So… Someone is going to jail for that, right?
Right?
Settled for $610,000…so no. I feel like, given that minors were involved, the settlement should have been on top of criminal charges.
Usually when you hear about a settlement (and not a plea deal) that means this was a civil case and not a criminal one. A civil case doesn’t weigh in on whether or not criminal charges will be brought.
If enough people push the Attorney General of that state to pursue charges they still could (Edit: it’s been 14 years and the Statute of Limitations is 5 years for wiretapping which I think is the highest possible charge). But there is a higher standard for evidence in criminal trials. Not to mention the defense’s argument would likely be that schools have the right to wiretap students’ issued laptops, so the AG probably doesn’t want this to go to court and end up enshrining such a right when it currently holds civil liability due to the civil case succeeding.
wiretapping which I think is the highest possible charge
Wouldn’t the highest charge be all that child pornography they intentionally created?
Why tf are your AGs allowed to just ignore crimes? Aren’t there laws to prevent selective enforcement like this?
It’s worth reading the entire article, it just gets worse and worse.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), U.S. Attorney’s Office, and Montgomery County District Attorney all initiated criminal investigations of the matter, which they combined and then closed because they did not find evidence “that would establish beyond a reasonable doubt that anyone involved had criminal intent”.
That’s not even close to the worst thing in the article, but GG justice system. I’ll remember this one day when I’m in court. “Well I didn’t have criminal intent.”
That’s a defense now?? One that removes the need to even have a trial at all??
The article actually goes easy on them. The first plaintiff sued because the student was brought into the principal’s office and told they were being suspended for drug use, and as evidence showed a photo of them eating something in their room. It turned out to be Mike and Ike’s candy. The family was so upset they were spying on the child in their bedroom that it escalated to an investigation and then the scandal unfolded.
The school tried to backpedal and claim that the app takes photos on a timer and they had no idea, and this was proven to be a lie in court when they showed the IT training video explaining how proud they were of the webcam snooping feature.
It gets even worse: During the investigation, it was discovered that at least one person had copied videos and photos onto an external hard drive and taken them. The investigation never discovered who it was, or how many people had made copies; They just knew that files had been copied to at least one external storage drive.
The implication being that all of the teenage girls had their laptops open in their bedrooms, and at least one random employee had copies of their photos and videos.
Its been a defence for several hundred years, in fact! Showing intent is one of the three things you need to establish in every criminal case for it to be considered valid. Fuck the cops for dropping this case though, how in hell was there no intent to commit a crime here wtf.
Weird, I’ve literally always heard “ignorance of the law is no excuse to break the law”, which seems to imply criminal intent doesn’t matter. Only that the action that was take was illegal.
It’s not intent to break the law, it’s intent to do what you did. If I walk out of a store with a can of tuna I didn’t pay for, that’s shoplifting, right? Well, not necessarily.
If I walk into a store, pick it up off the shelf, hide it in my jacket, and dart for the exit, probably.
If my toddler slipped it into my jacket pocket, and I didn’t notice, probably not.
If I put it in my jacket pocket because my toddler started to run away, I forgot about it, and paid for a cart of groceries… Maybe? But unlikely to convince a jury beyond a reasonable doubt that it wasn’t an accident.
Well…you see…here’s the thing…
Fuck you!
~Sincerely, the rich and elite, which control the legal system which is not meant to ever be in YOUR favor. It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.
Its always been intent. If you pay with counterfeit bills but didn’t realize because you got them from the shop that gave you change, you didn’t intend to do fraud.
Intent matters, always has.
But they did mean to take pictures of minors in the privacy of their bedrooms in the name of stopping petty theft which I’m doubtful would have occurred on any meaningful scale in the first place. Whether they meant it “criminally” seems immaterial here. I think they got off exceptionally light, and it’s a travesty of justice. You won’t convince me otherwise.
I feel very sure we have prisons full of people who didn’t mean to do whatever they did to be there.
It seems like it to you and me. At a trial, we’d hear their side of the story. Maybe there’s some explanation that could make it somewhat reasonable, and you would have a hard time convincing a jury beyond a reasonable doubt.
If I remember correctly, students had to pay extra to take their laptops home, I believe an insurance fee of some kind. The student whose family filed a lawsuit did not pay that. The laptop was supposed to be at school, but was not. In that case, there may have been reasonable doubt that the school was trying to track down its missing property that should not be outside of school grounds.
I fully understand your point.
But on the other hand, we’re in a period where the people doing this haven’t experienced it themselves. Nor have they learned about this in school. It’s all so new and so many people are ignorant and stupid when it comes to technology.
We need cases like these to set precedents so we can define something as criminal intent. People should be allowed to make a mistake at least once, and the government actually recognizes this.
In a much more polite way than I usually say it, we can agree to disagree here. I can also see your point.
But, I think any rational adult in the room should have said, “So we’re going to deploy software on computers that kids use in their bedrooms that will randomly or on demand take pictures of whatever is happening in that room? No fucking way, it’s not worth gestures around compared to the possibility that a couple laptops get stolen along the way. We can find another approach.”
No one should need an understanding of technology to understand why that is bad, and the WIkipedia entry makes it very plain that key figures in the decision knew that was precisely what was being done.
I’m sorry, this is the George Costanza defense.
Ahh i remember the days of the school shitbook pros. That kids is why when 2020 rolled around and all my classes went to online and they wanted me to use there laptops provided. I made a disk image of the ssd and ran it all in a VM with usb passthrough. Cant acess my webcam if there is none!
You know, a piece of black tape would’ve been a lot easier.
Or if computer manufacturers just put in a hardware disconnect for the camera and mic. Like Lenovo used to do with the wifi switch.
Hardware manufactures could (and should) put separate mic and cam LEDs wired directly in line with (wire in parallel to)the power circuits for the mic and camera. They won’t, but they should. Best they ever do is a digitally controlled LED that is sketchy as fuck, for the camera only.
The worst part about this IMO is the school system teaching digital dependency on proprietary software vendors.
Big tech salivates at the thought of being a child’s “first”… much like other kinds of child groomers.
They’ve gotta use something. There are only 3 choices, and one of those has less than 3% market share. Of the two choices left, Mac is the better choice.
If you issue laptops, market share should not be your consideration except for availability of programs and tech support.
Linux has plenty of both, and the obvious advantage of being open source and transparent.
Btw, many governments are currently transitioning to Linux for that very reason.
Schools are going to train kids on systems that they may encounter in the business world, and their chances of encountering a Linux DE are vanishingly small. Idk how many governments are transitioning to Linux, but the United States government wasn’t doing so when this US school issued laptops. I love Linux and use it on all my computers, but I’m realistic enough to understand why the school issued Mac or Windows.
Real question - WTF does market share have to do with this?
No one running a program like this is gonna care about “market share”.
Most are gonna be 'give me cheapest you got" even if that means buying HS students baby’s 1st computer from ‘Fissure Nice’ (because they aint gonna spend money that can go in their pocket for name brand shit)
Schools exist to prepare students for their adult life, and the working world. They’re going to choose an operating system that the students are likely to encounter at their jobs, and elsewhere in their lives.
Most are gonna be 'give me cheapest you got" even if that means buying HS students baby’s 1st computer from ‘Fissure Nice’ (because they aint gonna spend money that can go in their pocket for name brand shit)
They gave them MacBooks, so I’m not sure how you are arriving at this conclusion. School administrators don’t get to pocket any school budget money that they don’t spend on students.
This is such a bad take. You’re seriously comparing the purchase of a tool brand for students to child grooming? Jesus dude. A computer is simply a tool, and Apple made one for an education market and price that was complete and convenient for that purpose. This is just as “bad” as them relying on all Pearson branded materials. Are there problems there? Yes, obviously. Pearson has market-based motives to keep schools on their materials and so they have tests that lean in on their text books and it’s all kinda gross. But it’s not like the answer is “let’s all just read Wikipedia in class” or “let’s compare all the different source books and find the real truth” as great as that would be, it’s just not realistic and the one reference isn’t particularly bad, it’s just not the best possible. I guess all that to say chill he fuck out, the solution to everything isn’t open source.
No. It is not a bad take. Just look at candy cigarettes.
Oh it’s just advertising? Advertising is brainwashing, and nothing more. It should be outright banned. Especially campaigns targeting children.
The marketing wasn’t to children? It was to schools? They still do market to children (like the iPhone and messaging) but CHILD GROOMING?!? Fuck off. Trying to sell legos to children so they’ll be hooked on high-quality plastic toys is also grooming? Y’all are fucking stupid.
Hit a nerve? I stand by my assertion that “tech in education” initiatives by predatory vendors is akin to grooming children. Get them to speak the language of your product early, so that they’ll be a customer for life. IIRC the term is called “Cradle to grave marketing”[1] [2]. Leverage imprinting along the way for good measure. I get why the Googles and the Microsofts of the world are so eager to get their products into schools. That doesn’t mean that I agree with it.
I’m not saying marketing to children isn’t predatory. But this is a tool they need in school. It’s not practical at all to suggest they should be building computers and compiling their own OSes for school. Selling a product for use as a tool to children isn’t grooming. It’s definitely a marketing tactic, but so is everything?
comparison to pedophiles? maybe unfair. comparison to big tobacco? on fucking point.
a computer is a tool, sure, and the hardware is largely opaque at the high school level, excepting massive nerds
but every single one of these big tech companies runs all their shit on proprietary ecosystem lock-in, and keeping customers infantilized.
anything that isn’t open source should be fucking banned from schools.
I am absolutely not terribly invested here. But I wanted to kick something around (I opened the wiki and just decided I don’t care that much to invest time into this but it is a thought kicking around my brain so I figured I’ll express it here) - I am wondering if the school that did this is relatively wealthy. As Macbooks aren’t cheap, and I think most schools were tossing around chromebooks instead right? So perhaps the reason why nobody ultimately got in the appropriate amount of trouble for this crime is because they themselves were people of a certain status. Or knew how to grease the right palms.
It’s a suburb just outside Philadelphia and has some very wealthy parts. Kobe Bryant grew up there.
Yeah, see. I’ve seen some schools in my travels that make me want to slap someone. Because I am astonished at how far the haves and the have nots are apart. But also, I’d say in general whenever the sentence never seems to align with the punishment you can bet there’s some classist mechanisms in the works.
