<p>Hunt, there’s a little old document called the US Constitution…</p>
<p>In your hypothetical scenario, the police could not legally activate the camera in the missing laptop without express written consent (i.e. a warrant).</p>
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Says who? In what way would this be an *unreasonable *search or seizure?</p>
<p>In the case of Lojack, the owner contacts the police, I guess with some kind of ID code, and the police locate and retrieve the car. The system seems to work quite well.</p>
<p>The company that makes the system that LMSD bought said that school districts shouldn’t go vigilante and try to retrieve systems on their own. They should work with law enforcement.</p>
<p>Here’s the latest update from the school district: [LMSD</a> | Laptop Security Update](<a href=“http://www.lmsd.org/sections/laptops/default.php?id=1235]LMSD”>http://www.lmsd.org/sections/laptops/default.php?id=1235)</p>
<p>Hunt, one cannot secretly take photographs of someone (even a thief) when that person is in a place where they can reasonably assume to have privacy. Surveillance cameras on the street are allowed; activating a camera in my home is not (without a warrant). </p>
<p>If the police have (other) evidence that I stole the laptop out of the cruiser, they can go to a judge and explain why they need to activate the camera. It’s up to the judge to grant the warrant or not.</p>
<p>Sometimes it seems like laws protect the guilty. DH is in law enforcement, and some of the stories I’ve heard make me shake my head in disgust. But when cases like the LMSD come to light, I think we should all appreciate the protections granted by the Constitution and surrounding laws / Supreme Court rulings. If I learned that anyone was secretly photographing within my home, or even had the capability (i.e. sent my kid home with a laptop containing a camera that could be remotely activated), I’d go after them with both barrels.</p>
<p>So, to summarize:</p>
<p>It turns out that there were 78 activations over a year and a half that produced the 56,000 images. (Not: 146 - the total activations of webcams + IP address recording, or 48 - the number of activations this school year, or 80 - which is almost the same as 78.)</p>
<p>“Images” are either screen-shots or webcam shots. When activated, the system would generate one of each every 15 minutes.</p>
<p>The district says “no evidence of inappropriate monitoring, storage, targeting”.</p>
<p>The six computers stolen in September 2008 account for over 2/3 of the images. Almost an additional quarter come from five computers where the software was kept on. That leaves 69 computers generating 4,500 images (or 2,250 photos). </p>
<p>So the average wasn’t high, and Blake Robbins’ case (400 images or photographs – not clear) was way above average. His case may have been one of the leave-ons; it can’t have required 2-4 full days of activation to confirm that the person assigned to the computer had it, but off school grounds where he wasn’t supposed to take it. It may also have been the only case of activating the system because of taking a computer home without paying the insurance fee. (I have vague unease about the “no targeting” claim. If I were Robbins’ lawyer, I would be pursuing this pretty hard.)</p>
<p>The “LMSD soap opera / I love it!” e-mails were specifically referring to tracking the six stolen computers, not to any pictures of kids in their homes or elsewhere.</p>
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Again, says who? I think a court would say that you waive your presumed right to privacy if you bring the stolen laptop into your house. What’s *unreasonable *about turning on the camera in such a situation?</p>
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And again, if the laptop has disappeared, with no clue where it is, what exactly would this warrant say? I think if the camera gives the police a clue that the computer is in your house, then they might need a warrant to enter your house. But to activate the camera on their own stolen property?</p>
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<p>I don’t think a court would rule that way.</p>
<p>You think a guy who stole a laptop would be able to have the evidence suppressed if it took a picture of him in his house? I would be very surprised. Again, what’s unreasonable about it if he stole the laptop?</p>
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<p>You can reasonably be assumed to have more privacy in your garage than on the street, right? But if a stolen car has a Lojack in it, and the Lojack were to take pictures of who is driving the car and the car’s surroundings, would it matter if the stolen car was left on the street or in someone’s closed garage?</p>
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<p>Yes . . . aside from everything else, how would the police know that the thief is the one who still has the stolen laptop? Maybe he immediately pawned it, sold it, gave it to a friend, had a heavenly revelation and gave it to Goodwill while he ran off to become a hermit-monk, who knows. </p>
<p>This also applies to the school’s laptop situation. What if a kid had sold/given it to a third party? Does the school have the right to covertly spy on anyone who has the laptop?</p>
<p>Hunt - Part of the problem seems to be that you’re potentially violating more than the thief’s right to privacy. What if he brings the computer home and the picture it snaps is of his four year old prancing around naked? Does the fact that it is a stolen computer make that OK? This is why I think that any spyware or anti-theft that depends on a physical picture is problematic.</p>
<p>In the case of LMDS, it is even more problematic because these are computers being routinely loaned to students so the likelihood that computers might be missing (or believed to be missing) but not stolen is extremely high. It may have been wrong for Blake Robbins to take the computer home if he hadn’t paid the insurance fee, but it wasn’t theft either, and turning on a webcam that spies on students in their homes is a grossly disproportionate response to that kind of offense. Even if Robbins is indeed the only student spied on under these circumstances, there are a number of other scenarios I can think of in which the webcam might be activated on a non-stolen computer - bureaucratic error, laptop mix-up, verbal permission to take a loaner computer that doesn’t get recorded, etc. I think a court will take the likelihood of such scenarios occurring seriously in evaluating whether or not this was a civil rights violation.</p>
<p>Another standard courts use in making judgments like this is whether or not another, less coercive method of achieving the same effect was available. In an age of modern technology and IP addresses, I think that answer is yes.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl wrote:</p>
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<p>Lojack sends out a locator beacon so that the police can locate the vehicle. It doesn’t take pictures. In their marketing literature, they usually show the police apprehending the car thief on the road. If the car were in a garage, they would either need probable cause to enter the garage or a warrant.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl, AFAIK, Lojack in vehicles does not take photographs. It just finds the location of the vehicle. There is a similiar “Lojack for laptops” that, when activiated, finds the location of a laptop. No photo is necessary.</p>
<p>Hunt – yes, I do believe that a laptop thief could get the illegally obtained photograph suppressed. The old “fruit from the poison tree” argument.</p>
<p>I ultimately agree with ICargirl’s less-restrictive-alternative analysis. But I think she and some others of you are ignoring an important nuance. The police can’t put video surveillance cameras in your home without a warrant, etc. They can’t secretly, without a warrant, put a micro video camera in your glasses, so that you will bring it home and it will show whatever you are looking at there.</p>
<p>But I’m far from sure that idea extends to a situation where you steal a surveillance camera from the police. Can the police not turn it on because MAYBE you have taken it home, MAYBE it’s in a private place, MAYBE you have already fenced it to a third party who is dancing naked in the privacy of his home? I don’t think that’s the law at all, and I don’t think it will be. The mere risk that the camera will be in someone’s home does not justify disabling it if it is a legitimate investigatory device.</p>
<p>To clarify - I know Lojacks don’t take pictures - that’s why I said “if the Lojack were to take pictures” - I should have clarified my hypothetical more. If a Lojack were to take pictures, it would seem to me that it’s too darned bad that those pictures wound up showing me the inside of your garage versus the streetcorner.</p>
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<p>A government agency can’t perform covert camera surveillance within private property without permission without a warrant. Period. </p>
<p>All this discussion about ‘well what if you the device that went missing was the surveillance equipment’ or 'what if the device was something capable of conducting surveillance ’ is totally moot. The law doesn’t change just because of the potential technical capabilities of the equipment that’s gone missing. </p>
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The logic here doesn’t hold water. You can only ensure that you wont secretly violate the ‘right to privacy’ of someone that’s not linked to the suspected crime unless you know where item is and what it would see if you tried to monitor with it. If you knew that then you wouldn’t need to conduct surveillance since you could easily recover the device right then and there. </p>
<p>The court would say you need a warrant… and prescient basically says you won’t get one. </p>
<p>In regards to the LMSD case, it was open and shut as soon as the district admitted that indeed that had put a secret surveillance program in place–and that they had been conducting covert surveillance without a warrant. The reasons for doing so, what the photos were used for, etc. are all just additional details but in terms of the case itself it’s been a slam dunk from the beginning. </p>
<p>The plaintiff’s primary allegation is that a government entity secretly took photos of him in the privacy of his own home without his or his parents permission. And that was confirmed to be true.</p>
<p>From the basic legal aspects of the case it may as well have been a camera implanted in a textbook that took the pictures… the issue of laptops and webcams has merely become a distraction from the basic charges at hand.</p>
<p>It is really not that complicated. I own a laptop with a camera installed and software that enables me to remotely activate. Someone takes it without permission. I go to the police and give them permission to activate my software on my laptop to activate my webcam for the limited purpose of determining if the person with it can be caught on camera sitting in front of the computer and identified. Taken to that point and that point only, there is no 4th amendment violation.</p>
<p>The police, however, leave the camera on and capture pictures of other activities going on in the room and then use those pictures for police action. Warrantless search, 4th amendment violation.</p>
<p>In this case, the LMSD blew it because its use of the webcam extended to the second scenario. First, the cameras were left on for protracted periods of time beyond what was necessary to take a real time snap shot to determine if the person in possession of the computer was in front of the camera. Second, the LMSD used a picture of an activity the student was engaged in unrelated to the computer (the infamous Mike and Ike) as the basis to call him into the office and engage in an interrogation about suspected drug use.</p>
<p>This, of course, is without regard to some other significant issues including the school’s non-disclosure of the camera capabilities and also the fact that there was no issue of the school not knowing where the laptop was (they knew who had it, it was just that the student allegedly was out of compliance with policy by taking it home without paying the fee.) The whole situation could have been avoided if the LMSD morons had simply instructed the student at school that he had to return the computer each day before he went home until the fee was paid and then enforced that rule.</p>
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<p>um, …well unless you end up photographing someone unrelated to the action of stealing the laptop-something that’s quite probable. </p>
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<p>No no no. There is no such provision for ‘well lets just conduct a wee little surveillance, see if it produces something interesting, and then retroactively decide if conducting surveillance is worthwhile and violates anyone’s privacy.’ It doesn’t work like that.</p>
<p>If you want to conduct such surveillance you need a warrant. A judge will weigh a variety of issues including the likelihood that less intrusive results could achieve the same goal, the severity of the actions being investigated and the likelihood that the privacy of those unlinked to the case will be violated. If a judge is satisfied they’ll issue the warrant, required by the constitution, to conduct a search or surveillance that allows an authority to break constitutional “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects” in the light that there is strong probable cause that they’ve committed a serious crime that can only be solved by breaking that right. </p>
<p>Embarking on your own vigilante video surveillance in private homes without a warrant (such visual recording warrants are nearly impossible to get) is an extremely serious offense… that’s why LMSD finds itself in so much trouble. I guarantee that behind the scenes the LMSD lawyers will have gone bonkers upon finding out what the school was actually up to. It’s indefensible.</p>
<p>More details:</p>
<p>Lawyers are saying that as many as 100 different LMSD students were photographed during the various surveillance operations–a number much larger than the number of laptops that yielded images during surveillance operations. </p>
<p>That would confirm one of the huge downfalls of logic in the district’s strategy for investigating missing laptops. In short, even if the laptop was stolen you’re going to end up spying on those that likely had nothing at all to do with the fact that the laptop isn’t where it’s supposed to be. Those people have rights too.</p>
<p>Also, apparently the FBI is not only interested in the photos and warrant-less camera surveillance but also the screenshots. If the screenshot shows the contents of an e-mail, instant message or other private communication sent over the internet it could be illegal wiretapping. However, those statues are extremely complicated so we’ll have to see what happens there.</p>