The Spy at Harriton High
strydehax.blogspot.com
strydehax.blogspot.com
This is the kind of thing the western media perceives as happening in countries like China, not in America, the 'land of the free'
We are and will continue to be that because the people responsible for this will:
Have their lives ruined.
Be out a *lot* of money.
Very possibly end up in prison.
You're always going to have immoral people in a society who think they're above the law, the critical thing is what you do to correct them and to provide harsh object lessons for others who are tempted.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/china-executes-corrupt-offi...
Nigeria or even Russia would probably be a better example; at least they're not famous for killing people for corruption.
That said, your main point is completely correct: this is the system working.
But you're right in part because they feel like they have to keep up appearances and they will upon occasion reach up high, something that hasn't been true in Russia for who knows how long. (Then again, we don't know if Zheng Xiaoyu's real crime was losing a political battle.)
In this case I used the PRC as the counterexample because it was what the parent commentator used. Another good one would be the place that inspired 1984, where ever greater violations of civil liberties, due process and the rule of law as well as privacy are taking place without noticeable push back.
I don't know what would be happening in the U.K. if some school there tried to pull off this sort of nearly literal "1984" (not quite, since the video monitors in Oceania were explicitly there to spy on you, you just didn't know when someone would be paying attention) ... but I wouldn't be sanguine.
With all the video surveillance and things like ASBO laws in the UK, would a story like this even be considered news?
Even if they did have the best of intentions, I think that they should be absolutely ruined. Make the very idea of such intrusions so thoroughly toxic that no one, even the most conniving, dare attempt it for fear of the stakes involved.
After all, turning America into the panopticon is the highest stakes around.
My house would be raided by a SWAT team and everything electronic in it would be taken...TVs hard-drives, computers, computer monitors, networking equipment, routers, servers, camera equipment, everything.
The fact that this isn't happening to the school administrators is hideous. Not only did they admit that what they're being accused of is possible, they demonstrated it!
To put that in perspective, I think most school districts punish students this way if they bring a loaded rifle to school.
It definitely sounds like something a school district would do. I am just asking because I have seen this stated in a bunch of hacker news comments, but haven't seen where this information came from.
I can't find the official school policy from the school. But I haven't found anything disputing this either.
There's one thing we agree on - that's pretty nasty.
Just so we don't forget, Obama voted to give telecoms, which handed our privacy to anyone who asked for it, immunity.
http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/90990
Parents seem to have weird privacy expectations of their kids but you can be sure they will scream bloody murder over a peeping tom.
Someone in that IT dept was collecting pictures of students. My moneys on Mr. Perbix, thanks to his overly smug god of IT attitude. This story is going to get much worse before we see its end.
A little electrical tape will fix that. Sometimes the simple solutions are the best.
Smearing the lens with oil or butter is deniable. Make sure you tape over the microphone port.
There should be more shock and anger about this, and if there isn't that fact should also be a reason for shock and anger.
This story is just getting more wrong with each article.
I don't think we're even close to "only government approved firewalls at your home".
Anyway, if you're looking to build that custom OpenBSD firewall / gateway, might I recommend the Alix 2d3 board. It is so choice:
It's the kind of absurdity that I wouldn't expect - it's a fairly wealthy school district and I'm not surprised at the giving of laptops to students. What I'm shocked at is that they seem to have completely failed to a) Hire competent and reliable IT staff b) Internalized and understood the security and liability issues at an administrative level.
I was out before Haverford started really implementing computers (at the time they didn't even have computers for the teachers) but I suspect you're right - if they could have done something like this they would have. I can recall a very particular mentality among the administration there which was much along the lines of 'protect the students from themselves at all costs'.
A shame, though.
It just seems like not only the competent IT staff, but also the school and district administration, felt it was OK to randomly activate and get pictures and screenshots of all of the students.
Actually I probably would have gone after the remote administration server too.
(Of course I'm wondering about the physical security on the hard drive (e.g. an unrepairable seal); an obvious thing to do is to image the drive and proceed from there. Although I'm sure that's explicitly against policy and that they're looking for tool marks and so on.)
(And the administration complains, their "evidence" is "I was trying to take a picture of you getting undressed, but I got a piece of tape instead." Nobody is going to say that, and so nobody is going to "call you" on your tape-sticking.)
The plausibly deniable "oil or butter" on the lens suggested by bootload in this topic sounds better to me, only problem there is that you wouldn't know it was enough.
Maybe just rigorous do the tape while it's at home and you have to use it (for classes where it's required).
If my kid got expelled from school for putting a post-it note over the spycam, I would not hesitate to use my savings to sue the *&$# out of the school district.
Any zero tolerance policy for "stickers" ought to fail in the aftermath of this Charlie Foxtrot, especially as the nasty details come out or are blatantly suppressed.
How about some smacking them with some "zero tolerance policy" -- a taste of their own medicine.
In other words, just use any normal program that can acquire images from the camera to see how much (or little) you've managed to obscure the view.
But it's largely getting this level of attention because of the shock value (ooh, pictures!). In fact, this is just one more predictable step in the entrenchment of the police state that compulsory school by its nature is.
... after all, they did cover pleaserobme.com
One of the major reasons countries like Nicaragua are what they are is because the country born in the "suburbs outside Philadelphia -- birthplace of constitution" has been sponsoring corrupt dictators there under the disguise of some "war on drugs" or "war on communism". No this is not a diversion of topic. The illusion (I think delusion) of liberty, equality, rule of law is just that -- an illusion. Police, NSA, CIA have long had the ability to spy on US citizen without any warrants. Our beloved President personally voted to provide immunity to the telecom companies that just handed our privacy on a silver platter to NSA, CIA and anyone who asked for it (Choicepoint & friends). Then we turn around and are just "shocked" that a school would pick up the cue from its big brother and run with it.
They are probably thinking: if the government is going to "protect" its citizens by spying on them, we will "protect" our children even more by spying on them harder!
The software in question would phone home whenever the laptop was connected from other than the school's LAN and start making pictures; at that point, the only thing the system could do would be to allow retention of them or not.
(I am not saying whether it is his fault or someone above him ordered it, but I am assuming his superiors are soulless bastards who can hire expensive attorneys. He might be just as bad, but he cannot hire lawyers and PR firms).
I think the vice principal, and any other staff with knowledge of the spying capabilities should not be allowed to shove the blame onto the tech staff. Everyone involved should be punished to the full extent of the law.
IT people are often put in situations where they have to implement the will of the less-technically-enlightened who sign their paychecks, even when it violates the privacy standards that the IT staff would prefer. For instance, invasive filtering at work that logs all of one's activity by default and attempts to prevent external HTTPS or proxy usage is against the ideals of most who have to implement and maintain such a system, but thousands have to do it every day.
There are many, many alternatives to the malicious "inevitable child porn" point-of-view. Maybe Pibrix thought that "stolen mode" wasn't activated until someone reported it, because someone higher-up than him had set all of the computers to report back anytime they are outside of the school's network. He's just one high school network tech, he's not necessarily the end-all here. We don't know how the rules for "stolen mode" were determined; perhaps they could be updated when students connected to the school's network. Therefore, when normal students complained of spontaneous light-blinking at home, when their laptops weren't even reported stolen, Pibrix could have sincerely believed it was a glitch.
We just don't know, so let's not target potentially-innocent people here, ok?
We should at least let this thing flesh out a bit more before we start with the marking of public enemies, right? This should scare anyone whose employer may potentially incriminate their employees in the employer's shady dealings.
I mean, I don't know, maybe he was guilty, maybe he did push for this system so he could watch the kids in compromising or private positions and get his kicks off of that, maybe he was saving all of the incidental nudes and posting them to 4chan. We don't know, and I'm not saying that the guy did or didn't. I just think it's a little early to incriminate this one guy just because he talked about how the software they use works and how to make it so non-privileged users can't use the webcam.
The only question here is that did he realize the laptops have to always be in phone home mode for this to work? The anti-theft feature obviously doesn't work if the laptop doesn't make contact a server after the former is stolen.
Plus there's the blink of the green spycam light; school IT knew about it, we won't know until discovery or its criminal equivalent if they realized that it was due the actions of their spyware.
But I insist on saying "this system will inevitably create child porn" and that his not realizing that is no excuse. The child porn laws do not care about mens rea (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea).