I'm a member of the Boulder Valley School District's "District Accountability Committee" or DAC. Each school in the district has a representative that meets once a month at district headquarters to hash out policy, budget, and other recommendations to the school board.

At last night's DAC meeting, during the Q&A period following our Superintendent's briefing (in which he brought up the ongoing problem of kids vaping in school bathrooms), I mentioned an amazing talk I saw at this past @defcon #DEFCON33 called "Unmasking the Snitch Puck: The creepy IoT surveillance in the school bathroom" - video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCnojaEpF2I

You see, New Vista High School, which just opened a brand new building, has installed these devices, called a Halo 3C Smart Sensor, in all the bathrooms and elsewhere inside the school building, and has made a measurable impact reducing the number of vaping-in-school incidents. But, as I told superintendent Anderson, the sensor itself brings along with it some seriously problematic security vulnerabilities, in addition to the undocumented capabilities that the researchers in the talk exploited.

The superintendent's response to that made the whole room bust out laughing: "Andrew, you never fail to bring to my attention things that scare the hell out of me" - to which I responded, literally my job, Rob. It's why they call it "Threat Research" my guy.

This is why every community board, council, committee, etc. needs a thoughtful hacker present, to relay important information like this to policy implementers and policy makers who just don't keep up with this space.

#BVSD #schoolboard #edtech #edpolicy #techpolicy #Boulder #COpolitics