Another SPYCAM UPDATE with an interesting twist...

[PCIntern]

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/homepage/20100430_School_official_says_Lower_Merion_lacked_laptop_policy.html

Here are the para's which I find MOST INTERESTING:

"I tried to get the administration to look closely and get a policy on several occasions," Cafiero said in her first interview since the district put her on paid leave. "There was only so much I can do. They did nothing. It fell on deaf ears."

The last time she tried, Cafiero said, was after a technician told her in November that he had activated a student's laptop Web cam even though the computer was not missing.

According to Cafiero, the technician said a Lower Merion High School teacher had pressed him to turn on the camera based on a suspicion that the student was goofing off in class.

Cafiero said she told the technician his job "was not to spy on students" and reminded him that they were to activate the tracking system only for lost or stolen laptops.

She said she brought that incident up on Nov. 10 during a meeting on the laptop initiative with administrators from both district high schools and her boss, George Frazier, director of information systems.

***************************************

Anyone who says that everything's OK 'cause it's Teachers and Administrators can get (screwed) AFAIC. This is EXACTLY what I thought would be going on and let me tell you that I think that it's even worse than this...

All of a sudden, the TEACHER wants to turn this on...and she's lecturing people on why they shouldn't...Believe that? I've got a bridge to sell you...

[woo me with science]

1. Yeah, and put it in context with this little outrage:

"{Cafiero} said she brought that incident up on Nov. 10 during a meeting on the laptop initiative with administrators from both district high schools and her boss, George Frazier, director of information systems.

According to Cafiero, Frazier said he opposed activating the Web cams on students' laptops, but other administrators wanted to keep using the feature.

"There was some back-and-forth discussion amongst them and the final decision was to keep doing what we were doing," she said. "I was a little surprised, but, again, I wasn't the policy maker."

.................

What "policy"? The "policy" the families were never told about?

So they were actually having discussions and arguments among themselves about whether to keep on doing this, but not one of them cared to mention the fact that the families had no idea this was going on?

[PCIntern]

2. Yes but remember..

she's setting up a defense as she's gonna be the Fall Guy if they can do this...note NO ONE HAS EVER MENTIONED THE NAME OF THE PRINCIPALS OF HARRITON OR LOWER MERION. Not once that I've ever seen...

I hope there's a maelstrom when the Eff Bee Eye report comes out...but even if it doesn't, AFAIC, they're all a disgrace to the human race...

[pokerfan]

3. Double Secret School Policy

[PCIntern]

4. Animal House Redux...

[WeDidIt]

5. I'd call Cafiero's words a "smoking gun"

It will definitely result in a judgment in favor of the families.

[MicaelS]

6. She just threw Perblix under the bus....

Cafiero, 45, the district's information systems coordinator, was one of only two employees with the authority to turn on the software that could capture Web-cam photos and desktop screen images every 15 minutes from a running laptop.

She and the other employee, technician Michael Perbix, were suspended with pay a week after Harriton High School sophomore Blake Robbins and his parents filed a lawsuit accusing the district of spying on students through the laptops. Robbins said an assistant Harriton principal confronted him with a Web-cam photo that had been shot in his Penn Valley home.

Cafiero said Perbix handled most of the activation requests. She estimated she had been asked to turn on the Web cams less than six times in two years.

She and Perblix were the only two "employees with the authority to turn on the software", that means Perblix was the one who turned on the camera to spy on the kid "goofing off".

[RoyGBiv]

7. I've avoided this so far ...

... for several reasons, one of which is the extreme irritation that develops when certain people get involved in this and try to justify it.

But, I want to ask a question in one of your threads since you're more closely associated with this than anyone else here.

Has anyone, to your knowledge, brought up the depth of how bad this is from a technical perspective? The camera in these machines has been the target of hackers in other contexts. This software they used removed one of the barriers hackers have to get through.

Without getting into the techno-jargon, what these idiots did was turn on a feature of the software that could have been monitored by *anyone* who was aware of it and had moderate or better hacking skills. (The software, in any other context, would be called a trojan, at least this feature of it.) I say "moderate" because no genuine hacking would have been involved at all if a person was given certain bits of information. Even without social engineering, had an enterprising hacker been doing port scans that targeted any of these laptops, the person doing so, if they had the right skills, would have pretty much been able to do whatever they wanted with the system, including remote activation of the camera without the user's knowledge.

Put another way, there could be third parties out there that neither the school administrators or the technicians even know about who accessed these computers. Or, one of the technicians could have told someone else what they were doing and given them enough information, intentionally or not, to be able to spy on the systems outside the channels of the school.

This is actually a problem with the software itself, and it's possible the techs didn't know about it, but I'd bet a few dozen donuts that at least Perbix did.

[PCIntern]

8. Excellent question...

A few of us have discussed this as a hypothetical...it is fascinating to see who refuses to grant that something else may have been going on since before this story broke into the MSM...we ha discussed it last summer as concerned parents...

As to your question, the answer is: I have no idea.

[RoyGBiv]

9. Thanks ...

If you hear something, please post about it. I have been following your threads.

I want to believe at least the FBI will be taking this into consideration for their part of the investigation, but I have not been at all impressed with the lawyer in that civil action. A lot of what is hitting the papers seems to me to be a war of words between lawyers with not a lot of critical evaluation of what is being said. I'm afraid some of that lawyer's lack of action may have inadvertently facilitated the destruction of evidence.

Anyway, the bottom line is the policy was horrible and, I believe, illegal regardless of what actually happened with the cameras. Some of those attempting to justify this mess have completely missed the point in trying to focus on who saw what and when and why. They never should have seen anything at all.