#like when I stumbled across Doug Jones on here

[plaidpyjamas]

you know how sometimes on tumblr you'll just be minding your own business, blogging like a little gremlin, and then out of nowhere a celebrity will reblog your thirst post and basically jumpscare you?

ok so imagine you've made a thirst post about one of the Avengers bucky, only for that specific avenger to reblog your post with a tag like nice or thanks or something idk I just feel like that would be a fun fic idea so I'm throwing it out into the world somebody write it PLEASE

[wonderfulworldofmichaelford]

Michael After Midnight: TGWTG Anniversary Crossovers

I think enough time has passed where I can talk about these films without looking like I’m jumping on a trend.

Back when it was, you know, an actual thing, Channel Awesome would every so often gather together and make a big-as anniversary film to celebrate the site. The movies would always be these massive doorstoppers where everyone would be running around in Halloween costumes of whatever character they liked the most that fit the theme and fighting some random villain. None of this ever really tied in to their work, and none of this even remotely had anything to do with reviews. It was all just hanging around with friends and having dumb fun, and when I was younger I kind of just accepted that.

But certain revelations have made that dubious. No one was having fun making these. Everyone was miserable, except perhaps Doug Walker, who was just utterly oblivious to the plight of his coworkers. There was seedy stuff going on, people were pretty much being tortured and abused, and it’s a wonder anyone was ever able to feign enjoyment in any of their scenes. And looking back on these movies I used to remember fondly, I have to say… they kind of really, legitimately suck ass. These three films – Kickassia, Suburban Knights, and To Boldly Flee – are just legitimately painful and depressing to sit through, for reasons both meta and writing-wise.

The biggest problem with all of them is their humor, which is a pretty big problem when you’re starring a bunch of comedians, some of whom can be legitimately funny. The worst bits tend to revolve around the mind-boggling number of references they cram into each script; To Boldly Flee and Suburban Knights are much worse in this regard, as they have all of the actors literally dressed up as their favorite characters, but there are two examples of this sort of thing that shine as the worst examples of all. The first is Lindsay Ellis doing a Sarah Palin impersonation in Kickassia; Palin was such a flash-in-the-pan politician that it instantly dates the whole movie, and I don’t know if it was just bad writing, lack of direction, or what, but Ellis just fails to make this joke work at all. Like I know I can’t expect this to be as funny as Iron Sky’s Palin riffing, but still, it’s just sad.

The absolute worst, however, is JO in To Boldly Flee as Ed from Cowboy Bepob… at least that’s who I think he’s supposed to be playing. I know nothing about Cowboy Bebop and have outright refused to ever watch it because if Ed is anything like how JO played her, I’m going to fucking hate the whole show, Steve Blum and Melissa Fahn be damned. JO’s portrayal is whiny, hyper, annoying, manic, obnoxious… there’s not a single positive thing that can be said. His performance of the character is pretty much the poster child for just how absolutely awful these movies could get.

There’s also a lot of jokes where the punchline is basically just “this guy’s body/genitalia is funny, teehee.” Suburban Knights and To Boldly Flee have some truly awful examples of this, such as the numerous upskirts Doug Walker gets as Link and the infamous Spoony Dune scene. But even that isn’t the worst of it. The worst of it comes from the frequent states of near-nudity that Justin “JewWario” Carmichael would find himself in throughout these films. To Boldly Flee has him channeling George Takei and fencing without his shirt on, which is bad enough, but Suburban Knights has perhaps the worst scene of all, in any of these films, though only with hindsight.

For those of you not familiar, JewWario was outed as a creepy sexual predator during the whole #ChangeTheChannel fiasco. The guy groomed young women and did god knows what else during his time on the site, with none of his coworkers any the wiser and the management doing their best to cover it up; in fact, everyone only found out because the suits who owned CA made a huge blunder during their rebuttal of the claims of its former employees. With all of that context, please try and rewatch Suburban Knights’ climax in which JewWario helps save the day by revealing his penis to everyone. This right here is Keyser Soze levels of “uncomfortable in hindsight.”

The stories aren’t much better, and often fall into the same sort of issues that The Angry Video Game Nerd movie fell into, in that nothing in these films really showcases why we love the reviewers; Kickassia infamously has the Dr. Insano twist, as one example of how they botched this. All of these movies just feel too epic in scope and don’t really try to incorporate anything that we love about these reviewers into the films. Only To Boldly Flee really does anything right in that regard, as it throws back to everything from oneshot Nostalgia Critic villains to the Todd-Lindsay-Lupa love triangle to Phelous dying… the real problem is you have to actually sit through To Boldly Flee to see that. The movies go for these epic plots where the reviewers do cool shit like take over micronations (Kickassia), quest for powerful artifacts (Suburban Knights), or deal with extremely heavy-handed and hamfisted allegories for internet privacy bills (To Boldly Flee). You’d think maybe throwing a bunch of comedians into an epic plot like any of these could lead to some funny jokes, or maybe some sort of Monty Python-esque parody, but no, instead these comedians decide to revel in melodrama and try to genuinely act, with EXTREMELY mixed results. It doesn’t help that some of these people just aren’t even remotely funny when they’re trying to be.

Here’s the thing with The Angry Video Game Nerd’s movie, in comparison to these, though: it may have had this epic, ridiculous, goofy plot involving Area 51, kaiju, aliens, and crappy Atari games buried in a landfill, but the entire plot was building up to, and ultimately delivered on, the promise of the long-awaited review of the E.T. game. For all the film’s flaws, Rolfe knew what we loved about the Nerd, he knew what the fans wanted, and by god did he give it to them in the silliest, most epic way possible. Even if I didn’t love the film, the fact Rolfe knew why we’d want to see a feature-length Nerd film in the first place speaks volumes about how he understands that he can do what will make him happy artistically and still show the fans what they want to see.

These movies from the Channel Awesome crew don’t seem to get that at all. They don’t build up to a review. They don’t build up to them discovering the worst movie or song or whatever they review. They’re all very straightforward genre comedies where they can make a bunch of shallow, Seltzer & Friedberg-esque “Look at this thing that exists! That’s a joke right?” references. Aside from seeing your favorite reviewers in a goofy plot like this, where is there any bit of the reason you watch these people in the first place? Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if they were playing characters instead of them playing themselves, in their internet reviewer personas; at least then you wouldn’t be watching Brad Jones stumbling around in a Darth Vader helmet and think to yourself miserably “God I wish that poor guy was watching another E.T. porno.”

So there are some positives in these films, shockingly enough. Brad Jones is consistently good across the entire ‘trilogy,’ especially in Kickassia where he has the good sense to walk out on all the bullshit for a while. Maybe it’s just because these films got me interested in him, but I definitely think he does a good job. The same can be said for a lot of the actors, such as the bad guy in Suburban Knights and Ma-Ti’s actor; they manage to deliver at least solid performances in spite of the films. And then there are the James Rolfe cameos, and it’s just always good to see Rolfe in general.

To Boldly Flee, despite its reputation, actually has a lot of genuinely good bits. For instance, the distraction song is actually a really solid musical number. Linkara, Doug, and Spoony actually play really well off of each other, so when they have their three idiot villains team up they at least get some decently good moments. And other reviewers I generally like such as Phelous or Todd do a solid job, and frankly in To Boldly Flee Doug Walker does show some impressive dramatic acting… but it’s in service of a character who has previously been portrayed as a petulant, whiny, self-serving, egotistical manchild, so it almost feels like he’s playing a totally different character. Still, credit where credit is due.

None of these films succeed at what they want to. Ostensibly, they are supposed to be celebrating the site and the friendship of the reviewers, but as I mentioned, there’s no reviewing, there’s nothing that indicates what the site is about, and they all just come off as ego-stroking self-congratulatory wanking. None of these films were worth the pain and suffering that the cast and crew had to go through to produce these, and watching them at all these days is especially hard knowing that a lot of these people are smiling and joking through pain, stress, and abuse. It’s sick.

Kickassia may be the most competent, but that isn’t saying much at all. Aside from the whole Palin bit, this one has a simple, straightforward plot and is relatively down-to-earth, and it almost feels like it really was just a bunch of friends making a shitty low budget action movie in the desert… something sadly undermined by reality. Suburban Knights is probably one of the most uncomfortable to sit through due to jokes like Film Brain saying he’d eat Kinley Mochrie’s “pea-ness” (this was before she came out mind you) and the numerous jokes surrounding JewWario’s junk, but it almost works, like it nearly comes close to being a dumb epic fantasy comedy, but it just frequently shoots itself in the foot with the bad writing and acting and its overreliance on references.

To Boldly Flee is, to put it absolutely simple, a hot mess. This film is an utter trainwreck from start to finish. It is the Battlefield Earth of internet review movies, a bloated, messy, overly long dumpster fire with some of the most nightmarish behind-the-scenes stories and horrendous financial mismanagement you could ever imagine. But where Battlefield Earth is at least unintentionally funny, this film… is not. This film just makes you feel bad for everyone involved, it makes your heart ache for all the poor reviewers who had to suffer under the miserable conditions, it makes you question Doug Walker’s sanity in thinking he could turn his screeching manchild of a reviewer into some tragic martyr in a total 180 from how he had always been portrayed prior. None of these three films are worth sitting through, but I think To Boldly Flee is, with hindsight, the one least worth sitting through, which is a truly incredible accomplishment.

It’s kind of tragic. I still like a lot of the reviewers who took part in these – Todd, Linkara, Phelous, Brad Jones, and even Doug to some extent (though that’s an unpopular opinion these days) – but I just can’t muster up any forgiveness for these films anymore. And I don’t blame any of the people in it (except maybe Doug); most of them were there out of obligation or friendship or what have you. These films are just a monument to hubris, ignorance, broken friendships, horrible management, and wanton cruelty to those who called you friends.

See that picture up there at the top? With all of them gathered together like friends? God, how I wish that were the reality. How I wish that picture accurately reflected life, that they were all pals having a good time and that these films were something they were proud of. But behind that picture are stories all of them could tell of hurt, betrayal, resentment, anger, contempt, and some very unspeakable things in Carmichael’s case. I wish the sort of world a surface level glance at that picture shows you existed, where the crew of TGWTG all had a blast making these shitty movies together, because at least in that case I could find a sort of ironic enjoyment in them. But reality has gone out of its way to undermine any of that. 

[join-the-joywrite]

Women in War -- 11

All Maggie Maravillla ever wanted was to help people. She never imagined losing damn near everything when winning a war.

WiW masterpost

Chapter 11

"Te amo."

The words were a whisper, deafening her more than the rush of wind. She heard them again as arms wrapped around her and she could only see the blue sky above. She forgot to scream. She heard them again and began to wonder if he were really whispering them in her ear or if she were imagining it all.

Perhaps she was imagining it. All off it. Perhaps this was all a bad dream and she would wake up on that cliff about to undertake the very same mission.

As the wind whipped her hair around her face, she remembered her decision to get it cut so short. She remembered Bucky's gaping expression when he first saw her.

"You don't like it?"

"No! No, you look amazing, Magpie! I'm just really going to miss braiding your hair for you when you're working."

"Aw, Buckwheat, do you really think it suits me?"

"Yeah! Yeah, I think you look like a million bucks! I would--"

The memory flew from her mind, sharp as her landing was. The arms that had been around her fell limp. She gasped for air, struggling to remember procedures she had learnt to give other people. She struggled to speak. If she could speak, she could breath.

But she didn't want to. She knew what waited for her when she found the energy to move again. She knew, but if she didn't confirm, she couldn't be right.

Wincing with each movement, Maggie rolled to her side, her face meeting the cold snow. She wanted to lay there and never get up. She wanted to follow him. She wanted to go wherever he was gone.

But she knew she couldn't. He wouldn't let her. He would have helped her get up. But he couldn't, could he?

Maggie hissed and groaned as she pushed herself up. "Bucky," she grunted, hoping he would answer. "Hey, Buckwheat."

She would have given her left arm to hear him call her Magpie.

"Bucky?"

She crawled back to him and shook his shoulder. She'd begun to shiver. "Bucky, this isn't funny. Bucky, we have to move."

Denial. It was not a pleasant state. She had seen several people refuse to accept what doctors told them. She had seen several people reguse to read official letters they received. She always wondered how could someone be presented with cold, hard facts and still deny them. She didn't understand now even, but she would later.

She shook his shoulder, grabbing a fistful of his blue jacket. "Bucky! Get up!"

Maggie's teeth knocked together as she cursed at him in every language she knew. She begged and begged, but nothing changed. He didn't open his eyes. His chest neither rose nor fell. He didn't move. Maggie screamed and cursed and yelled and threatened, but she couldn't bring herself to shake him as violently as she wanted to, hoping to shake him awake.

Becky.

Becky was waiting for him. For her to bring him back.

If she couldn't bring him back alive, she had to take him home to her. To Alice and Evelyn. To George and Winnifred. To her father. Home.

She sniffed and wiped her tears before they froze. She searched Bucky for the radio they'd fitted him with before sending him after Steve on the zipline.

She fiddled with it for a moment, hearing nothing but static.

"Doug? Doug, do you read me?"

The static continued. She fiddled with the buttons further.

"Doug? Morita? Is anyone there?"

She prepared to turn the button again when the static jumped.

"Dugan? Falsworth? Can you hear me?"

The static stopped for a second. "Who is this?"

She knew it was routine. They had to be sure they were talking to the right person. They'd developed a security code among them, one they were sure no Hydra soldier could possibly figure out. It was simple -- and admittedly stupid -- but effective, and confirmed to work.

"This is Dr Crystal Maravilla. Dried fruits." She was surprised she remembered their last meal before the mission with everything that has happened since then.

"Doc!" she heard Doug call out, "it's Doc! Morita, turn it up! Doc, what's happening? Cap radio-ed in a couple minutes ago. He said Enzo got Zola."

"Captain Rogers and I were . . . seperated," Maggie said, trying to keep the chatter out of her voice. If she focused on not shivering, maybe she wouldn't remember to cry. "I'm going to need a pick-up. My co-ordinates are . . . hang on." Maggie pulled a device off her own belt and checked it. "47,07, 13,24."

"Sargeant Barnes?" Dugan asked.

Maggie didn't answer. Saying it meant it was real. Maybe if the Commandos got to her in time, she could save him. Maybe.

"We're on our way, Mags," Doug said softly. She almost didn't hear him.

///////////////

The entire drive across the continent, Maggie kept silent. She ignored everyone, eating only when Olivier begged her to. She had no reaction to anything -- not even the taunts from Zola that Dugan shut up with a single blow to the Swiss doctor's shoulder and a threat that the next would be higher up.

Maggie could not find sleep. The soldier that kept watch attempted to get her to sleep or to eat or to even speak. Olivier only succeeded in feeding her. Maggie did not sleep. She passed out several times, but she always jolted awake within less than an hour with a searching gaze. When it landed on the covered body in the truck, her eyes would glaze over and she would go back to merely existing where she sat.

Eventually, they returned to the base in London.

Once they heard word that the Howling Commandos had returned, Howard found himself being dragged through the officials by an anxious Becky, who was following an equally anxious Peggy.

It was Peggy that opened the doors. She, along with everyone else, was startled when Steve tumbled out and pushed through the crowd, ignoring everyone. "Steve?"

Howard had to pull Becky put of Steve's away before he stumbled over her. He and the two women inched closer to see what took the others so long to get out -- and why Dugan had gotten out of the driver's seat and had gone in the back, the way Steve left.

They moved back immediately when Dernier and Falsworth jumped down and reached back in to take hold of something.

As the men exited the truck, holding the covered stretcher, Becky counted them and put a name to each face.

"Maggie," Olivier said from inside the truck, "Maggie, se lever. Nous sommes arrivés."

If Olivier was talking to Maggie in the truck, that left only one soldier.

"No."

"Beck?" Howard noticed immediately when Becky's legs gave way under her. She would have hit the ground if Howard hadn't already been holding on to her. "Beck!"

Peggy tore her gaze from what resembled a funeral procession to Becky. When the realisation truly struck her, Becky found the strength to push away from Howard and run to catch up with the soldiers. They stopped when they noticed Becky standing uncertain.

"Je suis désolé," Dernier whispered.

With hands whose shake she could not stop, Becky reached out for the sheet and slowly lifted it. Howard reached her in time to keep her from falling to the floor.

"No!"

Becky screamed as they continued walking, taking her brother away from her. Howard wrapped his arms around her, holding her up. She screamed and cried and howled. It seemed as if the whole of London stopped to listen to the cries of a sister. The sounds that ripped through Becky's body broke the hearts of people who didn't even know Bucky by name. The agony was evident in her screams and in her tears. She leaned against Howard, unable to support herself at all. He stood still and held tight with no idea what he was supposed to say or do.

When her throat was too raw to even cry, silent tears soaked Howard's shirt.

Of course, the war did not stop to let them mourn, but Howard organised a flight to Brooklyn, where he spent two weeks after the funeral with Maggie and Becky in Bucky's old room. Olivier followed Maggie, of course. He and Howard had explained what they could to Winnifred, George, Alice and Evelyn. Howard had organised the funeral and everything that came with it.

"We were going to get married," Maggie said one day, with a voice that echoed like that in an empty hall. Olivier looked up, stunned to hear her voice after what felt like years. It didn't even faze him that she spoke to him in English. "When the war was over, we were going to get married and have one kid and a cat. He even named the cat."

"Maggie. . ."

"You don't have to say anything, chouchou. I don't know what to say either."

"Is that why you haven't been speaking much?"

Maggie dragged her gaze from whatever world it was in to Olivier. "What's to say, Olivier? I'm only alive because of him, you know. I would've died too. Impact alone should have killed me. Whatever Hydra did to him in that isolation ward made him stronger, much more so. Strong enough to absorb the shock of that kind of fall." Maggie smiled bitterly. "But what good is super strength when it can't stop your neck breaking?"

"Maggie, je suis tellement désolé."

"Je connais, hijo."

///////////////

"Johann Schmidt belongs in a bug house. He thinks he’s a God. He’s willing to blow up half the world to prove it, starting with the USA."

Phillips glanced at Howard, who gave a small nod before continuing.

"Schmidt’s working with powers beyond our capabilities. He gets across the Atlantic, he will wipe out the entire eastern sea board in an hour."

"How much time we got?" Jones asked.

Phillips glanced in the general direction of the prison cell. "According to my new best friend, under twenty four hours."

"Where is he now?" Dernier asked.

"Hydra’s last base is here." Phillip's held up a photo to the Howling Commandos. "In the Alps. Five hundred feet below the surface."

"So, what are we supposed to do?" Morita asked. "I mean, it’s not like we can just knock on the front door."

"Why not?" Becky asked. She glanced at Steve. "That’s exactly what we’re gonna do."

Later, Maggie found Becky in a storage unit, drowning in Bucky's jacket. "¿Tienes espacio para uno más?"

"Sí, siempre," Becky mumbled.

Tucking her skirt behind her, Maggie sat down beside Becky, leaning against her shoulder. Suddenly, Becky began to laugh.

"Are you drunk?" Maggie asked, not lifting her head.

"He loved you so much," Becky said, "he always thought you were so goddamn funny. If he'd seen you at the funeral, he wouldn't have found it bittersweet. He would've straight up laughed. Maybe called you an idiot. Definitely called you a sap."

Maggie smiled. "I know."

"I mean, it was a funeral! And the very well-known Dr Maravilla showed up in yellow and white. Very inappropriate. Very very inappropriate."

"Have you been drinking? I'm asking seriously."

"Sí."

Maggie was silent for a second. "Can I have some?"

Becky passed her the bottle she had been drinking from. "Peggy brought it for me. She said she found Steve in a demolished bar. I have something for you."

Maggie lifted her head when Becky moved away, pulling at a chain tucked into her uniform.

"He said he would try as hard as he could to come back for them, but if he couldn't, he'd send you back to us. He said I had to hold on to them and if you came back without him, I had to give it to you."

Maggie's frown vanished when she was presented with Bucky's tags. "No," she said, her throat tight, "no, he was your brother."

"And yet he loved you more," Becky murmured, putting the chain over Maggie's curls. "It doesn't matter. He wanted me to keep them for you."

Maggie leaned against Becky's shoulder again. Her hand tightened on the neck of the bottle. "We'll be all right."

Becky scoffed. "Back your bag, Mags, we're going to bully Schmidt."

Peggy and Howard later found them asleep on top of each other in the storage unit, huddled under Bucky's jacket and the strong smell of booze filling up the small room.

prev || next

WiW masterpost

[bountyofbeads]

A President (FAILING TO COMPREHEND THE MAGNITUDE OF THE PROBLEM) Unequal To The Moment

#VoteBlueNoMatterWho

By Susan B. Glasser | Published March 12, 2020 | The New Yorker Magazine | Posted March 16, 2020 |

CRISES CLARIFY. THE BIGGER THE crisis, the more the clarity, which is why the incompetence, dishonesty, and sheer callousness of the Trump  Presidency have been clearer in recent days than ever before. As the coronavirus, as of Wednesday an official pandemic, spreads, the lives of Americans depend on the decisions made—or not made, as the case may be—by a President uniquely ill-suited to command in this type of public-health catastrophe. In that sense, the last few weeks may well have been the most clarifying of Donald Trump’s Presidency.

In a prime-time address to the nation on Wednesday night, Trump declared war on the “foreign virus,” blaming first China and then the European Union for spreading it, and insisting that it carried “very, very low risk” for Americans. The starkly militaristic and nationalistic tone of the address sounded scary and ignorant and utterly inadequate at a time when the country is being radically upended, with travel halting, workplaces and schools shuttering, and hospitals bracing for impact. The “foreign virus” will not be contained or shut out by a European travel ban, which the President announced, any more than it was by a China travel ban, which he had previously decreed. It is already here in states across the nation, and experts warn that it could infect millions and kill hundreds of thousands in a worst-case scenario. Trump spoke little about that, beyond a vague nudge to Congress to pass a payroll tax cut and a warning to “elderly Americans” to be “very, very careful” and avoid “nonessential travel.” He failed to explain or even address the shocking lack of testing of Americans—a stark contrast to the response by other countries—and did not warn the public about or advise them on how to handle the difficult days ahead. Even the major measure that he announced, the European travel ban, required immediate clarification and correction from Administration officials who said it did not apply to trade, as Trump indicated in his remarks, or permanent residents. His former homeland-security adviser, Thomas Bossert, immediately panned the ban as a “poor use of time & energy.”

In short, Trump was detached from the unfolding reality of a global crisis that is unlike any in memory. I’ve watched Presidential speeches for a few decades now. I cannot recall one that was less equal to the moment.

Trump spoke from the Oval Office exactly five weeks to the day since the end of his impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate, which left him with essentially unchecked power after the Republican-led Senate voted against his removal. So much has happened since the trial, which already seems as if it happened in another era, but there is a through-line: Trump himself, constantly conflating the national interest with his personal interest. As the coronavirus spread and the President initially ignored, downplayed, and lied about it—even dismissing coverage of the risks as a media-inflamed “hoax”—the costs of the Senate’s impeachment decision have been cast in sharp relief. It will be a long time before we can reckon with the full damage done by an Administration whose incompetence, disinformation, and sheer bungling in the early stages of the crisis have been at once predictable and breathtaking.

The critics were quick to declare this to be Trump’s Katrina, Trump’s Chernobyl, even Trump’s “Pandumbic,” as “The Daily Show” named it. What is striking to me, however, is how much the last few weeks represented Trump merely being Trump. This wasn’t a situation in which the folly of the system or the depth of mismanagement was suddenly revealed to the man at the top, but a case in which the man at the top was the folly.

It’s almost unbelievable from the vantage point of the present moment, when we are in the midst of an officially designated global pandemic and a consequent economic crisis that threatens to plunge the United States and the rest of the planet into a recession, but consider how the President of the United States has spent his time since the coronavirus infection reached America in mid-January. He has:

Publicly attacked the judge, prosecutors, and jury forewoman in the case of Roger Stone, Trump’s longtime political associate who was convicted of lying to Congress and other offenses.

Fired his Ambassador to the European Union and a National Security Council adviser on Ukraine, and purged others who figured in the impeachment investigation as he fulminated to aides about “snakes” in his Administration.

Fired the acting director of National Intelligence, after an intelligence briefing to Congress about Russia’s ongoing efforts to interfere in the 2020 election.

Nominated as his new director of National Intelligence a highly partisan Republican congressman who was forced to withdraw from the exact same job last summer for inflating his résumé.

Sued, through his campaign, the Times, CNN, and the Washington Post for publishing opinion articles that he did not like.

Installed a new, twenty-nine-year-old personnel chief in the White House who had been previously fired and marched off the premises, and gave him a mandate to revamp the vetting process for Administration officials, with a new emphasis on loyalty.

As the novel coronavirus spread from China across Asia and Europe and to the United States, Trump used his Presidential Twitter feed, his four campaign rallies, his trip to India, and various public appearances in February to attack by name dozens of targets, including the Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor; “Crazy Nancy Pelosi” and her “impeachment hoax”; the “failed” and “sanctimonious” Senator Mitt Romney; the “puppet” Senator Joe Manchin; the “lightweight” Senator Doug Jones, a “Do Nothing Stiff”; Jay Powell, his appointee as chairman of the Federal Reserve; John Kelly, his former White House chief of staff, who was in “way over his head”; and Jeff Sessions, his former Attorney General.

The President, who has made name-calling such a signature of his boorish public persona that it is rarely even pointed out any more, also found time to demean the Democratic Presidential candidates running against him—“Mini Mike” Bloomberg came in for particular animus before he dropped out, belittled by the President as a “stumbling, bumbling,” “weak and unsteady” “5’4” mass of dead energy.” As criticism of his response to the virus escalated, Trump doubled down on his attack on journalists as “the enemy of the people” and targeted individual journalists by name, calling them “wacko” and talentless.

All of this he did while the epidemic spread. At the same time, Trump was claiming that the illness was being contained; that it dies in warmer weather; that it was not coming to the United States; that it was about to disappear; and that it was not very serious. Indeed, had you read only communications from the President about the spreading coronavirus, you would have been subjected to a barrage of lies and misinformation and self-serving bombast, information that even at the time it was being said was clearly and unequivocally untrue.

I reviewed all of the one thousand and forty-nine tweets and retweets that Trump sent in the five weeks between his impeachment acquittal and Wednesday afternoon, counting forty-eight that mentioned coronavirus. By far the largest number of these—twenty-one—bragged in some way about the Administration’s response to a crisis that Trump claimed was being contained because of his fast, early action to shut the “boarders” with China. The next largest group of tweets attacked Democrats or the media or both for not giving him credit, or for seeking to create panic, rather than recognizing what a good job he has been doing. It was only on February 24th that the President sent his first tweet about the illness arriving in America. “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA,” Trump tweeted. At the time, there were fifty-three confirmed cases in the country, a number that by March 1st had risen to more than a hundred. Just last week, Trump told Americans that coronavirus cases were “going very substantially down.”

Amazingly, these statements continued throughout this week, as the World Health Organization finally declared the novel coronavirus to be pandemic and chided nations—read the United States—for “alarming levels of inaction.” On Sunday, Trump claimed, “We have a perfectly coordinated and fine tuned plan at the White House for our attack on CoronaVirus.” On Monday, before the stock market crashed and a congressman who had flown with him on Air Force One had to quarantine himself, the President began the day by blaming the media and Democrats for seeking “to inflame the CoronaVirus situation, far beyond what the facts would warrant.” By the end of that catastrophic day, an unrepentant Trump appeared at a White House press conference and said, “We have been handling it very well” before promising a major, very, very big economic recovery proposal with no specifics. He concluded, “This blindsided the world, and I think we’ve handled it very, very well.” On Tuesday, he returned to this theme after visiting the Capitol for a private lunch with applauding Republican senators. “It will go away,” Trump said of the virus, on the day that more than a thousand cases were registered in the United States. “Just stay calm. It will go away.”

We don’t know whether this is Trump’s long-delayed reckoning, the overdue moment of accountability for a man who has escaped such reckonings his entire life. The election is not for many months. The dizzying events of just the last few weeks—the remarkable upending of the Democratic Presidential race, the hubris and foolishness of the Administration’s initial response to the virus—may be long forgotten by then.

That does not make this any less of a significant milestone in this most unbelievable of American Presidencies. On Wednesday, the respected government medical expert Anthony Fauci told Congress that the worst is yet to come. “Yes, yes it is,” he said. Trump cannot tweet this virus away or lie it into oblivion. The virus does not care if he gives tax cuts to friendly oil barons or bails out his own hotels with federal dollars, possibilities that have been floated in recent days. Trump may believe that only Republicans matter to his political fortunes, but he has yet to find a doctor who can insulate his base, and his base only, from the ravages of this disease. Nor will he.

Trump has spent years devaluing and diminishing facts, experts, institutions, and science—the very things upon which we must rely in a crisis—and his default setting during the coronavirus outbreak has been to deny, delay, deflect, and diminish. His speech on Wednesday night was a disappointment but not a surprise. He told us what we already knew: America is in big trouble.

*********

A WEEK AT THE EPICENTER OF AMERICA’S CORONAVIRUS CRISIS

By James Ross Gardner | Published

March 13, 2020 | The New Yorker Magazine | Posted March 16, 2020 |

WE STOPPED TOUCHING ONE ANOTHER on a Wednesday. Or was it Tuesday? Information came at us so fast—confirmed cases, public-health warnings, deaths—you could swear the days of the week had been transposed, their order jumbled like everything else. Certainly by Wednesday the handshakes stopped. Hugs weren’t far behind. Even among longtime friends and family. This would soon happen elsewhere in the country, to a degree, but here in the Seattle area, where by week’s end covid-19 would kill nearly twenty of us, evading physical contact carried extra urgency. Every avoidance felt like an act of heroism. You told yourself you were saving lives, and you were probably right.

Days earlier, on Saturday, February 29th, we woke to news of the first U.S. death from the virus, a man in his fifties, at a hospital in Kirkland, eight miles northeast of Seattle. At nearby Life Care Center of Kirkland, two patients tested positive. The number of confirmed cases tripled within twenty-four hours. By Monday, five were dead, four of them patients at Life Care in their seventies and eighties. Out came declarations of emergency, from the Seattle mayor, Jenny Durkan; the King County executive, Dow Constantine; and Governor Jay Inslee.

We didn’t know it yet, but we were living in a kind of laboratory of the country’s future. We were the first. The first to see bus drivers don face masks; the first to take seriously, citywide, singing “Happy Birthday” twice in a row as we washed our hands. The first to experience a unique kind of isolation. Circumventing handshakes helped avoid spreading disease—the elbow bump won out as the preferred alternative—but it also fostered a sense that none of us should be anywhere near one another. On the bus you chose to stand rather than share a seat with a stranger. You thought about crossing the street when approaching too many other pedestrians on a sidewalk. Officials would eventually advise—then demand—that we avoid large public gatherings. We were still out in the world, but barely of it. Alone together.

In that isolation, you had time to notice just how many objects your fingers touch throughout the day. Door handles, crosswalk-signal switches, elevator buttons. Every surface was suspect. The elbow bump diversified, became an all-purpose tool. You elbow-tapped to select your floor, and used the same elbow to hold the sliding doors for someone rushing to get to work on time. (Then stood as far away from her as possible on the ride up.)

We also contended with Seattle’s new role on the world stage. We’re used to being in the news for our innovations, here in the home of Amazon, Microsoft, Starbucks, and the original Boeing. If we’re lucky, the Seahawks play a decent enough season for everyone else to hear about it. Now we were known as ground zero of a deadly epidemic poised to sweep the continent.

On Tuesday night, NBC News, sharing its story on the crisis, tweeted, “Seattle a ‘ghost town’ as residents face uncertainty of growing coronavirus outbreak.” We laughed it off and clapped back. It was a gross exaggeration. Those of us downtown could see the city wasn’t empty. But we recognized some truth in it, too. The weekday bustle was there, but anesthetized.

All the while more news issued out of Kirkland. In daily briefings, officials from Public Health—Seattle & King County shared the vaguest of details. “A female in her 80s, a resident of LifeCare, was hospitalized at EvergreenHealth. She is in critical condition.” “A male in his 70s, a resident of LifeCare, hospitalized at EvergreenHealth. . . . The man had underlying health conditions, and died 3/1/20.” The death toll kept rising, but without names and specifics the epidemic could feel unrelated to any real danger, as if it only consisted of inconvenient rules, an invisible event that merely compelled people to bruise elbows and hoard toilet paper and Purell. Then the families started talking.

Carmen Gray sat behind the wheel of her Buick in the Life Care parking lot, just before noon, on Tuesday, March 3rd. A line of Douglas firs towered over the sidewalk between the nursing home and the residential street that borders it. Among the trees, Gray could see silver-bearded men toting TV cameras. Nearby, on-air talent paced in hats, gloves, and coats buttoned tight against the winter breeze. Photographers behaved like motion detectors, lifting their lenses at the slightest hint of movement near the nursing-home entrance. Earlier in the morning, ambulances had transported three patients to nearby Evergreen hospital, but there was no action now.

Next to Gray, in the passenger seat, sat her younger sister Bridget Parkhill. They had a decision to make. Their mother, the seventy-six-year-old Susan Hailey, had lived at the home since November, convalescing from knee surgery. An ankle fracture from a fall prolonged her stay. For the past four days, Hailey, like her fellow-residents, had been in quarantine. Or as close to quarantine as the staff, without expertise in containing an epidemic, could muster; patients were supposed to be confined to their rooms, but, Gray noticed, several were in the hallways.

Because none of the residents could leave, unless via ambulance to the hospital, the sisters had been able to interact with their mother in only one way: standing on the sidewalk outside Hailey’s room, waving at her through the window, pointing at their cell phones, and motioning for her to pick up the phone when it rang. In this way they soothed their mother, who felt isolated, scared. To pass the time, Hailey watched “The Price Is Right” in the morning, “Jeopardy!” at night, old movies in between. In a photo Parkhill took with her phone, Hailey appears on the other side of the glass in a wheelchair, an oversized gray hoodie draped over her shoulders. Behind her, holding the handles of the chair, stands a woman, presumably a caretaker, in floral-patterned scrubs, with a white mask covering her mouth.

Their mother didn’t exhibit all the symptoms of covid-19—she had a cough and shortness of breath, among other signs, but no fever. That didn’t mean she hadn’t contracted the virus, or that she wouldn’t. The lack of answers from both the nursing home and Public Health was frustrating. No one seemed to know what the next steps were. The sisters feared for their mother’s life.

Gray, a wine-shop clerk who lives in nearby Bothell, had never in her fifty-seven years spoken on record to a member of the media. She wasn’t sure she was prepared for the attention. “I don’t think I’ve ever been on camera before,” she later told me by phone, “let alone half a dozen of them all at one time.” But there she sat in the car, watching the scrum of cameramen and reporters among the tree trunks, just waiting for something to happen. And she knew she had a story to tell. As her sister dialled the number of a local TV studio, Gray opened the driver’s-side door, walked across the parking lot toward those firs swaying in the wind, and stepped into the coronavirus spotlight.

Two days later, on Thursday, at around 2 p.m., family members of a handful of other patients held a joint press conference in the same spot. Kevin Connolly, whose eighty-one-year-old father-in-law, Jerry, was inside, complained that many of them had learned about the outbreak on the news, not from Life Care staff. “At the rate that this disease is killing people in this establishment,” Connelly said, “my father-in-law will be dead by the end of the week.”

Pat Herrick’s eighty-nine-year-old mother, Elaine, was already gone, a nursing-home representative had informed Herrick by phone early that morning. Hours later, a Life Care Center of Kirkland employee inside the building called to say, inaccurately, that Elaine was just fine. Herrick said that she didn’t blame the Kirkland employee for the emotional roller coaster, but she was visibly agitated.

So was Curtis Luterman. The day before, he called the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s  COVID-19 hotline and said that his eighty-nine-year-old mother, Mary, was at Life Care Center of Kirkland. The representative who answered the phone asked perplexing questions: In what state was the nursing home? Had any coronavirus cases been detected there? At the time, Life Care and its outbreak were the biggest, most ubiquitous news story in America. “Miss,” Luterman rhetorically asked the cameras pointed at him, “are you living under a rock?”

Hearing directly from the families had an impact, as did rigorous 24/7 reporting, especially by the staffs at the Seattle Times and the public-radio station KUOW. The deaths numbered eleven, ten of them linked to Life Care. On Friday, the day after the family press conference, when asked about the plight of those at the nursing home, Constantine, the King County executive, ordinarily a creature of Obama-like cool, grew visibly irate. “We’ve had some challenges with Life Care, and I’m starting to lose my patience.”

A week earlier, on Friday, February 28th, Constantine had landed in Washington, D.C., for the National Association of Counties conference, where on Sunday he was scheduled to join counterparts from Texas, Michigan, and New York for a panel on early-childhood development. That night, as he walked back to his hotel after dinner with a colleague, his cell phone lit up. A call from a staff member. There was trouble back home. The first cluster of covid-19 cases had surfaced in Kirkland.

A native Seattleite and fourth-generation Washingtonian, former college-radio d.j., and personal friend to many of the region’s grunge-era icons, Constantine—or “Dow,” as he’s almost universally referred to around town—has been the county’s executive since 2009, responsible for the physical and economic well-being of 2.2 million people spread out over 2,130 square miles.

After the call in D.C., Constantine rushed to his hotel room and booked the next available flight home. From the air he monitored the situation, and soon after landing learned of the first mortality. From Sea-Tac airport he went straight to the Chinook Building, the county’s headquarters, in downtown Seattle, where his office would soon host C.D.C. and state health officials, now working closely with his own public-health department. “We’ve been at a dead sprint ever since,” Constantine told me. “One of the things we needed to do immediately was provide space for isolation of confirmed cases and for recovery.”

This was especially important for the region’s sizable population of people living with homelessness. (The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development recently ranked Seattle/King County’s housing crisis the third worst in the nation.) “Every infection we’re able to prevent, every day that we can forestall the rapid escalation of this is a day closer to saving lives,” Constantine told me. He authorized the purchase of a motel, an eighty-five-bed Econo Lodge in the suburb of Kent. He ordered that modular units previously acquired for such an emergency—mobile-home-like structures often employed as offices at construction sites—be placed around the county for potential housing. Along the way, Constantine became the face of the containment effort—the calming, almost monotone voice when it was time to place our panic in check, or throaty indignation when the situation deserved criticism.

How did things get so deadly so quickly? (As of this writing, Public Health—Seattle & King County has confirmed two hundred and seventy cases of the virus. Twenty-seven people have died, twenty-two of them associated with the nursing home.) Constantine says an extensive investigation of Life Care is likely coming. For now, public-health staff have explained it to him this way: covid-19 had finally reached its most vulnerable target. The virus, he told me, “was lurking around, and then it suddenly expressed itself in this one place where there were a lot of people who were susceptible to becoming very ill or dying, and if it had not reached there it might still be circulating largely undetected in the community.”

When Constantine announced that all county employees—with the exception of those in essential services, such as trash pickup—would not be coming in to work, the statement sent ripples through the region, as did the recommendation that businesses make it possible for their employees to telecommute. By Wednesday night, March 4th, both Amazon and Microsoft, which have a combined workforce of more than a hundred thousand in the region, had e-mailed employees to say that they should not come to the office and should work from home instead. Smaller companies all over soon followed. We were about to be first at something else. The first work-from-home city.

That’s how it’s been ever since. A whole region of office dwellers—not in the office. Our status is W.F.H. Who knows for how long. Meetings are held via Slack or, if you’re feeling a particular amount of local pride, Microsoft Teams. Not everyone can do this. Service and hourly-wage jobs don’t enjoy telecommute options. And we’re only beginning to fathom the impact on those workers and the businesses that employ them. The impact of the outbreak is unequal, like so much else in Seattle and the country.

That first week we were living in the rest of the nation’s future, avoiding physical contact. This week, we’re experiencing what I presume will happen to everyone else next. Occupational isolation. Workdays conducted entirely in sweatpants. It occurs to me now that the people at Life Care were living this even before us. After all, Carmen Gray’s mother, Susan Hailey, was confined to her room a week before most Seattleites, with only television to keep her company.

After Gray’s appearance on the local news—“My sister and I are as anxious as can be,” she had told the cameras under the evergreens. “They’re waiting for people to get gravely ill before they transfer them out”—her message went national. Later in the week she and her mother appeared on ABC’s “World News Tonight with David Muir.” This time, it was Hailey’s turn to talk. “I don’t like being trapped,” she said, by phone from her bed, “and I am.”

She sounded frail. The day after Gray first approached the press, Hailey’s symptoms became more pronounced, and an ambulance rushed her to the hospital. She was finally tested for covid-19, but the results hadn’t come back yet the last time I spoke to her daughter, last Friday. (Gray later texted that Hailey had tested positive for the virus.) There at the hospital, at least, Gray could finally touch her mother. “I was able to gown up, and mask up, and go in and talk with her.” It was the happiest I’d ever heard Gray. The physical interaction, the ability to touch, transformed her, if only for a few seconds. But our conversation was short. Gray was tired. We all were. “I have not taken care of myself the way I’m supposed to. And so now I’m trying.”

*********

[zipgrowth]

When 12-Year-Olds Can Breach School IT Systems, Who’s Responsible?

Like moths to a flame, curious and tech-savvy students have always pushed the limits of what educators deem ‘acceptable use’ of school technology. This is in no way a new phenomenon. We provide them with access to powerful, general-purpose computing devices, access to the internet, and time—and at younger and younger ages. They explore, tinker, make, express themselves, push back, pursue their interests, and act out.

What’s different in recent years is that in doing the unexpected with school technology, students can affect not just their own education and that of their classmates, but the operations of entire school districts (and even far beyond). Schools and edtech vendors take (some) steps to secure their systems and limit student access to the more powerful administrative features of school technology devices and systems, but time and again and again students demonstrate their ability to circumvent these controls.

When students break school rules related to the acceptable use of school technology, they are subject to being disciplined. For some, it results in a slap on the wrist, coupled with a redirection of youthful energies (for instance, to computer science courses or to assisting the school IT department in providing training or technical support). Many an IT professional’s career has been spurred by such actions.

For others, it results in expulsion from school and a federal criminal record. For those students who are caught (not all are), there appears to be little consistency across schools in how these disciplinary policies are applied.

Since schools don’t report detailed statistics on suspensions and expulsions, data are not available about the prevalence of student computer-related disciplinary actions. Based on the evidence I’ve reviewed and experts I’ve spoken to, I think these incidents are commonplace. In fact, I think our default assumption probably should be that there are students in every middle and high school in the nation routinely probing their school IT systems and edtech apps for exploits.

Given the fact that minors (pre-teens even) seem to so regularly and—in some cases—so thoroughly bypass school digital security controls, one can’t but be left questioning whether school leaders and edtech vendors really grasp the many and significant issues at hand. Adding insult to injury is the fact that there exist no universally accepted school IT security standards, weak enforcement mechanisms for ‘reasonable security’ practices of schools and vendors, and a systemic lack of attention to the issues of digital security even as state and national policymakers (and private philanthropy) push schools to “shift to digital.”

Coupled with the pervasive and often automated collection of data on students, families, and school staff, school technology is uniquely powerful and sensitive. What was once stored in locked file cabinets in an administrator’s office—if it was even feasible to collect at all—is now stored on a computer network designed to enable broad internal and external access.

With the choice to deploy digital records and communication systems should come responsibility for security and consequences for poor or negligent practices. And while some can be quick to excuse schools’ actions as they aspire to modernize (getting by on a shoestring budget, biased toward deploying free-of-cost technology, often with understaffed or underskilled IT departments), we would do well to remember that districts are also big business, overseen by elected and appointed representatives, and charged with managing annual budgets of tens or even hundreds of millions a year. Digital security is a leadership issue.

My hope...is to kick start a movement to find a common sense middle ground that leads to better school cybersecurity practices, while at the same time celebrating–yes, celebrating!–student ingenuity with and interest in computers.

Doug Levin

To wit: when 12 year-olds can breach the IT systems of organizations with $100 million-plus budgets, how should we assign blame? Penalties and disciplinary actions for students who violate acceptable use policies are established, but what of the consequences to school districts? At what point could district leadership be considered negligent? What obligation do schools have to be forthright with their communities about their digital security shortcomings? How might schools react differently to these incidents, in ways that are more proactive and even humane?

These are hard questions, no doubt, but given the frequency of ‘students hacking their schools’ incidents, I believe it is time we more forthrightly address this complicated issue.

The Case of ‘Joseph Jones’ and the Rochester Community (Michigan) Schools

The Rochester Community School District—with an annual operating budget of $160 million–employs more than 1,500 staff members at more than 20 ‘nationally recognized, award-winning’ schools. External accounts of the district suggest many things going well. While technology upgrades have been a focus of the district (like in many other districts across the nation), the district is not high-tech relative to others across the country (e.g., while the district provides laptops to all teachers and makes computers on carts available to classrooms, the district does not support a 1:1 program).

In June of this year, I was alerted to a heretofore undisclosed “student hacking” incident in the district by a parent I will call Mrs. Jones. Her son, whom I will call Joseph Jones, was in the midst of computer-related disciplinary hearings and she was seeking information and help. (Note: I have changed the names of the individuals involved to protect their privacy). An internet search brought her to the K-12 Cybersecurity Resource Center and to me. I have spoken to her lawyer, and to her and her son on multiple occasions and at great length. This is a story they have approved and want to tell, even as it has not been completely resolved.

Three years ago, when Joseph Jones was 12 years old and a 7th grader in middle school he and another school friend stumbled upon a permissions issue on a computer in the school library intended for student use. A simple glance at the directory structure of this public computer revealed that it was logged into an account with access to several shared folders. Within those shared folders was the real surprise: in one was a file that listed all student usernames and passwords in an Excel document in clear text; in another, was an application that provided the ability to change usernames and passwords for any person–student or staff–in the district without restrictions.

“This was so easy to find. It was like three clicks and you were in. That’s how simple it was. Go to the file explorer, open up the…[shared drive], and click on the Excel document.”

Joseph Jones

To make matters more concerning, the username and password for the account running on that public computer was written on a note taped to the side of the screen for all to access and use. (Joseph reports that this was a common practice in the schools he attended in the district.) He and his friend soon figured out that this account was accessible not only on the public computer in the school library, but at any computer within the district network, including over the internet via a remote access application provided by the district (MyRCS) for student, parent, and staff use.

“I was unsure of what I needed to do upon discovery of the password list. I felt as though I’d be quickly dismissed by the media center staff since I was only 12…at the time. Additionally, I was afraid to mention this to anyone since I would likely be in immediate trouble. There was no one to ask and no clear procedures in place by the school for a discovery of this kind, so the easiest thing to do was to keep quiet about it.”

Joseph Jones

This discovery was not an act of malicious or even sophisticated hacking, but the act of two curious boys with above-average technology skills. However, instead of coming forward at that point, the boys kept the secret (mostly) to themselves and—like moths to a flame—over the following three years gingerly explored the district’s internal IT systems, always keeping a low profile but still expecting to get caught at some point by district IT security.

And, on May 18 of this year, get caught they did. When approached by school administrators, they came clean, including turning over their personal computing devices to law enforcement. Joseph was expelled, and he still faces the risk of criminal charges, which the district is actively pursuing.

See full letter here. (Source: Doug Levin)

The final straw for Joseph’s exploits—and what likely indirectly led to his questioning by school administrators who were tipped off by another unnamed student—was the sharing of a technique to bypass the school’s internet filters. One friend told another, and like wildfire soon too many students were visiting supposedly blocked websites for school staff to miss. While students across the country avail themselves of a variety of techniques to circumvent network filtering, Joseph’s technique involved using the still-active but unmonitored account of a retired teacher who had not been employed by the district for several years. It turns out that teacher accounts are not subject to the same internet filtering as student accounts.

His other offenses in the district’s eyes—once all the cards had been laid on the table—included:

Not disclosing his original discovery of the permissions issue on the district servers;

Being aware of and assisting his friend with the installation of Monero (cryptocurrency) mining software on a district server, but not disclosing this to district officials; and

Disrupting a different friend’s classroom, which was engaged in a teacher-led Kahoot! session. (That friend texted Joseph his class’s game PIN which Joseph used to spawn a bot that flooded the game with fake users. Note: such bots are plentiful, found via simple online searches, and trivially easy to use.)

There have been no allegations of grade changing, online harassment, deleting or manipulating student or personnel files, denial-of-service attacks, or defacing school website properties. Joseph had no other record of disciplinary issues with his schools. Whether he and his friend were the only people to exploit the district’s security practices is unknown, but one thing is clear: a truly malicious actor could have caused irreparable damage.

It Takes Two to Tango

That Joseph broke school policy and would be disciplined—even harshly—was never really in contention. Joseph admitted he knew that he’d likely end up suspended or expelled for his actions.

“I was a ticking time bomb at that point. I knew that by the time I got to high school that if I got caught it was [not] going to end [well]. If I were to recommend anything to other students if there is something wrong with their network, they should tell somebody. I regret that I didn’t.”

Joseph Jones

At the same time, he was increasingly incredulous about the security practices of the district. His mother agrees:

“Students and parents shouldn’t just be upset with [Joseph] but upset with the school district about the lax security. Anyone within the district could come along and do this…[and] there is going to be somebody else. They should insist that the [district’s] security gets tightened up, because their stuff is at risk—all of their kids’ information, their health records, grades—all of it is at risk. It’s not at risk because we have smart kids like [Joseph] that start out as curious, it is at risk because the security policies that are in place are outdated…and nobody is looking at them.”

Mrs. Jones

The Jones family maintains that the district has been excessively adversarial in its dealing with Joseph. The district has aggressively pursued expulsion—they denied them the option of withdrawing Joseph from school—and he expects to face still-pending criminal charges.

The irony of the situation–from the Jones’ perspective–is two-fold. First, based on their interactions with the district about this incident, the family lacks confidence in district leadership’s understanding of the underlying security issues plaguing the district. Based on my understanding, these issues include:

Misunderstood or misapplied administrative account permissions;

Poor password generation, storage, and management practices, including not de-provisioning the accounts of former employees; and,

Not maintaining visibility into internal network operations, including account access and capacity/usage logs over time.

As such, Joseph and his family believe it likely that any of the new software the district may have purchased in reaction to this incident is either targeted to other threats (unrelated to the existing vulnerabilities Joseph exploited) or should have already been in place as part of a baseline cybersecurity program for a responsible organization. They find district claims of costs related to rebooting school computer equipment to be evidence of the degree to which the district is reaching to substantiate their claims.

The second irony is that one of the reasons the district offered for Joseph’s expulsion was to make an example of him to the wider school community. Yet, as of today, the only notice the district has made related to this incident was a cryptic suggestion posted on their website in early June that students have the ability to change their passwords.

Source: Doug Levin

This post will be news to the school community (and–upon its publication–the incident will be added to the K-12 Cyber Incident Map).

The District Responds

Prior to this story’s publication, I reached out to Rochester Community Schools for a response. In addition to giving them the opportunity to preview the article (as I had the Jones family), I also asked a handful of questions. A district spokesperson responded with the following information:

Is the district pursuing criminal charges against any of the suspended or expelled students? Why or why not?

“At Rochester Community Schools, we take the safety of our students and staff very seriously. Protecting our family is always our top priority. As such, we are prepared to prosecute to the fullest extent of the law anyone associated with dangerous and malicious activities, including those associated cybersecurity breaches.”

Has the school community been informed of the incident(s)? If not, why not?

“The Rochester Community School District works with local law enforcement to investigate all threats, including those associated with cybersecurity. When there is an ongoing investigation, we cannot publicly share details that could have a negative impact on the investigation.”

What steps has the district taken to shore up the security of IT systems (based on what was learned from the district’s investigation of this incident)?

“The Rochester Community School District uses various tactics to mitigate cybersecurity risks. Building awareness, encouraging employees and students to strengthen their passwords and keep them secure, and having restrictive permission policies are important steps in the process. Other tactics remain confidential to the organization so as to keep our network and student and staff information safe.”

Being an impartial outsider to this situation, I can’t help but see this story as emblematic of the complexity surrounding the larger issue of “students hacking their schools.” Indeed, it is among the tamer of the dozens of such incidents I have documented since 2016.

“If they think I am the only kid who is going to do stuff like this, I don’t think so. There are going to be kids coming who know as much—if not more—than me, and who knows if they have malicious intent.”

Joseph Jones

Stories like this one will continue to occur in districts across the country if and until the issue of K-12 cybersecurity risk management commands more attention and resources from district leaders. Schools and their vendors must become more intentional in designing their systems for use by students who may not always behave in ways that are expected. And ultimately, school leaders and vendors should be held to account for not ensuring a minimum baseline of security controls. On its face, it seems hard to argue that any $100 million enterprise has in place adequate security controls when a couple of 12 year-olds can bypass them and trivially so.

When a student does cross the line, schools should consider long and hard whether the most appropriate response is to expel the student and criminalize that behavior, versus viewing it as a unique teaching moment and a chance to shore up internal security practices. (Many organizations, in fact, pay good money for penetration testing services and/or offer bug bounties as part of their security compliance programs). Given the emphasis on STEM careers and the importance of computer science for the broader economy, it would seem that we’d want to embrace and channel the energies of those who show an interest and facility in computer operations…even when it may be in unanticipated ways.

I don’t think there are easy answers, but I am certain that this story is far from unique. My hope in sharing it is to kick start a movement to find a common sense middle ground that leads to better school cybersecurity practices, while at the same time celebrating–yes, celebrating!–student ingenuity with and interest in computers. It is my sincere hope that this isn’t too much to ask.

When 12-Year-Olds Can Breach School IT Systems, Who’s Responsible? published first on https://medium.com/@GetNewDLBusiness