Ongoing PA Webcam Spying Case

While I was searching for a pic of Mike and Ikes my doppelganger blog was conducting a highly detailed analysis of the PA school webcam spying case.  It's pretty damming; this should put to rest any claim that the school wasn't in the wrong.

http://strydehax.blogspot.com/2010/02/spy-at-harrington-high.html

This investigation into the remote spying allegedly being conducted against students at Lower MerionLMSD Staff List, Mike Perbix is listed as a Network Tech at LMSD. Mr. Perbix has a large online web forum footprint as well as a personal blog, and a lot of his posts, attributed to his role at Lower Merion, provide insight into the tools, methods, and capabilities deployed against students at LMSD. Of the three network techs employed at LMSD, Mr. Perbix appears to have been the mastermind behind a massive, highly effective digital panopticon.

The primary piece of evidence, already being reported on by a Fox affiliate, is this amazing promotional webcast for a remote monitoring product named LANRev. In it, Mike Perbix identifies himself as a high school network tech, and then speaks at length about using the track-and-monitor features of LanRev to take surreptitious remote pictures through a high school laptop webcam. A note of particular pride is evident in his voice when he talks about finding a way outside of LANRev to enable "curtain mode", a special remote administration mode that makes remote control of a laptop invisible to the victim. Listen at 35:47, when he says:

"you're controlling someone's machine, you don't want them to know what you're doing"
-Mike Perbix
It isn't until 37 minutes into the video till Perbix begins talking about the Theft Tracking feature, which causes the laptop to go into a mode where it beacons its location and silent webcam screenshots out to an Internet server controlled by the school.