In the state of North Carolina, the Catawba(how do you pronounce that?) County School system suddenly found that the Social Security numbers of some 619 students were suddenly accessible by Google.  So, they called up Judge Boner(I'm not kidding), and were able to get a temporary injunction filed against Google, forcing Google to remove any data associated to the Catawba County School System.  School officials are claiming that Google spiderbots somehow hacked into a password protected directory on the County's DocuShare server, and thus making the contents of that folder, which contained the names, grades, and SSIDs of students, available.

The consensus among knowledgeable people seems to be that someone on the county's end screwed up.  Google can't hack, and it can't get to files that are secured by a password.  There was obviously some back end, or a link with an embedded password.  Of course, a simple robots.txt file with the words "disallow /whatev" would have fixed this, but apparently, it never occurred to anyone.

Even if it was by some miracle Google's fault, I pose another question to the Catawba County School System: why are you using SSIDs as student identifiers?  Universities, that spend most likely 10-100x more than you do on security, have been hacked and have had SSIDs stolen, and they've now changed to Student ID numbers.  The amount of schools still using SSIDs and not Student ID numbers should be 0.

If anyone is going to be prosecuted in this case, it should be the employees and administrators of the Catawba County School system.  They're the ones who let their students down.