Re: guilty until proven innocent?

["Mary Landesman" <mlande () bellsouth net>]

> that they went to all the trouble to go back and check up on him

> From what he says on his blog, they went back to check on him because he had
accessed some info regarding (cheating on) ScanTron tests and that triggered
an immediate alert.

My son is a senior now and so far I know of only one instance where a kid
got suspended/disciplined for their activities in the computer lab. In this
particular case, the kid was a student admin on a particular server and he
was setting up proxies for kids to bypass the school's filters. The first
time, they shutdown the proxy and changed the passwords. He went back in,
set the proxy back up, and handed out new passwords. That's when they nailed
him. So really, he was asking for trouble. :P

Enterprising kid though. He's apparently got a very lucrative side business
on eBay and, from what I've been told, makes nearly as much as his parents
do.

I object much more to our kids' personal data being handed off to military
recruiters and commercial companies (Noggin, Zap2, etc), than I do
monitoring their computer use. It is, after all, the school's property and
they have a right and need to protect both that property and the students
who use it. I do think, however, they should be required to notify both kids
and parents that the systems are being monitored (something my son's school
does do).

-- Mary

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Blue Boar" <BlueBoar () thievco com>
To: "Mary Landesman" <mlande () bellsouth net>
Cc: "'FunSec [List]'" <funsec () linuxbox org>
Sent: Tuesday, January 24, 2006 1:36 PM
Subject: Re: [funsec] guilty until proven innocent?


Mary Landesman wrote:
> I'm a parent, so I come at this from two sides. And I grudgingly have to
> admit that I don't know what else the schools are supposed to do. Most
kids
> (all the ones that hang out at our house, anyway) are fully aware the
> schools' computers are monitored. I don't know why this particular kid did
> not.

I just find it interesting that the school has the monitoring in place,
and that they went to all the trouble to go back and check up on him
after they saw that he had been looking at "inappropriate" things.
Where "inappropriate" in this case means something the librarian or
whomever didn't care for.  And of course (if you take the kid's story at
face value), they blew it.

I guess I'm just of the opinion that inappropriate government monitoring
can still happen before 18.

For the record, I have 5 kids, 4 of which are in school already.

BB

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