Report reams IT admins for secretly snapping student pics

A suburban Philadelphia school district secretly captured more than 58,000 images of students and their friends and family members as a result of an "overzealous" campaign to track the whereabouts of school-issued laptops, according to an independent report. Although the tracking technology was supposed to be used only in …

[Rab Sssss]

58 thousand pics?

Well with that amount of pictures I would hope that they are pretty fucked...Not intent to spy my arse.

[Winkypop]

iKiddieview

Has Apple got an app for that?

[John Smith 19]

Now this *could* be a few pictures of every student

But that sounds like a *lot* of pictures of certain students.

The hotter looking ones perhaps?

OK we know IT tends to attract technically adapt but not very well socialized individuals, but it's pretty hard to believe that the phrase "Violation of privacy" did not enter anyone's mind at *some* point.

Who watches the watchers?

[Combat Wombat]

Lesson to you all

As predicted, the management hung the techs out to dry..

If management asks you to do something dodgy, cover your own ass.

[Quxy]

IT hoisted by its own petard

Now, I'm normally going to usually side with IT. But in this case it's pretty clear that senior IT dude Michael Perbix was the person instrumental for introducing LANrev into LMSD's laptop program. School management undoubtedly failed in their responsibility to mandate appropriate privacy and usage policies; but Perbix has been very public in his enthusiasm for LANrev and his belief that students shouldn't expect any privacy. Sorry, this IT guy doesn't need your sympathy.

[Anonymous Coward]

Title

So they snap an under-age lad partially undressed and that's just invasion of privacy? I can't help but think that if it'd been a girl there'd be some sort of anti-paedo crusade going on.

[Richard Porter]

And of course...

any kid now intending to nick a laptop will immediately tape over the cam lens.

[Fred Flintstone]

No nudity??

Hang on, this is a teenager. I find that somewhat hard to believe. Is he on Valium?

[Ammaross Danan]

Title

"Hang on, this is a teenager. I find that somewhat hard to believe."

Nope. No nudity. These were 2 MacBooks, and Mac users would never do anything questionable...

I would have asked for the one with *nix on it. Then I could at least rest assured there's a small chance the cam wouldn't even be operational... :)

[Intractable Potsherd]

It is difficult to see ...

... how 58000 pictures is, effectively, being defended as "an accident". I'm open to being corrected, but, prima facie, this is either willful or negligent misuse of the system put on the computers.

[frank ly]

Whitewash Job, Big one

"..secretly captured more than 58,000 images of students .."

"..50,000 of those images were taken after the computers had been recovered,.."

"..More than 400 images were secretly snapped of Blake Robbins,.."

That is bad enough...... then..

"..report found no proof that anyone deliberately set out to spy on students,.."

"..or that once captured, the images were downloaded..."

"..although the report said none of the images included nudity..." Oh, how do they know that unless the report authors checked by looking at downloaded images???

I'm not sure who is the most freaky here, the school IT people or the report writers.

This is a whitewash job with a big, thick brush.

[Annihilator]

Sledgehammer to crack a nut

Ignoring the invasion of privacy argument which I think is self-explanatory, why on earth did they use a camera to try and identify theft? I can just see the sys-admin now "hmm.. yes... it appears to be in a bedroom. We're slowly narrowing down the location"

Why not just have it report it's IP address periodically?

[Sooty]

At a guess

It's to capture those cases where it's either nicked by another pupil, or just reported stolen so that they can get another and keep the freebie laptop.

Ie this stolen laptop is still being used by you, heres a photo of you/your mates using it to prove it.

[Christoph]

Just a slight update there

So the story has changed from:

"We didn't take any pictures"

to

"We took fifty eight thousand pictures. But we didn't download any of them"

Well, no problem there then.

[heyrick]

All your child are belong to us

As you say, they went from "we didn't do it" to "we didn't download any", yet didn't this case begin with a photo? One of the "not downloaded" photos? How many were of this Blake person? Didn't somebody say around 400 inc. sleeping? And they know this how? Oh, wait, the photos were obviously downloaded and looked at. I wonder what else will eventually come to light. Wouldn't the photos from the camera (or the computer in question) to, well, anywhere else count as "download"? After all, photos of the theft perp are useless if they remain on the stolen machine so they must have been collected somewhere. Does this certain somewhere maintain access controls? It would appear not.

Mmm, did this monitoring support streaming video?

[before you laugh at my last question, I've done it myself with an eeePC and a meagre 128kbit uplink channel; if you want to see a girl in the noddy you can just watch the low-quality (12.5fps 60kbit) video stream until she starts taking her top off, and then you just lean on the "take snapshot" button... mmm, I wonder if it did sound as well? built in mic, basic MP3, 48kbit/mono would be low on resources and easy enough to do; hell, 128kbit shoutcast is not a big drain on resources.]

The above square-bracketed suggestions may be a flight of fancy, but one thing is for certain, they're trying to gloss (white paint, of course!) over what they've done. The only question now is what was the true extent of it? The hardware these days is more than capable of providing ChickTV-on-Demand, and if the students/parents aren't tech savvy, could well be doing so with nobody noticing. How far did this go, really?

[Steve X]

And someone believes this?

Definitely sounds like some wannabe PFY. "Let's booby trap the cheerleaders' laptops, get some nekkid flesh. If we get caught we'll say it was for security".

[Stone Fox]

it would seem

that big brother really IS 'watching' you!

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really an independent report

It was commissioned by the very people under scrutiny here - i.e. Lower Merion School District.

As such it's difficult to take any findings within the report very seriously.

[Anonymous Coward]

That is what happens when ...

It seems a natural consequence that will occur naturally once numpties have been appointed in both senses:

(a) in perpetrating the abominations

and

(b) in conclusion of investigation.

It smacks of "go in hard on them (or at least give such appearance) but not too hard (wink, wink if you know what I mean)".

And seems on the face of it a total pre-judgement result.

[teebie]

Doesn't explain the original complaint

If they didn't download the pictures how did the assistant principal see an image of the boy holding sweets that look like pills?

And how did the employees come to see the images as "a little LMSD soap opera" if they didn't look download them. And even if they didn't "deliberately set out to spy" "discovering they could spy, and doing so" still seems pretty serious.

Creepy creepy ballbags.

[A Non e-mouse]

That's OK then

"Some [pictures] were taken while he was sleeping or partially undressed, although the report said none of the images included nudity."

Well, that's OK then. I'm glad to see the people involved exercised a modicum of discretion.

[John Smith 19]

*but* you've *got* to think of the children

And it would seem the admins were doing just that.

Still not to worry. Those pix won't show up anywhere.

Except

mmm.com

nnn.org

and traded in a few chatrooms.

[Anonymous Coward]

not logical

some pictures were taken while...partially undressed =/ none included nudity

say what? undressed but not nude anywhere....no nude arms....no nude legs...no anything?

how is that possible?

[Anonymous Coward]

Kidding?

"The 69-page report found no proof that anyone deliberately set out to spy on students, or that once captured, the images were downloaded."

Which means they couldn't pin it on any one scapegoat.

58k photos. 400 on this one guy? Who are they frickin' kidding?

[Andus McCoatover]

Colour me stupid...

But if this doesn't have shades of Gary McKinnon in it, I'll put on a blue cap, bugger a perp with a broom-handle, and be found innocent.

[Eddy Ito]

Oh, it's ok then

"The 69-page report found no proof that anyone deliberately set out to spy on students..."

Where have I seen that before? Ah yes, about that kiddie porn case, it went something along the lines of "your honour, there is no proof that my client deliberately downloaded the photos that were found on his computer."

[Anonymous Coward]

Wherefore art thou, Pervcam ?

Pervcam is the new Upskirt!