To recap: In February, the Robbins family filed a lawsuit — Robbins v. Lower Merion School District (pdf) — alleging that the Lower Merion School District in Pennsylvania misused the 2,300 Webcam-enabled laptops it issued to students in order to remotely peep into the students’ homes, take photographs and violate their privacy. The school district said it used the webcams only to track school-issued laptops that it thought were lost, stolen or inadvertently taken without permission. In May, lawyers and computer experts hired by the district to investigate the case released a report (pdf) that said there was “overzealous and questionable use of technology by [Information Services] personnel without any apparent regard for privacy considerations or sufficient consultation with administrators.” Later that month, a federal judge “permanently banned the Lower Merion School District from using webcams or other intrusive technology to secretly monitor students through their school-issued laptops.” (Wired had a story about security vulnerabilities in LANrev Theft Track, a remote-surveillance technology used by Lower Merion School District.)

Now, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports that the Lower Merion School District’s school board has unanimously passed new policies “to govern the use and tracking of student laptops and other technology” to avoid a repeat of the recent controversy, which has cost the district “nearly $1 million in legal fees and expenses.”

The measures, passed unanimously by the school board at its monthly meeting, spell out in detail when, how, and for what reasons school officials can access or monitor the laptops they will give to each of the district’s nearly 2,300 high school students next month. Read more »

The Department of Homeland Security’s Privacy Office has released a new privacy impact assessment (PIA) concerning the agency’s study of a type of biometric identification — iris recognition. From the privacy impact assessment (pdf) on “Iris and Face Technology Demonstration and Evaluation.”

As part of its Multi-Modal Biometrics Projects, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science & Technology (S&T) Directorate and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) are investigating iris recognition as a promising biometric modality that may become suitable to support DHS operations in the near future. [...]

The purpose of this evaluation of iris recognition technologies is to conduct field trials/studies of iris camera prototypes under conditions and environments of relevance (e.g., humidity levels, amount of sunlight, etc) to DHS operational users to assess the viability of the technology and its potential operational effectiveness in support of DHS operations. S&T is conducting a PIA because biometric information is being collected from individuals detained in an operational setting. [...] Read more »

The New York Times reports on questions about personal privacy that can arise from “geotagging” photographs or videos — embedding GPS location data — and then publishing those photos on Web sites or social-networking services such as Twitter or Facebook.

Security experts and privacy advocates have recently begun warning about the potential dangers of geotags, which are embedded in photos and videos taken with GPS-equipped smartphones and digital cameras. Because the location data is not visible to the casual viewer, the concern is that many people may not realize it is there; and they could be compromising their privacy, if not their safety, when they post geotagged media online. [...]

“I’d say very few people know about geotag capabilities,” said Peter Eckersley, a staff technologist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, “and consent is sort of a slippery slope when the only way you can turn off the function on your smartphone is through an invisible menu that no one really knows about.” Read more »

The Star reports on the issue of camera surveillance in Canada.

While police forces around the globe are equipping officers with cameras clipped to bike helmets, lapels and vests, police in [Toronto] are still focused on increasing in-car cameras and surveillance cams in public spaces. Civil rights advocates say the devices raise protocol and privacy issues.

“The trend is clearly going in that direction, though there are no plans here for that at this point,” said Mark Pugash, director of the Toronto police public information unit. [...]

Some Canadian forces have started testing the body cams, and many see the officer of the future as a plugged-in, patrolling monitor, whether in a car, on a bike or walking the beat. Police in Victoria tested six mini-cameras, which cost about $1,500 each, mounted on bike helmets or sunglasses, for four months in 2009. [...] Read more »

The New  York Times reports on video surveillance in Urumqi, China:

At the intersection with Shanxi Lane, a busy crossing in this northwest China metropolis, 11 surveillance cameras eye the bustle from a metal boom projecting over one corner. Still more cameras stare down from the other three corners — 39 in all, still-photo and high-resolution video. [...]

Roughly a year ago, Urumqi’s ethnic Han and Uighur populations took part in the worst ethnic rioting in modern Chinese history, killing at least 197 people. The riots caught the Communist Party and the local government unaware.

Now at least 47,000 cameras scan Urumqi to ensure there are no more surprises. By year’s end, the state news media says, there will be 60,000.

Video surveillance is hardly uncommon in the West. But nowhere else is it growing as explosively as in China, where seven million cameras already watch streets, hotel lobbies, businesses and even mosques and monasteries — and where experts predict an additional 15 million cameras will sprout by 2014. [...] Read more »

The Kansas City Star reports on an issue we’ve seen before: Government use of automatic license-plate recognition cameras. Use of the systems is growing. In March, USA Today reported: “Departments in Denver and Colorado Springs; South Portland, Maine; Gwinnett, Douglas and Cherokee counties in Georgia; and Clinton, Conn., are planning to deploy or have already added License Plate Recognition (LPR) systems this year, officials from those agencies said.”

I discussed the issue when Washington, D.C., began expanding the use of these license plate readers. One of the biggest questions is: What happens to all the data on innocent individuals? In the UK, police admitted (under the pressure of Freedom of Information Act requests) that they are keeping for five years the data from license plate scanners recording the trips of 10 million drivers a day — even those drivers who are innocent.

Constant surveillance treats all individuals as if they are already considered suspicious or guilty. Ubiquitous surveillance occurs in certain situations, such as prisons. Do we want people driving or walking in public to become as watched and tracked as prisoners?

Is this data collection worth the civil liberties costs? Though the scanners do find some criminals, there is a cost-effectiveness argument to be made. For example, in Arizona, “Of the thousands of license plates scanned each day, only a small fraction of the vehicles are tied to some possible criminal activity.”

The Kansas City Star reports:

The readers use three infrared cameras mounted on top of the trunk, pointed in different directions, to constantly scan for nearby license plates. The system compares each plate to lists of stolen vehicles, owners wanted on outstanding warrants, Amber Alert information and more. Read more »