By Richard Ilgenfritz
Lower Merion School District officials Monday night approved the use of a new computer-software package that will replace the controversial LANrev system that allowed staff members to remotely activate student-issued laptop computers.
This summer the district will begin replacing the LANrev system in thousands of computers with Casper Suite by JAMF Software. The new software will cost the district $28,050 annually and is expected to be in the district computers by the fall as the district continues its one-on-one computer program.
Board President David Ebby said the Casper Suite program will allow the district to continue to have the ability to upgrade the computers in the field as needed but it does not contain any of tracking features that have brought the district into a federal lawsuit. In February the parents of Harriton High School student Blake Robbins sued the district claiming it used the LANrev system to spy on him with a webcam while he was at home. The district has since admitted that it used the program but only to track missing or stolen computers.
In another development, a judge is also allowing a computer expert hired by the plaintiffs' side to conduct his own analysis on the district's forensic team's findings. In an order agreed to by the attorneys and signed by Judge Jan E. DuBois last week, John Steinbach is reviewing the findings of Level-3 Communications.
He is reviewing a mirror image of the hard drive that was on the computer used by Michael Perbix, one of two district employees who had access to the program that was able to remotely activate the student-issued computers.
According to the lawyer for the family, Mark Haltzman, the computer used by Perbix is being checked since he was the employee who activated the monitoring system on the computer issued to Blake Robbins.
During the review, Steinbach will run his own program to look for all images on the computer. The reason is that if a photo from the LANrev system was saved using another software program such as Photoshop, it will no longer have a LANrev digital signature.
If the district's forensics team, L-3, was only looking for images created by the LANrev system, it might not have been able to recover photos copied and saved from LANrev to other software programs, Haltzman said.
Haltzman was asked about any discrepancies that might be found between Steinbach's and L-3's findings. "It has not been decided what happens at the next step," Haltzman said. "Right now we are just trying to see if in fact that occurred."
Steinbach will not be viewing any of the images that are on the computer. Instead he will be looking at the hash values of the images that were recovered by L-3. In this computer code, he will be able to tell how many images were created by using the LANrev system.
The review began last Friday and was expected to last a week to 10 days.
0 comments:
Post a Comment