Second Lawsuit Over School Webcams Involves Student Who Was Photographed 469 Times Over 2 Months

from the what-happened-to-42-times? dept

Remember the school district in suburban Philadelphia involved in a lawsuit over secretly taking webcam images of students? The school initially denied things, and later said that it had only used the feature 42 times to help find lost or stolen laptops. However, a law firm brought on by the school to investigate its use of the LanRev system found 58,000 images were taken. That's led some other students to realize that they might have a beef with the Lower Merion School district as well. A second student has now filed a lawsuit against the school after discovering that the school took 469 secret photographs from his webcam over the course of two months.

What happened was that the student lost his laptop on December 18th. The laptop was found by a teacher and returned to the student on the 21st... but also on the 21st, the school's IT folks turned on LanRev's "TheftTrak" service. Even though the laptop had been returned to the student, the LanRev system was never turned off. It took 469 secret images and captured 543 secret screenshots. It wasn't turned off until that first lawsuit was filed, and someone in the IT department realized there might be an issue there...

What's really scary? If a school administrator hadn't revealed the whole system to the first student by showing him a photo of him at home, this would still be going on and none of the students would know about it. The only reason this lawsuit is being filed is because of the information that came out during the investigation into the first incident.

Filed Under: school, spying, webcams

Students Who Caught Gym Teacher Stealing Money From Lockers May Get Punished

from the that-doesn't-seem-right... dept

A few years back, we had a story about some students using a mobile phone camera to record a teacher's outburst on film. Rather than disciplining the teacher who appeared way out of line, and who had pulled a chair out from under a student, the school disciplined the students for filming the teacher. In what may be a similar situation, reader Pickle Monger alerts us to the story of some students who got upset about money regularly disappearing from their lockers. After complaining to school officials and getting no help at all, they set up a mobile phone camera to record what happened to the lockers... and actually caught their gym teacher breaking into the lockers to steal the students' money.

So how is the school reacting? Celebrating the ingenuity and the sleuthing skills of the kids in catching a bad teacher stealing money from students? Nope:

A school spokesman said it's possible the student who recorded the cell phone video could get in trouble as well because students are not supposed to use their phones during the day.

School officials said they are not allowed to record video in locker rooms because of privacy.

Now, obviously the situation is a little more complicated due to the privacy issues in a locker room, but there's no indication that there were any privacy problems here at all. The whole purpose was to catch the thief that the school wouldn't catch. Punishing students for breaking those rules, while ignoring the reasons why they did it, teaches a really bad lesson to students.

Filed Under: mobile cameras, school, spying

Laptop Scandal School's Own Law Firm: Aside From Those 58,000 Spy Photos, There's No Evidence Of Spying

from the we-find-ourselves-not-guilty dept

A law firm employed by the Pennsylvania school district caught using student laptop webcams to spy on students at home has released a 72-page report (pdf) on the incident after a 10-week investigation. Most of the report's findings aren't too surprising; it exonerates most higher-level school officials like any wealthy school district's in-house investigation should, concluding that there's no evidence indicating that anybody above the IT level "knew how TheftTrack worked or understood that it could collect large quantities of webcam photographs or screenshots." The report also confirms reports that the system took some 58,000 images -- a far cry from the 42 images the school originally claimed.

Aside from those 57,958 extra photos and screenshots, e-mails alleging that school administrators found the spy technology entertaining -- and the fact the system was only unearthed in the first place because a student's at-home behavior was spied on -- the study concludes that "we found no evidence that District personnel used TheftTrack to "spy" on students." Still, at least the report slams the school district for being "overzealous" in their use of the technology, and for having a complete disregard for student privacy:

"Although there is no forensic method to determine with certainty how often images stored on the LANrev server were viewed, we found no evidence that any District 3 personnel surreptitiously downloaded images from the LANrev server. Rather, the collection of images from laptops while they were in the possession of students resulted from the district's failure to implement policies, procedures and recordkeeping requirements, and the overzealous and questionable use of technology by IS personnel without any apparent regard for privacy considerations or sufficient consultation with administrators."

By and large the study places the lion's share of the blame on school IT folks, most of whom were already forced to retire. It does seem rather convenient that the district was allowed to hire their own law firm to investigate (at least when lawyers weren't working with plaintiffs to allegedly help keep evidence out of the hands of federal investigators). That's of course the first thing the lawyer for the district's former IS director Virginia DiMedio complained about. While the IT folks certainly appear oblivious and culpable, there seems to be plenty of incompetence to go around. Hopefully higher level administrators aren't entirely immune to the ultimate fallout, given they failed to pay any attention to the fact their district was busily building a little Macbook surveillance state with little to no accountability.

Filed Under: school, spying

Teens Sue School After Being Disciplined For MySpace Photos

from the no-free-speech-until-you-graduate? dept

We've seen a bunch of stories lately about schools handing out discipline for activities done online, and conflicting court cases on the subject make it fairly unclear where a school's authority to discipline students ends. In the latest case, two sophomore high school girls posted private photos to their MySpace accounts from a sleepover. The photos are described as "racy." While they were set to private, someone copied them, and eventually school administrators saw them and banned the girls from extracurricular activities for a while and also required that the two girls apologize to the (all male) coaches' board. It also required the girls to undergo therapy sessions. All this because they posted some silly photos online? Beyond the question of whether or not the school even has the right to discipline these students for events that had nothing (at all) to do with the school, the punishment also seems to go well beyond the "crime." Kids do silly/stupid things all the time. And, yes, these days there are cameraphones and social networks that make these things easier to record and distribute, but it doesn't change the fact that kids are kids. I doubt there are many adults out there today who didn't do something silly or stupid as a teen. For those of you who are a bit older, imagine if cameraphones and social networks had been around then? Would you have wanted to have been suspended from school activities? The whole thing seems like a huge overreaction.

Filed Under: discipline, school, teenagers
Companies: myspace

School Wins Cybersquatting Case, But Was It Worth It?

from the no-this-isn't-a-school-site-.com dept

A school in the UK has won a three-year domain-squatting case against some Canadian domain parkers. The school, called Framlingham College, wanted to set up shop at framlinghamcollege.co.uk, but the domain parkers beat them to the punch, and put up a page with links to, among other things, online dating sites. Apparently these sites then had links to "mature porn," which upset the administrators of the Christian school, and gave the BBC justification for the tasty headline "School's links to porn site end." It seems right that the school was able to wrest control of the site back from domain parkers, illustrating that in this instance, the dispute and resolution system worked. That said, was it such an important battle? The head of the school notes "I have no doubt that people who were seriously interested in the college will have found this site and then run a mile" -- so it's not as if people were being fooled into thinking it was the school's actual site. And there are these things these days called search engines that many people use to locate sites they're looking for, rather than just trying random URLs. Perhaps the College would have been better off using some of the resources it devoted to this battle on search-engine optimization, since its real site doesn't seem to appear in the first five pages of Google results for a search on its name. Isn't people being able to find the school's site more important than the URL it uses?

Filed Under: cybersquatting, framlingham college, school, uk