<p>Important to note PAID leave, so no “bad guy” assumptions should be made – makes sense to remove those who could alter the IT evidence while an investigation is happening.</p>
<p>But here is what interests me:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>So what was the control the other 40 times?</p>
<p>And:
</p>
<p>So are we looking at criminal prosecutions and 1983 actions against police department personnel for spying inside homes without warrants? There is no way IT set up feeds to the police without top-level admin knowledge and approval of the spycam program; hard to believe that would not have been a board notice/action item as well.</p>
<p>At least the police feed was secure, which hopefully means the spycam access was protected from hackers.</p>
<p>Interesting… although nothing in the article really helps the district’s case. </p>
<p>They say police were involved on “at least two” occasions, but what about the other 40?</p>
<p>Also, even on those two occasions they imply that they conducted surveillance first and then got in touch with the police… again it doesn’t work like that. </p>
<p>If the two people were found guilty on those instances they could have those convictions overturned on the grounds that police used warrant-less covert surveillance video as evidence in the case. Even if they were obviously guilty if the police and/or LMSD conducted an illegal search without a warrant those criminals could now potentially get off on a technicality. Nice job LMSD.</p>
<p>There’s an awful lot of public finger pointing going on at LMSD. AP is pointing the finger saying it wasn’t her and didn’t know anything about it (yet she somehow ends up with images on her desk), IT guys are pointing the figure at the administration saying ‘they told us to turn them on’ and ‘they failed to inform families about the technology.’ </p>
<p>It’s clear they know the district is in some deep doo-doo, and now they’re all jockeying for position to make sure that they’re not left holding the ball when all is said and done.</p>
<p>I read some of the comments to the article and a few correctly pointed out that those accused of wrongdoing in the case have now essentially just dragged local police department out in front of the bus that is this scandal. </p>
<p>
From reports this link was only setup to share files. It wasn’t a link to the spy system itself. Therefore it was very likely just a simple file server like a secure version of FTP (Win-SCP for example) to allow the school officials to place a file on a school server and allow a remote person to transfer those files across an encrypted connection. </p>
<p>As for the spy system itself, IT professionals that looked into it seemed quite concerned that the security around the system seems quite minimal and open to malicious use if someone other than those authorized had intent and set out to do so.</p>
<p>…yeah, like pictures of the inside of someone’s house, pictures of the inside of some kid’s bedroom, pictures of some random naked kid walking in front of the camera…</p>
<p>“…hat remains a very impressive number marking a top district, just correcting my mistake…”</p>
<p>CluelessDad - Going off topic here. How many NMF are there if this is thought to be many? I am guessing this is out of about 4-500 seniors making it about 5%.</p>
<p>LMHS has fewer than that per class-around 375 or so and HHS is a very small HS with an average of 225 per class. So around 300 per class averaged out between the two schools in the district.</p>
<p>"In each case, the tracking has to be turned on for an individual computer. Once that happens, the program will begin snapping photos and recording the computer’s Internet location at regular intervals, as long as the laptop is on, open and connected to the Internet.</p>
<p>At Lower Merion, that interval was usually set at the default, 15 minutes."</p>
<p>That could be a lot of photos. The comments about how many photographs were taken by the missing laptop that turned out to be in a classroom was pretty instructive. I wonder how the teacher who was photographed feels about that. </p>
<p>This story is really not getting a whole lot better for LMSD. </p>
<p>However, I don’t read anything into the two folks getting put on paid leave. There’s no way you can leave the people who were in charge of this software working in place while a potential criminal investigation is underway, and it is probably to their significant benefit that they’re on leave. This is not a poor reflection either on the IT folks or the district, and I’m surprised that so many of the newspaper comments focus on this.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Yes, it could be a lot of photos.</p></li>
<li><p>Another thing the story mentions, that should set off a whole new round of foaming at the mouth on the part of the jackals here, is that they had lots of policies and procedures to prevent abuse, but unfortunately they were largely unwritten policies and procedures. That helpful tidbit came from the lawyer for one of the techs.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>roshke - That’s about 600 seniors in the district. 20 NMF’s out of 600 then about 3%? How does the number run nationally? How much SAT tutoring do kids get in the LMSD? With their affluence, if kids are heavily tutored, is 3% still a good number justifying the SD high standing?</p>
<p>Unwritten policies and procedures certainly aren’t helpful, but honestly, I’m unconvinced that with the multitude of policies and procedures that most districts have that anyone really reads them all. It isn’t that the written policies aren’t important – they are – but as important is training that helps make sure that staff understand the core responsibilities they have for performing in accordance with district, state, and federal requirements, particularly when that is likely to be behavior that is not intuitive. (For example, in our state teachers are mandatory reporters for suspicion of child abuse. Key concepts we train the heck out of are 1. You must call if you suspect or student mentions possible abuse, 2. You must not investigate, 3. You must not ask about the progress of an investigation.) The thing is that everybody reads the policy and nods to say it is understood, but it is only when we go through scenarios that people really get it, because a lot of the time their instinctive reaction is to “help” by further investigating the situation, and it takes a fair amount of training to help them understand how this needs to be handled. </p>
<p>Written policies can help, but without some pretty good training or folks that have been sensitized to think about problems in a certain way, I’m not sure that the written policies do as much good as people might hope. And honestly, the software maker also bears some responsibility here – this software should have come with all sorts of large print warnings about the need to operate it in accordance with all federal, state, and local privacy laws. Perhaps it did.</p>
wow. i can’t imagine a public school in PA having unwritten policies and procedures. An “unwritten” policy is no policy at all. It is the school board’s responsibility to make policy - written that it. It is the administrations responsibility to carry out that policy.</p>
<p>Ultimately it boils down to the personal judgement of those in positions of authority (or with administrative access to powerful computing systems). </p>
<p>At the end of the day no amount of training or policies will matter if the people in the position to push the big red button lack the professionalism and judgement to handle situations correctly. </p>
<p>Also I found this quote from Perbix’s attorney rather unfortunate:</p>
<p>
What? Surely he should care about the children like they were his own children… not the friggin’ computers??? </p>
<p>In a nutshell that sums of the problem here… if they cared more about the computers than the children, their rights and the law then it’s no wonder they got themselves into such a mess.</p>
<p>I wonder which LMSD official will be next to come out and point fingers in some other direction…</p>
<p>The key policy/procedure I care about was whether IT had the capability to wipe the access logs: will we ever be able to reliably trace back the spycam access records?</p>
<p>JHS, rabid jackals circling, or snarling wolves defending the pack … cheap putdowns can be launched from any perspective.</p>
<p>Iglooo, if NMF semifinalists are top 1/2 to 1% (I believe?), anything north of that is a strong showing. I’m sure there plenty of threads around here on that topic (and socio-economic components). I know I started the NMF side commentary, but plenty to chew on staying on-topic here!</p>
<p>According to the LMSD website, 25 finalists and 11% of all seniors recognized (commended and finalists). Fairly high cutoff for finalist and PSAT given only in 11th. I have many friends with kids in this district - many seem more geared to SAT prep and don’t start until after the PSATs. Average SATs are among the highest in the state.</p>
<p>OK, I started the dance music, so jumping back in the pool (sorry for trying to direct the dancing, Iglooo).</p>
<p>With NM Commended at top 5%, LMSD seems to be running 2-3x across the NM sweepstakes. That’s great for any school, selective admission or open. Yes, a high-income suburb is largely de facto selective but there does appear to be a whole lotta teaching going on there. I think PA is a pretty strong educational state overall, so it wouldn’t seem one could just chalk it up to a thin state pool.</p>
<p>And have journalism standards just completely gone down the toilet? Sheesh. And to misspell the guys name using “perp” is aggravating. I’m halfway convinced Fox does stuff like this on purpose. But the lazy reporting is just everywhere these days.</p>
<p>The lawyers for the IT staffers put on administrative leave have talked again to reporters:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>The lawyer of course knows that this was illegal… If your client is totally innocent and didn’t break any laws you say your client is innocent and didn’t break any laws. </p>
<p>If, however, you client did break laws but is taking a defense that he/she only did what higher ups told them to do then you play this game that the lawyers have been playing with the press today.</p>