<p>The tech would have had to either do a screen capture or use something like screen sharing to see what was on the kid’s screen. Screen sharing typically adds some quirkiness to the user experience which might have been noticed. It can result in network latency as one computer has to send the screen content changes to the other screen.</p>
<p>A screen snapshot is possible but that’s another area where you’d have to take a lot of them to try to catch someone doing something improper. If I worked in this Orwellian district, I’d bring my own equipment in just to avoid being bugged. The network techs could just as well be spying on teachers and administrators (they might eat Mike and Ikes too). BTW, the equipment that I use at the office is my own.</p>
<p>That’s the lead in today’s Inquirer page 1 story.</p>
<p>BCE, are you agreeing or disagreeing with me? Your pictures are Exhibit A for my argument. None of those drugs looks remotely like the candies, and only a tiny portion of them even has a similar shape.</p>
<p>Apologies that I am very late to this thread with a question that has probably been asked and answered many times earlier. If the computers belong to the school system, do they not have the right (as is done in corp america) to look at the content? That may be different from looking at webcams, where the privacy issue muight get murkier (ie the webvam is owned by the school, but looking at fim in a persons home might be invasion of privacy?? Can someone post a nice synopsis of this thread and the issue??</p>
<p>JHS have you ever actually used the webcam in a MacBook? They’re decent considering their size be these thing’s aren’t exactly the Hubble Telescope. </p>
<p>It would be totally impossible from the image to determine with any accuracy what the ‘pill like object’ is in the image other than that it’s a small oblong shaped pill sized object.</p>
<p>Not only could you not tell the difference between a candy and a pill you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between an illegal pill and a legal one. How did they know it wasn’t simply a picture of some allergy medication or a vitamin–they didn’t. Even if the text on the screen suggested otherwise it’s not an excuse. </p>
<p>Imagine for example the student was in a web chat and he said “I’m feeding my habbit” and the other person said “Stop popping those pills, they’ll kill you eventually”</p>
<p>Was the person talking about popping crack or eating sugary snacks and was the other person’s comment about harming because of drug abuse or harming because eating too much sugar can be a serious health risk. It would be impossible to tell. </p>
<p>And again, all the above is irrelevant since these calls were not for the AP or any other school official to make.</p>
<p>Look more closely. You can do a google image search for capsules and find many that look like candy. Also remember that the cameras on laptops aren’t that good. Older models had 640x480 resolutions while newer models have 1.3 megapixel models. You add any kind of motion in there and things get fuzzy. Anyone that’s done videochat with Macs knows the limitations of the cameras.</p>
<p>As far as the “both pictures and words” thing, they might have grabbed a word processing document off of his laptop and read it instead of doing a screen capture.</p>
<p>JHS, thanks for the cite. But you have not responded to my (repeated) question: do you have a tie to anyone implicated in this case? If so, we should know this so that we can put your comments in context.</p>
<p>I’ll go first: I have absolutely no tie to anyone in this case, just a strong interest in the constitutional issues involved as the story has developed.</p>
<p>Apparently students were mandated to use the laptops supplied by the SD, despite the fact that, this being an affluent district, a large number of students would presumably own one already. Furthermore, they were prohibited from trying to prevent an intrusion into their privacy by disabling the webcam and microphone. Now why would this be?</p>
<p>I do not think that ownership of the laptops is a factor. It would be if there was property damage, I would assume. But it is not. </p>
<p>I did not know that in corporate America it is okay to look at the content of a computer. I know it is not okay to use a computer for inappropriate use (eg. playing video games on company time, or sending private emails), but, unless corporate laptops are being used to spy on employees, I do not see the parallels with this case. The SD was not saying that the laptop was used improperly. Instead, it is the family that is making this claim.</p>
<p>The company can look at anything they want to on company-owned equipment. I like to keep personal files on the systems that I use so I use my own equipment for work.</p>
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<p>Policies vary widely from company to company. Software engineers can be hooked up to their workplaces all the time now so that they can work at any time of the day or night. This means that casual browsing will go through the companies network and they can monitor that unless you keep the networks separate by using a virtual machine setup. If you don’t want the company to see something that you’re doing, you have to do it off network.</p>
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<p>Companies can spy on employees and they do. Our comings and goings are monitored by keycards, palm scanners, cameras, networks, cell phones, etc. It’s something to be aware of.</p>
<p>This makes me think about the use of school provided laptops. Assuming that many families in LM already had laptops of their own, would the school-provided one be on all the time and be able to monitor via webcam all the time? If a student chose to use his/her own laptop for personal use and use the laptop issued by the school strictly for school-related stuff, would the webcam be then off?</p>
<p>I don’t know the setups but I would assume that students could shut them down, sleep them or hibernate them. The webcam can only be used when the system is running and the laptop lid open.</p>
<p>“Yes, the parents’ credit history is irrelevant. Except that it makes them look like such . . . nice people. They certainly know a thing or two about overstepping bounds.”</p>
<p>Mr. Miranda was definitely not a nice guy. Neither is Mr. Fofana, who helped the TSA understand a year ago that there were limits to administrative searches. But civil rights are there to protect all of us, likable or not.</p>
<p>rocketman, not only have I not used the webcam in a MacBook, I haven’t used a webcam in anything, ever. I have one on my laptop, and I’ve never used it.</p>
<p>Of course you couldn’t tell the difference between a legal pill and an illegal one. But Mike & Ikes don’t look like either – they are way too big, and their colors are not pharmaceutically appropriate. I would understand how someone could mistake Tylenol for Ecstasy, or Oxycontin, but Mike & Ikes look like candy. </p>
<p>I don’t have any grand theory of what, if anything, turns on this. It’s just one of the parts of the story that hasn’t made complete sense to me yet.</p>
<p>Jym – Think of it this way: if your company required you to use a company provided Blackberry, and you later learned that they’d use (hypothetical) software on the Blackberry to remotely record your conversations, even when you weren’t using he phone at work, without adequate notice to you up front, would that ever be okay? Can other people around you ever have given consent to being recorded in that situation? Video seems to me to be substantially more intrusive, though the law may be lagging on this. (Of course, I’m of the “it’s all bits and bytes when you come down to it – there isn’t a practical difference between an audio and video or still image recording.”) </p>
<p>Even in work environments unions have negotiated strict limits on the use of recordings – airline pilots, for example, have held firm that data recorders only keep the last n minutes of conversation (n=90?) and strictly limits how that information can be used.</p>
<p>clueless: I have no connection to anyone in this case. Zilch. I have lots of friends and partners who live in or near Lower Merion, but I don’t. I know a fair number of parents and kids at Lower Merion high school, but as far as I know no one currently at Harriton. (In fact, I’ve never been entirely sure where Harriton is. I do know people who graduated from Harriton in the past, though.) I’m not a member of the synagogue that Robbins stiffed.</p>
<p>Like most people around here, I respect the heck out of the Lower Merion School District. It provides perhaps the best non-magnet public education in the country, maybe the world, at property tax rates that are well below what I pay.</p>
<p>My interest in this is purely . . . well, it’s not purely anything. The legal, strategy, and moral issues are juicy.</p>
The way this case has played out, my best guess is that the kid isn’t a drug dealer. If he were, he would be very unlikely to have taken such a high profile. Assume that your kid isn’t involved in drugs and isn’t a drug dealer–what would be your reaction to have him called into the office and being asked these questions based on secret monitoring of his bedroom? Even if the AP was entirely well-meaning, I think I’d be upset.</p>
<p>I don’t agree with JHS on all of this, but I agree that the issues are juicy.</p>
Fine, then please stop trying to suggest that someone could tell the difference between candies and pills based on grainy webcam images. I can assure you they can’t.</p>
<p>I will also agree with you JHS that these issues are indeed juicy.</p>
<p>Don’t know if this has been mentioned already, but apparently **Dr. Phil **will be doing a show on the case. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, he met with the Robbins family yesterday.</p>