An enthusiast recently "jailbroke" a laptop used by prison inmates for
educational courses, ultimately resulting in sensitive passwords being
posted online. This has now spurred prison officials to confiscate
1,200 laptops from incarcerated students.
When we reported on the infamous [1]"prison laptop" (or Securebook 5)
in February, it was covering Twitter user @zephry_wenting busting open
the device by painstakingly replacing the BIOS without removing power
to the board and then replacing the default OS by soldering a USB hub
onto the laptop. Following the installation of Ubuntu MATE and
FreeDoom, one would assume that was the sunsetted end of our pleasant
laptop prison break escapade.
Unfortunately, it seems to have collapsed into a series of events,
including prisoners having their directly acquired Securebook 5s taken
away. According to a piece by [2]Open Campus Media, this happened
because [3]Hackaday's coverage included the default password for the
OS. The Twitter posts and YouTube videos cited are both now deleted or
made private.
Original poster [4]Wenting has already gone on record, saying, "If I
knew beforehand, I wouldn't post the original thread." Unfortunately,
the government's move to mass-confiscate prisoners' laptops (often
locking down the prisoners to do so) still came despite Justice Tech
head Jeremy Schwartz's assurance that the work of outside hackers could
not be duplicated inside prison walls.
The timing of this move is regrettable because these aren't purely
leisure devices by any measure. The laptops were taken immediately
before the Winter Quarter Finals of community college classes, which is
a pretty pivotal deadline to have your most efficient writing and
research consumption tool taken from you. These laptops could run
outside of a dock. Still, they could reportedly only upload or download
information while connected to one, meaning a lot of existing classwork
may already be permanently lost.
Say what you like about the prison-industrial complex. Still, it's at
least a little unreasonable to jeopardize the education of people
attempting to better themselves in a highly controlled environment. We
hope the students have their laptops returned or replaced with their
original files intact soon. There was no evidence before this
pre-emptive move that anyone inside prison walls was aware of the
exploit, could even be made aware of it, or would even be capable of
utilizing it to any meaningful extent.
Realistically, those who can secure their tools for adding a USB hub to
a laptop that doesn't have it inside prison walls can almost certainly
secure a regular PC or phone in the same scenario. People already
operating within the boundaries shouldn't be punished for doing so.
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References
1.
https://www.tomshardware.com/laptops/notebook-for-prison-inmates-bought-on-ebay-justice-tech-solutions-securebook-is-locked-down-but-has-freedoom-loving-linux
2.
https://www.opencampusmedia.org/2024/03/04/an-engineer-bought-a-prison-laptop-on-ebay-then-1200-incarcerated-students-lost-their-devices/
3.
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/26/deep-dive-into-a-prison-laptop/
4.
https://twitter.com/zephray_wenting/status/1764871901975871819
