Last week, I wrote that we’d learned that the Lower Merion School District may have gathered many more photos of more students than had previously been revealed. Now, the Philadelphia Inquirer has put a number on it: A security program installed on laptops assigned to students captured 56,000 images over the course of two years, including screenshots (showing programs in use and private messages being sent) and surreptitious webcam photos of students at home.

Many of these images, it should be noted at the outset, do appear to have come from laptops that really had been stolen. Almost two-thirds of the total came from six laptops that had been stolen from a high school gym, and which kept transmitting for  almost six months, though even there it’s a close question whether a warrant should have been obtained. (Why it took six months to recover the laptops with an active security program running is a good question for another time.) But many of those pictures seem much harder to justify:

[I]n at least five instances, school employees let the Web cams keep clicking for days or weeks after students found their missing laptops, according to the review. Those computers – programmed to snap a photo and capture a screen shot every 15 minutes when the machine was on – fired nearly 13,000 images back to the school district servers.

Emphasis added. The district also says it only once activated the tracking program because a student had not paid the $55 insurance fee required before taking a laptop home. Blake Robbins, the student whose lawsuit brought the story to national attention, says that one case was his.  That raises obvious questions about whether school officials might have exercised their discretion to activate the tracking program more readily in the case of particular students. The activation procedure itself hardly imbues one with great confidence: Apparently 10 school officials had the authority to request laptop tracking, which they might do with a simple informal e-mail.

Just turn this over in your head for a moment. You’ve got ten different administrators—and in practice, the network techs themselves—able to turn a child’s home laptop into a remote surveillance camera just by sending an e-mail reporting that a laptop is missing, or that a fee didn’t get paid on time. The laptop can take thousands of photos over the course of days or weeks, with neither parents nor students any the wiser until a scandal forces closer scrutiny. If Robbins hadn’t been confronted, or if administrators had made a point of deleting these pictures of children at home rather than keeping them lying around in storage indefinitely, there’s no reason to think anyone would ever have known.  How many tens of thousands of parents have kids in one-to-one school laptop programs now? What don’t they know?

School Laptop Spycams Took 56,000 Pictures is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

When school administrators discovered nude photos of teenage girls in the cell phones of some boys at school, they decided to set an example and crack down on “sexting.”  The school officials took the matter to the local prosecutor.  The prosecutor, in turn, informed the parents of the girls that the youngsters would either have to attend a multi-session education and counseling class or face felony child pornography charges.

The letter to the parents explaining the “program” stated, “Participation in the program is voluntary. …  However, charges will be filed against those that do not participate.”  Hmmm.  This curious arrangement was challenged in a lawsuit and the court found the prosecutors’ actions illegal.  Go here (pdf) for the ruling.  Will the prosecutor be sanctioned for the illegal action?  Don’t count on it.

Poor Judgment All Around is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Researching government invasions of privacy all day, I come across my fair share of incredibly creepy stories, but this one may just take the cake.  A lawsuit alleges that the Lower Merion School District in suburban Pennsylvania used laptops issued to each student to spy on the kids at home by remotely and surreptitiously activating the webcam built into the bezel of each one. The horrified parents of one student apparently learned about this capability when their son was called in to the assistant principal’s office and accused of “inappropriate behavior while at home.” The evidence? A still photograph taken by the laptop camera in the student’s home.

I’ll admit, at first I was somewhat skeptical—if only because this kind of spying is in such flagrant violation of so many statutes that I thought surely one of the dozens of people involved in setting it up would have piped up and said: “You know, we could all go to jail for this.” But then one of the commenters over at Boing Boing reminded me that I’d seen something like this before, in a clip from Frontline documentary about the use of technology in one Bronx school.  Scroll ahead to 4:37 and you’ll see a school administrator explain how he can monitor what the kids are up to on their laptops in class. When he sees students using the built-in Photo Booth software to check their hair instead of paying attention, he remotely triggers it to snap a picture, then laughs as the kids realize they’re under observation and scurry back to approved activities.

I’ll admit, when I first saw that documentary—it aired this past summer—that scene didn’t especially jump out at me. The kids were, after all, in class, where we expect them to be under the teacher’s watchful eye most of the time anyway. The now obvious question, of course, is: What prevents someone from activating precisely the same monitoring software when the kids take the laptops home, provided they’re still connected to the Internet?  Still more chilling: What use is being made of these capabilities by administrators who know better than to disclose their extracurricular surveillance to the students?  Are we confident that none of these schools employ anyone who might succumb to the temptation to check in on teenagers getting out of the shower in the morning? How would we ever know?

I dwell on this because it’s a powerful illustration of a more general point that can’t be made often enough about surveillance: Architecture is everything. The monitoring software on these laptops was installed with an arguably legitimate educational purpose, but once the architecture of surveillance is in place, abuse becomes practically inevitable.  Imagine that, instead of being allowed to install a bug in someone’s home after obtaining a warrant, the government placed bugs in all homes—promising to activate them only pursuant to a judicial order.  Even if we assume the promise were always kept and the system were unhackable—both wildly implausible suppositions—the amount of surveillance would surely spike, because the ease of resorting to it would be much greater even if the formal legal prerequisites remained the same. And, of course, the existence of the mics would have a psychological effect of making surveillance seem like a default.

You can see this effect in law enforcement demands for data retention laws, which would require Internet Service Providers to keep at least customer transactional logs for a period of years. In face-to-face interactions, of course, our default assumption is that no record at all exists of the great majority of our conversations. Law enforcement accepts this as a fact of nature. But with digital communication, the default is that just about every activity creates a record of some sort, and so police come to see it as outrageous that a potentially useful piece of evidence might be deleted.

Unfortunately, we tend to discuss surveillance in myopically narrow terms.  Should the government be able to listen in on the phone conversations of known terrorists? To pose the question is to answer it. What kind of technological architecture is required to reliably sweep up all the communications an intelligence agency might want—for perfectly legitimate reasons—and what kind of institutional incentives and inertia does that architecture create? A far more complicated question—and one likely to seem too abstract to bother about for legislators focused on the threat of the week.

Big Teacher Is Watching is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Our friends at IJ have filed an exciting new lawsuit, one that, if successful, could save the lives of more than 1,000 people a year: people who die needlessly of assorted blood diseases (including leukemia) because the federal government criminalizes the offering of even modest compensation for bone marrow donation.

That is, the National Organ Transplant Act — which outlawed the sale of kidneys and other organs — for some reason included bone marrow.

NOTA’s criminal ban is unconstitutional because it arbitrarily treats bone marrow like nonrenewable solid organs instead of like other renewable or inexhaustible cells – such as blood or sperm — for which compensated donation is legal.  (That makes no sense because bone marrow, unlike kidneys, replenishes itself in just a few weeks, leaving the donor whole. )

The ban also fails constitutional muster because it irrationally interferes with the right to participate in safe, accepted, lifesaving, and otherwise legal medical treatment.

As Chip Mellor, president and general counsel of the Institute for Justice, said in a press release announcing the case:  “Bad things happen when the federal government exceeds its constitutional authority.  In this case, people actually die.  The Institute for Justice intends to stop that and to restore constitutional constraints that prohibit arbitrary limits on individual liberty.”

IJ brought this suit on behalf of adults with deadly blood diseases, the parents of sick children, a California nonprofit, and a world-renowned medical doctor who specializes in bone marrow research.  You can find more information here.  Perhaps more interestingly, IJ senior attorney Jeff Rowes is guest-blogging about the case all week at the Volokh Conspiracy.  Here’s his first post.

The Constitutional Right to Save Lives is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Five years ago, Google began scanning millions of books for inclusion in what eventually became Google Book Search. Google carefully designed the service to stay within the boundaries of copyright’s fair use provisions, at least as Google interpreted them. Still, some authors and publishers objected, and in 2005 they filed a lawsuit accusing Google of copyright infringement. The lawsuit dragged on for more than three years. Finally, in 2008, the parties announced a settlement of the lawsuit. Its text runs for 140 pages, not counting a secret termination clause available only to Google and its adversaries. The deadline for comments on the settlement was earlier this month, and on October 7 a federal judge must decide whether to approve or reject the settlement.

I was (and still am) firmly on Google’s side on the copyright claims at issue in the lawsuit. But the proposed settlement is another matter. The parties like to describe the agreement as a private agreement settling a legal dispute. But I agree with Librarian of Congress Marybeth Peters, who surprised almost everyone on Thursday when, testifying before Congress, she came out swinging against the agreement:

We realized that the settlement was not really a settlement at all, in as much as settlements resolve acts that have happened in the past and were at issue in the underlying infringement suits. Instead, the so-called settlement would create mechanisms by which Google could continue to scan with impunity, well into the future, and to our great surprise, create yet additional commercial products without the prior consent of rights holders. For example, the settlement allows Google to reproduce, display and distribute the books of copyright owners without prior consent, provided Google and the plaintiffs deem the works to be “out-of-print” through a definition negotiated by them for purposes of the settlement documents. Although Google is a commercial entity, acting for a primary purpose of commercial gain, the settlement absolves Google of the need to search for the rights holders or obtain their prior consent and provides a complete release from liability. In contrast to the scanning and snippets originally at issue, none of these new acts could be reasonably alleged to be fair use.

In the view of the Copyright Office, the settlement proposed by the parties would encroach on responsibility for copyright policy that traditionally has been the domain of Congress. The settlement is not merely a compromise of existing claims, or an agreement to compensate past copying and snippet display. Rather, it could affect the exclusive rights of millions of copyright owners, in the United States and abroad, with respect to their abilities to control new products and new markets, for years and years to come. We are greatly concerned by the parties’ end run around legislative process and prerogatives, and we submit that this Committee should be equally concerned.

The fundamental problem with the settlement is its audacious use of class action law. As my former colleague Mark Moller has argued, the aggressive use of class action law raises fundamental issues of fairness, due process, and the separation of powers. Rather than dozens of judges hearing individual cases and reaching judgments based on individual circumstances, class action law often asks a single judge to render justice on behalf of thousands of plaintiffs in a single decision. This arrangement opens the door to a whole host of potential problems. A single judge unlikely to have the knowledge required to render justice in thousands of individual cases simultaneously. And there’s a real danger that a nominally judicial proceeding will take on a fundamentally legislative character, reshaping the rights of thousands of people whose interests are not adequately represented by any of the parties before the judge.

This danger is especially acute in the Google Book Search case because of the incredibly broad scope of the class the plaintiffs purport to represent: all authors of books still under copyright in the United States. The settlement class doesn’t just include authors and publishers of still-in-print works, who are relatively easy to contact and can opt out of the settlement if they don’t like its terms. It also includes the copyright holders for millions of “orphan works” — works that are in copyright and whose authors cannot be located. These copyright holders are, by definition, difficult to find. The settlement effectively expropriates these absent parties for the benefit of Google and the large publishers leading the lawsuit.

The usurpation of the legislative function is especially clear in the case of orphan works because Congress has been actively considering legislation to deal with the orphan works problem. I have written in favor of an “orphan works” defense to copyright infringement. The leading orphan works proposals have two key features: they require prospective users of orphan works to make a good-faith effort to find rights-holders before using the works. And they are competitively neutral — everyone would have equal opportunity to use orphan works under the conditions set forth in the legislation.

The Book Search deal has neither characteristic. Using the legal fiction that the plaintiffs represent the interests of millions of absent copyright holders, the settlement would give Google carte blanch to use these orphan works without making a serious effort to contact their owners. This deprives some copyright holders of royalties to which they might otherwise be entitled. And it gives Google a permanent competitive advantage by giving Google an immunity to litigation that would not be available to competitors if they entered the same market. Not surprisingly, Google’s leading competitors, including Microsoft, Yahoo! and Amazon.com, have all urged the judge to reject the agreement.

Our system of government is based on the principle of the separation of powers. Congress, not the judicial branch, is responsible for making broad changes to rules of copyright. The Google Book Search settlement, if approved, would use the legal fiction of the class action lawsuit to re-write copyright law as it applies to the online book market. While the settlement includes some laudable provisions, it’s more important that the judge respect the separation of powers and reject the settlement.

The Libertarian Case against the Google Book Search Deal is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog