Protect Public School Students from Surveillance of Off-Campus Speech | Hacker News Reader

Protect Public School Students from Surveillance of Off-Campus Speech

eff.org

101 pointshn_acker36 comments

I wonder, if the device is equipped with a microphone and/or a webcam, does it mean that the school has the right to remotely activate them for "monitoring" purposes? It not too far from what they did when the monitoring software sent the screenshots of an email that never existed.

And what if he joked about stabbing his girlfriend/boyfriend? Would the school report him to the police? What the police would do in this case?

I have worked extensively with this technology and have witnessed many of its pros and cons firsthand. I have seen it misused, but I have also observed it saving students' lives and preventing mass violence events.

A major point to consider in the public conversation is what happens after a tragic event occurs. The school district is often called out for ignoring the warning signs, not paying attention to things that could have prevented the event, etc. So the other side of abolishing this technology is that school districts no longer have those tools and public expectations should be adjusted accordingly. What really happens is that public opinion ebbs and flows between support and opposition, depending on what tragedies have happened near term.

The policy and legal frameworks used by US schools clearly state that school district staff are not allowed to remotely activate the microphone or camera on a student's device.

There's also legal precedence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School...

When the Robbins case occurred, school districts everywhere took notice. In the organizations I've worked with since then, we no longer activate the microphone or webcam, regardless of the Chromebook's location. However, I can't speak for every school district, whose morals and ethics may vary greatly.

> It not too far from what they did when the monitoring software sent the screenshots of an email that never existed.

It did exist but it wasn't never sent. The software runs as an agent on the student device and inspects the DOM tree for text phrases it considers alert-worthy: self-harm, threats, drug use, etc.

> And what if he joked about stabbing his girlfriend/boyfriend? Would the school report him to the police? What the police would do in this case?

This entirely depends on the school and police personalities involved, but the answer is "possibly" or "probably", depending on the jurisidiction.

Regardless of the outcome, I think what's really important include the following:

- There ARE bad actors employed in every school district! Many of them would love to spy on students, collect naked photos and share them.

- School districts need STRICT AND ENFORCED use policy and minimal "need to know" access for TRAINED district staff. No hand slaps. Termination of employment, and legal and criminal consequences are in order.

- Auditing flipped on for everything possible (for CYA, if anything). If school staff flips on a webcam, that should be logged somewhere that cannot be scrubbed. In the case of a webcam activation, I'd have it auto-notify key personnel and probably legal. Those audit logs should be reviewed often by multiple auditors -- preferable a third party. Audit events should be backed by extensive documentation, such as a help desk ticket, if anything.

- If possible, students should obscure the webcam when not in use to protect themselves. If feasible, I also suggest they get a cheap dummy mic off of Amazon and keep that plugged in.

If this type of product survives litigation, we need to move toward assurances of privacy (eg. verifiable Private Cloud Compute model), so this doesn't turn into another Flock situation where certain government entities may have a global/national single-pane-of-glass.

I almost said "on-premises" there, but that would be a disaster because school districts don't patch their stuff.

> but I've also seen it save students' lives and stop mass violence events.

The saving lives thing is always the excuse for total surveillance. Trading away your freedom for security gets you neither.

It also relies on knowledge of a counterfactual situation. Was the guy arrested for a threat genuinely going to hurt people, or was it a dumb joke that was taken seriously by somebody snooping in a conversation they lacked the context to even understand?

From experience, this is generally easy to figure out. The ratio between dumb joke threats vs actual threats is something like >99.9%.

> The ratio between dumb joke threats vs actual threats is something like >99.9%.

This makes the situation ripe for false positives. If 99.9% of threats are jokes and you correctly identify joke threats as jokes 99% of the time, that remaining 0.9% is several times larger than the real threats.

And while the difference may seem obvious to you and I, being able to perceive the difference probably becomes harder across cultural divides (such as between teachers and a younger generation of students.) Furthermore, any bitter teacher with an axe to grind can leverage "zero tolerance" rules and strategic ignorance to deliberately construe a joke as a real threat to get rid of a kid they don't like (I've seen this sort of thing happen.) The more surveillance there is, the more opportunities there are to catch somebody making a edgy joke in what they thought was a private conversation.

Touche. I get that and agree. It's certainly a polarizing conversation.

I'm hoping the conversation and courts arrive at definitive guidance and regulations that preserves freedom, doesn't add to the surveillance state and provides some kind of answer to the half or more than half of the population that expects school districts to surveil everything kids do on their devices (self-harm, harm, bullying, etc).

It's a really weird experience to hear the same powerful people argue both sides. How do you expect us to do one without the other?

And again, it's... safe to assume there are a lot of bad actors in education where enforced safeguards are needed.

Just keep the spying to a minimum. Any spying on a kid or his family outside of school is off-limits. 1984 was a warning, not an instruction manual.

Already do, but that doesn’t help with the many more curious and nosy administrators out there, which is why you need regulations, enforcement, and auditing.

Making the spying impossible is better than any regulations or auditing.

With a separate camera and microphone, I just unplug them when not in use. For the builtin camera, I put a sticker over it.

I have zero faith in any software lockouts.

On a linux-like system, one could block access using file permissions, e.g chmod a-r /dev/snd/pcmC0D0c for a microphone. Probably less easy to do on Android, though.

Thanks for your answer. The fact that the legal framework you suggest aimed at preventing abuse doesn't exist already is terrifying, when you think about it.

The situation is also deeply unfair: wealthy students can keep the device provided by the school in a box and use their own instead, while less wealthy students will have to use the school's device and be spied on. "But that's actually a good thing," some might say, "it's always the poor who cause troubles."

IMO, this spyware shouldn't have been there in the first place, even if it means that in some cases it could have prevented yet-another shooting, or suicide, or drug abuse. The school should have the right to inspect the device anytime (when at school, not remotely) to make sure it is not being misused, and nothing more.

More surveillance won't make those problems disappear - actually quite the opposite I believe; because learning that your classmate has been suspended because he said the wrong words when talking to himself but some forgotten microphone caught them nevertheless is really stressing or depressing, depending on your personality.

I just don't see how the pros out-weight the cons here. Even if the laws and policies were well written, enforcement seems impossible. As you've said, there are going to bad actors sprinkled throughout any of these systems (and in a big enough system, this will always be the case). This power, in my opinion, is simply too great to be allowed. It will be abused. A lot.

This is a substantially more serious scenario now that transcribing and analyzing audio / video content is so much faster & cheaper today. Previously some freak had to watch or listen to everything in nearly 1:1 time to eavesdrop.

What a bizarre case. I’m a technology person and late Gen-X. The only tech in my school were lab computers and Ti-81/82 calculators, and I’ve been increasingly leery of the technology in schools since about 4th grade. Before that, they occasionally used iPads for a few things.

Now that my son is in 8th grade, the whole Chromebook phenomenon is something I find gross. Kids don’t read books. The various assessment products are gross and stress inducing, and the tools used for math, especially graphing, make trivial assignments incredibly difficult.

I hate to sound like an old man. But between worse educational products, corporate surveillance tools applied to children and cheap, hard to use devices, I miss books.

You are an old man: kids didn’t read books back when we were kids either. I did and you probably did, but that’s doesn’t mean most people did. And it doesn’t mean that kids aren’t curious or learning.

Technology in the classroom has completely and utterly failed at improving education.

Was that really the aim?

Or just getting kids hooked on tech and bowing to our tech overlords at a younger age?

I've seen many initiatives to "bring technology into the classroom". It always came with big promises. Lots of budget was allocated. No improvements.

Of course I was referring to the /real/ aim, not the well-publicised headlines and initiatives.

At what point could one argue that school-supplied Big Brother tech in students' homes constitutes a violation of both the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Amendment_to_the_United_... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Amendment_to_the_United... ?

EFF goes on about how speech has been protected off campus in various cases, but what about Bong Hits 4 Jesus where the Supreme Court ruled that the school did not violate First Amendment rights with suspension?

In that case, the student was off school grounds across from the high school.

Was Morse v. Frederick case law overturned in later cases?

And I could just be completely reading this incorrectly, too.

>but what about Bong Hits 4 Jesus where the Supreme Court ruled that the school did not violate First Amendment rights with suspension?

>In that case, the student was off school grounds across from the high school.

The wikipedia summary is actually:

>the Court held, 5–4, that the First Amendment does not prevent educators from prohibiting or punishing student speech that is reasonably viewed as promoting illegal drug use at a school-sanctioned event.[1][2]

So the parts you're failing to mention is that it's a school sanctioned event, and that it's promoting illegal drug use. Based on the examples in the EFF blog post, it's clear that those are not the cases that EFF is objecting to, for instance:

>Surveillance Software Exposed a Bad Joke Made in the Privacy of a Student’s Home

I agree that using school devices can be vaguely construed as being similar to "school-sanctioned event", but it's not the same, for the reasons outlined in EFF's blog post.

I am thinking more and more that a total surveillance state is basically inevitable as technology progresses. Governments will have the data and companies will have it too. Right now we are building up the infrastructure for a future totalitarian regime.

Yep and even if the current regime may not be too bad, the technological foundations are being set for when a future worse regime can take full advantage of it.

I guess learning "someone elses' computer isn't yours" is a lesson best taught early on?

I know fellow millenials that use their work computers for personal reasons. And thats some of the stupidest things you can do. Dont use work or school hardware for personal reasons.

I'd also say, if you're running Windows you're also surveilled to hell and back as well. Linux is basically the only platform thats not.

And as to larger surveillance, its pervading everywhere. Work. School. Driving (Flock). Commercial web. "Free" services.

I'm glad I grew up in one of the last generations that wasn't habitually online. I did loads of "troublesome behavior", that never followed me. Now, some thing will be captured with a smartphone and memorialized forever. And that... Alas. (Old man yelling at cloud, I guess?)

Yep. I treat work computers as hostile entities. They are always on an isolated guest SSID and VLAN and I never use them for personal tasks.

When my kids start bringing school-owned hardware home that's getting the same treatment.

Laptops are so cheap these days there's no reason to not buy a separate laptop for personal use and only use the work laptop for work.

Also put a sticker over the camera.

The original title is:

> EFF to Arizona Federal Court: Protect Public School Students from Surveillance and Punishment for Off-Campus Speech

This is honestly alarming. Student surveillance has crossed far beyond safety and is starting to look like constant monitoring of children’s private lives. The idea that schools can track off-campus behavior should worry everyone.

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