Suit: Pa. school spied on students via laptops (MERGED THREAD)

Parents Forum
361

<p>It’s obvious to you that you throw long-term, valued employees under a bus for no actual benefit? Care to explain your logic?</p>

<p>Sure, it’s in the interest of the employer to have a quick, thorough investigation. And a properly advised employee will HAVE to refuse to cooperate in that investigation unless she is somehow immunized, or can rely on a privilege that she controls. And the employer knows that. So the employer has a choice between firing the employee, losing her services, and not getting any cooperation, ever, and not firing the employee, not losing her services, and not getting any cooperation until her criminal exposure is resolved. Other than purely as a matter of empty PR, or if it truly doesn’t value her services, how is the employer better off with the first option?</p>

<p>Usually when this happens, it’s because the employer has decided that the employee involved is the person responsible for whatever bad thing is going on, and would be fired anyway for it. I know you have already reached that conclusion about the entire Lower Merion School District Administration based on what you’ve read online, but I would be surprised of the school board agreed with you yet.</p>

362

<p>JHS, your comment about public employees got me curious. I don’t purport expertise, but found web commentary, summarizing as follows: not sure about admins, but generally must show “just cause” to fire teachers (and sometimes support staff); however, refusing admin directives can constitute “willful and persistent violations of school law” so yes, it would seem the Hobson’s Choice of waiving 5th or losing job applies to public as well as private employees. </p>

<p>As I stated above, I don’t claim expertise so will not further debate whether the above correctly states PA law.</p>

363

<p>JHS, the LMSD has pledged full cooperation investigating this both to its community and (as it legally must) in response to criminal invstigations and subpoenas. As an entity, it has NO 5th amendment rights. In order to cooperate, it MUST use every ability within its power to bring the facts to the table. That means ordering its personnel to cooperate. </p>

<p>Do you really think the Board is going to get into a pushing match with the USAtty/local prosecutor on not compelling the cooperation of employees within their control? Because those employees are more “valuable” to LMSD than complying with the law? Talk about writing your own death warrant.</p>

<p>Individual employees may refuse, but I guarantee you their lawyers are not advising them that asserting the 5th is a no-brainer. They absolutely risk being fired if they choose to do so, and they will be advised of that risk. But any employee who will not be candid about what he/she did on the job when pressed by their employer? Yes, that is always a firing offense.</p>

<p>Please don’t personalize what “I want”. You are speculating that these employees won’t cooperate, not me. I don’t like to see anyone in pain or distress. And I still don’t know what any of these individuals did or did not do, or who was responsible for authorizing this program.</p>

364

<ol>
<li><p>As a general matter, governmental employers (who, unlike private employers, are bound by the Constitution) are not free to condition employment on a waiver of constitutional rights. That is a broad principle, and there are lots of “buts” and exceptions and doctrine around it.</p></li>
<li><p>Of course refusal to comply with a valid employer directive is grounds for firing. But given that the relevant result to the employer will be the same either way – no cooperation, no information – it’s hard to see what the employer gets out of it. It’s all well and good for people to spout about employees’ duties and full cooperation, but that’s not realistic here. The School District may have pledged full cooperation, but the key employees involved here will be cooperating fully only if they have been defrauded and are not represented. Otherwise, they will be cooperating very selectively. And firing them will not improve the quality of their cooperation.</p></li>
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<p>If you have made a decision to fire the employee anyway, then it’s no problem to be self-righteous here. If you haven’t, and if there may be some benefit even to limited cooperation, then self-righteousness is not going to accomplish much good.</p>

<ol>
<li>Almost anyone would prefer getting fired to going to jail (and getting fired anyway). So, they ought to be invoking their 5th Amendment privilege unless they have a legal opinion that nothing they have done is prosecutable, or they have a plea agreement with all prosecutors, or they have an immunity agreement with all prosecutors.</li>
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365

<p>I agree the LMSD employees are in a tough situation and should be guided by quality legal advice. I’ll also spot you that they shouldn’t be taking legal advice from me!</p>

366

<p>The boy has responded to the AP’s statement today… delivering a statement to reporters who were hanging out by his house. </p>

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<p>In his statement the boy also tells the school district to get on with it and reveal what they were up to:</p>

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<p>The press noted how calm and collected the boy was relative to the clearly nervous and fiddly school official. </p>

<p>Honestly, I’m impressed at (at least in public–that’s all we can see) the way the boy has dealt with the situation. He’s had camera’s thrown in his face several times outside his home and each time he remained calm and made sound statements. </p>

<p>Contrast that to these school officials who seem very scared and nervous… and from what’s been put out there so far that’s likely with good reason. </p>

<p>The AP focused on people saying mean things about her–totally ignoring the charges made against her. </p>

<p>Again, the AP played the oldest PR trick in the book of denying something she was never accused of doing in the first place–“I would never rob a bank… how dare people say such things” (says the person charged with holding up a mini-mart)</p>

<p>The student and family meanwhile have stuck to their story… namely asking the district to explain how it managed to produce images from within the boy’s bedroom when they were given no authorization to do anything of the sort.</p>

367

<p>JHS, an interesting topic. There is apparently a line of cases under Garrity which MAY provide public servants criminal use-immunity for compelled investigation cooperation. But it doesn’t seem to protect their jobs if they refuse to cooperate and looks to be a mess these days as to what it does or does not protect.</p>

<p>I’m not sure I want public servants to have get oout of jail free cards … on the other hand, don’t want public servants to be easy targets either … hhmmmmm …</p>

368

<p>From Stryde Hax’s web posting “The Spy From Harriton High”</p>

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<p>Wow. So much for the dubious SD claim that they innocently forgot to tell parents and students about the remote webcam activation (spy) capability. Of course they didn’t tell parents and students! The SD realized that if people were informed about the spyware many of them would have objected and guarded against it, thus rendering it useless for the SD’s intended purpose, which was spying.</p>

369

<p>^^^The software used is just a bit creepy too. Not only does it secretly take images and send them to the remote spy-master but the program then goes through the system to sweep up its tracks to make it look as if nobody was ever there. </p>

<p>That just seems a bit shady to say the least. If your only wanting to purely recover a lost device then surely you don’t care that the computer will have traces on the hard disk indicating that images were taken and sent to a remote location—so why have the secret program go back and erase those tracks?</p>

<p>Some engineers have said that a data investigator could potentially still uncover those tracks but they’d have to perform some forensics on the hard disk to recover the ‘deleted’ files.</p>

<p>All this is even more creepy when put in light of other comments made by Perbix when he said elsewhere that when “you’re controlling someone’s machine, you don’t want them to know what you’re doing.” I don’t mean to suggest that Perbix had some sinister intention, I don’t think he did, but even so it’s still just a bit too Orwellian for me.</p>

370

<p>Creating a program that writes zeroes to a file before deleting is fairly trivial.</p>

371

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<p>Does anyone really believe this? It’s just nuts. Any theory which includes the premise that the school district intended to spy on its students is a theory with no connection to reality.</p>

<p>I have to laugh at the great concealment theory. This was all Top Secret, except that it was common knowledge among the students, and the student council at Harriton had been briefed about it. Clearly, it had not been adequately and universally disclosed and explained, especially to parents, but just as clearly huge numbers of people knew about it and discussed it, going back to last year. In fact, if you want to defend filing the lawsuit, that’s a fairly important point – the district DID have lots of opportunity to re-think its position, since various students raised privacy objections repeatedly, beginning over a year ago. But then most of them handled it by taping over the webcam. So much for the nefarious plot of the school district to keep them from disabling the spyware!</p>

<p>Oh, and after guarding the secret so assiduously, the school district chose to blow its own cover by confronting a 10th grader with a webcam picture, not (if we can credit today’s statement) to discipline him, but to find out if he wanted to talk about a problem. Spies do that all the time! They love revealing their sources and methods at the drop of a hat, to achieve absolutely nothing!</p>

<p>I don’t want to make too much light of this, because the district administration is in hot water. Clearly, they did not do a competent job of being constitutional lawyers here, but it’s also clear that they never even tried. By the same token, they did a completely incompetent job of spying as well – because of course it never occurred to them that that’s what they were trying to do.</p>

<p>I don’t want to be too whitewashy here. I am disturbed by the “glitches”, and I take seriously the possibility that one or both techs were peeping through the keyholes much more than they have let on. It IS disturbing that there does not seem to have been any protections in place to keep them from doing that, even if they never abused it. I worry about unauthorized access to the system. The whole program was poorly thought through, and the district DID have lots of chances to recognize that before this lawsuit was filed. This is going to be a painful and expensive lesson for the district – it already is – and heads may very well roll before the final chapter is written.</p>

<p>Absent actual peeping-Tom behavior by the techs, however, I do not expect to see (a) significant criminal prosecutions of individuals, or (b) significant monetary damages to the plaintiff or other “victims”.</p>

372

<p>JHS, if this case was about a private sector company doing the identical thing to its employees and their families would you still be espousing the same opinions?</p>

373

<p>Personally, based on the information we know, I don’t see evidence of “spying” in the CIA/KGB sense of the word. I don’t think the school district had a massive program of running covert operations… maybe they did, but nothing presented yet would really suggest that. </p>

<p>However, there is plenty of evidence of incredibly gross negligence on behalf of the school administration and officials. </p>

<p>Those officials demonstrated the clear ability to create an incredibly powerful ‘spy’ system, but also demonstrated that they lacked the professionalism to responsibly use their positions of authority in a manner that respected the fundamental rights of American citizens as guaranteed by our constitution and laws. </p>

<p>When you put those two things together you get the legal mess the school district and officials find themselves in today.</p>

374

<p>toblin, yes, absolutely.</p>

<p>rocketman08, let me suggest that “those officials” demonstrated the clear ability to hire a skilled and (over)enthusiastic technical employee, who in turn built an incredibly powerful spy system largely by trial and error, which he may or may not have ever used to any significant extent. And he was negligent enough not to recognize that he had built a spy system, not a theft recovery system . . . which makes it awfully likely that he never even surfaced the appropriate privacy questions with any of his superiors. And they were negligent and inexperienced enough not to ask tough questions, because they had never given out 2,300 laptops to students before, and no one else they knew had, either.</p>

<p>You know the old business joke about how you can tell a real pioneer – it’s the guy with the arrows in his chest? That’s basically what we are looking at here.</p>

375

<p>I looked at the Facebook group referenced in the article in my post #334. Apparently, a very poorly kept secret (which doesn’t excuse the lack of notification to everyone). A parent at the HS says:</p>

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<p>JHS, love that arrow analogy. And you are right - they weren’t really trying hard to hide this at all.</p>

376

<p>JHS:</p>

<p>This is what I call whitewash. Blame it on the overzealous tech. The administrators were tech newbies.</p>

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<p>As far as the facts of the case indicate, it wasn’t the tech who misused the information collected, it was the administration. They are the ones who perverted a theft recovery system and turned into a spying tool!</p>

377

<p>JHS, I don’t particularly care about a huge lawsuit windfall or people doing jailtime (but that could change depending on what facts emerge). As I have previously noted, there will be a huge amount of prosecutorial discretion here and those involved can play to that accordingly.</p>

<p>But I am a protective dad of a D in exactly this age group so yes, I am INCENSED that those entrusted with high school girls’ (yes, boys too) safety could have opened up this Pandora’s Box.</p>

<p>You don’t need to be a constitutional scholar to have a spycam picture of a kid in his bedroom put on your desk to say “hey, wait a minute, this can’t be right!”</p>

<p>I think we differ in your willingness to assume there was no peephole spying going on it it can’t be proven. Really? Mr Perbix showed he is quite adept at erasing the spyware tracks. You take comfort in and minimize the unknown, I am haunted by it, “glitchy” webcams and all.</p>

<p>Worse, the arrogance of LMSD in even trying to defend the indefensible. There is an arrogant, “we are above the law” element even to date that is, in my view, taking them down a very dark road where they are losing any remaining sympathy by the hour. </p>

<p>LMSD needs to get ahead of this curve to leave it behind them and people taking the 5h – and LMSD condoning a cover-up – of those who do (as you suggest), well at that point for me it moves to where is the nuclear button for all involved?</p>

<p>One positive that has emerged is national and international focus on the issue, with an awakening of personal liberty and privacy rights that we all have gotten much too compacent about. So Merion will ultimately takes its watershed place alongside Miranda in the common language of personal rights. What an honor.</p>

378

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<p>Really. So, if you or a member of your family rented a laptop from my store and later found out I had the ability to secretly activate the webcam and take pictures (all in the name of security of course) and indeed did use this capability to record images of you and your family inside your home you would have no problem with this? I think you’re arguing only for the sake of argument. I remember my HS debating days, sometimes you were handed the short end of the stick.</p>

379

<p>“There is no safety in unlimited technological hubris.” McGeorge Bundy</p>

<p>Brilliant work, LMSD. I grew up in the shadow of Lower Merion. Literally one of the wealthiest districts in the country, attended by Kobe Bryant, and the source of much regard in the Philadelphia-metro area, they’ve really dropped the ball this time.</p>

380

<p>cellardweller – Well, there DOES seem to have been an overzealous tech here. I have you to thank for that information, I think. And I can practically guarantee you that the superintendent, principals, and assistant principals are tech newbies, probably tech no-bies. I bet they have learned more about computers this week than they ever knew before. And what you are calling “misusing the information collected” I think looks like “trying to be a caring educator”. Really, it is probably both at the same time.</p>

<p>clueless: Where do you get that I have assumed there was no peephole spying going on? I may discount the likelihood of that, but I am really concerned about it. I don’t think the possibility has been excluded at all.</p>

<p>On the other hand, here’s the best evidence it wasn’t going on: The tech gave the plaintiff’s picture to an assistant principal. What a stupid thing to do if he wanted to be a peeper! He just told someone not at all likely to be sympathetic that he could do that, and she turned around and told the kid and his parents, who were colossally unlikely to be sympathetic. And, of course, if the assistant principal was peeping, she was even stupider.</p>

<p>Don’t you have any respect for the intelligence and deviousness of peepers? Why in the world would they out themselves to stop a kid from popping pills at home? A peeper would never, ever have shared his secret with the world like this. A peeper would have known he was doing something profoundly wrong. These people clearly didn’t.</p>

<p>My personal guess is that, if someone was peeping, it wasn’t anyone involved in the incident that gave rise to this case.</p>

<p>toblin: when I said “yes, absolutely”, I was saying that I would be expressing the same opinions if this were a private business. I’m not saying I wouldn’t have a problem with your hypothetical. I am saying that I wouldn’t be calling you a pervert or a fascist based on facts like the ones in this case (which include the secret not being secret at all).</p>