<p>This was a bad, bad, bad idea to begin with. It could only have ended badly. </p>
<p>Off with their heads. 
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<p>Yeah, yeah, yeah. ;)</p>
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Sounds like the entire leadership of this school district needs to be under a good deal of scrutiny. The fact that they made this possible, then followed through with it is nauseating and child abuse in the lowest form. I pray that the law enforcement officials can cull the evidence they need to put away the criminals that deserve it.</p>
<p>These people need to go to jail…</p>
<p>None of these people should have access to minors whatsoever at this point. Invasion of privacy doesn’t even begin to cover it.</p>
<p>Wow… I work for a school district, and I just cannot fathom that they ever even put this software on these computers, knowing that they were to be used at home. </p>
<p>Our high school purchased a couple of hundred notebook computers for use by students in school, and the kids can also take them home if they sign them out. But I don’t believe there was any theft-recovery software on them - these were $200 notebooks, I don’t know if they even have webcams built in. The school’s policy is to lend out the notebook with a full battery but NOT lend out the charger. We’ve had these computers since Sept and last I heard not a single one had been lost or stolen (although a few were returned with some damage). The idea that software like LMSD installed is necessary for recovery of stolen laptops is just ridiculous.</p>
<p>Creepy and criminal, in my book.</p>
<p>That wouldn’t work with MacBooks.</p>
<p>One really nice feature of MacBooks and MacBook Pros is that they use they’ve used the same types of power supplies for many, many years. They come in 65 watts and 85 watts. In general, you can use a power adapter from a previous model with current models and, of course, the other way around. So it’s pretty easy to get Mac power adapters.</p>
<p>The FBI is now going to have a little chat with the IT official who made the “I know, I love it” comment:</p>
<p>[L</a>. Merion to let parents see secretly snapped photos | Philadelphia Inquirer | 04/17/2010](<a href=“http://www.philly.com/philly/news/homepage/20100417_L__Merion_to_let_parents_see_secretly_snapped_photos.html]L”>L. Merion to let parents see secretly snapped photos)</p>
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<p>How inappropriate do the purposes have to be to be deemed inappropriate?</p>
<p>I can’t think of an appropriate purpose. I really can’t. A previous poster said they could “ping” the computer to get the IP address - this technology wasn’t needed if the laptop was stolen. And even if the “pinging” thing didn’t work, there’s a little thing called insurance that could have been purchased - or the kids could have been told: You lose it, you pay for it. The same as they are told for textbooks.</p>
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<p>On her lawyers advice she’s pleading the 5th. LMSD would very much like to throw a few lower employees under the bus in order to make this go away. But given their many initial statements that have now been proven to be false, and the fact that at least one high ranking administrator knew about what was going on, that may be problematic. LMSD’s quick hiring of that high profile, very expensive Philly law firm did not make much sense at the time. Now it does.</p>
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<p>I’ve received stronger terms of regret from fast food employees who mixed up my order.</p>
<p>More details coming out… the school officials snapped 56,000 secret photos!!! Geesh.</p>
<p>The district’s lawyers have also changed their tone… now commenting that:</p>
<p>“The taking of these pictures without student consent in their homes was obviously wrong”</p>
<p>Also, directly contradicting the district’s earlier assertions, investigators say that in at least 15 cases they’ve been unable to identify any evidence for why the covert surveillance system was activated. The school previously insistd that they only did it to ‘find’ ‘missing’ laptops… The latest report also says that even for some of those cases cases school staff spied on the wrong computer when looking for a ‘missing’ one while in other cases they continued spying for weeks even after the ‘lost’ computer was found.</p>
<p>Horrifying…I would think that an illegal “wiretap” type crime may have occurred, but local law, and law enforcement tolerance for prosecution of these individuals will have a lot of effect on this case. Illegal child porn charges may be viable as well. However, as to pleading the 5th, let’s remember that two wrongs don’t make a right. This is a protection in the Bill of Rights. If selected as a juror, it is not permissible to infer guilt from the fact that a person pleads the 5th. I would personally find that difficult to do, but it is the law. It is the government’s burden to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. If we lose that we lose everything. I hope they make a good example of these folks, but using proper procedure.</p>
<p>Local Fox station is reporting on their website that the US Attorney is seeking access to the evidence so they can convene a grand jury, which could levy a federal indictment/charges on those involved.</p>
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<p>Lucky we are not jurors, so we are free to make the most logical inferences available.</p>
<p>“Sentence first - verdict afterwards” …Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.</p>
<p>Sounds to me like the whole thing started with misguided but reasonable intentions - we’ll install something that we’ll only use if a laptop is missing. I don’t agree this was necessary, but I can see what their thinking was. The problem came in the implementation - there should have been strict formal guidelines on when and how this was used, and they should have been followed. I’d say guideline # 1 would be that if a laptop was reported missing or stolen, the person reporting it would have to be TOLD that the system was being turned on. Second, there should have been some sort of checklist or system to ensure that the minute a laptop was recovered, the system would be turned OFF. It sounds to me like someone in IT (or maybe a few people) looked at the images and decided it was fun, and became voyeurs into the REAL Secret Life of the American Teenager. Wasn’t there a quote from someone about this being like watching a high school soap opera? </p>
<p>I read the article about the 56,000 pictures. They said none of them showed nudity, and some of them were indeed used to recover some laptops that were stolen from a locker room and to prosecute the offenders. The system apparently took a photo and a screen shot every 15 minutes, so no one was sitting and watching a live feed.</p>
<p>That said, this is still WRONG WRONG WRONG. If you buy the argument that this system was needed to recover laptops, the argument that the system had to be kept secret still makes NO sense. If kids know that they can’t activate a stolen laptop without someone seeing them, then they won’t bother to steal it! </p>
<p>The system should not have been installed… but since it was, it should NEVER have been activated WITHOUT the express written permission of the student (and their parent, if under 18) whose laptop had gone missing.</p>
<p>While I think this was really wrong, it’s important to understand that “facts” can be spun to make intentions looks worse than they are. For example, the thousands of pictures probably include thousands of pictures of empty or dark rooms. Or there may be 500 virtually identical pictures of a kid typing. As I understand it, once the “security feature” is activated, it simply takes photos and screenshots automatically on a periodic basis (or maybe it’s at each startup, I don’t know). So it could be that most of these pictures were never looked at by anybody.
I think it will turn out that the intentions were mostly good, that the execution was poorly handled, that communication was botched, that there’s no pervert collecting the photos, etc. I’m not sure I want anybody to go to jail over this (unless it turns out worse than I think)–but I do want it to make a big enough stink that other schools systems won’t do this.</p>
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<p>Yes, once activated the system usually takes a photo at regular intervals when it’s turned on. I think the default was around several photos an hour but I think earlier analysis also showed that could also be changed up or down depending on how much the person controlling the system wants to see. </p>
<p>56,000 images from 48 successful surveillance operations at a 15 min interval works out to be an average of about 78 hours of surveillance per occasion (aka 78 hours of the computer being ‘on’ and on the internet). </p>
<p>However, 38,500 of the images were from just six computers that were actually stolen. The legality of that covert surveillance operation is still highly questionable since it still appears they conducted the operation without a warrant–yes it may have helped find the computers but lots of things would ‘help’ solve crimes but are, for good reason, still illegal. Anyway, let’s set those images aside from the moment </p>
<p>That leaves 18,000 images over 42 computers. Of those 18,000 images a whopping 13,000 (72%) were taken on computers that, at the time, the school explicitly knew were neither lost nor stolen. Was that the result of incompetent school officials or did someone like the, as one school employee put it, the “LMSD soap opera” that they were seeing and decided to keep watching. I guess that’s what the investigators and the FBI want to find out. </p>
<p>The plaintiff’s lawyer says that some of the images of his client were “purged” from the archives and thus nobody’s been able to view them and investigators say that for 15 of the activations there’s no evidence indicating why they were even being subjected to cover surveillance at all. Giving the school the benefit of the doubt, it could have been just that there were grossly insufficient systems in place to accurately track such information (setting aside the sanity of even setting up any system at all in the first place)… but again assuming that the school officials thought what they were doing was legal it still highlights how woefully poor the system was being run and managed.</p>
<p>With both this case and the other lawsuit the district is currently fighting (redistricting issues) the more investigators probe behind the scenes the more dirt they’re digging up on the school officials.</p>
<p>A lot of people need to be fired and should go to jail over this. You see something like this and you just say, “What were they thinking?”</p>
<p>I hope the system works the way it is supposed to. It certainly helps that there is so much attention focused on this case.</p>