So… Someone is going to jail for that, right?
Right?
Settled for $610,000…so no. I feel like, given that minors were involved, the settlement should have been on top of criminal charges.
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Always.
And also didn’t go to any of the victims
Says at the bottom, 175k to the first victim to open a case, 10k to the second case and… 475k to the lawyers.
Well, I stand corrected… But Jesus those lawyer fees…
I hate this country.
dont hate your country, hate lawyers.
here’s a quick one: Q: what do you call 500 lawyers at the bottom of a river? A: A good start.
and one more for fun
Q: How do you keep a lawyer from drowning? A: Take your foot off their throat
Usually when you hear about a settlement (and not a plea deal) that means this was a civil case and not a criminal one. A civil case doesn’t weigh in on whether or not criminal charges will be brought.
If enough people push the Attorney General of that state to pursue charges they still could (Edit: it’s been 14 years and the Statute of Limitations is 5 years for wiretapping which I think is the highest possible charge). But there is a higher standard for evidence in criminal trials. Not to mention the defense’s argument would likely be that schools have the right to wiretap students’ issued laptops, so the AG probably doesn’t want this to go to court and end up enshrining such a right when it currently holds civil liability due to the civil case succeeding.
Well if they recorded and student jerking it then the school made cp and. I doubt theor is a limitation on that.
Why tf are your AGs allowed to just ignore crimes? Aren’t there laws to prevent selective enforcement like this?
In our court system, precedent (an existing ruling by a higher court on a similar case) often weighs heavily in future court cases. IIRC the point of this doctrine is fairness and legitimacy by consistency of rulings.
Its weaknesses, however, include the ability to set a bad precedent. For this reason, our AGs sometimes ignore potential cases if they’re not sure they can win.
In other words, this case might not have been quite the slam dunk the headline would suggest.
It’s worth reading the entire article, it just gets worse and worse.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), U.S. Attorney’s Office, and Montgomery County District Attorney all initiated criminal investigations of the matter, which they combined and then closed because they did not find evidence “that would establish beyond a reasonable doubt that anyone involved had criminal intent”.
That’s not even close to the worst thing in the article, but GG justice system. I’ll remember this one day when I’m in court. “Well I didn’t have criminal intent.”
That’s a defense now?? One that removes the need to even have a trial at all??
The article actually goes easy on them. The first plaintiff sued because the student was brought into the principal’s office and told they were being suspended for drug use, and as evidence showed a photo of them eating something in their room. It turned out to be Mike and Ike’s candy. The family was so upset they were spying on the child in their bedroom that it escalated to an investigation and then the scandal unfolded.
The school tried to backpedal and claim that the app takes photos on a timer and they had no idea, and this was proven to be a lie in court when they showed the IT training video explaining how proud they were of the webcam snooping feature.
It gets even worse: During the investigation, it was discovered that at least one person had copied videos and photos onto an external hard drive and taken them. The investigation never discovered who it was, or how many people had made copies; They just knew that files had been copied to at least one external storage drive.
The implication being that all of the teenage girls had their laptops open in their bedrooms, and at least one random employee had copies of their photos and videos.
The implication being that all of the teenage girls had their laptops open in their bedrooms, and at least one random employee had copies of their photos and videos.
Sure but they couldn’t prove criminal intent so it’s ok.
/s
Its been a defence for several hundred years, in fact! Showing intent is one of the three things you need to establish in every criminal case for it to be considered valid. Fuck the cops for dropping this case though, how in hell was there no intent to commit a crime here wtf.
Weird, I’ve literally always heard “ignorance of the law is no excuse to break the law”, which seems to imply criminal intent doesn’t matter. Only that the action that was take was illegal.
There are strict liability crimes. Like if you admit to shooting someone but maintain it was an accident. You won’t get a murder charge, (or murder 1 depending on state) but you are going to get time in prison.
It’s not intent to break the law, it’s intent to do what you did. If I walk out of a store with a can of tuna I didn’t pay for, that’s shoplifting, right? Well, not necessarily.
If I walk into a store, pick it up off the shelf, hide it in my jacket, and dart for the exit, probably.
If my toddler slipped it into my jacket pocket, and I didn’t notice, probably not.
If I put it in my jacket pocket because my toddler started to run away, I forgot about it, and paid for a cart of groceries… Maybe? But unlikely to convince a jury beyond a reasonable doubt that it wasn’t an accident.
It’s not intent to break the law, it’s intent to do what you did. If I walk out of a store with a can of tuna I didn’t pay for, that’s shoplifting, right? Well, not necessarily.
But they did mean to take pictures of minors in the privacy of their bedrooms in the name of stopping petty theft which I’m doubtful would have occurred on any meaningful scale in the first place. Whether they meant it “criminally” seems immaterial here. I think they got off exceptionally light, and it’s a travesty of justice. You won’t convince me otherwise.
If I won’t convince you otherwise there’s not much point in discussing anything. I’ll throw out one point I mentioned in another comment nonetheless…
From what I remember of this school district’s case, the laptops were assigned the laptops for free to use at school. If they wanted to take the laptops home, they needed to pay an additional fee for extra insurance costs. This student did not. There is a reasonable argument that the school was tracking down its missing property. Maybe you won’t be convinced otherwise, but a jury (really, a single jury member) very well could.
Well…you see…here’s the thing…
Fuck you!
~Sincerely, the rich and elite, which control the legal system which is not meant to ever be in YOUR favor. It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.
System working as intended.
The thing is, those people working IT at this school aren’t members of the rich elite or else they wouldn’t be working there. The parents of the children spied on are members of the rich elite, so it’s strange that their concerns got tossed in the dumpster here.
You (and I) are, unfortunately, not rich enough to ignore the law. Seems some others are.
Intent to perform an action.
If they legitimately didn’t know there was spying software on the computers and it was discovered later then they didn’t intend to do it. But they did intend to spy on the students, and it doesn’t matter if they thought it was legal.
“Strict liability” crimes are the exception to that rule. A lot of relatively minor crimes, like code violations or letting minors into a bar, are in that category.
Not every criminal case. There’s strict liability crimes, the most well-known being statutory rape.
Its always been intent. If you pay with counterfeit bills but didn’t realize because you got them from the shop that gave you change, you didn’t intend to do fraud.
Intent matters, always has.
But they did mean to take pictures of minors in the privacy of their bedrooms in the name of stopping petty theft which I’m doubtful would have occurred on any meaningful scale in the first place. Whether they meant it “criminally” seems immaterial here. I think they got off exceptionally light, and it’s a travesty of justice. You won’t convince me otherwise.
I feel very sure we have prisons full of people who didn’t mean to do whatever they did to be there.
Of course, but in this case, their intent was to spy on children.
Yes
It seems like it to you and me. At a trial, we’d hear their side of the story. Maybe there’s some explanation that could make it somewhat reasonable, and you would have a hard time convincing a jury beyond a reasonable doubt.
If I remember correctly, students had to pay extra to take their laptops home, I believe an insurance fee of some kind. The student whose family filed a lawsuit did not pay that. The laptop was supposed to be at school, but was not. In that case, there may have been reasonable doubt that the school was trying to track down its missing property that should not be outside of school grounds.
I fully understand your point.
But on the other hand, we’re in a period where the people doing this haven’t experienced it themselves. Nor have they learned about this in school. It’s all so new and so many people are ignorant and stupid when it comes to technology.
We need cases like these to set precedents so we can define something as criminal intent. People should be allowed to make a mistake at least once, and the government actually recognizes this.
In a much more polite way than I usually say it, we can agree to disagree here. I can also see your point.
But, I think any rational adult in the room should have said, “So we’re going to deploy software on computers that kids use in their bedrooms that will randomly or on demand take pictures of whatever is happening in that room? No fucking way, it’s not worth gestures around compared to the possibility that a couple laptops get stolen along the way. We can find another approach.”
No one should need an understanding of technology to understand why that is bad, and the WIkipedia entry makes it very plain that key figures in the decision knew that was precisely what was being done.
I’m sorry, this is the George Costanza defense.
You’re actually quite right.
Hang them!
At least fucking fire them and make them go to court before you let them off the hook.
Ahh i remember the days of the school shitbook pros. That kids is why when 2020 rolled around and all my classes went to online and they wanted me to use there laptops provided. I made a disk image of the ssd and ran it all in a VM with usb passthrough. Cant acess my webcam if there is none!
You know, a piece of black tape would’ve been a lot easier.
Or if computer manufacturers just put in a hardware disconnect for the camera and mic. Like Lenovo used to do with the wifi switch.
That wont help with recording the audio from the mic
Hardware manufactures could (and should) put separate mic and cam LEDs wired directly in line with (wire in parallel to)the power circuits for the mic and camera. They won’t, but they should. Best they ever do is a digitally controlled LED that is sketchy as fuck, for the camera only.
Framework does. Switches for the mic and camera both electrically disconnect the devices: https://community.frame.work/t/the-1080p-webcam/157
It’s a bit more expensive, because a pure electrical switch wouldn’t age well and you’d get bad connections sometimes. They implemented an optical switch that does the same job. That’s probably whole pennies per unit more expensive, and ain’t HP got time for that.
That’s actually really cool. Framework will likely be my next laptop.
The worst part about this IMO is the school system teaching digital dependency on proprietary software vendors.
Big tech salivates at the thought of being a child’s “first”… much like other kinds of child groomers.
They’ve gotta use something. There are only 3 choices, and one of those has less than 3% market share. Of the two choices left, Mac is the better choice.
If you issue laptops, market share should not be your consideration except for availability of programs and tech support.
Linux has plenty of both, and the obvious advantage of being open source and transparent.
Btw, many governments are currently transitioning to Linux for that very reason.
Schools are going to train kids on systems that they may encounter in the business world, and their chances of encountering a Linux DE are vanishingly small. Idk how many governments are transitioning to Linux, but the United States government wasn’t doing so when this US school issued laptops. I love Linux and use it on all my computers, but I’m realistic enough to understand why the school issued Mac or Windows.
I see your point, thanks.
On the other hand, who if not state could help Linux adoption? If such programs would become universal, students would train on Linux, and businesses would be compelled to adapt.
This is such a bad take. You’re seriously comparing the purchase of a tool brand for students to child grooming? Jesus dude. A computer is simply a tool, and Apple made one for an education market and price that was complete and convenient for that purpose. This is just as “bad” as them relying on all Pearson branded materials. Are there problems there? Yes, obviously. Pearson has market-based motives to keep schools on their materials and so they have tests that lean in on their text books and it’s all kinda gross. But it’s not like the answer is “let’s all just read Wikipedia in class” or “let’s compare all the different source books and find the real truth” as great as that would be, it’s just not realistic and the one reference isn’t particularly bad, it’s just not the best possible. I guess all that to say chill he fuck out, the solution to everything isn’t open source.
No. It is not a bad take. Just look at candy cigarettes.
Oh it’s just advertising? Advertising is brainwashing, and nothing more. It should be outright banned. Especially campaigns targeting children.
The marketing wasn’t to children? It was to schools? They still do market to children (like the iPhone and messaging) but CHILD GROOMING?!? Fuck off. Trying to sell legos to children so they’ll be hooked on high-quality plastic toys is also grooming? Y’all are fucking stupid.
Hit a nerve? I stand by my assertion that “tech in education” initiatives by predatory vendors is akin to grooming children. Get them to speak the language of your product early, so that they’ll be a customer for life. IIRC the term is called “Cradle to grave marketing”[1] [2]. Leverage imprinting along the way for good measure. I get why the Googles and the Microsofts of the world are so eager to get their products into schools. That doesn’t mean that I agree with it.
I’m not saying marketing to children isn’t predatory. But this is a tool they need in school. It’s not practical at all to suggest they should be building computers and compiling their own OSes for school. Selling a product for use as a tool to children isn’t grooming. It’s definitely a marketing tactic, but so is everything?
and kids need stress relief, so why not let joe camel give it to them?
So in this argument, Macs are tabaco and Linux would be… vaping? I’m not exactly sure what the absolutely necessary stress relief product would be in which a certain brand and an open source alternative would make sense to be comparable to cigarettes.
Maybe more like Jansport. Is jansport grooming kids to like a specific brand of backpacks? Or Nike for specific shoe brands? Or Kellogg and Tony the Tiger? All of these things pray on social expectations and the impressionable nature of children. Just because the school is providing fucking Lucern milk doesn’t mean they’re grooming kids to have a fondness and expectation for that milk brand. I understand this isn’t’ a popular opinion on the fedi, and I’m not fond of the big tech brands shitty tactics. But you’re all unrealistic dipshits.
you’re saying we should give kids cigarettes? or something like cigarettes? maybe kids don’t need to be addicted to things?
if you really need to keep this metaphor going, linux is, like, meditation or cognitive behavioral therapy or having friends, because its generally good for you, and doesn’t lock you into a bullshit proprietary ecosystem like tobacco or macs do.
see, the thing about lucerne milk is, if im making a milkshake, and I run out of lucerne milk but have an unopened bag of canadian milk, I can pour in the weird-ass canadian milk (spilling half of it because what kind of freaks put milk in a bag?) and it will work and be fine. because its just a company selling milk. all the milk is just milk. milk, in fact, is interoperable, and open if not free. hell, I can make milk if I really desperately want to.
if I have an apple product, and want to make it work with a non-apple-approved product, im going to have to fight their engineers at every step. fuck, getting them to start using FUCKING TCP/IP was like pulling teeth.
It’s not practical at all to suggest they should be building computers and compiling their own OSes for school.
Who was suggesting custom built PCs or Gentoo for schools?
comparison to pedophiles? maybe unfair. comparison to big tobacco? on fucking point.
a computer is a tool, sure, and the hardware is largely opaque at the high school level, excepting massive nerds
but every single one of these big tech companies runs all their shit on proprietary ecosystem lock-in, and keeping customers infantilized.
anything that isn’t open source should be fucking banned from schools.
I am absolutely not terribly invested here. But I wanted to kick something around (I opened the wiki and just decided I don’t care that much to invest time into this but it is a thought kicking around my brain so I figured I’ll express it here) - I am wondering if the school that did this is relatively wealthy. As Macbooks aren’t cheap, and I think most schools were tossing around chromebooks instead right? So perhaps the reason why nobody ultimately got in the appropriate amount of trouble for this crime is because they themselves were people of a certain status. Or knew how to grease the right palms.
It’s a suburb just outside Philadelphia and has some very wealthy parts. Kobe Bryant grew up there.
Yeah, see. I’ve seen some schools in my travels that make me want to slap someone. Because I am astonished at how far the haves and the have nots are apart. But also, I’d say in general whenever the sentence never seems to align with the punishment you can bet there’s some classist mechanisms in the works.
The program began in the 2009 school year. The first Cr-48 was released in December 2010.
That sounds unlikely to me. If the school is wealthy, then so are their students’ families.
Yeah Lower Merion is rich. It’s where Kobe came from.
The beef?
No, the rapist.
Chrome book my kid had was sending regular traffic out to some address that belonged to a scholastic vendor. Even when the device was idle. I blocked that site at the router. Thanks pfBlockerng. A few days later he had another chrome book needing our WiFI password. That is when the chrome book got its own VLAN and SSID. The SSID name was compromised. I also tightened the screws on google workspace. They tried one more time with a another chrome book before they gave up on whatever they were after. I have no doubt they wasted some time trying to overcome it. I still treated it like a wiretap. None of my precautions stopped me from putting tape over the mic and camera.
I was a little disappointed they never inquired about it. The fact they didn’t pretty much guarantees what ever they were doing wasn’t required.
I remember spending entire days trying to break the horrible ROM protect on those pieces of garbage when they first started popping up at every school district. Google got wise fast and separated write protect into its own software only flag inside the organizational stuff for any Chromebooks linked to a domain.
I did a nicer one recently which was a samsung chromebook which involved completely disassembling the entire thing and removing the heatsink just to be able to remove a tiny ass piece of conducting electric tape to disable write protect.
Even after that I had to very carefully rewrite the shitty google bootloader with libreboot if I wanted to run literally anything else without making a google approved kpart file which would only run on google’s compiled kernel.
I remember when the news came out on the radio. The school reported to parents what their kids have been up to.
Tsk tsk. Rule number one of espionage (and hacking), never show your hand. Anything that tips off the mark and makes them suspicious that they are being watched will ruin everything.
What’s the point of espionage if you can’t even gossip
You joke but it’s a real thing. When the allies (chief among them, Alan Turing) cracked Enigma, they had to decide not to act on certain bits of information, lest they reveal that they can crack it.
Same reason the Brits said they’re so good at detecting German planes at night was because they eat lots of carrots. It was actually RADAR.
“I like Apple devices because they respect my privacy”
Except for the part where all that’s been preempted by organizational settings.
Out of the box, Apple does fairly well.
Gotta respect a company that tells the US government to pound sand with regularity (when they want a phone cracked)
“Apple gave data to law enforcement 90% of the time”
Apple’s apparent privacy stance is just marketing
Aren’t they required to by law?
Without a warrant no, but for the most part they do it willingly.
Gotta respect a company
No you don’t
Fair point! Fuck 'em. Theres always more reasons to NOT respect a corporation than there are to respect them.
It’s worth noting that in recent MacBooks the camera can’t turn on if the led is off. It’s an electrical thing, not a software thing.
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An LED is pretty damn simple and there’s no reason it would even be possible to control the voltage going to it. May as well worry about hackers finding a way to make a physical shutter transparent.
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I dont know why few manufacturers dont just put a simple sliding shutter over the camera.
There is an end user support concern with this. I prefer sliders, but users will put in tickets saying their camera doesn’t work.
I still buy lenovo just for this professionally.
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My current work laptop has a shutter built in which heavily blurs the camera, so it’s relatively obvious why your camera isn’t working but you still get some level of privacy
that could work, or perhaps have a cut-out on the camera cover that blurs all light going in and has the words written on it “shutter closed” or something. Digital way built into the driver is probably easiest.
Am I the only person that immediately covers their webcam with Scotch’s Magic Tape? It frosts the image so that it doesn’t look like it has been covered but rather that it is extremely smudged and thus only silhouettes can be somewhat discerned.
Thankfully most laptops I see now come with a built in physical cover for the webcam.
And in context of this post…Mac laptops do not. So the scotch tape (or black tape) idea is sound.
The issue with those is that you might get told to uncover your camera. With Magic Tape you can always say that it is uncovered. Light goes through, so you can pretend that maybe the camera is busted.
If they tell you to uncover your camera at home then we got problems.
All the time in the corporate world. We have clients that require their employees to be on camera during Teams calls. We have it under our agreement with our clients that being on camera is at our employee’s discretion. Because clients often provide us with laptops to access their networks, we cover our cameras with tape and ask that the laptop be put in our storage cases when not in use. Also, if one of our employees is working on more than one client, no two client laptops can be on and out of their case at the same time.
Yeah but that’s a defined period on a video communication app. If I’m getting changed in my room and I get a message about my camera…
Hey maggoty!
Hi Maggot! Slow day?
If I’m getting changed in my room and I get a message about my camera…
That is unjustifiable but not what I mean. An ex colleague of mine runs a company with some really questionable policies, but if you want to work there you have to agree. One of those policies is that your camera has to be on at all times during business hours. If you live in a studio apartment, then you better get dressed in the bathroom.
Again though, connected to an agreed time frame and with compensation. That’s a shit contract but one nonetheless. You keep bringing these examples and it’s going to start looking like you’re okay with the school spying on kids.
We put pimple patches on everything, they just fit right on. The acid might be affecting something, but stuff still seems to be okay. Patch on the mic, patch on the camera.
*Patches pop right off and are translucent. So yeah, same idea here. But also magic tape is the tits and idk why the hell people are downvoting Jo. Ya ding-dongs!
Cut that reddit bullshit out.
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DELL laptops are neat in that they let you disable all these in the firmware.
Even neater if there is a hardware switch to enable/disable on the fly.
it is best to switch to Linux so the webcam doesn’t work even if you wanted to
(old joke I know)
Dell work laptops and all in ones have had a manual slide shutter for years.
But not mic, the mic and camera should have physical ways to disable.
Maybe if it was something like this where it’s not my laptop but I’m not worried about people hacking my personal computer
Nah, all the nerds I know do it. Not that you’re a nerd Jo, you’re cool af. But nerds can be cool, too! But Jo…ain’t no nerd!
As a cybersecurity specialist even using my phone kind of give me the creeps. Anyone anytime can access your camera easily, BUT if the item was issued by a third party always assume they are spying. I’ve seen this happend in huge corporations that you would not believe do that. Also a 20 something IT support guy have access to it for sure.
Be safe, if you cant format or disable the driver for microphone and camera just turn it off when naked please
Turning it off is zero guarantee. Get a physical cover for the camera. If you can’t get a physical cover, then put electrical tape over it.
After I had turned off the webcam in my system settings, my boss twice commented on the shirt I was wearing while WFH. So then I glued two layers of duct tape over the entire upper rim of the laptop, and it never happened again. They did, however, seem inexplicably distraught when we had the next Teams call.
Yeah, drivers are easy to reinstall.
IMHO this is/was a total shit show by the school district. The student intern knew better; hope they are in charge now!
I want to but I made the mistake of buying a phone that uses the camera as the light sensor…
Not gonna lie… You had me there at the beginning!
Dell and other Windows based OEM laptop manufactures have built in camera covers now-a-days. Just saying.
All right it says in the wiki that this all kicked off because a kid was getting disciplined at school for something they did in their bedroom and no details are given about that part. That alone seems really messed up
I do not know you but lets say its your job. And they gave you a laptop. Do you think you should be punished for whatever it is you do in your bedroom?
No but that’s like a major red flag type of thing. I was wondering how they get away with that to begin with
More reason as to why if I ever become a parent, I’m personally setting up and monitoring my kids devices to ensure they aren’t being spies on through their cameras/webcams because a school wants to know what’s going on in their private life.
“hey honey, here’s your first computer. no parental controls, but you’re only allowed to run arch, and im doing a pen test every weekend, with an attack that will disable features I can reach for three days. good luck!”
edit: alternatively: “there are parental controls on the router and I’ll be switching them up regularly. you’re not allowed to look at porn until you’re a better hacker than your parents.”
Just don’t. So many problems solved. Potentially infinite problems solved.
Stick-on slide shutter for the camera will do the trick
I’ll admit I’m a little paranoid, so I’d still be checking other things like mic.
Heh, just keep the laptop shut and use external monitor kbd and mouse.
Not all kids can afford that.
Yeah, a piece of tape is much cheaper
Microphone: hello
