[clug] [OT] ABC's Law Report: remote webcam activation on student laptops

[steve jenkin]

Thought some CLUG'ers might be interested.

A School in the USA issued students Macbooks with remote webcam
activation (to help locate if stolen) - but didn't inform students.

Deputy principal pinged a student for "taking pills" in his *bedroom*.
Whole passel of trouble.

s

<http://www.abc.net.au/rn/lawreport/stories/2010/2888868.htm>


Damien Carrick: It sounds like technological supervision is an important
aspect. There's a duty of care to do whatever you can in that regard,
but in the US, I believe that there's a school in Pennsylvania, where
supervision went wildly out of control. Can you tell me about that case,
and what the pitfalls can be when schools try and go too far in the
other direction?

Robyn Treyvaud: This was a district in the US, that as part of their
technology offerings, had a one-to-one laptop program. So all the high
school students were given a MacBook, and what they weren't told when
they signed the documentation around receiving these was in fact that
there had been webcam activation software put on these computers, and
while a few students had noticed that strange things were happening
around the webcam, little lights were going on, no-one really questioned
why they were there,

and it only came to the attention of the Lower Merion School District
that a student was approached by the deputy principal and she had an
image of him in his bedroom,

and he alleges that he was only taking sort of little white candy
things, she accused him of taking drugs,

and he then said to her, 'So how did you get that image?' so of course
she then had to disclose,

'Well, we've got these webcams that we're activating'. The reason why
they apparently used that webcam activation software was that they were
losing a lot of computers, and they felt that if they could take a
webcam screen shot of the environment that that computer was in, well
they would be able to locate those computers.

Now the young student involved in this incident went straight to his
parents and it's escalated now to the Supreme Court.

The issues around it are that the images that were collected by the
server from which this activation was occurring,

could also include images of the students in their bedrooms in a state
of undress.

That then constitutes child pornography, and it's a very murky case,

if you like, because no-one knows how many images were taken, there's
certainly allegations made that some of them were of laptops that hadn't
even been recorded as missing, and so I think how this plays out in US
courts is going to be a very interesting precedent for us all to be
mindful of.

And I guess the questions that I keep being asked is

'Well how do we know that this is not happening in Australia?' or

'How do we know that this is not happening in my school?'

-- 
Steve Jenkin, Info Tech, Systems and Design Specialist.
0412 786 915 (+61 412 786 915)
PO Box 48, Kippax ACT 2615, AUSTRALIA

sjenkin at canb.auug.org.au http://members.tip.net.au/~sjenkin