In nearby Kutztown, PA, 13 students are charged with digital trespassing:
They're being called the Kutztown 13 — a group of high schoolers charged with felonies for bypassing security with school-issued laptops, downloading forbidden Internet goodies and using monitoring software to spy on district administrators.The students, their families and outraged supporters say authorities are overreacting, punishing the kids not for any heinous behavior — no malicious acts are alleged — but rather because they outsmarted the district's technology workers.
The Kutztown Area School District begs to differ. It says it reported the students to police only after detentions, suspensions and other punishments failed to deter them from breaking school rules governing computer usage...
The trouble began last fall after the district issued some 600 Apple iBook laptops to every student at the high school about 50 miles northwest of Philadelphia. The computers were loaded with a filtering program that limited Internet access. They also had software that let administrators see what students were viewing on their screens.
But those barriers proved easily surmountable: The administrative password that allowed students to reconfigure computers and obtain unrestricted Internet access was easy to obtain. A shortened version of the school's street address, the password was taped to the backs of the computers...The administrative password on some laptops was subsequently changed but some students got hold of that one, too, and decrypted it with a password-cracking program they found on the Internet.
Anyone who tapes their password to the back of a computer deserves to be bypassed, and that goes for schools, too. Why did the school spend thousands of dollars to buy 600 Apple laptops and, apparently, not one dime on an IT person who would have understood how to keep the computers encrypted? This could have been much worse. What if one of the laptops had been stolen by someone who could have used to it do much worse things than download chat programs?
Regardless of the punishment for this crime, I hope the school has learned a valuable lesson here.
Posted by kswygert at August 10, 2005 07:20 PM