On the Net, unseen eyes access private Webcams

According to the complaint filed in United States District Court in Nashville, members of a girls’ basketball team visiting Livingston Middle School in Tennessee spotted the camera right away. “It was high up in a corner, near a ceiling tile in the visitors’ locker room,” said the girls’ lawyer, Mark Chalos. “It seemed to look out over the changing area.”

The girls were wary at first, Chalos said, but ultimately didn’t believe the camera would be recording them, so they continued changing their clothes. Later, one girl mentioned the camera to her coach, who confronted Livingston’s principal. The coach was told that the camera was not positioned to observe dressing and undressing, the court papers contend. But after parents pressed the point, a school district official reviewed the video and reported that it showed the girls in “bras and panties.”

That was enough to enrage the parents. But what they learned as they questioned school authorities outraged them even more. Logs from the server holding the school’s video show that the images were available, unsecured, over the Internet, Chalos said, and indicate several instances of access by unknown outsiders.

With the proliferation of surveillance cameras in everyday life and Webcams at home computers, the ease with which unsecured cameras can be detected on the Internet has become an increasing cause of concern. Last month, bloggers began reporting on the ability to tap into thousands of raw Webcam feeds with a few simple Google searches, and the Spanish police arrested a suspect on charges of developing a computer virus that can activate a Webcam without the owner’s permission.

The Yankee Group, a market research company, estimates that as many as 13 percent of American households have a Webcam attached to one of their computers, often sitting on top of a monitor in a living room or a bedroom.

Like each Web page, each camera on the Internet has an address, and unless the cameras have been concealed behind software firewalls, their addresses make them specifically searchable and identifiable.

A Google search one day last week indicated more than 10,000 such Web cameras, showing everything from bedrooms and living rooms to coin-operated laundry businesses and shoe stores to plasma reactors and mountain ranges. (Some of the cameras required passwords for access to the video.)

Other video sources are mostly security cameras that have been fed onto the Net, either deliberately to make them available to the public, like traffic or weather cams, or simply because putting the camera online was the easiest way to get the video signal into the building’s security office.

If a Webcam image is deliberately displayed as a part of a public Web site, then the image is obviously intended to be seen by whoever visits that site. But a search for specific video camera signatures allows users to skip the Web site and view the camera image outside its intended context.

It is illegal to gain access to a secured computer without the proper authorization, even if the computer’s password is publicly known. But is it legal to look at unsecured Webcams discovered as a result of a Google search, through the back door, so to speak? “It’s probably not illegal, but you never know,” said Annalee Newitz, policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights advocacy group. “That would be the court case–would a reasonable person consider these cameras to be public?”

Read the complete story @ Cnet News

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