turn the Computer OFF?!
Seriously, I don't think you get the point.
But Karl explains it quite well and to the point.
http://market-ticker.denninger.net/archives/1986-My-God,-I-Saw-A-Cop!-FBI-And-PA-Schools.html
http://market-ticker.denninger.net/archives/1987-Stasi-Style-Crap-Continues-Lower-Merion-Schools.html
If the school district is really REALLY concerned about the laptops going AWOL, can't they install some kind of "black box" transmitter thingie? I am gobsmacked that somewhere in the bowels of the school bureaucracy, someone said "Well, we can have the laptops take pictures at various intervals" without being gangstomped by the district's lawyers. Pass the popcorn, this oughta be a good one.
What's LMSD then? The only thing Google's 'define:' gives is Lower Middle School District.
@ first OP: presumably, since the software was for tracking stolen laptops, it has a "remote-on" function because you can't track something that is off. If it's in suspend mode, then it's probably easy to have the network port stay open and send some sort of WOL type thing. Then again, harder to do with wireless...
...cannot be used for this type of wake-up remotely, unless the system generating the WOL packet is either on the same physical (wired) network, or there is some form of MAC level routing set up.
By definition, WOL packets have to be at the MAC level (if the laptop is off, DHCP cannot allocate IP addresses), and these do not route through standard IP routers.
And this also means that the laptop cannot be on a wireless network, as WOL does not work over an 802.11abgn network.
My suspicion is that when the laptop in on, there is a VPN set up to allow the laptop to access and be accessed by the school systems, regardless of the network, routers and firewalls between the school and the laptop. This will be a software VPN, which relies on the OS, which means that the system has to be on.
Unless someone has produced a LAN card that is integrated in these laptops that does IP and VPN actually in the NIC when in standby mode. If they have, I suggest that these would be laptops to avoid, as who knows who would be able to snoop.
In his web seminar the Tech admin at the centre of this mess, Mike Perbix, explains in great detail exactly how it works.
I dont remember all the exact details but in essence when the laptop is turned on and once it establishes a connection to the internet it will connect to the LANrev server back at the school on a port published on the school's firewall. The LANrev software is running at all times on the laptop and can not be switched off and doing so is an excludable offence under the school rules.
The LANrev software by default sits in remote admin mode so that the school IT admin team can remotely manage the machine. If the laptop has been flagged as stolen then once it has established its connection to the LANrev server the LANrev software on the laptop will kick into remote observation mode and start taking screenshots and photos every 15 minutes and dispatching them to the school LANrev server.
I am pretty sure this system only works when the machine is turned on however I am not sure if it keeps taking snapshots and photos once it has been triggered even when it is not on the net until it is told not to do so when it connects back up with the LANrev server in the school.
I think he mentioned that he could activate the camera at any time on any connected laptop and take snapshots. I think I remember that he was boasting that the camera could be set to take pictures every 15 minutes when not connected to the home network. You and I would presume that the home network was the one at the students home but I suspect that he could have meant the "home" network in the school that the LANrev server was situated on.
It is a while since I last saw the web seminar that he did so I may have some of the details wrong. I last saw it when the scandal broke. The full seminar can be found in 6 parts on youtube by searching youtube for "Mike Perbix LANrev" and you used to (and probably still can although I havent tried) be able to access the seminar through links in the Blog page linked to at the bottom of the article that we are comenting on.
Mike Perbix's web seminar video was at one time part of the promotional material for LANrev however LANrev have now disavowed him and removed the webcam functionality from their product by all accounts
...my university IT department switched our standard office monitor to one with an inbuilt webcam. Mainly because of the new videoconferencing kit we just installed. But a lot of postgrads were getting paranoid about being spied on.
Not sure why anyone would actually want to watch postgrads sitting in their grotty food-packet-filled offices, but I am sure this incident will result in the first aid cabinets needing another top-up of bandaids (used to cover the webcam lenses).
I was lucky enough to get a new monitor before the webcam ones. I prefer a seperate webcam. I can turn it upside down for internal video calls. And it is easier to move to where I can use my hand, made up with whiteboard marker lips and eyes, as my puppet (my motto is currently "talk to the hand"). I am planning to get hold of a fake eyeball from the science centre gift shop some time and do Vindaoonian impersonations too. Luckily my boss has a good sense of humour. :-D
It says "school issued Macs" in the article. Which suggests they were school property. So the sysadmins should have every right to do what the school tells them to rather than what some kid wants.
Also, presumably there were some T&C's included with the purchase of the $55 insurance surveillance pack that they bought.
Caveat Emptor!
I suggest that everyone read the AP story which mentions something that I find rather shocking. Apparently hundreds of parents/families are opposing the Robbins' suit against the school. I'm caught between wondering why, and worrying that the answer to my question might be even worse.
That's what it says. I don't know what "other reasons" there were, but apparently the primary reason was financial. Presumably meaning they are afraid (perhaps rightly) that the settlement from such a lawsuit could bankrupt the school.
While I can see where they're coming from, I don't much like that line of reasoning. It reminds me of the "too big to fail" justification for the bank bailouts. People in positions of power have to be held accountable somehow. I would rather put up with a little temporary disruption than let them hide behind that excuse indefinitely.
They shouldn't stop at the school, they should also go after the individuals who I'm sure will claim they were "just doing their jobs".
The district is going to be in a world of hurt when some student takes a 'sexting' pic and it winds up on the net with a ready excuse that it was taken remotely. Oh yes, the poor fan will seize with the amount of shit that's going to be on it.
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