School district: Spy Webcams activated 42 times | Hacker News Reader

School district: Spy Webcams activated 42 times

news.cnet.com

17 pointsjacquesm14 comments

Little by little more information trickles out about this case, I think it is far more serious than it looks on the outside right now.

Given the fact that there apparently was surveillance of students without proper cause it immediately becomes a legitimate question how far reaching that surveilance was.

You have to do a lot of 'watching' in order to catch someone doing something that looks suspicious in the first place (no matter they got it wrong), and then to go public with the fact that (1) you've been doing this and (b) you underestimate the ability of the world to extrapolate to whatever else you might have been up to is pretty dumb.

Then there is the question of any screen captures / voice recordings, listening in on employees without cautioning them is already a punishable offense, listening in on minors in a structural way and looking at them without going through the proper authorities is a completely different kettle of fish.

And if hardcopies or files were passed around with screenshots and / or recordings those responsible will end up in jail for a long long time, in that case you could argue that this was actually a child porn ring that got their raw materials by subverting the PCs of children in their care.

More links today on this case (which I've been following pretty closely, given my interests in anything that has to do with webcams):

http://education.zdnet.com/?p=3655

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/homepage/84877027.html

One immediate question that needs answering is if this laptop was not reported stolen and that supposedly is the condition to be met before activating this system then what was the reason this student was under surveillance in the privacy of his own bedroom.

It's a typical case of 'who watches the watchers', if there are no real safeguards on enabling this feature then you can almost be sure that it will be hacked. And depending on the security of the implementation it is very possible that there are ways to enable the feature completely bypassing the schools' central safeguards (assuming those are in place).

I'm hoping for some hacker student on that school to dive in and document what exactly is going on on those computers, for instance, why there is no visible indicator that the camera is active.

Minor point, but since the laptops in question are Macbooks, there is most certainly a visible indicator; a little green light next to the camera comes on when it is active.

Overall, I agree with you though, there really are no safeguards to stop administrators from abusing their power. They only thing that I can think of to help curtail this sort of abuse is restricting the use of their remote control software to the networks explicitly provided by the school.

Is that light hardware or software controlled (in other words, does it come on as soon as the camera is powered up or is it a function of the driver to enable the light ? Can that be bypassed ? Or would you need to modify the hardware for that ?)

I'm not sure, because I haven't really looked at any of the api's, but I'm pretty sure that it's hardware controlled. Internally it's hooked up via USB, and none of the software I've seen has used the camera without the light on (including non-Apple software).

One of the articles on this, which I can't cite because I didn't save the link, said parents had complained to the school IT department that the webcam indicator would light at strange times. According to the article, the school dismissed the complaints as not an issue. This was all before the current situation emerged.

On the Apple's I have it is hardwired with no API - Power Camera = Power Light.

a little green light next to the camera comes on when it is active

Is this true when a single still image is captured? It isn't clear from the reporting whether the cameras were used to capture video or still images.

i hope the instigators of this will be made examples of.

Spy webcams activated 42 times leading to recovery of 18 missing/stolen laptops.

Occam's Razor time, guys: a) they were looking for stolen laptops b) it is all clever cover for a kiddie porn ring.

That doesn't explain why they punished a student for "improper behavior at home". Clearly, his laptop was not stolen.

Clearly, it hadn't been stolen -- but had it been reported stolen? It's a classic method of keeping something you're supposed to return. In that case, their activating the webcam would be perfectly in line with the stated policy.

Point being, there's still a lot of information we don't yet have. The policy of remotely monitoring the webcams is stupid, but beyond that, we don't know the specifics of why this particular webcam was activated or what the "improper behavior" was, so we don't know how much additional stupid there might be.

It doesn't matter, they've already made the judgement that the schools property is more important than the privacy of children, because they were students.

They shouldn't have activated them once let alone 42 times.

The 42 times they were activated in case of stolen laptops are pretty clear cut, but there are apparently other times those cams were active as well, and there is pretty hard proof that this concerned laptops that were not stolen.

In the past I briefly worked for a dept at a university that needed to recover some laptops stolen by students. The computers were macbooks

Did they spy on people using the web cam? NO! Because they weren't insane.

Instead, they simply built up a log of evidence from the machines' use (IP addresses, etc) and contacted the proper authorities. It got taken care of.

Web cam spying? Ugh. Sounds like some people developed a CSI complex. "Freeze it! Right there! Enhance! We've got you now, freshman!"

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