Minihan's World

Yet another "Stupid" Award to make

February 18, 2010

Lower Merion School District (PA) wins this week's Stupid Award for rigging laptops given to students

Here is a case of real stupidity.  Administrators in Lower Merion School District rigged laptop computers given to students to access the webcam feature anywhere. One student, now suing the school was disciplined, and is now suing the district, for "inappropriate conduct at home".

As reported in Boing Boing, the blog, the story is "the laptops issued to high-school students in the well-heeled Philly suburb have webcams that can be covertly activated by the schools' administrators, who have used this facility to spy on students and even their families. The issue came to light when the Robbins's child was disciplined for "improper behavior in his home" and the Vice Principal used a photo taken by the webcam as evidence. The suit is a class action, brought on behalf of all students issued with these machines.

If true, these allegations are about as creepy as they come. I don't know about you, but I often have the laptop in the room while I'm getting dressed, having private discussions with my family, and so on. The idea that a school district would not only spy on its students' clickstreams and emails (bad enough), but also use these machines as AV bugs is purely horrifying."

While we don't like to do it, we award our STUPID AWARD to Lower Merion School District for one of the dumbest actions we have seen.  They probably used stimulus money to purchase the laptops.  Wouldn't that we a hoot.

 

Security at TSA - how good are they?

October 14, 2009

By now, virtually everyone who has not been in a deep cave or enclosed in heavy plastic has heard about the latest breach by TSA of its own security - the paper drop in court that ended up all over the Internet.

Everything started with a response by TSA to a suit that included a redacted copy of its screening manual.  The document had been eletronically redacted rather than inked out, so copying the document to another page made the removal of the redactions easy to accomplish.  Janet Napolitano, the Secretary of DHS i mmediately tried to cover up the fiasco by saying that the document was out-of-date anyway and no harm done.  If that were the case then the opposing side in the court case needs to have a long talk with the judge on why they were provided faulty information.

Napolitano, testifying before a congressional oversight committee blamed everything on a contractor, but also said that several TSA/DHS employees were being disciplined for the breach of their own regulations.  They did not announce who or what punishments were meted out, so its hard to tell if they are really concerned, or simply going through the motions as they usually do.  Don't hold your breath on finding out either.

The government has a legitimate interest here in trying to keep the document -which has been bouncing around the Internet since - secret because it contains the prototcols that TSA uses to decide who gets screened, when, and to what degree -- information that could be invaluable to terrorists.  The real solution to this breach is to make a clear example that another will not be tolerated.  Cancel the contract and fire some employees -- if this were the military and some codes were compromised there would be real, swift, and substantial punishment for those involved.  DHS should do the same and let it be know what punishments were imposed.

Several interesting pieces can be found in Fierce Government, a great site for accurate Fed news.

Comments?

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