8 ms·

Thousands of webcam images have been found in the school district being sued

109 points by obsaysditto 16y ago

LiveTheDream 16y ago
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
- cperciva 16y ago
  Populus.
  - s-phi-nl 16y ago
    Translation: Who will guard the guards? The people.
    - cperciva 16y ago
      Translation: 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).
      - sketerpot 16y ago
        Why should Latin be part of the standard curriculum?
        cperciva 16y ago
        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.
        hga 16y ago
        For that matter, I've read that the original English translators of Japanese primary sources translated the "dirty bits" into Latin.
        sketerpot 16y ago
        > 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?
        foldr 16y ago
        >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.
        tokenadult 16y ago
        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.
        marr 16y ago
        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".
        sketerpot 16y ago
        > 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?
        jplewicke 16y ago
        So that the world will have more Perl hackers: http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/HTML/Perligata.html http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/HTML/Perligata.... .
        jacquesm 16y ago
        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.
        sketerpot 16y ago
        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.
      - Qz 16y ago
        I didn't take Latin and I still understood it. I don't think the translation was really necessary, more a statement 'I know Latin'.
        roofone 16y ago
        I didn't take Latin and I did not understand it. I appreciate that someone took the time to translate it.
        Qz 16y ago
        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.
      - s-phi-nl 16y ago
        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. Perhaps I should have posted a link to the Wikipedia article instead. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custodes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custodes [edit: added first two sentences]
cubicle67 16y ago
how do you get a society where something like this is uncovered, and half of the comments are abusing the family that uncovered it? oh, and the past tense of shine is shone :)
- fname 16y ago
  the same society that says "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear"
- cynicalkane 16y ago
  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.
- Freebytes 16y ago
  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.
blantonl 16y ago
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.
- lallysingh 16y ago
  One nude photo of a student changing, and this is going to turn to a shitstorm.
  - influx 16y ago
    If so there should be jail-time involved for the person administering this system.
    - DanielStraight 16y ago
      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.
      - billybob 16y ago
        "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.
CWuestefeld 16y ago
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 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.
- vinhboy 16y ago
  Thank you for this link... I have always wanted to do this.
- redrobot5050 16y ago
  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.
  - ErrantX 16y ago
    > 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.
ssouth 16y ago
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.
- nkohari 16y ago
  It was a private school, wasn't it?
  - obsaysditto 16y ago
    Public school. Harriton High School in Lower Merion School District
Qz 16y ago
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.
- jacquesm 16y ago
  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.
imgabe 16y ago
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)
DanielBMarkham 16y ago
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.
- boyer 16y ago
  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.
  - hga 16y ago
    I think the latter item (#3) is from a PBS show on another school district. Which doesn't change the general point of "where's the outrage"?

109 points by obsaysditto 16y ago

LiveTheDream 16y ago

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

cperciva 16y ago
Populus.
- s-phi-nl 16y ago
  Translation: Who will guard the guards? The people.
  - cperciva 16y ago
    Translation: 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).
    - sketerpot 16y ago
      Why should Latin be part of the standard curriculum?
      - cperciva 16y ago
        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.
        hga 16y ago
        For that matter, I've read that the original English translators of Japanese primary sources translated the "dirty bits" into Latin.
        sketerpot 16y ago
        > 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?
        foldr 16y ago
        >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.
        tokenadult 16y ago
        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.
      - marr 16y ago
        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".
        sketerpot 16y ago
        > 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?
      - jplewicke 16y ago
        So that the world will have more Perl hackers: http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/HTML/Perligata.html http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/HTML/Perligata.... .
      - jacquesm 16y ago
        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.
        sketerpot 16y ago
        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.
    - Qz 16y ago
      I didn't take Latin and I still understood it. I don't think the translation was really necessary, more a statement 'I know Latin'.
      - roofone 16y ago
        I didn't take Latin and I did not understand it. I appreciate that someone took the time to translate it.
        Qz 16y ago
        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.
    - s-phi-nl 16y ago
      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. Perhaps I should have posted a link to the Wikipedia article instead. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custodes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custodes [edit: added first two sentences]

cubicle67 16y ago

how do you get a society where something like this is uncovered, and half of the comments are abusing the family that uncovered it? oh, and the past tense of shine is shone :)

fname 16y ago
the same society that says "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear"
cynicalkane 16y ago
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.
Freebytes 16y ago
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.

blantonl 16y ago

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.

lallysingh 16y ago
One nude photo of a student changing, and this is going to turn to a shitstorm.
- influx 16y ago
  If so there should be jail-time involved for the person administering this system.
  - DanielStraight 16y ago
    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.
    - billybob 16y ago
      "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.

CWuestefeld 16y ago

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 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.

vinhboy 16y ago
Thank you for this link... I have always wanted to do this.
redrobot5050 16y ago
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.
- ErrantX 16y ago
  > 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.

ssouth 16y ago

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.

nkohari 16y ago
It was a private school, wasn't it?
- obsaysditto 16y ago
  Public school. Harriton High School in Lower Merion School District

Qz 16y ago

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.

jacquesm 16y ago
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.

imgabe 16y ago

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)

DanielBMarkham 16y ago

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.

boyer 16y ago
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.
- hga 16y ago
  I think the latter item (#3) is from a PBS show on another school district. Which doesn't change the general point of "where's the outrage"?