The Merion School Spy-On-Kids-With-Webcam Case

Wow.

Every once in awhile I get hit with a story that leaves me scratching my head and saying to myself, "What the hell were they thinking?"

This particular scratching came from the story pertaining to the Lower Merion School District. The best summary thus far of the events comes from Philly.com. The gist of the story; kid had a school-issued laptop at home, gets called into the office, and the assistant principal confronts the kid with a picture taken by the laptop's built-in web camera showing him with "pills" and accuses the kid of drug activity.

Um...

The school had software called LANRev installed on the laptops for theft control. If a laptop is stolen, then it's "tagged" on a server and the laptop tries to "call home" to record the IP address as well as record snapshots from the web camera and screen activity.

The student's family apparently turned around and filed a lawsuit for invasion of privacy, and from there poo was hitting all sorts of ceiling fans. Students had noticed the webcam light randomly blinking on and off at various times and were told this was a "glitch," that they could ignore it.

Now it's time for all sorts of indignant cries to rise up from the choir...

For example, one parent saying that the computer could have taken pictures of his daughter when she took the computer into the bathroom as she showered. Huh? Isn't that like cooking bacon in the nude? Why would you take a thousand-dollar laptop into a humid, wet room while you were showering? You do know that electronics don't like water, right? (this link gives the example in the transcript of the podcast) My daughter is nearly 18 years old and I wouldn't hesitate to whack her on the back of the head if we spent a thousand dollars on a computer for her and she took it into the bathroom while she showered.

But this does bring up a legitimate concern, namely the ability for someone to get pictures of kids in their rooms in various states of undress. This would then bring the school (or system administrators) into the nasty territory of child pornography.

Hmm...

I'm personally torn on the issue. I've read the excellent writeup by Stryde Hax on his blog here, and I think I understand his viewpoint. Unfortunately it's not really a balanced view on the situation (as is his right to present on his own blog, of course; he I think he has been very understanding of dissenting viewpoints in my opinion and am glad for what he has contributed to the story since most involved seem to prefer throwing out non-constructive or vindictive opinions without any actual content to justify the viewpoint, while Stryde has been very good at articulating his view.)

Here's my take.

People have a right to their property, and to protect said property from theft. If I'm robbed, I am damn well justified in being angry at the violation of my privacy and have a right to be angry at having someone steal my sense of security.

I think I should be allowed to set my computer to do whatever I want. It's mine. If I want it to take pictures and upload them to a server, I should be allowed to do so, as long as there's no intent to violate someone's rights (having my computer take pictures of me during the day or pictures when it's stolen is legit in my book, but having it programmed to take pictures because I'm planting it in a locker room is clearly wrong.)

The school laptop program is giving students school property. This cannot be emphasised enough because people like to conveniently forget that part of the story. The schools is lending property to students. My feeling is that because the laptop isn't mine, and isn't under my control, I'd trust it about as far as I absolutely must and after that it's shut down. The laptop was supposed to be used for schoolwork, not texting friends, browsing the web for porn, or anything else the personal computers are used for, even email that isn't school-related. Anything you do can be recorded and used against you later. I have yet to understand why people can't get that through their heads; just as employers own the computer on your desk at work and can browse your mail and monitor your Internet use, schools have the same rights on their network, and unless it's spelled out otherwise you should reasonably assume those Big Brother rights extend to a laptop you don't own.

I think that a school should be able to do whatever they can for gathering evidence to bust people for stealing expensive property, and taxpayers should support it since this ultimately is funded by the taxpayers. Losing laptops and breaking them and treating them like crap doesn't get them fixed for free. Someone foots the bill, even if the path for the money is convoluted to the point where kids don't understand that Mommy and Daddy may end up having to pay more in taxes because they can't be more responsible with school property.

BUT...

There are caveats to the case. The computers were meant to bridge the digital divide; every kid has a computer with which to do schoolwork under the laptop program, and that meant as they implemented the program that every kid was basically required to use the school laptop to get through their classes. In other words, there wasn't a choice in the matter. They had the laptop, and it was apparently spying on them at times. Again I wouldn't have trusted them for anything not school related; I'd use the laptop for school, and use my own computer for my own personal use. This isn't necessarily an option for kids that don't have computers of their own, and I understand that. But I'm still torn on that as another issue because it seemed that many of the kids that can't afford even a $300 computer manage to afford a cell phone. Priorities. But that's not the topic at hand.

Also, the school denied that the laptops had the ability to take pictures of the kids and spy on them. It's one thing to have the ability, it's another to hide the fact that it can be done. According to the Philly.com story, representatives from the student council asked administrators about this and were basically ignored when they voiced privacy concerns; from the sounds of it the administrators stuck to the story that it was a "glitch" causing the webcam light to come on. Totally unethical.

The Philly story also points out what was possibly the biggest bonehead move on the school's part. The user agreement that the kids and parents had to sign was just the old boilerplate used in past years for using the Internet in the school, nothing new or updated related to using school computers at home. Dude, liability 101...were you all asleep at the wheel here? Where was the tech with half a whit of common sense who stopped to say that maybe you should have special rules in place for kids carrying thousand-dollar equipment around, especially knowing that kids treat school equipment like crap since, "Hey, I didn't pay for it! It's FREE!"

Most parents don't seem to know just how much liability schools have to cover their arses for. When a teacher sees or overhears anything, anything, they have to report it to higher ups or they can be responsible should something happen to said kid. Kid has a bruise around the neck resembling fingers? Kid have unusual cuts on the arms, or marks that look like something was injected with something? Or maybe they heard some passing talk about a kid being coerced into oral sex? These things have to be reported to administrators or authorities.

So if I were there when discussing issues in rolling out these laptops, one of my concerns would be that these things are virtual black boxes for collecting data on kids and that would put technicians into a potentially dangerous situation with knowing "too much." Troubleshooting a computer and running across browsing history involving abortion, drug use, parents raping sons or daughters...sure, chances are slim, but in a litigious society there is little room for "we'll deal with it if it ever comes up" and hope for the best. With the addition of taking pictures of the computers in homes, you can be sure to bet that I'd worry about collateral damage; pot plant in the background? Parent or sibling walking in the background half-nude from the shower? It's a can of worms I'd not want to deal with.

More than that, where are the checks and balances? The article states that the system was only used if requested by administrators at the high school or higher-levels. That isn't good enough. There should have been an iron-clad method for controlling who gets to use this and view the collected evidence, not just within the school but by a third party, such as the local police department. Better yet have the police involved each and every time the system is used.

Side note-the school apparently is saying that the police department did know about it, because the pictures are uploaded to a website where they can view the collected evidence. The retired police chief was quoted as saying he knew nothing about it. Another case of police being...surprise...technology-tarded, nodding their heads when told about what they can do when in fact they had no clue what they were agreeing to? Or is the school lying? Or are the police covering their own behinds?

These seem like common sense cover-your-behind issues that should have been dealt with at the outset of the program.

Of course there are little details that are squeezing out as the story develops. Worse, the details that do leak out are mostly one-sided, as the school plays the stoic "lawyer advises us to say nothing so we're not commenting" game while the kids and parents are shooting off whatever details they want, true or not. For example, there's no full explanation for why the theft-tracking was activated on a laptop that the school knew the particular student had in his possession. There is also a rumor that the kid wasn't using drugs, he was actually eating Mike and Ike's candies, which if it's true is going to be a definite story for the hall of embarrassingly stupid mistakes.

The Philly.com story also has some more background on the details of the kid and his history with (mis)using the equipment. According the news story, his family never paid a required $55 insurance fee before taking the laptop off campus, and the laptop in the question was a loaner unit because he had broken at least two laptops. It then went on to say that the theft tracking features were turned on because the school suspected the student had taken the computer home when he wasn't supposed to, in which case it would be considered "stolen."

...of course, it was just laziness and/or lack of procedure that would lead them to turn on the picture taking features, as the only thing needed to prove the laptop was removed from campus was that it "phoned home" to the school's server after hours from an IP that belonged to a home network.

No doubt the case is going to continue to contort and twist as more details leak out. The federal authorities are now involved to see if there are civil rights that were violated, and congressional representatives are trying to score points by calling for an investigation (really, with all the waste in government, is it necessary to waste time grandstanding on this when there's already a court system being involved?) Everyone is now in spin control mode, doing what they can to cover their own arses and justify missteps.

What is clear is that the school was engaged in unethical behavior. Had I had a hand in the program, I would have encouraged openly telling students that yes, there are systems in place to keep them from being stolen. Students are issued laptops with ID numbers that are registered, and they are responsible if said laptop is broken or disappears while in their care. It has been my experience that kids treat technology as if it's disposable if there's no consequence for destroying it; they need to have encouragement from parents and school alike to take care of the equipment.

I also would have made it perfectly clear with an updated technology policy what is expected from students and parents charged with the care of the laptops. That would include notifying them of the possibility of photos being uploaded remotely as well as what the laptops could be used for. How they could have been so negligent in this is truly mystifying.

But life is 20/20 hindsight and this district will have a black eye for a long, long time. They will be known for many years as a district that deviously spied on kids and because of that they will have a long and hard road to travel in rebuilding what trust they had among students, parents, and probably teachers. They'll also have an interesting time if they are found guilty in the courts and end up paying a large settlement to this kid's family and as a consequence raise taxes on residents in the district...

EEE PC: More Conclusions

I've been using the EEE as my primary system for over a month now. So what's it like?

First the upsides.

My data is always with me. That's the primary reason we use computers; to have access to our data and services. I always had my computer on at home with secure shell open and waiting for my connections in the first place; I could access it from a laptop or other computer when away. Now I have that data whenever my netbook is with me, meaning accessing it is a bit faster (since I'm not editing a manuscript over a network connection, for example). It also means that I can access the data when I don't have a network connection available.

This thing is a tough little computer. The hard drive in the 701/4G Surf is not a standard drive, meaning no spinning platters with a little read/write head floating a hairs' breadth from the surface of the metal, further meaning that if it were dropped or there are extremes in temperature it would scrape the platter and possibly damage the head or media. It also means it runs quieter and requires less cooling.

It's small. This thing takes portability to heart; it's so lightweight that I think the Vaultz case I use to carry it actually weighs more than the netbook.

It runs Linux. I know Linux. It's usable, it's relatively small, and commands that work on my desktop at work also work on my netbook. I now have it running the Ubuntu Netbook Remix, so it stays up to date with security fixes and again...the commands are familiar. I can use handy tricks like redirecting Secure Shell tunnels and mounting other Linux computer filesystems with sshfs, and there's no vendor-exclusivity.

This unit happens to be one of the ones that has an underside panel that unscrews to add memory. I have a 512 meg DDR2 DIMM card running at 400 Mhz. I can probably upgrade it relatively inexpensively and without needing to solder or screw around with modifications to the unit.

Once you get the hang of it, using encryption on the laptop isn't so bad. I have encrypted my home directory so that if it is stolen, someone would have to crack the password in order to gain access to my files. If I'm not logged in or didn't leave my account logged in, my files appear as gobbledygook to anyone that tries looking at my home directory contents from a boot disk.

The unit has a built-in SD Card slot. I like it because I'm frequently transferring images from my camera and video camera to my external drives. The EEE was initially using the SD slot as additional swappable storage to make up for the small 4 gig built-in drive, but I've found that it was ahead of its time with giving access to SD cards now that so many accessories store data on them and using the USB cable can entail special drivers or instructions or software to interface with the toys. Lowest common denominator tends to be more reliable. Just insert the data card and use it like a disk volume instead of farting around with your high tech sony insta-digital-camera's settings.

Then there are downsides.

My data is always with me. If my netbook dies before I make a backup or if it's stolen, I lose my primary working set of data.

The drive in it tends to be on the slow side. I'm pretty sure this thing is using something more akin to an internal flash drive than an SSD drive because I've read information and seen video of SSD-equipped systems and they are fast compared to standard drives. this thing has a tiny amount of storage space and tends to crawl. It could very well be the sub-par specs compared to today's machines; it wouldn't be the first time I've hit bottlenecks that I didn't think were caused by a particular technology (i.e., a server that was slow and I thought it was the network getting bogged down, only to discover that indeed we've hit a point where the RAID controller and slower drives couldn't keep up with data requests!)

The battery life is sub-par. I bought a new battery thinking the old one was dying; nope, I still get around two hours of usable time on it. Very annoying, given the small screen and lack of spinning drive. The time on comparable netbooks today is closer to six hours or more. Either the battery technology on this is really crap or there's somthing quirky in the early generation 4G's.

It's small. The portability comes at a price. I wish there were some easy way of getting a virtual keyboard or a keyboard that expanded; the keys on this unit are small, and my fingers are big. I know I've brought this up before. My take is that I can almost type on it well. My error rate is definitely higher, and I am glad when I use it at home that I have a USB keyboard to plug into it so the "native" keyboard is more of a fallback while on the road. It's annoying but not a dealbreaker.

Linux was created for geeks, by geeks. It scratches personal itches, meaning that usability "papercuts", as they're called by Canonical's CEO, aren't bandaged unless a particular programmer is irritated by it enough to fix it. More often than not that means that Linux afficionados find workarounds and make excuses, saying that it's not hard to get around the issue, just do XYZ. That works well for them, but makes the Linux system look piss poor when comparing a simple, everyday task on a Mac running OS X (which is running a derivative of UNIX under the hood) and a Linux system side by side and it just works on the OS X system. I shouldn't have to use workarounds after two decades of development under Linux.

What kind of tasks? This is another papercut. I use a desktop monitor at home, an LCD panel. I plug it into the Mac, the Mac recognizes it and sets the display and refresh rates correctly. I have the monitor in front of me and the notebook on my right; on the Mac I tell it to arrange the monitor on the notebook's left and then dragged the strip on the virtual monitors to the LCD panel, turning it into my primary display. Works great. I was pleasantly surprised when I connected it up again the other day and the display came up as my primary display again, complete with doc and menu bar, with the notebook acting as a secondary display. It must have filed away some information about my LCD panel to remember my settings. Nice!

The netbook, however, loses this configuration. I connect the monitor up and boot the netbook. Inevitably, the first time it discovers the monitor, it mis-sets the refresh rate so that things are readable, but vibrating so fast that graphics look like they're being buzzed visually. Highly annoying. Oddly enough, I reboot the computer, and it will display things more sharply, like the second time around it discovers the proper refresh rate. Two boots. Every time.

Furthermore, if I try rearranging the displays, it won't set the graphics properly. I lose the menu bars and task bars, I can't use the netbook with the monitor attached anymore because I've basically lost all the control elements. I need to disconnect the monitor and re-set my settings to fix it. No matter how I try to set it or arrange it, the netbook screws it up. So I'm left with my primary display being on the netbook on my right side, and dragging my windows to the right hand side of the netbook's display to have it "wrap" to the primary monitor I want to use, then re-maximize programs. It appears that the primary display on the netbook/Ubuntu system is the monitor that is set to be on the "left" side of the virtual displays. Since I can't rearrange the displays and have it properly arrange graphical elements like menus, I can't move the Samsung LCD monitor to the left; the netbook always thinks it's on the right. That sucks.

I think the USB controllers on the netbook are slow, or the combination of memory/CPU/controller makes it slow. The netbook has a tremendous system load appear if I copy a lot of data over the USB bus to external Western Digital drives. Given that the netbook has a low amount of storage to begin with, this really means that things I occasionally do on computers...audio or video editing, for example...are out of this system's reach. It can barely watch YouTube videos, let alone edit them. Using external drives to store large data files would be painful to even contemplate.

Power is screwy on this thing. I keep getting this "your battery may be bad" error. I looked into it after I replaced the battery and it still had the error message; turns out that the unit is apparently known for it. The circuitry reports the power level to the operating system as a percentage, so the operating system interprets it as being at 1.9% power since it's converting the percent to another percent; it's suppose to report the power output in mAh. 100 mAh on a battery reporting itself as having a capacity of 5200 mAh is indeed going to screw up the math, and it appears that no one is going to fix this issue with a patch specific to the ASUS battery model in question within Linux.

Related to power, when this gets low on power it just shuts off. Blip. All work not saved is gone. No warning. The MacBook I use from work will try to go to sleep or hibernate to save your work, and give ample warning. The most warning this gives is a red battery display in the upper corner of the menu (which I configured to show that information) and if I don't keep an eye on it, blip it shuts down straight dead. It's a nasty surprise.

There is no disc drive. I know this cuts down on power use and size, but still it's a little bit of a pain not to be able to burn discs or access burned discs, especially when Ubuntu's built-in support of disc burning trumps OS X's way of handling it in my opinion (in OS X it looks like I'm burning aliases instead of files. I was sure when I first did it that I actually burned a disc of shortcuts instead of the content I actually wanted. Not user friendly in that aspect. Ubuntu uses Brasero to open a window in which it looks like I'm dragging copies of my files to that window, then click the big "burn" button to finalize it.)

Conclusions...

I've been using it exclusively for my desktop work at home. I am able to use it for most things I need; but I am limited, and those limitations chafe me. I can't watch many Youtube videos because it stutters on some of them horribly; I'm better off using my iPod. I can't use my computer to sync my iPod; but I already have a Windows computer to which I connect it with iTunes (and use my netbook to VNC into the headless Windows computer to do updates and maintenance.) I can't run Virtualbox...I suppose I could, but man it would be horribly slow, and there's no way I could create a hard disk bigger than a couple hundred meg at most without an external drive, and that would make access even slower.

The tasks I primarly focus on...remote control of the Windows system for my iPod, editing my manuscript of a novel, composing email in Thunderbird and reading mostly static web content...it works okay for those tasks. It does get bogged down with flash content to the point where it'll stutter the interface (the web browser will "pause" as it loads content, making the menus and tabs unusable for up to thirty seconds at a time.)

It's portable and it boots relatively quickly. Actually running of tasks seems to slow it down, but booting isn't that bad, despite running with encryption on the home directory.

I am able to get my primary work done, just with a little more care and a few more...papercuts.

In the end there are systems today available for under $500 that are refined versions of this 701. Unfortunately most of them are Windows 7-based so support for Linux is limited to what you can find from other netbook pioneers and experimenters online before buying, and since netbooks often have specialized design considerations there is an increased chance that something won't work properly due to driver issues if you try installing Linux on a new netbook. Would I consider getting a new netbook to use as my primary system? I'd consider it. I'd like to find something that addresses limitations in storage and speed, but again that influences some of the things I like about this unit...size, quiet running, and the flash memory instead of regular hard disk drive. Most of the cheaper units out there use micro drives so there's plenty of storage (if it has Windows, it needs that extra storage). On the other hand the battery life has increased to 6+ hours despite the slightly larger displays and traditional hard disks.

So the unit is usable, but I'm on the lookout for something better down the road. If I had a ten star rating system I'd give it an overall six for my purposes; satisfied enough to keep using it, but I definitely look around at Sam's Club and Amazon and NewEgg at the current crop of systems and wonder if I have enough money to buy something that might possibly fit my needs better.