Students To Be Spied On, Censored With School Issued Laptops

May 3rd, 2012

FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda

Software has ability to monitor, censor web activity even in students’ homes

Steve Watson
Prisonplanet.com
May 3, 2012

Students To Be Spied On, Censored With School Issued Laptops 500x 95765605

Students in Portland, Maine are to be issued with laptops that will track their activity and actively block certain websites including social media sites.

Internet filtering software will be downloaded automatically onto the computers when students boot them up at school, reports the Kennebec Journal. However, the restraints will stay in place even when the students are working from home or other non-school premises, including outside of normal school hours.

Sites such as Facebook, Hulu and YouTube, as well as forums, news groups, games, dating sites, gambling sites and chat rooms will all be blocked.

According to Peter Eglinton, chief operating officer for the district, the changes are a legal requirement. However, this is not the case, as noted by Doug Levin, executive director of the State Educational Technology Directors Association, based in Maryland:

“While federal law requires school districts to take measures like creating an Internet safety policy and blocking sexually explicit content, there is no requirement that social media sites be blocked,” Levin said.

Furthermore, the U.S. Department of Education recently issued guidelines explaining that it is acceptable to allow social networking sites and video streaming, said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, deputy director of the American Library Association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom.

A d v e r t i s e m e n t

The article also notes that no other school district in the country has blocked access to social media sites from school computers that are used at home.

The privacy concerns raised by the move will also draw comparisons with a previous incident reported in 2010 when a school district in Philadelphia was reportedly discovered to have used school issued laptops to actively spy on students in their homes.

School district officials in Lower Merion were accused of remotely accessing laptops and taking thousands of images via the in built cameras, including photographs of students in their homes, screen shots of web sites they visited, and excerpts of their online chats.

It seems other schools across the country have been actively using the same or similar technology to monitor students for some time.

The following clip is from PBS FRONTLINE: Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier, broadcast in early 2010. The clip is from segment 4 of the show titled Teaching with Technology.

The Assistant Principal of the featured high school demonstrates how he effectively spies on students by remotely accessing cameras in their laptops. He monitors their activity and even takes pictures of them, much to his own amusement:

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Steve Watson is the London based writer and editor for Alex Jones’ Infowars.net, and Prisonplanet.com. He has a Masters Degree in International Relations from the School of Politics at The University of Nottingham in England.

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Comment Rules

35 Responses to “Students To Be Spied On, Censored With School Issued Laptops”

Dual boot with Linux OS, problem solved kids 😉

jchance Reply:
May 3rd, 2012 at 10:27 am

It isn’t that easy. When these laptops are issued to students it is conditional and one of the conditions is no modifications to the operating systems or hard drive layouts.

American Dystopia Reply:
May 3rd, 2012 at 10:58 am

Dual boot with Linux OS on USB Jump Dive or SD card, problem still solved kids 😉

…. Reply:
May 3rd, 2012 at 11:33 am

American Dystopia:

Trust me, people A LOT smarter and with A LOT more technical knowledge and expertise would than you have developed countermeasures. Your simple understanding here will not work.

jchance Reply:
May 3rd, 2012 at 12:43 pm

@American Dystopia

First off don’t talk about something you know nothing about. An SD card is not designed as a storage medium to be able to handle read/write like a hard drive or USB thumb drive. If you try running an OS on an SD card it has to be in read only mode because if you do not it ends up frying it. USB thumb drives on the other hand do not have the speed necessary to make the use of an OS on such a medium practical. Anyone who uses Linux knows that, which by the way you should be referring to Linux distributions not Linux as an OS. Here is the simple reason why too. Linux is the kernel, the heart of the OS, but alone it isn’t capable of doing anything without the tools, services, and applications developed by members of both Open Source and Free Software.

From there, the majority of schools with these laptops lock down the BIOS so only people with the administrator password can modify them. When they do this, they make it so the laptop can only boot from the hard drive, not CD/DVD, USB, or SD card slots.

This is coming from a person who has worked in IT and has been a computer programmer since the mid 1990′s, so I know what I am talking about on this subject.

LibertyHound Reply:
May 3rd, 2012 at 12:57 pm

@ rat turds,

More dropping, I see!

American Dystopia Reply:
May 3rd, 2012 at 1:39 pm

@jchance

I see you don’t use Linux. Lots of people run Linux off memory cards. I’ve been running one of my Linux based Media computers off a 4 gig CF card for 5 years now with no problems.

wildcat Reply:
May 3rd, 2012 at 12:42 pm

It is a school issued laptop. Whatever you store on that laptop, can be retrieved by the school using remote access tools like BIOS level or desktop level remote access. The school could also ask for the laptop to be returned or to have it confiscated. Given the attitude of the authorities
now, you could draw a picture of your mother selling off the last snowclearing brush and the teachers would think she is a pole-dancer.

Don’t take unnecessary risks. Take a photograph of you and your friends playing around with bubbleblowers and the school would do you for having lookalike drugs parenaphilia.
I would immediately reinstall the OS and install whatever software the kid might need.

jchance Reply:
May 3rd, 2012 at 10:30 am

The copy of the OS issued with the laptop has all of the software used for this blatant violation of inalienable rights on the installation medium. You are also not allowed to use another OS or installation disk either. If you do it is an offense punishable by the school.

This is why parents should buy their children their laptops then control the software on their property.
The only problem here is the ability to take photos of the children and their desktop windows while outside of school.
Watching them in class is no different to the teacher looking up from their desk to see if anyone is goofing off and censoring material on *school-issued* equipment is irrelevant.

I’d still be for the children putting some tape over the lens and an enpty headphone-plug size adaptor into the microphone jack, as well as moving the wifi switch to the off position.

Vengeance Reply:
May 3rd, 2012 at 10:04 am

And pigs are gonna fly too huh…

jchance Reply:
May 3rd, 2012 at 10:35 am

@Gay_Ray

I hate to break it to you but in most school districts the parents pay for these supposedly school issued laptops at a discounted price when issued or do so with their property and/or income taxes because that is what is used to purchase them.

There is a big difference besides between a teacher doing his or her job watching the students to make sure they are doing their work in class and the school’s administration using a laptop to spy on them, especially when it is done in the homes of private citizens when they are not in school.
Homeschool your children, their brains and souls depend on it. Do you love them enough for the extra effort?

squirrelmaster5500 Reply:
May 3rd, 2012 at 10:10 am

Good post

…. Reply:
May 3rd, 2012 at 11:36 am

Menzoberranzandweller:

It seems YOU were homeschooled by idiot parents. Little wonder the world is mostly dumb.

Menzoberranzandweller Reply:
May 3rd, 2012 at 12:10 pm

You’d last about 5 seconds with me before your consciousness left you. You have not the courage to even have a name. Your grave will probably be unmarked as well.
They may just catch a few young boys jerking it.

squirrelmaster5500 Reply:
May 3rd, 2012 at 10:10 am

They will anyway lol

American Dystopia Reply:
May 3rd, 2012 at 11:15 am

My guess is they’ll catch a few teacher jerkin it for em.

wiggins Reply:
May 3rd, 2012 at 11:27 am

Mr Garrison……..

…. Reply:
May 3rd, 2012 at 11:50 am

There you TV watchers go again.
Can you say “Voyeurism”? Sheesh…
Students will be “issued” a laptop? I wouldn’t think Maine had that much money. Oh well, if the school wants to “issue” laptops, fine, ultimately it is their laptop and they can do/install/record whatever they want. You don’t want the school looking over your shoulder, then get your own laptop. Most Jr. High School students I know (including the majority of com-mentors on PP) have enough computer knowledge to get around any spying techniques currently known to man – if not, they have friends who do. “Hey Suzie, I have remedial math class with nerd Gordon , and he can turn your computer security off an on. He only charges 10 bucks too. Or a hand job, whichever comes first.” You don’t want mr Vice Principal spying thru your camera? A piece of masking tape works wonders.

Admittedly, it was about four years ago that I was conversing with a 6th grade teacher ( aka middle school) and I asked her what the biggest problem that she and her fellow teachers faced. I was expecting the usual: lack of money, parental apathy, no technology – but, without hesitation, she replied, “The biggest problem we have right now is students ‘sexting’ each other with their cell phones.”

This sounds like another PP world class attempt at straw grasping.

jchance Reply:
May 3rd, 2012 at 10:41 am

You miss the point. These laptops are paid for by parents whether they pay for them when issued, which most school districts require them to purchase laptops for their children now, or they were purchased using the parents’ tax dollars. Therefore they cannot be considered school property. If the parents pay for them directly then the parents or their children own them because they were gifted to their children. If they were purchased with tax dollars they are then the property of the state and/or local community. Either way, the schools are then required to follow not only their state’s constitution they are required to follow the US Constitution. And don’t try to say neither constitution applies here because there is no age limits set on who is protected by them.

zeroskill Reply:
May 3rd, 2012 at 12:06 pm

No, I didn’t miss the point. Again, you are trying to make something out of nothing. The same parents that you speak of also pay for the chemicals used in the chemistry classes, but that doesn’t give a student the right to make Nitro-Glycerin (or even attempt to), and if the faculty of that school are so abysmally inept that they don’t even monitor what the students are doing with the potentially harmful substances and/or objects, they deserve to be sent to the Gulag. AJ PP have rung the bell and you are salivating and barking. This must be a slow things-to-whine-about week. As a matter of fact, this affair is an excellent practical exercise for students in what happens when the government wants to “give” you something, especially something “for your benefit”. Last week PP was all about the deliberate dumbing down of American kids as an evil commie plot, this week somebody seems to be trying to reverse that trend and you whine about it? You need to learn to pick your targets a little more usefully.
they’ve already spied on kids dressing undressing in their bedrooms,
they accused a kid of pill popping for eating skittles too, TOTAL BS!!!
same paedophile jackasses put video cameras in school bathrooms,
gym locker rooms etc. control freaks who call in cops to tazer kids.

get your kids away from these freaks.
“want some candy little girl” is now “free computers!”
absolutely, format, and re-install the operating system. Never accept the free gift from the system without doing this.
Surveilling kids is creepy beyond imagining. 🙁
I wonder how long before there is some plan to make these computers mandatory, so even those students whose parents have other computers they might use are not permitted to do so, say under the guise of eliminating cheating?
now if he can pull this off he will become the next president after his dad’s four year term
There’s a girl reading a REAL BOOK in the photo! How did THAT get by the censors? Put her on house arrest!
Simple solution – don’t use it. It’s not the students laptops and does society really need more snotnosed pricks littering the internet with their uneducated and immature comments? No, they don’t. If they really wanna subvert the system and use them on their own they can, instead of dual booting, get another drive and load your own o.s. and physically switch them back and worth – unless there is some security sticker to prevent that (which I doubt since these are teachers). It’s kinda the reason why the TSA hates me. Whenever I travel I routinely ship my hard drive or have it travel with someone else (wink, wink) never mind the fact it is 448-bit blowfish encrypted. We gotta get more proactive than reactive folks.
If you everyone out there really feels that the government’s spying is wrong then start encrypting everything. There’s plenty of free software out there that will encrypt voice, data, text and emails. And even if they can eventually crack the encryption the system will get overrun a 1000 fold trying hack everyone’s data.
Quotation by Steve Watson:

“It seems other schools across the country have been actively using the same or similar technology to monitor students for some time.”

Steve-o could only find one incident where some bad, dishonest people used a laptop camera to illegally monitor students in there home, and another one who used the cameras in class, so to make it seem the problem is widespread and that the school administration which is the subject of this article, and every other school district will necessarily do the same, he uses the term SEEMS. Well, Steve-o, when your have proof stronger than your feelings, please feel free to list a cite.

As far as the laptops in the video, the kids were AWARE the camera was on them, because THEY TURNED IT ON, “using it like a mirror.”
BIOS level remote administration trumps OS reinstallation.