School Used Webcams to Spy on Students

PHILADELPHIA – A suburban Philadelphia school district used the webcams in school-issued laptops to spy on students at home, potentially catching them and their families in compromising situations, a family claims in a federal lawsuit.

Lower Merion School District officials said the laptops "contain a security feature intended to track lost, stolen and missing laptops," and that the feature was deactivated Thursday. Angry students had already responded by putting tape on their laptop cameras and microphones.

Sophomore Tom Halpern described students as "pretty disgusted," and noted that his class recently read "1984," the George Orwell classic that coined the term "Big Brother."

"This is just bogus," said Halpern, 15, of Wynnewood, as he left Harriton High School on Thursday with his taped-up computer. "I just think it's really despicable that they have the ability to just watch me all the time."

The school district can activate the webcams without students' knowledge or permission, the suit said. Plaintiffs Michael and Holly Robbins suspect the cameras captured students and family members as they undressed and in other embarrassing situations, according to the suit.

A school district statement released late Thursday said the tracking feature would not be reactivated "without express written notification to all students and families."

"This isn't just them spying on the kids, this is them intruding on the parents' home. Who knows what they are seeing?" Walczak said. "The courts for 80 years have said there's no greater sanctuary than a person's own home."

The lawsuit's allegations raise new concerns about school-issued laptops, said an Electronic Freedom Foundation lawyer.

"I've never heard of anything this egregious," said Kevin Bankston, a senior staff attorney at the San Francisco-based group. "Nobody would have imagined that schools would peer into students private homes and even bedrooms without any kind of justification.

Students like Halpern say they mostly keep their computers in their bedrooms — and rarely turn them off.

"School ends at the end of the school property, so they shouldn't really be in our business at home," Halpern said.

more at link...

Don't think for 1 second that Microsoft, Apple and Google aren't front companies for the Pentagon, DARPA, NSA and CIA. Social networking is online profiling made easy; put your whole life online and let Big Brother watch. The Death Star surveillance grid is near completion. A scientific dictatorship is taking over just as Zbigniew Brzezinski's book, 'Between Two Ages; America's Role in the Technetronic Era' lays out in detail. Good luck trying to find a copy.