I'm glad that somebody is still tracking this story, and it hasn't just dropped on the ground.
Too often, it seems, a news story outrages us, but the furor quickly dies down. In the end, nobody even notices the ritual scapegoat.
A little while back, somebody proposed here (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1183587 ) a web app that would allow us to follow a news story entire life. This reminds of that, and why it would be a good idea.
One reason the furor over this died down so quickly is that different stories reported the facts differently. My friends and I all debated what had really happened. The student believed the webcam had taken pictures of him acting inappropriate without his knowledge or consent (and no parents were notified of this 'feature' of school-provided laptops).
However, it was not clear in initial reports if the student had actually done something and was spied on, or if he had taken pictures and shared them in school. Some schools have policies where students can be disciplined for violations off school grounds in instances of bullying or disseminating "ssext messages" from their peers. It was not clear, from the reporting, if this was the case.
The fact that the media is now reporting the facts, and the schools thought it was actually a good idea to spy on high school students in their own homes, shows a kind of unparalleled stupidity in both a legal standpoint and technological one.
Also, considering the statistic on how many children of the ages 14-18 "sext" one another, this software, the school's servers, the IT staff and the administrators could all be considered to be part of a child pornography network, if in fact any of those kids decided to "privately model" for another student using their laptop. Aside from the civil aspect of it, I would be contacting my state's AG to investigate whether or not any of those laws were broken.
> the school's servers, the IT staff and the administrators could all be considered to be part of a child pornography network
No, please lets not go to that silly place.
It detracts from the real child pornography issues.
We don't need CP laws to convict these people of a crime; the crime they have actually committed.
If the administrator was taking pictures of them nude or in sexual positions and then storing them; i.e. with the intent of viewing them sexually, then nail him.
But otherwise this is well covered by voyeurism law. A much more appropriate charge.
where there is smoke, there is fire. Sounds to me like what initially was an ability to view students working in school quickly digressed into illegal abuse of the deployment. That district's insurance company must be terrified at this point, because lawyers are going to come out of the woodwork to jump on this one.
The presence of a nude photo shouldn't matter. America has lost sight of intent as a critical component in crime. The administrators of this system intentionally photographed minors in their bedrooms without their knowledge and without any consent. What the photos show is irrelevant. The obsession about the act over the intent is why we have highschool kids getting booked on child pornography charges for receiving naked pictures of their classmates while something like this hangs in the balance. This is a clear case of criminal privacy violation and misconduct towards minors, regardless what the pictures show.
"The presence of a nude photo shouldn't matter. America has lost sight of intent as a critical component in crime."
Absolutely. The intent was to photograph kids in their own homes and without their knowledge. That is absolutely criminal. If there were no nude photos taken, it's just by chance. They should be prosecuted just as if there were.
If you put a gun to somebody's head and pull the trigger, whether the gun jams or fires shouldn't matter, legally. You acted with murderous intent.
This is incorrect, because incentives are important. If we don't hold people responsible for their actions, even when their actions are due to negligence or incompetence, then we build a society that is intentionally negligent and incompetent.
When (hypothetically) some teenage girl's nude photos wind up on the web, I don't think that a "sorry, that was an accident" is going to make her feel much better. When people are injured due to the actions of others, the injured parties are owed some redress.
We don't want incompetents running things, so we need to make sure that they are weeded out. Now, it may be that "oops" is a mitigating factor, but it is in no way an excuse.
A friend of mine was doing a tax protest many years ago, handing out fliers in front of the post office. He was arrested for this. He later sued the town and the police officers for violating his civil rights. He won several thousand dollars from the town, but the police officers got off. The explanation was that it wasn't their fault because they hadn't been trained for this scenario. Now, knowing that this is a viable excuse, our police officers have every incentive to avoid training. If they get trained, they're liable for their behavior, but staying ignorant is a get-out-of-jail-free card.
Edit: I may have misunderstood you. I first read this to say that a hypothetical nude photo wouldn't be a big deal, because the school didn't mean to do that. Maybe you're saying the opposite, that it doesn't matter if there is NO such photo, because it should be obvious that it could easily happen.
> Edit: I may have misunderstood you. I first read this to say that a hypothetical nude photo wouldn't be a big deal, because the school didn't mean to do that. Maybe you're saying the opposite, that it doesn't matter if there is NO such photo, because it should be obvious that it could easily happen.
I took it that GP is stating that we shouldn't only consider this to be a big deal if nude photos show up. We shouldn't have to hope that the 'child porn' card is played to have people suffer real consequences for what they did at that school.
Nevertheless, I am torn in how to response to CWuestefeld's point. I want to say that it would be just as bad to obsess over intent without worrying about act, but I'm not sure that's true.
Even in the cases presented (accidentally posting a nude photo and arresting someone who had not committed a crime), the crime is still not just in the act itself. The crime is also in the negligence involved. A negligent police officer should be punished even if no one is mistakenly arrested. If someone negligently handles nude photos (I'm not sure why you'd have them in the first place, but let's leave that aside for now), they should be punished even if the photos don't get leaked.
If social security numbers are leaked on a public website, those responsible should be punished even if no one loaded the page. If, however, a company is absolutely devoted to security but someone still breaks in and steals social security numbers, the company's punishment should be less, even though the act (social security numbers falling into the wrong hands) is less bad than the negligent company's act (social security numbers being mishandled but never falling into the wrong hands). I'd rather my social security number wasn't leaked, but I'd place greater trust in a company which handled it correctly and still got broken into than one that handled it recklessly but got lucky.
Really, I think that's the point I want to make above all: Luck should have no bearing on the law.
I guess it boils down to people needing to act responsibly. We must each fulfill those responsibilities that are incumbent upon us. If I'm entrusted with those SS#s, I'd better take care of them. If I took reasonable measures to do so but they're lost, I'm less bad then if I was irresponsible and just lucked out.
It is true that Hussein did use chemical weapons, with a wink and a nod from the Reagan administration, against Kurdish civilians in the Iran-Iraq war. However, in this context, the question of whether Hussein "had weapons of mass destruction" is clearly a question of whether he had them leading up to the 2003 US-led invasion, which, to the best of anybody's knowledge, he did not. After the invasion the Iraq Survey Group concluded that Iraq had destroyed all major stockpiles of WMDs and had completely ceased production in 1991.
An increasing number of revisionist apologists are intentionally conflating whether Hussein ever had chemical weapons, and whether he had them in 2003, which was the (ostensible) justification for the war. Let's not let such slimy rhetorical tactics slide.
The district has said it turned on the camera in Robbins' computer because his family had not paid the $55 insurance fee and he was not authorized to take the laptop home.
This is puzzling. First of all, if he didn't pay the fee, why did he even have access to it to take it home? Secondly, if you already know where the laptop is and who has it, what's the point of turning on the camera? (Other than to satisfy your penchant for voyeurism)
Absolutely disgusting. I'm happy this case is being treated seriously and that (as it appears) there's the hope of action being taken against these school administrators.
I've thought for years that parents place far too much trust in public-school staff.
There is a tendency in society for people to blame the victim. You hear about rape crimes, and people ask what the girl was wearing with the idea that somehow she was 'asking for it.' I try to view the situation from both sides as much as possible, but I do not advocate blaming the vicitim in most circumstances.
In this particular case, it is stupid for the school system to even implement this policy in the first place. There are multiple issues with this other than the spying aspect.
(1) Why is the school letting the kids use laptops in the first place? What is wrong with desktop machines that are cheaper that stay at the school? Is there really a significant advantage given to learning or is it worth it to the taxpayer? I highly doubt a positive correlation exists between computer use and higher grades.
(2) They could simply have installed other tracking software or reported the IP address back to a server have the laptops found if stolen. They could have required some form of collateral or payment if a student lost a laptop or if the laptop was stolen. It does not make sense to justify such a method of tracking when other (better) solutions exist.
(3) The system was only 'activated' 42* times, but it took thousands of pictures? You only need one picture to identify someone. They were actively spying on these kids.
Besides all this, why the heck do they need pictures to track a device? A picture of a bedroom doesn't even tell you where the laptop is. A GPS reading does, and is far less invasive (though I would still insist on the students being notified about GPS tracking).
I think they thought that they would get a photo of the thief and it would make it easier to prosecute. (And giving that photo to the police would put that person on their radar as well).
WRT 3: If you think about it, a system has to be in "phone home" mode when it leaves (the school LAN in this case) for an anti-theft system to work.
As I recall from my interpretation of what the school's sysadmin said (and perhaps others), when the system connects to the net and it's not the normal LAN, it automatically starts taking pictures and sending those, screen shots and the usual (IP address etc.) to the school's servers. But I may be wrong.
ADDED: But I'm pretty sure I'm right, these are Macs with their hardwired "camera on" lights. Which many students noticed blinking and were assured was merely a "glitch". At least according to many accounts ... I guess we'll find out in the upcoming trials.
"Activated" in that context is using the theft server software to look at that already stored info. The only question then would be if administrators also looked at the pictures in one way or another outside of the scope of a "stolen" or whatever laptop.
Whichever, it sounds like some of the were having a little too much fun spying on their charges. Which should have told them something....
WRT 1: There's the theory that laptop use in the classroom is good. I think this is bogus (it's been much discussed in general) but they were working on that theory. Laptops also allow work to be completed away from fixed workstations, including obviously in this case at home. Use of the laptops was mandatory for various classes.
WRT 2: They did require some sort of collateral or payment, but still had situations where a laptop was out there without it. I think this lawsuit is one of those cases, or they are now claiming so.
> As I recall from my interpretation of what the school's sysadmin said (and perhaps others), when the system connects to the net and it's not the normal LAN, it automatically starts taking pictures and sending those, screen shots and the usual (IP address etc.) to the school's servers. But I may be wrong.
Wouldn't it make more sense to query the school system to see if the laptop is flagged as stolen before using the camera?
That's the failure in that logic. "Purely from a security viewpoint," it would make sense to strip all airline passengers naked and force them to stow all their luggage/clothes (i.e. no carry-ons), and have armed security agents staring them down the entire flight.
Hmmm, that brings up the question "Can this software ever be moral or legal?"
I.e. if you were to use it outside of the context of a school, there's still the possibility a minor might steal your laptop, set it up in his bedroom, have legal (for him and her) XXX with another minor....
In the above case I think you haven't broken the spirit of US child porn laws (that they are born illegal because they can't be taken without hurting the minor(s) in question), but I could be wrong. Legally your case is much iffier. Morally it's stronger, but how much so?
I've heard of more than one hacker installing remote webcam software on their laptops, to track it if it were lost or stolen. The commenters seem to think this is the same sort of thing. Obviously anyone who's been following this story, or has read that article carefully, knows there's a whole bunch of legal and moral issues involved, but it's easy to get the impression from casually reading the article that it was simply a matter of tracking stolen property.
It saddens me that this is necessary. It wasn't long ago that Latin was part of the standard curriculum in grammar schools.
The people
For clarity: This is my answer, not the answer given by Plato (who argues that the guardians should guard themselves) or answer from Juvenal (who implicitly takes the position that this is an impossible problem).
Imho, for the same reason that schools shouldn't only teach OOP langs.
Ideas are expressed differently in different languages and there are often important nuances, where the real message is to be found, which are lost. For instance, it might have more of the intended effect to translate it as: "Who is watching the watchers?". A little paranoia here or there... today, the idea of 'guards' is pretty benign.
That Latin is a foundational language for most of the West is also an important consideration. It enables people to understand written or verbal communications which use words they haven't encountered before... Something like being able to understand a programming language you've never written in by virtue of its apparent syntax and flow control. A good illustration might be the use of "for".. you have for each, for x in y, or for(;;). Knowing the "root", "for", pretty much explains how to decode the ()'s contents in the lesser English-like C style.
Thirdly, there are many great ideas written in Latin. Those ideas have profound things to say and we risk cutting ourselves off, as a people, or maybe more importantly as individuals, from "lessons learned".
> Imho, for the same reason that schools shouldn't only teach OOP langs.
If you're going for linguistic diversity, why not go all-out and learn something completely unrelated to Latin? Maybe one of the Asian languages, for example. I know one guy who says he thinks differently when he speaks Mandarin than he does when he speaks English. Maybe that would be a little too hard, compared to Latin?
> Thirdly, there are many great ideas written in Latin. Those ideas have profound things to say and we risk cutting ourselves off, as a people, or maybe more importantly as individuals, from "lessons learned".
Surely we, as a people, can afford a few decent translators?
Because learning Latin trains the mind in logical thought.
Because studying Latin helps people learn about the grammatical structures which they use in their native tongue without understanding.
Because understanding Latin makes it much easier to learn any of the many Latin-influenced languages, or even to guess at what text means without knowing the language.
Because knowing Latin is a prerequisite for learning much of European history from primary sources.
> Because learning Latin trains the mind in logical thought.
How? Is there something magical about Latin? Would other, less dead languages have the same effect?
> Because studying Latin helps people learn about the grammatical structures which they use in their native tongue without understanding.
That's hardly unique to Latin.
> Because understanding Latin makes it much easier to learn any of the many Latin-influenced languages, or even to guess at what text means without knowing the language.
Why not learn another Latin-derived modern language, instead? You get some of that same effect, and you learn a language that isn't dead.
> Because knowing Latin is a prerequisite for learning much of European history from primary sources.
How many people are going to want to do that, ever? Consider the opportunity cost of learning Latin for those who won't. And then, of the people who will want to read those primary sources, how many of them would benefit from being able to read them in Latin rather than in a translation?
Because learning Latin trains the mind in logical thought.
[citation needed]
Really, there has been experimental research on this subject, and the best considered conclusion is that Latin doesn't have any particular virtue in training the mind in logical thought.
Note (as anyone who reads my HN profile will see) that I by no means disparage the study of foreign languages, dead or alive.
>Because studying Latin helps people learn about the grammatical structures which they use in their native tongue without understanding.
It would be much more helpful just to study those grammatical structures directly in the native tongue. Studying the grammar of your own language via latin is just an odd way of doing it. English and latin are not very similar grammatically.
Think of latin as the foundation of French, Italian, modern day Romanian, Spanish and a whole lot of other languages to a lesser extent.
Understanding even only the rudiments of Latin will give you tremendous insight in to the historical development of languages and will help you a lot in learning them as spoken today.
So, essentially, learning Latin will give you a bunch of cognates that may be very useful if you then go on to learn French, Italian, etc.? I can see how this would be useful if you wanted to follow the linguistic evolution of those languages, but if you want to learn to speak them, wouldn't it be more effective to learn those languages directly? Since they have common roots, I imagine that learning one of them would give some advantage when you go to learn the next one.
And yet if someone had not translated it, you could have googled for a translation and maybe learned a little Latin in the process. Which is basically how I learned enough Latin to understand it.
I wish more people knew Latin, too. My interest in languages is one of the reasons both that I am here and that I have a φ in my username. I posted the translation because I thought doing so would teach the most people a useful Latin phrase which I didn't know.
Can someone make the title a little more grammatical? It's not really a sentence and it doesn't make sense unless you already know what it's referring to.
Titles have to be 80 characters or less. Plenty of times it takes more than that to make a title more 'grammatical', so bits are sacrificed to fit the limit.
I continue to be amazed that people are not more outraged about this. While there is some outrage and certainly charges will be filed, in general the public's opinion of their right to privacy and anonymity has shifted by orders of magnitude in the last 20 years.
There are a number of facts that I can almost guarantee that anyone not outraged probably aren't aware of - I will list only a few because anyone who doesn't do research before posting or reading posts for opinions is kind of hopeless.
1. Students were required to use these laptops for their coursework - in class and at home. No laptop - no going to class.
2. Despite the software being designed to track stolen property. The school district pursued a student for eating candy (drug suspicion) while is laptop had not been stolen. The software company has come out against the school and disabled the functionality the school used.
3. There's a video on youtube showing a systems administrator messing with the students on the laptops while in school (reading over their shoulders and what not). Keep in mind these are mandatory for classes.
Too often, it seems, a news story outrages us, but the furor quickly dies down. In the end, nobody even notices the ritual scapegoat.
A little while back, somebody proposed here (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1183587 ) a web app that would allow us to follow a news story entire life. This reminds of that, and why it would be a good idea.