FBI Probe - Did Webcam Spy On Student At Home?

[Confederate Kahanist]

http://www.care2.com/causes/education/blog/fbi-probe-did-webcam-spy-on-student-at-home/



On November 11 last year, Blake Robbins, a 15-year-old student at Harriton High School, in a suburb of Philadelphia, was hauled into the assistant principal Lindy Matsko's office, shown a photograph taken on the laptop in his home and disciplined for "improper behavior."

Some background: Last fall, Lower Merion School District provided 2,300 high school students with Mac laptops in what its superintendent, Christopher McGinley, described as an effort to establish a "mobile 21st-century learning environment." The scheme was funded with $720,000 in state grants and other sources. The students were not allowed to install video games and other software, and were barred from "commercial, illegal, unethical and inappropriate" use. What Blake and his parents did not know is that the school was able to access the webcam on Blake's laptop remotely at any time.

Now Blake's parents are suing their son's school, the school district, its board of directors and the superintendent. Michael and Holly Robbins are alleging that the district unlawfully used its ability to access a webcam remotely on their son's district-issued laptop computer to spy on him while he was at home and unaware that he was being observed. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for Eastern Pennsylvania, also includes a class action on behalf of every high school student in the district.

And in a dramatic move late yesterday, federal prosecutors and the FBI said they would join the probe into whether the Lower Merion School District did indeed spy on its students using remotely-controlled laptops. The suit claims a violation of the privacy and civil rights of the students and their families and accuses officials of violating electronic communications laws by spying on them through "indiscriminate use of an ability to remotely activate the webcams incorporated into each laptop." According to the district, the webcams were installed to prevent theft of the laptops which are issued to every student. The district's technology department activated tracking software in the webcams on 42 laptops reported lost or stolen during the current school year, the district said.

The case raises many questions: Why were parents and students not explictly told about the built-in security feature that could take over the laptop and see whatever was in the webcam's field of vision? Why did the "acceptable-use" agreement that families were required to sign in order to allow the student to take the laptop home not explicity state the security feature that enabled the school to spy on its students? Doug Young, a spokesman for the Lower Merion School District, termed that "a mistake."

And a much bigger question: Why would any adminstrator want to spy on a 15-year-old student? In answer to this question, the American Civil Liberties Union has filed a brief supporting the plaintiffs, saying that it believes the case is unique and raises questions of whether the school district violated the boy's rights to privacy and against unreasonable seizure.

Stay tuned for further developments!

[cjd]

Here is a bit more about the story.... I had to laugh when the kid said that he was eating Mike and Ike candies and not taking drugs like the school officials accused him of. Sounds like this school district is a little sick.

http://www.mercurynews.com/peninsula/ci_14457137
MAGID ON TECH: School district's webcam spy case grows legs

By Larry magid

Daily News Columnist
Posted: 02/23/2010 05:39:18 PM PST
Updated: 02/23/2010 05:39:20 PM PST

It's a story that won't go away.

Last week, the family of 15-year-old Blake Robbins filed a lawsuit against Lower Merion School District near Philadelphia, alleging that the school district activated the webcam in the student's school-issued MacBook to photograph him in his own home. The school district admitted that it did have the capacity to remotely turn on webcams and said that it did so 42 times in the past couple of years only to "locate a laptop in the event it was reported lost, missing or stolen so that the laptop could be returned to the student."

The Robbins family claims that an assistant principal at the district's Harriton High School accused Blake of using drugs and cited as evidence a photograph of him taken in his own home via the Mac's webcam. Blake said that the "pills" he was accused of taking were Mike and Ike candies.

Subsequent to all of the hubbub over the case, the district pledged to stop activating the cameras even in the event of a suspected theft and that decision was reinforced on Monday when a federal judge ordered the school to stop activating the cameras. The judge also ordered them to stop taking screenshots from the computers. The judge didn't issue an injunction because the school consented to the decree.

The software used on these Macs was a product called LANRev published by Pole Position Software. LANRev is a remote management tool that enables administrators to manage laptops, including making
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sure that software is up to date and that programs are working properly. The software can also be used to take screenshots, track Web activity or any other activity that the user does, and to activate the built-in webcam.

Pole Position was acquired last year by Absolute Software, maker of the consumer product LoJack for laptops and Computrace, which is sold to enterprise customers including school districts. In an interview, Absolute's Vice President for Global Marketing Stephen Midgley said the company has renamed LANRev and is no longer positioning it as a theft recovery tool. Instead, it is migrating institutional customers to Computrace.

Unlike LANRev, customers themselves can't go in and track a computer. If a computer is missing, they must first file a police report and then Absolute technicians will conduct a trace using the IP address and GPS. Midgley said the company no longer does webcam activation because it's not a good forensic technique.

"The photography doesn't always take a picture of the criminal, and it's not always permissible in a court of law," he said. By the time a laptop is reported stolen, he said, it is probably being used by someone other than the thief, and having a picture of the person is of little value to investigators.

There is a new twist to the case. Philadelphia Fox TV affiliate WTFX uncovered a video clip of a 2008 webcast that featured Mike Perbix, an employee of the Lower Merion School District, talking about how he was able to configure LANRev to go into "curtain mode" to surreptitiously peer into remote machines.

In the webcast, Perbix said, "You can go into curtain mode, so if you're controlling someone's machine and you don't want them to see what you're doing, you just click on the curtain mode icon. ... you can take a snapshot of the screen by clicking on the little camera icon."

He also talked about a time when they "actually had some laptops we thought were stolen which actually were still in a classroom because they were misplaced, and by the time we found out that they were back I had to turn the tracking off and I had a good 20 snapshots of the teacher and the students using the machines in the classroom."

The blog Styde Hax has a summary and a link to the webcast. (http://tinyurl.com/yc8kgp3).

The U.S. attorney's office and the FBI on Monday said that they are investigating whether the district violated federal privacy laws.

Larry Magid's technology column appears Wednesdays in the Daily News. E-mail can be sent to [email protected].