Apparently a school district in PA decided to use the laptops they had issued to the students as a spy device to take images of whatever was going on in front of the web-cam. The news broke last week when a class-action lawsuit was filed by one a student who was reprimanded for "inappropriate behavior" (see below the scandalous behavior) and confronted with a picture of himself at home taken by his school issued laptop. Anyhow. It has grown to be a pretty big story on the tech blogs.

Ars Technica has a pretty good rundown of the new developments, and as usual they have links with great background. I'll just hit the highlights of what has emerged since Friday. From the article:

• The Federal Bureau of Investigation is now investigating whether the school broke any federal wiretap laws
  
  
• A federal grand jury has also subpoenaed the school for records related to the so-called "security" measures implemented on the laptops. The district is being asked not to delete records or software from any laptops and to preserve records.
  
  
• The Lower Merion School District has issued a statement that they have activated the system 42 times in the last year and only to find stolen laptops(*).

Oh and, we now know what "inappropriate behavior" the kid was caught in:

Blake Robbins' attorney spoke to NBC Philadelphia (video link) and claims the school "caught" Robbins with two Mike & Ike candies in his hand, which look like pills. The student apparently eats the candies "religiously" and the school overreacted to the image.

One other unsettling tidbit from a local NBC affiliate:

The district claims they do have to right to access the webcams at any time, but say they only use the feature to locate lost computer.

WTF? I really hope they are totally off base on this.

The comments at Ars Technica highlight a blog posting at Stryde Hax who digs quite a lot deeper into what was going on. He tracks back the work of Mike Perbix who apparently has recorded at least one promotional video for a tracking software package called LANRev (Nicely blows my "Prey" theory out of the water, BTW). Anyhow, "Stryde" goes through a thorough examination of the software and of Mr Prebix's rather prolific online footprint discussing the use of laptops for surveillance. The whole post is pretty good even for a non-technically inclined person.

He also digs a bit deeper into student reports and comes up with kind of a creepy picture and highlights a few other points:

• Possession of a monitored Macbook was required for classes


• Possession of an unmonitored personal computer was forbidden and would be confiscated


• Disabling the camera was impossible


• Jailbreaking a school laptop in order to secure it or monitor it against intrusion was an offense which merited expulsion

The last one is obvious. No IT policy is going to allow the users to "jailbreak" the software configuration.  But in conjunction, the other policies are kind of unsettling.

(*)It is less than obvious what the exact monitoring policy was. It seems like there are a couple of gaping holes in the school district's story at this point. If they only used it for stolen laptops, how did the kid get captured eating candy? And if it was only used by the IT department for recovery purposes, how did the picture find it's way to the principal?

This keeps looking worse for the school district. Now the question will be if Mr Prebix has managed to "Cheney" all the records.