Thursday, February 18, 2010

Spying on Students at Home? Why NOT!?

Holy crap.

Seriously... Here's some disturbing, Big Brother news for today... Boing Boing reports that students in the Lower Merion School District (in Pennsylvania) have been issued laptops by the school which...
"...have webcams that can be covertly activated by the schools' administrators, who have used this facility to spy on students and even their families. The issue came to light when the Robbins's child was disciplined for "improper behavior in his home" and the Vice Principal used a photo taken by the webcam as evidence. The suit is a class action, brought on behalf of all students issued with these machines."
I read stuff like this a few times a week, but almost never this severe.  This school is now fighting a class action lawsuit initiated by one of the students, Blake Robbins (brief HERE in PDF) against these charges.  Here's hoping justice prevails on this case one way or another.

In the meantime... Ugh!

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