
School district: Spy Webcams activated 42 times - jacquesm
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-10457126-71.html
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jacquesm
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.

~~~
vault_
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.

~~~
jacquesm
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 ?)

~~~
vault_
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).

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patio11
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.

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

~~~
lotharbot
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.

------
27182818284
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!"

