
In Wayzata, Minnesota, a school spies on its students - Balgair
http://boingboing.net/2014/12/03/in-wayzata-minnesota-a-schoo.html
======
VieElm
> with a librarian chipping in one of my most hated lines, "But if you're not
> doing anything wrong, why are you so concerned about privacy?"

This librarian is a bad librarian who must have dumped whatever he or she
learned as part of their MLS program. Librarians are against filtering, they
are against censorship, it is written into the code of ethics of the American
Library Association. Librarians understand the chilling effect that privacy
intrusions create. Protecting the privacy of library patrons is a central
tenet of being a librarian and in my opinion this librarian needs to have an
attitude change or lose their job.

[http://www.ala.org/advocacy/proethics/codeofethics/codeethic...](http://www.ala.org/advocacy/proethics/codeofethics/codeethics)

[http://www.ala.org/advocacy/privacyconfidentiality](http://www.ala.org/advocacy/privacyconfidentiality)

Librarians fight censorship and privacy intrusions, they stand up for their
patrons and fight school boards and other government agencies. They have
fought the controversial patriot act provisions that required revealing
library records to law enforcement without informing the affected patrons.

This librarian makes me so mad.

~~~
sroerick
Surveilled reading is more dangerous than censorship, full stop.

It's frustrating people don't realize this.

~~~
dredmorbius
Yet another reason I'm increasingly _really_ disliking the client-server
relationship of the Web. I'd vastly prefer a decentralized distributed content
system.

And yes, that would totally gut advertising models.

------
joshstrange
While in HS and for 4-5 years after I ran a simple http proxy (Just enter the
address you want to go to and it loads it on the server then serves up the
page) for my fellow students. It was far from perfect and didn't work with a
number of websites but it gave a great deal of access to content that was
otherwise inaccessible. I had a couple teacher come to me to ask how to use it
so they could use youtube videos in class (educational). I wrote code for my
HS and so to prevent being blocked I just hosted the code on the same server
(that I owned and paid for) on a subdomain of the site I wrote for the school.
They couldn't block the domain (they couldn't figure out how to block just a
subdomain) and they couldn't block the IP.

That worked for about a year until I graduated and then I transferred all the
code to the school and they ran it on an internal machine and stopped using
the URL which got blocked soon after. I still had siblings in HS and MS so I
just bought 5 .info domains (dirt cheap, like $2/each and a further discount
b/c I bought 5 at a time) and named them all after popular songs (The thinking
being kids remember song lyrics/title easily). I then would text the mirror
URL to my siblings and they would distribute them to their friends and I would
also post 1-2 of the URLs on the site itself with a reporting tool to let kids
let me know when a mirror they were using was blocked.

The site was not only a proxy but also hosted a couple thousand flash games
(all custom PHP that I wrote at the time). The ad revenue from the games
covered all my hosting costs for this site and other ones I was working on and
covered the buying of new domains every few months when I had exhausted the
old ones.

I had the opposite encounter with the administration though. The games were
the main focus and kids were just starting to get into FB/Twitter and the
admin knew me because of the programming I had done for them and so didn't
care. Kids would get in trouble for playing games when their work wasn't done
(as they should) but (most) teachers didn't care if they kids played games as
long as they had their work done.

This story isn't super related to the linked one but I felt it was in the same
vein and wanted to share. I also used SOCKS proxies out to a server I owned
and booted off an external USB HD so I didn't have to deal with the locked
down computers and never had an issue (though I didn't rub either in the
admin's face).

~~~
chatmasta
I did the same thing. Started a network of ~10 web proxy websites when I was
14, advertised on proxy.org and some link partnerships, ended up making $50
per day on adsense before crashing down to $15 a day. Sold the network on
sitepoint market (now flippa) for $1200. It was the first "real money" I made
online and I never looked back. :)

------
Jeremy1026
In high school my friends and I worked on a proxy, that using a custom build
of portable FireFox on USB drives, that would connect through Germany to get
us unfiltered internet. There were about a half dozen of us with the required
files, settings, and knowledge to use it in the school. We were able to go 6
months before anything came up from administration, it was during a school
wide assembly that it was reported that "some students were by-passing the
schools firewall, and a reminder that this was against the rules." This didn't
stop us. We took the knowledge that the school was looking as a bit of a
challenge. Over the next couple of months we did some more work on our
"product" and changed the routing to first hit the school network, check to
see if it was blocked, then continue on via a proxy that we had running at one
of our homes if needed. We went 2 more years without ever hearing anything
from the administration about the firewall.

I say good on the author for standing up against the schools asinine blocking
policies.

------
DanBC
Their networks, their rules.

Intentionally doing things they do not want you to do is a _terrible_ idea. I
agree that the rules are stupid but the author is very lucky they haven't run
into someone vindictive and stupid who called the police, or just expelled
them. These things happen.

~~~
mturmon
You're being down voted, but you have a point. Commenters nearby don't get
that the school district and its administrators will be liable if kids are
using school resources (bandwidth) to access controversial websites.

E.g., there's an audit and someone starts looking into the router logs, and
then word leaks to the local newspaper. ("Think of the children!") So the
district in effect _must_ put in a filter. Now we're just arguing about the
threshold on the filter, and it's not a matter of absolute principle, just the
setting of a knob.

The same reasoning applies to a school-supplied laptop or iPad.

The situation is similar to a job-supplied network and computer. There are
limits on what you should be doing on it, because it's not yours.

If you want to do whatever you want, you'd better own the resources.

~~~
forrestthewoods
Liable for what precisely? What type of controversy? Reading naughty words?
Reading opinions that disagree with the status quo? Perhaps reading a pamphlet
titled Common Sense?

The district could actually not put in a filter. That is a thing they could
just do. Then, when the newspapers complain, they can yes that's what they
did. I promise you the world won't end.

Do you know where underage school children can go to access "controversial
websites"? The public library. They can walk right in, sit down at a computer,
and view the internet in all it's uncensored glory. For free. In public. As
children. Shocking I know.

Also they can just use their smart phone because it seems like every kid over
the age of 10 has a smart phone with internet. As best I can tell the world
has still not ended.

~~~
mturmon
"I promise you the world won't end."

For the teacher and the school administrator, it could. We don't live in the
world you're writing about.

The smart phone comparison is not the same, because the kid's parents control
whether there is a phone and its settings.

The public library comparison is interesting. Not the same (because their
missions are different), but interesting.

~~~
forrestthewoods
No, their world would not end. Even in the worst case scenario of getting
fired their world wouldn't end. There's no need to be melodramatic.

Even in the face of public anger the school district could choose not to fire
the targets of public ire. That would of course require having a backbone and
principles, but it's totally a thing that could happen.

Kids look at porn at smart phones. I'm not even sorry if this bothers you.
It's a thing. You can't stop it. Stop trying.

~~~
mturmon
"I'm not even sorry if this bothers you. It's a thing. You can't stop it. Stop
trying."

I think I see. My aims have been unclear.

I'm pointing out a political reality that I feel is controlling outcomes here.
I'm not staking out a personal position, because in the context of a school
administration embedded in a city government with oversight by the voters, my
personal position means little.

To be honest, and this is where we diverge, I'm not interested in staking an
opinion on this one. The school can do whatever it wants. Let it be open, or
restrict it -- whichever works.

The library case is different; there are obvious free expression interests at
play there -- including patrons who rely on the library for all internet
access. (Would it further irritate you to mention I've been an ACLU member
since the early 1990s?)

As I mentioned, the smart phone comparison is not apropos, because parents
would supply the smart phone, and what their kids do on the phone is up to
their family to decide.

------
daughart
If you think college will be any better, you're dead wrong. It will be worse,
because the punishments are greater, the rules are more ad hoc, and the
administrators are both more knowledgable and more likely to be embarrassed in
the more hierarchical and bureaucratic institution.

I learned in college not to fight with administration, just focus your efforts
on improving yourself and doing something great with your talents. This will
someday hopefully put YOU in the position of power, and then it's your
responsibility not to be a hypocrite.

------
binarymax
So this might be off topic but still related, Ghostery blocked 104 trackers
from this site. _One hundred and four_! So given that, I am a bit wary of
folks claiming rights of privacy when you are throwing that many tracking
devices at me.

\--EDIT-- Apparently Ghostery was turned off after an upgrade (I hate when
that happens) - and apparently its a recursive tracking nightmare where some
load some more, and then more, and then more. I reblocked everything and now
I'm showing 8 - but it does balloon to 104 for non-blocking users. If you are
brave you can pause blocking and see :)

~~~
username223
I get 8, plus 12 blocked JavaScript requests, including this thing to
apparently detect that I'm blocking it:
[http://blockmetrics.com/static/adblock_detection/js/d.min.js](http://blockmetrics.com/static/adblock_detection/js/d.min.js)

BoingBoing is pretty bad, but not at all exceptional.

~~~
Balgair
Right? For a site that is all about 'Snowden this' and 'Manning that' you'd
think they'd be a bit more reasonable about the cookies and whatnot. Not
saying cookies are bad at all, they make a lot of the web work for us for
free, and I am not saying those cookies on boingboing are malicious at all,
but it does cause a pause for concern.

------
jobu
It's really sad how many school officials see themselves as rule enforcers
rather than education facilitators.

A kid that's arguably more knowledgeable than any of the school's IT staff is
bypassing the schools federally mandated filters, and the solution is to ban
him from the school's internet?! There are so many better ways of handling the
situation that it's almost funny.

------
aselzer
I was accused of "destroying" about 20 laptops (didn't boot) in 8th grade,
because some other kids called me a "hacker". Later I realized that the system
administrators of the school had probably broken the bootloaders or partitions
and were incapable of fixing it, so they blamed it on "hackers".

All computers are full of surveillance software (Apple Remote Desktop), and
there is a person constantly monitoring them (in the library and in
classrooms).

The internet can only be accessed through a firewall blocking content that
really shouldn't be blocked. Pages like nmap.org are blocked under the phrase
"hacking". Minecraft and any pages related to games (like wikis), or even
slightly related, possibly completely unrelated, were blocked for for the
reason "games", as if that would have stopped people from bringing them on a
USB drive. At some point I had a school project about Minecraft and was told
to research. I could, but that was because of my SSH socks proxy.

It's sad that Google gets set to "safe mode" and deactivates HTTPS when
accessing it from a specific IP address on the will of schools. However,
that's great for WiFi sniffing and practicing the use of Ettercap.

Don't ever accept a school-provided device without removing whatever OS or ROM
there is on it and flashing/installing something new.

Great choice of Arch Linux tethered to the phone (me too).

------
james1071
To which you respond, "If you are not a <insert appropriate bad thing>, why
are you spying on me?"

------
runarb
I remember that a couple of years ago a school did that the "if you're not
doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide" a little further, and spyde on
kids at their homes via their webcams. I find it almost unbelievable that
public official can sink so low, but apparently it did happen:

The _" laptops issued to high-school students in the well-heeled Philly suburb
have webcams that can be covertly activated by the schools' administrators,
who have used this facility to spy on students and even their families. The
issue came to light when the Robbins's child was disciplined for "improper
behavior in his home" and the Vice Principal used a photo taken by the webcam
as evidence. "_

\- [http://boingboing.net/2010/02/17/school-used-
student.html](http://boingboing.net/2010/02/17/school-used-student.html)

Edit: The case was apparently settled for $610,000:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School_District)

~~~
ColinCochrane
I can't fathom how that Vice-Principal could have possibly thought that was a
good idea. Monitoring students _in their homes_ isn't only a grotesque
violation of their privacy but also just plain creepy.

------
teleskier
Went to school here (WHS 1995). It is a top notch school district and should
be embracing these kids. Seems the more things change, the more they stay the
same.

I live in Austin TX now and have a 2nd grader. School district is loaded with
computer science / tech industry children. His computer science teacher would
give him an award if he could get around a firewall - and then have him teach
the others.

------
CapitalistCartr
The problem is bigger than this. Teachers, anyone getting a degree in
education, have for decades had the lowest SAT scores of any major. We don't
send our best and brightest into our schools. Then we don't promote our
brightest into management roles within those schools. The result is a sadly
predictable Stalinist approach to things, especially technology.

~~~
fiatmoney
That factoid is somewhere between misleading and false.

[https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2012/01/15/teacher-
qu...](https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2012/01/15/teacher-quality-
pseudofacts-part-ii/)

~~~
CapitalistCartr
It's neither. Instead of a blog, here's CBS news article from 2011:

[http://www.cbsnews.com/news/heres-the-nations-easiest-
colleg...](http://www.cbsnews.com/news/heres-the-nations-easiest-college-
major/)

~~~
fiatmoney
I coulda sworn those goalposts were over _there_.

Notice that that blog post references undergraduate grades, and that the
parent to my post, as well as the post to which I link, mentions SAT scores. A
global inflation in teachers' undergraduate grades does not imply those
teachers are unqualified.

Also notice that the blog post I reference, in turn references this in-depth
report on teacher quality.

[http://www.ets.org/Media/Education_Topics/pdf/TQ_full_report...](http://www.ets.org/Media/Education_Topics/pdf/TQ_full_report.pdf)

------
biff
The most amazing thing to me is that if you had a student that demonstrated
extreme aptitude and interest in any other subject in school they'd be looked
at in the best possible light. But if it involves computers, they're a
"hacker".

I'm sorry to see how little this has changed in fifteen years.

~~~
rayiner
If people were doing things outside the authorized rules with their chemistry
sets, for example, you can bet administrators would be pissed about that too.

I don't agree with the school's response, but I also don't buy kids hiding
behind the "aptitude for computers" thing. In high school, I was programming
in C++. Took a class in it. Got praised for it. You can display aptitude and
interest in computers without indulging your adolescent urges to toe the line
with the rules.

------
AbdirizakOGF
I currently go to this school and they actually blocked this specific article,
claiming it contains "prohibited forums content"

------
free2rhyme214
An alternative around this is to use a mobile hotspot but most high school
kids can't afford them.

~~~
Blaine0002
any kid with a data planned cell phone and minor abilities in computers has a
mobile hotspot.

------
jdawg77
More people should be upvoting this. Especially Americans.

Even more so, any American with children, like me. The treatment this guy
received is unethical at best - if the adults in charge don't know what the
(insert expletive here) they are doing when being paid for it, harassing an
educated person, regardless of age, because they are smarter & better with
technology is in no way a solution.

What we need to do is stop educating the Americans we have, "Free speech," if
these policies are reflective of the modern nation state we've built. If
that's not the case and we still value some form of, "Free speech," then the
way this has been handled should be investigated and dealt with.

 _Not_ yet another Benghazi investigation. Seriously.

~~~
coldpie
Mm, I don't think this really has anything to do with free speech. No one's
speech is being restricted here. They're being prevented from doing off-hours
activity on school grounds. Whether that helps or harms in a school's
educational goals is an open question. But it's not a restriction of free
speech in any meaningful way.

What's more concerning to me is school administrators who are so quick with
the stick when they could be using a carrot instead. Give this kid a study
hour to work on stuff with the IT guy. Probably he could do a lot of good work
for the school, effectively for free, and he'd have no reason to keep up the
circumvention game.

Which, to be clear, is what this is. It's fun to break the rules and feel
you're speaking truth to power. I know I did that in high school, even taking
apart a computer to remove the CMOS battery to reset the BIOS password to
launch a different OS. No good reason for it, it's just fun. The trouble is
it's a dangerous game this kid is playing. And it needn't be, they could turn
this into a great learning opportunity.

But no, school administrators keep up their tiny dictatorship image, and this
kid will get expelled or something. Oh well.

~~~
jdawg77
Free speech as in, doing investigation into what policies are and how they are
setup. Read the article, they _are_ restricting speech in the sense that they
aren't sharing what they're doing in monitoring usage of the device, networks,
etc.

Is it so hard to publish the, "Rules of the road?" In my day, we called them,
"Terms of Service," for private companies and public institutions have laws,
etc, that govern their operation. All of that is how the system, near as I've
ever been able to figure out, should function.

Then this happens, when a kid can't actually find out what policies are or
why, or who implemented them, or what rule was triggered to ban / block
certain things, that run counter to the established curriculum...again, read
the article.

My children have multiple passports and I know very well how restrictions work
in multiple countries, having worked in three so far full time for long enough
to need to know. The way the high school in the article is being run, as well
as the opaque nature of the system administrators rules, is abhorrent.

Tax payer money being spent to...enshrine and embiggen the ego of some two bit
hack who can't get a job in the private sector because their technical skills
aren't up to par? From the sound of it, this may be the case. Sorry but
regardless of public or private sector, a person needs to be _qualified_ to
hold the job they are hired to do.

Somebody, please, fire the webmaster and the director here. Then let's start
implementing some transparent policies or dump the notion of, "Free speech."

~~~
pionar
> Then this happens, when a kid can't actually find out what policies are or
> why, or who implemented them, or what rule was triggered to ban / block
> certain things, that run counter to the established curriculum...again, read
> the article.

I did read the article, and there's no mention of what the student did to find
any of this out. Did he ask anyone?

You seem to be jumping to conclusions based on a one-sided account.

My reading of this piece is that it's petulance, a child who doesn't get it
that school internet access is not a right (hell, when I was in high school,
there was one computer in the library that had access at all).

When you use a school's internet service, you're subject to the rules of such
privileges, and the administrator (in this case the DoT) is the final
rulemaker. Don't like it? Do what he's doing now, and get your own internet
service.

~~~
maxerickson
The voters that elect the school board are the final rule makers. Not the
bureaucrats charged with carrying out the policies set by the school board.

The actions of this student are easy to look at as activism designed to
influence those voters.

~~~
sosuke
We see that issue throughout this thread, voters don't get to make the final
rules in most things. They elect the school board, or elect whomever chooses
the school board, and they put their trust in the ideals which that candidate
has sold so that they rules that end up being put in place are most like the
ones the voter would have chosen themselves. If the voters candidate doesn't
win, or their candidate does win but changes his or her tune, that voter has
little to no recourse until the next voting cycle. Voters don't get to set the
minutia.

Furthermore, for smaller government bodies, voters outside of the residential
area for that government body don't have a vote at all! You have to go even
higher to put your faith in a state or county school board candidate.

~~~
maxerickson
Yeah, this idea that democracy is a good thing all on its own (which at least
seems to have gained strength in my lifetime, maybe I've started paying more
attention) is quite dangerous.

It's an important part of our system, but I'm not sure we should celebrate
when important and far reaching decisions are made on a 51/49 basis.

I think we just are talking about slightly different things. Of course
mechanistically, voters, as you say, have to put up with what they get. But
philosophically, their agents (the board and those the board hires) are meant
to act in their interests.

