White Civil Rights : The Website for Europeans and Americans Wherever They May Live

by Ian Mosley

The Philly.com website reports: “The system that Lower Merion school officials used to track lost and stolen laptops wound up secretly capturing thousands of images, including photographs of students in their homes, Web sites they visited, and excerpts of their online chats, says a new motion filed in a suit against the district. More than once, the motion asserts, the camera on [plaintiff Blake] Robbins’ school-issued laptop took photos of Robbins as he slept in his bed. Each time, it fired the images off to network servers at the school district. Back at district offices, the Robbins motion says, employees with access to the images marveled at the tracking software. It was like a window into ‘a little LMSD soap opera,’ a staffer is quoted as saying in an e-mail to Carol Cafiero, the administrator running the program. ‘I know, I love it,’ she is quoted as having replied.”

It sounds like these bureaucrats were actually spying on this kid for the fun of it. At what point are adults looking at teenage girl students undressing?

The article notes “Those details, disclosed in the motion filed late Thursday in federal court by Robbins’ attorney, offer a wider glimpse into the now-disabled program that spawned Robbins’ lawsuit and has shined an international spotlight on the district. In the filing, the Penn Valley family claims the district’s records show that the controversial tracking system captured more than 400 photos and screen images from 15-year-old Blake Robbins’ school-issued laptop during two weeks last fall, and that thousands of webcam pictures and screen shots have been taken of numerous other students in their homes.”

Why is it that I have so little difficulty in believing that this happened, and why am I so completely unsurprised that it seems to have occurred to no one that this was illegal and unconstitutional?

The article continues “Robbins, a sophomore at Harriton High School, and his parents, Michael and Holly Robbins, contend e-mails turned over to them by the district suggest Cafiero may be a voyeur who might have viewed some of the photos on her home computer. The motion says Cafiero, who has been placed on paid leave, has failed to turn that computer over to the plaintiffs despite a court order to do so, and asks a judge to sanction her. Since the Robbinses sued in February, district officials have acknowledged that they activated the theft-tracking software on school-issued laptops 42 times since September, and a number of times in the previous school year – all in order to retrieve lost or stolen computers.”

Thanks to the Internet there is increasingly less privacy in this country. Official agencies like the FBI and police are only part of the problem. Employers routinely spy on their employees. Now we find that a school board can turn a laptop with a camera into a two-way “telescreen” operated by Big Brother right out of George Orwell’s famous novel “1984″.

Maybe it’s a bad idea to have a computer with a built in camera or microphone as hackers and government spies will likely find ways to turn them on when we think they’re off. This is definitely a bizarre new intrusion that few people saw coming.