School district says 56,000 photos were taken of students using spyware | Hacker News Reader

School district says 56,000 photos were taken of students using spyware

thetechherald.com

30 pointsvaksel35 comments

If this is the case that was in the news a while back, a major issue was that students were required to use the school-issued computers and threatened with expulsion if they brought their own computers to school.

If it's the same case, that's a big problem: The defense so far is that all this spyware was required for theft recovery. If so, why not allow students to use their own computers? Requiring students to use computers that invade their privacy seems extremely suspicious to me.

Suspicious, but given that this is a group of obvious control freaks we don't have to look further than "You will use the school's supplied computer and only it because I Am The Law."

Every new article I see about this story appears to have more and more pointers towards a child porn investigation. I hope someone sensible thinks very seriously before deciding to do that...

Are you implying that you think the child porn laws shouldn't be used? I know they are abused horrifically at times, but if the accusations being made here are true, I can't even begin to call this an abuse of a child porn law. I can imagine a world in which someone could think this is a good idea without thinking through all the implications, but at the first picture of someone (anyone, child or otherwise) in an even remotely compromising position that landed on the school's drives, the sane, sensible, and basically legally-mandated thing to do would have been to immediately terminate the program. They failed this test and it is perfectly just that they be prosecuted. Deterrence is a perfectly reasonable motive here; we absolutely do not want anyone to think this is a reasonable solution to any problem.

Save your objections for the actual abuses, lest you dilute your argument. (Assuming that is what you are trying to imply. Which isn't clear, though I'm not sure what else you could mean.)

(Edit: In other posts you talk about intent. As I argued above, if intent had been pure the program would have shut down at the first sign of trouble. I do not have problem imputing bad intent to these actors, again, given the truth of the accusations. If they wished the benefit of the doubt, there were actions they can and should (in every sense of the term) have taken, which they did not.)

I see your argument; actually it's very good and I mostly agree with the point made.

But still I'd prefer to see other, more applicable, laws used.

Proving somebody saw these nude images (if there are any) is going to be a huge legal minefield. And even then classing it as child pornography is difficult for a variety of reasons.

When I talk about intent I mean the intent to see it as sexual content. Clearly the proper thing to do is delete any inappropriate images - and in this respect there may be some indecency laws that apply. But CP is about the sexual abuse of children and the use of indecent material in a sexual context. This has already been watered down here in the UK to the point of making a conviction barely an inconvenience to them.

School administrators were overhead talking about how they liked the cameras because it was a mini drama of the personal lives of students in their building... how is that not clear intent? They were looking at the photos for fun. Sure you can't prove their cornea lined up with the image, but come on, have you ever heard a pedophile say 'I took the pictures with my eyes closed and didn't look at them, I just made them available to others'?

Indeed that's definite intent - but it's not sexual intent...

I suspect that is inevitable. This is a heinous violation of the privacy of minors in their parents homes. I suspect that prosecutors will be forced to reach for the biggest hammer they have.

Well my US law grounding is only the basics but they have some fairly big hammers they can bring to bear before CP law are required.

I'm not sure if the state this is in has Voyeurism laws but that is a good place to start. Then you have unlawful recording, various surveillance laws and lots of privacy law violations.

Of course if this woman has taken the images with a sexual intent (or used them with a sexual intent) then totally; throw the book at her :)

Child porn laws, like any laws, should be enforced without respect for the defendant's status. If the definition of child porn is so broad as to include what this school has done, then they should be prosecuted as mercilessly as anyone else would be.

Well, yes, if the CP laws have been broken then definitely.

However, from what I have read (and based on my experience) this does not fit any of the profiles of an child pornography case.

It is actually damaging to other cases if this is prosecuted badly.

I think it depends on what the intent was. If the intent was to surreptitious take pictures of minors with the hopes of catching some nudity, then I'm guess it falls into the CP bucket.

I think it would be hard to show though that there could be a different intent though for surreptitiously taking photos of teens at random times.

A big part of my job is proving intent in just such cases. It is, as you point touch on, really difficult.

There could be a very "innocent" reason; the sysadmin could be simply obbsessed or interested in individuals lives (it's actually not an uncommon problem) and not even consider that something indecent might appear on screen. She might not find it sexually interesting etc.

If the intent really was to photograph nude children then I'd fully expect there to be lots and lots of evidence showing this (particularly in terms of other indecent material on her computers).

Supposing intent was not CP, but was some kind voyeuristic intent, what are the possible kinds of ways she could be prosecuted? What about the administration of the school who signed off on this debacle (particularly the forced use of the laptops under penalty of expulsion that contributed greatly to this mess?)

> what are the possible kinds of ways she could be prosecuted?

Well pretty much what I listed here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1292998

> What about the administration of the school

Yeh, that's a complicated one - I hope they don't get off the hook or anything silly. But I don't see how CP laws could apply to them in any way.

I presume they will get them under negligence / malicious neglect laws.

> But I don't see how CP laws could apply to them in any way.

Yeah, I wasn't thinking along those lines either way. But negligence sounds pretty good.

As the revealed number of taken pictures increases, the probability of there being child porn increases as well.

Taking the image of a nude child is not, by default, child porn.

If it was taken as part of the process (i.e. had not been specially taken, has not been copied elsewhere, taken home etc.) then proving intent is difficult.

I can't help but wonder... did the light come on?

My understanding is that kids were told that this was a common malfunction and not to worry about it.

This whole thing has struck me as beyond creepy. I'm embarrassed both as a technologist and as a former educator. That this was allowed to happen is just horrifying.

I remember an article from when this story broke about how the administrators bragged about a script they wrote that would turn the camera on, but block it's output so if a user saw it was on and then loaded a program to see what was display they would see nothing.

Apparently the also ran this randomly so it would flicker every now and then...

purely despicable.

Huh, I guess I had thought they'd disabled the light somehow...

I think the light may be in hardware. It is on the OLPC.

They're Macs, Apple is wise about this and it's in the hardware and cannot be disabled without doing physical "surgery" to the hardware.

Well that's certainly the way it ought to be, if you ask me.

Even for a hardware implementation, the LED will be driven by an output pin of the onboard microcontroller. If the webcam firmware is flashable over USB it could be remotely disabled by software.

It probably flickers very briefly, so your eye might not even see it (just a guess).

Edit: give it a try, report back: http://www.intergalactic.de/pages/iSight.html

This might be relevant too: http://macosx.com/forums/1427678-post3.html

The light stays on for a full second and is a bright green LED - impossible to miss if you're looking at the screen.

Looks like many of these pictures were taken when the kids were not looking at the screen.

> According to an email she sent to a co-worker, cited by Robbins’ attorney, when told that the images and screenshots from the students’ laptops were like a soap opera, Cafiero said, “I know. I love it!”

Disgusting.

"During her deposition to Robbins’s lawyers, she invoked her Fifth Amendment rights and refused to answer questions as not to self-incriminate. One of the questions asked of her was whether she had downloaded “…pictures to her own computer, including pictures of students who were naked while in their home,” the motion notes."

Somehow, I can't help but think that it would have been better just to answer the question - refusing to answer on the grounds of self-incrimination sounds just as bad or worse as answering yes to the question.

On the other hand, maybe she hasn't looked through all the pictures she's downloaded, and doesn't want to be hit with perjury as well. Or maybe it's that combined with having used a computer which was not technically hers but which was not used by anyone else, making definitions potentially a tad unclear.

Why is nobody in prison yet?

Because the trial hasn't taken place yet.

Agreed. This was outrageous behavior on the part of the school district, but we must remember that we have due process.

Actually, no criminal charges have been made yet.

In a situation like this, it will take some time to put together a solid case that you can put before a jury.

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