“In a lawsuit filed Tuesday in federal court, the family said the school’s assistant principal had confronted their son, told him he had ‘engaged in improper behavior in [his] home, and cited as evidence a photograph from the webcam embedded in [his] personal laptop issued by the school district,’” Hardy and Cook report. “The suit contends the Lower Merion School District, one of the most prosperous and highest-achieving in the state, had the ability to turn on students’ webcams and illegally invade their privacy.”
Hardy and Cook report, “The district’s Apple MacBook laptops have a built-in webcam with a ‘security feature’ that can snap a picture of the operator and the screen if the computer is reported lost or stolen, Young said. But he said ‘the district would never utilize that security feature for any other reason.’ The district said that the security system was ‘deactivated’ yesterday, and that it would review when the system had been used.”
“The suit says that in November, assistant principal Lynn Matsko called in sophomore Blake Robbins and told him that he had ‘engaged in improper behavior in his home,’ and cited as evidence a photograph from the webcam in his school-issued laptop,” Hardy and Cook report. “Matsko later told Robbins’ father, Michael, that the district ‘could remotely activate the webcam contained in a student’s personal laptop… at any time it chose and to view and capture whatever images were in front of the webcam’ without the knowledge or approval of the laptop’s users, the suit says. It does not say what improper activity Robbins was accused of or what, if any, discipline resulted.”
Full article here.
In a related Philadelphia Inquirer report, Derrick Nunnally and Mari A. Schaefer explain, “In an age when built-in laptop cameras, no larger than a fingernail, have become commonplace, using them for clandestine surveillance can be a matter of simplicity itself.”
“Doing so requires one technical tweak to the machine before it is turned over to its user,” Nunnally and Schaefer report. “First, the computer’s administrator would have to enable the laptop to respond to remote access. Once the laptop is connected to the Internet, the administrator could sign on to it without the user knowing.”
“Then the administrator, over the Internet, could turn on the laptop’s camera and microphone as easily as if the machine were in the same room, and record the data – digital audio and video, for example – to the administrator’s machine,” Nunnally and Schaefer report. “‘I could take over without the user’s knowledge and just activate the webcam,’ said Jim Martin, who is based in Houston and teaches computer forensics to law enforcement and private industries.”
Nunnally and Schaefer report, “This is not always a bad thing, as illustrated by the case of a White Plains, N.Y., woman who in May 2008 found that her stolen MacBook was showing up online. She switched its camera on remotely and soon had a picture of its suspected thief to take to police, according to the New York Times.”
Full article here.
A CBS News Early Show report featuring Harriton High School Sophomore Savana Williams with her Apple Macbook:
Direct link to the video via CBS News here
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers "Gladmax,""Edward W.," and "Aussiebookguy" for the heads up.]
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