Kid suspended for "liking" pic of airsoft gun

[tomthebaker]

Thought Police

 

[D. Hargrove]

Like that movie with Tom Cruize where they can detect your future intentions and arrest you for them. I see now the suspension has been reversed, but what a shame it occurred in the first place.

 

[p238shooter]

I suspect Left Wing panic before taking a look at the facts, and using some common sense thinking. Sad people like this are in charge of our children in school and are trying to move out to the rest of their life outside of school.

 

[surjimmy]

Just a few years ago a boy was suspended for a year, for drawing a WWII fighter plane shooting its machine guns. Just the plane nothing else, and got suspended for 1 year

 

[D. Hargrove]

Just a few years ago a boy was suspended for a year, for drawing a WWII fighter plane shooting its machine guns. Just the plane nothing else, and got suspended for 1 year

That makes perfect sense. Not to me, but to someone apparently. Good thing times were different back when I was a kid, less I never would have gotten out of grade school.

 

[Dave70968]

How is the school monitoring all the social media posts and likes of all the students?

And who is ok with that?

You think that's bad? D. Hargrove gets closer to reality.

This is the type of crap that growing up, I was taught that the U.S.S.R did, and they were BAD!!! Along with spying on phone calls of their citizens. Damn, what a reality check!!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School_District

Robbins v. Lower Merion School District is a federal class action lawsuit,[2] brought in February 2010 on behalf of students of two high schools in Lower Merion Township, Pennsylvania a suburb of Philadelphia.[3] In October 2010, the school district agreed to pay $610,000 to settle the Robbins and parallel Hasan lawsuits against it.[1]

The suit alleged that, in what was dubbed the "WebcamGate" scandal, the schools secretly spied on the students while they were in the privacy of their homes.[4][5] School authorities surreptitiously and remotely activated webcams embedded in school-issued laptops the students were using at home.[6][7] After the suit was brought, the school district, of which the two high schools are part, revealed that it had secretly snapped more than 66,000 images.[8][9] The suit charged that in doing so the district infringed on its students' privacy rights.[6][10][11] A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction, ordering the school district to stop its secret webcam monitoring, and ordered the district to pay the plaintiffs' attorney fees.[12][13][14]

The lawsuit was filed after 15-year-old high school sophomore (second year student) Blake Robbins was disciplined at school, for his behavior in his home.[6][14] The school based its decision to discipline Robbins on a photograph that had been secretly taken of him in his bedroom, via the webcam in his school-issued laptop. Without telling its students, the schools remotely accessed their school-issued laptops to secretly snap pictures of students in their own homes, their chat logs, and records of the websites they visited. The school then transmitted the snapshots to servers at the school, where school authorities reviewed them and shared the snapshots with others.[15] In one widely published photo, the school had photographed Robbins in his bed.[16]

...

Concealment of surveillance
The school district intentionally did not publicize the existence of the surveillance technology. It also actively sought to conceal it.[23][41]

The district did not inform students or their parents, in any of its communications with them (including the district's promotion of the laptop program, guidelines about the laptops, and the individual contracts that it gave students to sign), that the laptops gave the district the ability to secretly snap photos of whatever was in the line of sight of the student-issued laptop webcams, and to take screenshots.[23][26] Nor did it inform them that the district would avail itself of those capabilities.[23] The district also did not adopt policies regarding the use of TheftTrack by district employees.[23]

DiMedio said "the district did not widely publicize the feature 'for obvious reasons.'"[23] She reportedly declined to tell students about TheftTrack because doing so could "defeat its purpose."[23]

Perbix said that when "you're controlling someone's machine, you don't want them to know what you're doing."[33][34][42][42][43] He praised TheftTrack in a YouTube video he produced, saying: "It's … just a fantastic feature … especially when you're in a school environment".[44] Perbix maintained a personal blog in which he discussed computer oversight techniques, including how to cloak remote monitoring so it is invisible to the user.[45]

Concerns raised by student intern
On August 11, 2008, weeks before the district handed the laptops out to students, a Harriton High School student interning in the school's IT Department sent an email to DiMedio, with the subject line: "1:1 concern (Important)". He said that he had recently learned of the district's purchase of LANrev, and had researched the software. He had made the "somewhat startling" discovery that it would allow school employees to monitor students' laptops remotely.[23][40][46] He wrote:

I would not find this a problem if students were informed that this was possible, for privacy's sake. However, what was appalling was that not only did the District not inform parents and students of this fact … [W]hile you may feel that you can say that this access will not be abused, I feel that this is not enough to ensure the integrity of students, and that even if it was no one would have any way of knowing (especially end-users). I feel it would be best that students and parents are informed of this before they receive their computers.... I could see not informing parents and students of this fact causing a huge uproar.[23]

DiMedio responded:

[T]here is absolutely no way that the District Tech people are going to monitor students at home.... If we were going to monitor student use at home, we would have stated so. Think about it—why would we do that? There is no purpose. We are not a police state.... There is no way that I would approve or advocate for the monitoring of students at home.

I suggest you take a breath and relax.[23][40][46]

DiMedio then forwarded the e-mails to District Network Technician Perbix, who suggested a further response to the student intern. With DiMedio's approval, Perbix e-mailed the student intern, also dismissing the student's concern:

[T]his feature is only used to track equipment … reported as stolen or missing. The only information that this feature captures is IP and DNS info from the network it is connected to, and occasional screen/camera shots of the computer being operated.... The tracking feature does NOT do things like record web browsing, chatting, email, or any other type of "spyware" features that you might be thinking of.

Being a student intern with us means that you are privy to some things that others rarely get to see, and some things that might even work against us. I assure you that we in no way, shape, or form employ any Big Brother tactics, ESPECIALLY with computers off the network.[23][46][47]

Principal Kline
In addition, two members of the Harriton High School student council twice privately confronted their Principal, Steven Kline, more than a year prior to the suit. They were concerned "that the school could covertly photograph students using the laptops' cameras."[23][33] Students were particularly troubled by the momentary flickering of their webcams' green activation lights, which several students reported would periodically turn on when the camera wasn't in use, signaling that the webcam had been turned on.[9][23][25][48] Student Katerina Perech recalled: "It was just really creepy."[25] Some school officials reportedly denied that it was anything other than a technical glitch, and offered to have the laptops examined if students were concerned. Kline admitted the school could covertly photograph students using the laptops' cameras.[42] The students told him they were worried about privacy rights, asked whether the school system read the saved files on their computers, and suggested that at minimum the student body should be warned formally of possible surveillance.[42] No such action was taken.[42]

...

On February 18, 2010, the day the case was made public, the school district posted an initial reply on its website asserting that: "The tracking-security feature was limited to taking a still image of the operator and the operator's screen," and that it "has only been used for the limited purpose of locating a lost, stolen, or missing laptop. [T]his includes tracking down a loaner computer that, against regulations, might be taken off campus."[9][60][61] The complaint had not indicated whether Robbins' laptop had been reported lost or stolen, and Young said the district could not disclose that fact.[17] Young asserted that the district never violated its policy of only using the remote-activation software to find missing laptops. "Infer what you want," Young said.[17]

That same day, the district turned off TheftTrack on tracked laptops, and deleted pictures from LANrev, as discovered by a subsequent forensics review.[9] The district also denied that the school administrator had ever used a photo taken by a school-issued laptop to discipline a student.[62] The vice principal reiterated the statement in a video distributed to national media on February 24, 2010.[63]

On February 20, 2010, Haltzman, Robbins' counsel, told MSNBC Live that Robbins had been sitting in his home eating "Mike and Ike" candy in front of his school-issued laptop.[14] The attorney said that the vice-principal had accused Robbins of taking illegal pills after seeing him eating the candy in a webcam image.[18] Michael Smerconish, a Philadelphia Inquirer columnist who reviewed the photo, said that it did in fact appear to be the same size and shape as Mike and Ike candy.[28] Haltzman said that his client's laptop had not been reported stolen or lost. The lawyer also raised questions as to who in the school system decided when to activate each student's webcam, and for what reasons.[52][59]

...

The school district eventually acknowledged that it had snapped more than half the images after missing laptops were recovered.[8] A computer forensics study commissioned by the defendants recovered 66,503 images produced by LANrev, though it was not able to recover all that had been deleted by district employees.[9] The district asserted that it did not have any evidence that individual students had been specifically targeted.[8] Haltzman said: "I wish the school district [had] come clean earlier, as soon as they had this information … not waiting until something was filed in court revealing the extent of the spying".[69]

Christopher Null, technology writer for Yahoo! News, observed: "It's a little difficult to believe that none of the material captured is scandalous".[70]

The district also admitted that in Robbins' case the remote surveillance was activated and left running for two weeks, even though school officials knew the laptop was at Robbins' home.[4] It also admitted that its technology staff activated the camera on his computer, and gave images it covertly snapped to two Harriton High School principals.[71]

Six days after the initiation of the lawsuit, and after a district review of its privacy policies, the school district disabled its ability to activate students' webcams remotely.[6][9] Lillie Coney of the Electronic Privacy Information Center said: "If they thought it was right, they wouldn't have stopped."[72]

Read the whole thing. Even without issuing laptops to students, there's an awful lot the school can do with webcrawlers and other automated tools on their own machines to scrape Facebook, etc. looking for content related to your kids. And if your kids are being issued any sort of electronic devices--or even being asked for their Facebook, etc. account names (even without passwords), it becomes a whole lot easier. Even if they don't give up their own info, if one of their friends does, that's an easy way to get in to a lot of what they post.

 

[Dave70968]

Sorry, I have to add one more quote from the above article:

The report also found that district officials knew that Robbins had taken his laptop home, but still decided to activate the covert surveillance that secretly captured hundreds of webcam photos and screenshots—included pictures of Robbins sleeping and partially undressed, a photo of his father, and images of instant messages and photos of friends with whom Robbins was video-chatting.[120] After the program was activated on Robbins' computer, one district employee had emailed another: "Now currently online at home".[120]

Think about the implications of that for a moment. "Now currently online at home [emphasis mine]."

That means somebody was watching in realtime, boys and girls.

If it happened at one school, it can happen at more.

 

[MacFromOK]

This is dumber than a stump.

But I also remember a while back, some 1st grader (or thereabouts) was suspended for taking bites out of a piece of toast to make a pistol shape, and then (gasp!) pointing it at another child.

I guess nobody lets their kids play "Cowboys & Indians" or "Army" anymore (toy guns were standard issue when I was a kid). Seems like our nation is becoming a wimpy freak show.

 

[deerwhacker444]

This is dumber than a stump.

But I also remember a while back, some 1st grader (or thereabouts) was suspended for taking bites out of a piece of toast to make a pistol shape, and then (gasp!) pointing it at another child.

I think you're thinking of the infamous Pop-Tart gun..

 

[MacFromOK]

I think you're thinking of the infamous Pop-Tart gun..

Ah, probably so. Thanks.