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

[Troy Heland]

There are other questions here that should be asked:

If the student in question was taking pills in the nude would the Deputy
Principle still have confronted the student with the images?  I doubt it.

Is it against school policy/laws to take pills of any sort in your own
bedroom outside of school hours?  Is it here in Australia?  I don't know.

In Australia we seem to stand strong against ethically and morally
questionable practices.  I remember there being reports a while back about
security footage in a schools toilets (just at the basins) to catch smokers
etc.  Which was (quite rightly) found to be unlawful (If memory serves me
correctly I think it was in Melbourne...).  I doubt any high school would
even attempt to implement this in Australia.

Troy Heland
OPC IT



On Wed, May 5, 2010 at 8:51 AM, steve jenkin <sjenkin at canb.auug.org.au>wrote:

> 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
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