Eye Spy with the Schools Wecam on you students AT HOME!

[Wilhammer]

What the hell!!!!!????

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/02/17/school-used-student.html

I guess this is pro safety - no privacy and lets hope you are not caught doing the nasty at home...by perv school admins...

[Michael Emrys]

Big Brother is watching you.

Michael

[Tero]

The land of the free and in the home of the brave ?

[dieseltaylor]

I am astonished at the collective stupidity behind this. Very worrying - I feel sorry for the Board who no doubt never even knew of the problem and now will suffer.

[Elmar Bijlsma]

That's so messed up I just can't imagine how such a scheme came to be.

How can anyone think that's an appropriate thing to do? I would hate to be the lawyer defending this on the merits.

[gunnergoz]

The real question is, why did this take so long to happen? The technology has been out there for a long time. I suspect other situations have arisen where illicit commandeering of a laptop webcam has taken place, we just don't know about them yet. Maybe this will cause some people to wonder why that little blue light is on all the time on their laptop, especially when they go to the shower...

To be honest, I've been a bit paranoid about these webcams, wondering if even the "on" light can be bypassed. But one can hardly get by without skype or some other FTF software anymore, so I guess we'll have to live with it. But it would be nice to know that software and hardware people are on top of this and looking for ways to fix the problem and keep these cams from being hacked and/or surreptitiously remote commanded.

[souldierz]

I saw a news report on this a while back when they were introducing it in classrooms.I thought that was messed up then and it was only a matter of time before there was controversy.The school principal got a kick out of it, when witnessing unsuspecting students realizing that he was watching them from another computer every time the students used their web cams in class,and when they were not suppose to.He could see them all at anytime the web cam was on and I thought to myself, this is a bit much, what a stupid idea this is gonna turn out to be.

From what I hear people can hack into your web cam and turn it on.Basically anything can be done with computers nowadays.It was reported that some Nations used this hack to spy on others.If your that worried, put a piece of tape or something to cover the camera up.And never, ever hold any secret meetings in front of it,ya never know:)

[Michael Emrys]

If your that worried, put a piece of tape or something to cover the camera up.And never, ever hold any secret meetings in front of it,ya never know:)

And most importantly, never light up a J or have a wank while the computer is facing you.

Michael

[Bigduke6]

I think the really creepy part about this is, that a group of American educators whose job it is to educate children, went along with the idea.

These are professional teachers, they are entrusted with the future of the country. If people like that don't have a problem with turning a remote camera on in another citizen's home, then I am not very optimistic about their ability to teach the next generation about, you know, the importance of the bill of rights.

Which to me is even scarier than sneak pictures taken by remote cam in some one's home.

[Michael Emrys]

...a group of American educators whose job it is to educate children...

*sigh*

I'm afraid you got that wrong, Bd6. It's been a very long time indeed since most teachers saw their duty as one of education. Nowadays it is defined as a combination of babysitting and where possible, indoctrination. Mostly schools are there to inure children to the mind numbing boredom and soul destroying regimentation that they will experience for the rest of their lives. It is also to provide the necessary documentation for future employers that said children have completed the necessary course of boredom and regimentation that will make them suitable employees.

Now obviously the above description does not always apply. But then no system is perfect.

Michael

[Bigduke6]

You know Michael, you keep talking like that, the guys in the black helicopters might come for you one day. Them words is seditious, they is.

[Michael Emrys]

You know Michael, you keep talking like that, the guys in the black helicopters might come for you one day.

Oh goody. I love flying and the only time I ever got to ride in a helo I was flat on my back on a stretcher and it was night out, so I couldn't watch the scenery.

Michael

[souldierz]

Unfortunately, not every teacher is a Plato or Socrates.

That's what I told one condescending teacher when he said I wasn't exactly a top student.I told him, your no Aristotle yourself.

Growing up I saw none of the like that held great minds in my schools.I went through the same old mind numbing routine, that seemed more like a lock down in a prison.Hell I bet if i got thrown in the big slammer, it would be like high school all over again(just more people getting shanked instead of beat up).

Some schools are great, but me personally I was in a poor school and the focus was more on trying to get us to be obedient.I can see some teachers trying to get this scheme through in my old high school, but after they threatened to make us all wear uniforms, the whole school walked out and moved like a massive mob down the streets in the city to other schools making life hard for everyone,Cops even had to go with the flow and clear the streets and escort us,so I don't think they would try anything like that again.No matter how ignorant you think the students are being,pissing off a bunch of teenagers and almost sending them to riot in the streets was not a good move or even a smart attempt in trying to imply yet more obedience, especially when your dealing with the majority of students who come from families with middle to lower class income.

To be a little fair though, There were some teachers that shined brightly and were very in tune with the students.Most students would get good grades in classrooms when the teacher was more of a mellow kind of fellow and knew how to play and joke around with the class,and not a sit up straight and shut the hell up kind of guy looking to lay his harmer down on someone who coughs.Some teachers had a real leadership gift that earned them the respect of the students and students would often crowd them.A few teachers I remember were so well liked, that if you said something bad about them, the tough guys would even turn around and smack you in the head.

[gunnergoz]

If the parents don't value education, the kids will see little to be serious or focused about to begin with. No amount of excellent teaching can make up for a kid who is just not there because his parents say education is not important or relevant to him/her.

[Stalins Organ]

These remote camera systems have been used to catch ppl before - I have vague memories of a news report....ah yes...here we go..(not quite a camera....)....here's another...and even Mac's do it

IMO there's nothing wrong with the idea....but they should have told the kids/parents that it was on board, let them setup the passwords, etc., and perhaps kept a secure file of them at school in case they would be needed - with 1800 laptops given away it's a sure bet you are going to make use of that every year at least!!

[Tero]

By Stalin's Organist

IMO there's nothing wrong with the idea....

Everything is wrong with the idea. People have been sentenced to years of imprisonment for lesser invasions of privacy.

Why is there such an easily exploitable built in feature like this in the first place ? AFAIK the unauthorized webcam take over is among the easiest to accomplish (right up there with the CD/DVD-station open/close gag).

but they should have told the kids/parents that it was on board, let them setup the passwords, etc., and perhaps kept a secure file of them at school in case they would be needed - with 1800 laptops given away it's a sure bet you are going to make use of that every year at least!!

The problem IMO is why the school board would need to monitor for student behaviour ? General security cameras in hallways are sort of OK but this kind of monitoring is control freakishly sick to the core.

If you condone this you can not complain when the thought police comes to take you away.

[dieseltaylor]

Someone going for a defence!

http://www.smartplanet.com/technology/blog/thinking-tech/the-real-problem-with-student-laptops/3147/#comments

[Tero]

I read the lawsuit and one thing is uncertain: whose network connection was used in the home ? If they used their own web connection how did the school admins access the pictures ? When the machine was hooked up at school the pics got downloaded to the server or did the machine send live imagery to the school terminal ?

The specs seem to indicate the machine sent data automatically to the school. Bypassing the home firewalls perhaps ? (If the machine was indeed a Mac as shown in the pictures in the story the implications are huge ).

[YankeeDog]

The specs seem to indicate the machine sent data automatically to the school. Bypassing the home firewalls perhaps ? (If the machine was indeed a Mac as shown in the pictures in the story the implications are huge ).

Since someone with administrator privileges presumably installed the remote spying software onto the computers before giving them to the children, There's no real surprise here. Once someone who knows the administrator-level login is able to physically access the machine, no computer is secure. And once a program like this is installed, getting the data stream past a home firewall wouldn't be that difficult, either.

Now, unless the program were very sophisticated well hidden, it would be relatively easy for someone who knows a thing or two about how Macs work to detect that something unusual was running in the background. It's the kind of thing you wouldn't notice unless you were looking for it, though.

[bitchen frizzy]

The school administrators are lucky the boy wasn't doing anything... less innocuous than eating candy. In the U.S., people have gone to prison for having surveillance cameras in clothing store dressing rooms. Any school employee fool enough to be recording the goings-on in a teenager's bedroom is risking 20 years of hard time. Whether the law makes sense or not is beside the point.

Assume the laptop had out-of-box software. No IT genius behind this. The home firewall - if there even was one - would let the laptop phone-home and establish a two-way connection since the request originated inside the firewall. Maybe a dialog box popped up, but if the kid had to hit "Yes" to continue, he would have done so in order to use the laptop. Doubful the pop-up explained that by hitting "Yes" he was consenting to having his bedroom activities observed and recorded, but only stated that the computer needed to access the school's server as a condition of his using it.

[JonS]

The school administrators are lucky the boy wasn't doing anything... less innocuous than eating candy.

I think it is pretty much a given that there are photos and video of kids doing many things "less innocuous than eating candy," unless you buy into the extraordinary coincidence that in over two years of such activity the school just happened to turn on *only* this kids camera, and only at the *exact* time that he was gobbling candy - not 2 hours earlier, nor two hours later.

Whether the law makes sense or not is beside the point.

I think privacy laws make a great deal of sense. It's a shame there aren't more of them, and that the ones that already exist aren't more rigoursly and broadly applied.

Assume the laptop had out-of-box software. No IT genius ...

Many of the technical details of this incident are reasonably well known. The spying trojan was installed by the school IT admin, and some effort - and lies - went into making it difficult to identify that anything (from the students POV) was amiss.

Boingboing.net has pretty good coverage of this, and some of the comments there are reasonably coherent and intelligent (there are also a lot of "me too" type comments, but that's par for the course). Schneier hasn't covered this yet - as far as I can tell - but that, and the related comments, is one to look forward too. OTOH, I suspect that Scheier's comments will be along the lines of "you cannot and must not trust any hardware you do not completely control", plus some variant of "who watches the watchers".

[bitchen frizzy]

I think privacy laws make a great deal of sense.

I was referring to pornography laws, actually, which cast a pretty broad net that someone conducting in-bedroom surveillance can get caught in without having any intention of doing anything salacious.

Privacy laws make sense to me, too.

By out-of-box I meant commercially-available monitoring and snooping software, not what came on the laptop.

[Stalins Organ]

By Stalin's Organist

Everything is wrong with the idea. People have been sentenced to years of imprisonment for lesser invasions of privacy.

Why is there such an easily exploitable built in feature like this in the first place ? AFAIK the unauthorized webcam take over is among the easiest to accomplish (right up there with the CD/DVD-station open/close gag).

The problem IMO is why the school board would need to monitor for student behaviour ? General security cameras in hallways are sort of OK but this kind of monitoring is control freakishly sick to the core.

If you condone this you can not complain when the thought police comes to take you away.

Don't be silly - remote access is used worldwide every day to recover stolen laptops and other electronic devices, and has been for a couple of years now - THAT is the idea that there is nothing wrong with, and was the stated purpose of the software on these machines.

[dieseltaylor]

The excellent in depth report on the matter from a technical view

http://strydehax.blogspot.com/2010/02/spy-at-harrington-high.html

[Tero]

Don't be silly - remote access is used worldwide every day to recover stolen laptops and other electronic devices,

It is also abused with at least equal zeal for illegal and semi-illegal purposes.

And I have not seen any official reports how many stolen/lost laptops have actually been recovered with such means. The only stories have involved lucky individuals who have happened to spot their machines been used by the thief. Who more usually than not was known to that person.

AFAIK even in the US you need a court order for the ISP to provide the exact location of the IP address of any given machine, lost/stolen or otherwise engaged in dubious activity.

and has been for a couple of years now -

I'd hazard a guess the cyberstalking has been a feature ever since internet was conceived.

THAT is the idea that there is nothing wrong with, and was the stated purpose of the software on these machines.

The more immediate problem as I see it that any access permission hoaxed from the firewall opened up the pertinent IP/UDP ports for abuse by third party malware/software attacks on the home machines.

The users were not advised/warned the machine camera was used to monitor their behaviour, at school or at home.

I guess the terrorists have won when "the establishment" feel the need to monitor every word and expression of the members of their respective communities.