Holy shit.

“Can you fill me in on what the fuck is going on here?”

If I had to guess, it’d be that somebody was really, really interested in what the students looked like sans clothing.  Because that’s about the only thing that could conceivably incite an administrator to do something that’s as blatantly and obviously a really, really, really bad (multiple felonies bad) idea as this on the school’s dime.

I don’t think there’s any connection but the first thing that popped in my mind when I read this was the Salem Witchcraft trails. I remember reading a theory that the trails were a way for sexually repressed people (namely men) to oogle and fondle the mostly young female accused. They would publicly strip them down and point out moles and stuff in order to “prove” the devil had marked them. The teen girls having to apologize to the all male staff brought that to mind. A bunch of old men who’ve probably seen the images in question (trading them back and forth to “discuss”) and then having these teen brought before them to atone. It has to give them some sort of thrill, or at least leave them feeling morally superior that the girls have been properly punished.

I think the administrators need to be immediately prosecuted for pedophilia.

What kills me is the fact that these administrators don’t realize how their actions make them LOOK. Seriously, is there any other thing to think other than these people are a bunch or perverts?

I don’t think schools see students as people anymore, just assets and liabilities, and they’ll do whatever it takes to better tell the one from the other.

I half-suspect this kind of crap started in the wake of Columbine.

I was just re-reading the old Slashdot “Tales from the Hellmouth” posts the other night, and I started thinking that, not only did the teachers and administrators completely overlook and endorse the school bullies over the kids who were being bullied and abused, but the admins themselves began to take over the top bullying positions at a lot of schools.

Hence: insane zero tolerance stories, teachers snooping in kids’ private lives for excuses to throw them out, and bans on stuff that no one ever sniffed over before.

Only part of it is designed to prevent future shootings or school violence—most of it is devoted to beating the kids down and reminding them that they better kowtow to the teachers and principals. Schools still suck for most kids, but it’s no longer because of other kids—it’s because the teachers have taken over working overtime to make school hell.

I do think that this may be less of a new trend and more of a media fascination.  The stories - rightly - get much more publicity than they did ten years ago, and, I suppose, that probably leads to some copycatting by similarly mean spirited school administrators.

But I do think in general, schools are as rational/dysfunctional as they’ve always been.

I must point out that you are talking about 2 different groups of people.  While many school administrators were once teachers, must of them are not currently teachers. 
Most teachers will never be administrators, in part because the job really sucks.  It sucks when compared to teaching, which quite frankly I once considered doing and decided would end up sucking for me as I don’t have sufficient patience - not so much for the students but for the parents and administration.  As both my mother and step-father were teachers, and my step-father moved on administration (for the money, he liked teaching), so I had a sufficiently close up view to know it wasn’t for me.

Can you fill me in on what the fuck is going on here?

Sure: There’s an ever-growing notion in our culture that people under 18 aren’t fully human and don’t deserve rights. This notion is particularly prevalent in the way schools are run. School administrations, in my experience, have no interest whatsoever in enacting any kind of justice or fairness. Instead they act like prison guards, with even less responsibility to protect the rights of their wards than actual prison guards.

These days, they’ve taken the concept of in loco parentis and tacitly interpreted it to mean that they have a responsibility to punish and shame kids who engage in sexual activity. It’s like having a whole team of fundamentalist parents! Yay!

“It has to give them some sort of thrill, or at least leave them feeling morally superior that the girls have been properly punished.”

I bet they get as much or more thrill just from the raw exercise of power as anything sexual.  It’s all part of that “picture a boot stamping on a human face, forever” thing.

And they have perfect role models for that kind of thing in the way the Federal Government has implemented indiscriminate spying on Americans on a mass basis.

I can hardly wait to find out when the blackmail starts…

What’s missing in this is the extent of the religiosity of those responsible for this stupidity. It seems to me that overly religious people are overly interested in the behavior of other people’s children. Are there other more detailed news stories about this?

I do think that this may be less of a new trend and more of a media fascination.

Having been through the school system more recently than you (I assume so, anyway; I just graduated college), I have to disagree. This shit is systemic. I saw it every single day at my school and my friends at other schools dealt with the same thing.

It was while I was in high school, for example, that my school system decided that everyone involved in a fight would be immediately arrested. In a real, mutual fight that makes sense (though unless someone is seriously injured I think it’s an insane overreaction). But if you get beat up? You get arrested. Accosted by a group of punks? They get arrested, but oh hey, so do you. Help your friend up after he gets the shit beaten out of him? You get arrested, too. That’s not just in theory - it played out that way, multiple times. The school administration didn’t give a shit who was actually at fault or who might be a victim in a given situation. They’re all kids, so it doesn’t matter.

Sure: There’s an ever-growing notion in our culture that people under 18 aren’t fully human and don’t deserve rights.

It is an extension of the same infantilization of childhood that has led to the Free Range Kid backlash.

What MsKate said.  Taking unwitting media of kids and making it public, when said stuff, as the lingo goes, “sexy stuff,” is pedophilia.  Nail it ‘em, please.

I think there is also the conceited attitude among educators that “parents aren’t doing their jobs, so we have to do it for them”, all because most parents don’t have the time or inclination to kiss ass and bake cookies as they are told.

Now I know why some of the best school administrators I have seen went from the military to the corporate world and then switched over to teaching and seeking higher qualifications.  They have actually had responsibility for adults and for themselves before coming near kids.

Uh, does anyone else remember the case of those kids who were prosecuted for distributing child pornography for sending each other sexy pictures of themselves?  Although I think that’s a patently idiotic application of the child porn law, shouldn’t snooping school administrators who end up collecting (and, I assume, storing in case they have to justify “disciplining” the student) nude photos of underage students off their own computers fall within it as well?  This case seems to be to be far worse, in the sense that there’s no consent argument - the students didn’t wilfully give those photos to their principal.  This is more like the principal building a private bathroom on each student’s bedroom and then hiding in the bushes and taking photos of them in the shower.  Which, as far as I know, is also illegal.

It’s a combination of slut-shaming of the kids and perversity of the adults spying on them.

Clearly your teachers weren’t covert sexual predators like these teachers.

What I don’t understand is what teacher/administrator has the freaking time to spy on that many kids so continuously that they’d find something to “discipline”?  This strikes me more as the act of a voyeur who gets off on lack of consent than an overzealous administration seeking to control students.

Amanda, H. L. Mencken nailed what’s going on v. the administrators almost a century ago:

Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

“What I don’t understand is what teacher/administrator has the freaking time to spy on that many kids so continuously that they’d find something to “discipline”?”

I doubt the capability was activated and used on all 1,800 laptops.  This sort of tool tends to be selectively used, either because there’s a student who’s been a “discipline problem,” a student who’s disliked but has the infuriating habit of not breaking any rules on school grounds, or a student who has *ahem* attracted the interest of a particular administrator.

Man, homeschooling looks better every day. I hope everyone who ok’d this gets prosecuted, sued, and barred from any position with kids ever again. It’s pervy, wrong, and a gross violation of kids’ rights. (and their families…what if the laptop was on in the living room?)

I believe in the mission of public education, dammit, why do so many jackholes keep using their authority in school for anything but good education? It’s not that hard *not* to be a jackhole, really it isn’t.

This situation is in some ways worse than Orwell: people are voluntarily allowing spy cameras into their bedrooms, because it benefits them in various ways.

I hope this leads not only to lawsuits and firings, but to new legislation, if only to make explicit that existing concepts of privacy and consent apply to this sort of situation, ALSO.

It is all too easy to impute depraved motivations to people who pull crap like this, but in this particular case, it is hard to ignore the creepy factor.

Hmmm a couple of reasons:

1) The school district wants leverage to control parents who advocate for their kids.  Note, it’s a well-heeled district, where parents are likely to know how and have the means to use the legal system to get redress for school actions.  But if the district can counter that with - well, OK, but we can show in court that your kid….. (and quite possibly what YOU did/said - I mean, aren’t parents SUPPOSED to watch what their kids are doing on the Internet?)

2) There’s already been some sort of parent/district dispute and this is just an escalation, again, for leverage. 

3) It’s a hoax - funny how the district isn’t named.

This may be the creepiest story I’ve ever heard. I mean, individual perverts and voyeurs are creepy enough, but this probably had to take an entire committee of people to decide. And even if all the people on the committee are not personally perverts, pedophiles and voyeurs, how could they *not* consider the totally fucked-up potential uses of such a program.

I can just imagine an administrator getting obsessed with a particular student and then spying on them just to find something they could use to make the kid’s life hell.

3) It’s a hoax - funny how the district isn’t named.

Lower Merion.

http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/767429—schools-gave-students-computers-then-used-webcams-to-spy-on-them-lawsuit

http://craphound.com/robbins17.pdf

OK, here’s the original (allegedly) of the suit.

I think this is also an example of whiteopia in action. A school district that’s rich enough to issue 1800 midrange laptops to high school students is not a school district with serious (at least by standards that don’t count the unpopular kids) crime and violence problems. But just as you get all sorts of gated communities in places where the only violence is domestic, you get mini police states in places where the authorities don’t have any “real” crime to go after. (This is nothing really new—in colonial massachusetts the level of prosecuted deviance remained roughly constant even as whole subpopulations were driven out of the colony for heretical beliefs. The powers that be simply changed what they considered prosecutable deviance.)

I saw something as I was channel surfing last week—Frontline? 20/20? Some news-ish show about kids being given laptops and administrators could not only watch them if the cameras were on, but could track everything they did. 

The administrator said they had the camera function and that kids tended to use the cameras like mirrors.  Many of them are chatting/texting during class instead of working on what they’re supposed to be doing.  He bopped around several kids’ laptops and would message them if they were seriously goofing, which resulted in the camera being turned off immediately and the appropriate windows being activated.

They didn’t say anything at all about watching the kids after school.  Right there we’d better have a multimillion dollar suit, because there’s no reason on Earth for teachers to be watching kids out of school short of chaperoning them with a permission slip.

Big Brother is watching you.

An Austin, Texas man just intentionally flew a small plane into a building that houses IRS offices, and NTSB is confirming that the man set his own house on fire before going to the airport.

I think we’ve just seen rightwing terrorism in action.

Looking at the building, I have to think the plane was loaded with incendiary devices or explosives, because the whole freaking building is destroyed, and it was a seven story building.

The guy apparantly intentionally plowed into the building full speed, and the sky was clear in Austin today.

Within the past year there has been a big redistricting hassle at Harriton High where the victim of this spying goes- busing and racism and all (what is this?  the ‘60’s?)
http://justsnarky.blogspot.com/2009/01/lower-merion-school-district-screws-up.html
THat’s the first hit; lot’s more backup.
The district is also a partisan one - each party runs it’s own slate of school board members.  So potentially, political opponents could receive “updates” from the current admin about their opponents campaign plans if said opponents were also parents, whose words and actions could also be spied on - hmmm, hmmm, hmmm.

“This situation is in some ways worse than Orwell: people are voluntarily allowing spy cameras into their bedrooms, because it benefits them in various ways.”

That’s pretty victim-blamey.  Nobody knew about the webcams being remotely-enabled and remotely-accessed until the incident that sparked this suit.  If I get a laptop from the school district to enhance my education, immediately disable the webcam because that’s what you do when you’re not using it, how am I a voluntary participant in their spying if they then use a covert program to override my disable without telling me they’re retaining the right to do so?

It’s also pretty inaccurate, given the omnipresence of the two-way telemonitors in 1984.

“I think we’ve just seen rightwing terrorism in action.”

I’m sure somebody somewhere once may have called him a Socialist, or implied he was, which proves that he was a Leftist, probably a Democrat, and Jonah Goldberg was right all along.  Or something…

On reflection, I can a mostly innocent but extremely stupid way that the school district could have gotten itself into the wiretapping and underage-porn business. I bet somebody asked themselves the question of what would happen if kids used the laptops to look at porn, hot-chat with each other, or do any of the zillion other embarassing things some people do with computers. They would have imagined the local and national headlines about a school facilitating viewing of obscene pictures by minors, the lawsuits (this is Lower Merion we’re talking about) if a kid used their laptop to arrange a liaison with someone the parents disapproved of (or, worse yet, an actual predator). Then they would have imagined trying to craft a widely-publicized acceptable-use policy that would still result in parents letting the laptops into their homes.  And then somebody came up with the brilliant idea, “No, we’ll just remotely audit what they’re doing!”

before I jump to conclusions about the man in Austin I’ll need to see what “Rate Your Professor” says about him…

What everyone else said, pretty much. Just as 9/11 was the perfect godsend for authoritarians in politics and police forces to go hog-wild on all their racist, fascist fantasies of control, Columbine was that go-ahead for school administrators.

Remember that in a lot of cases, authoritarian minded fundamentalist Christians have been trying to take over the administrative side of school districts in order to help “lead” the secular institutions into reverting back into semi-propaganda states for religious parents. Now, suddenly the mother of all excuses lands by which to bring the hammer down on non-conforming students and the student body in general. Mix in a well-known hatred for youth by old conservatives because of the inherent liberalism of growing up in the shadow of victories long since won and the desperate need to dominate and control in order to feel like you fully exist in authoritarian personalities, and that leads to the police state on campus.

Post Columbine, we got it all. Police on campus, zero tolerance laws stepped up in enforcement, most of us freaks spending at least one day in the principal’s office explaining an overheard statement or a perceived angriness. My best friend got yanked in over talking about a video game cut scene, I spent a day being threatened with suspension for grumbling to myself when a class project partner epically tried to screw us on the class project and through it all the footballers were still allowed to beat kids into unconsciousness and other massive bullying campaigns, because Columbine “proved” that it would be the kid bullied who was the “real” threat.

This naturally lead to obvious obscene abuses. A couple of years later, an administrator decided to do a panty check of every girl at the dance to make sure no one was planning hanky-panky on the dance floor or daring to wear the forbidden thong of teenage lust by flipping up each and every girl’s skirt that entered the dance in pretty much full view of most of the dance floor. She was “disciplined” which ended with her being transferred to a higher paying job further up the rungs.

So how it could get to a point where a pervy administrator who doesn’t know google well enough to enter a search for “barely legal voyeur” would use this to get his rocks off, get some leverage on whiny parents, and engage in vast overreaching slut shaming of the filthy sluts raised by secularists. It’s pretty standard rape culture stuff really, especially with the fundamentalist christian view of sex and sexuality (it’s dirty and wrong and the only way you can enjoy seeing their naked bodies is if they are proven dirty and wrong so you can shame them about how dirty and wrong you are, see also Salem witch trials and the rapist excuse of “look how she was dressed” or relationship to prostitutes).

What worries me, though increasingly is that he got some tech head to grant him this sort of remote access and set it up for him, likely a student if it worked anything like back in my day. What happened to the youth honor system? Back when I was a survivor in high school, the administrators wanted to do all sorts of similar things on a lesser level and the tech head student they recruited would just claim it was impossible and otherwise stonewall while giving himself extra perks from the access.

If administrators are getting more tech-savvy or better at recruiting the most weasely tech-head they can find, we could be seeing stuff like this way more often.

I think pedophilia is right out other than as a disturbing possibility. If the administrators in question were regularly using it for such a purpose then admitting that they have that ability by publicly using the images as evidence for discipline (which I assume is not related to sexual activity) would kind of tip their hand.

Ok, granted, the guys who OKed this and apparently had no clue about 4th amendment rights, data security legislation or intellectual property protections obviously weren’t the sharpest tools in the shed.

I saw something as I was channel surfing last week—Frontline? 20/20? Some news-ish show about kids being given laptops and administrators could not only watch them if the cameras were on, but could track everything they did.

I saw the same program.  And yeah, there was nothing mentioned about spying on the kids after school. 

I can almost see doing the remote activation thing during classtime, and then maybe messaging the kids to let them know that the teacher/principal knows that they’re not doing whatever it is they’re supposed to be doing during classtime.  Almost.  It’s still, in my mind, a violation of privacy, but I can see how an argument could be made that that might be okay.  But as soon as the end of the day bell goes and the kids leave school property, it is absolutely not anyone affiliated with the school’s business what the hell those kids are doing and there is no legitimate reason whatsoever to spy on those kids. 

I hope the assholes who did this get the pants sued off them and never get to be around kids again, in any capacity.

I’m still amazed that most of these incidents don’t end with a bunch of parents tearing into the schools and shooting the principals. If I had kids, I think I’d be hard-pressed not to put more of these crazy administrators in the hospital or morgue…

I use a lot of artifacts in my history classes.  A friend who teaches education classes asked me to come talk to one of her graduate classes about using artifacts in lessons.  I was happy to do so but was taken aback when one student asked where I got permission to bring these things into a class.  Huh? What?  I answered honestly, I don’t ask, I use my judgment. 

Apparently several of the students (who are currently high school and junior high teachers) were shocked that I’d bring actual Civil War bullets into class.  We’re not talking about swords or something like that, just regular Minne balls.  Yeah I have to be careful about some things I use in class (I carefully screen films, cartoons, etc, for racial or religious imagery that might be offensive) but several of the students were wary of bringing in ANYTHING without forms signed by their administrators giving them permission.

“If the administrators in question were regularly using it for such a purpose then admitting that they have that ability by publicly using the images as evidence for discipline (which I assume is not related to sexual activity) would kind of tip their hand.”

I doubt even the worst school administration out there is a big old pedophile hoedown.  Unless it’s solely the responsibility of one person, you’re more likely to see ten people using it to spy on students they just know are up to something or their pain-in-the-ass parents and one person using it to see if they can get footage of students naked or masturbating or making out with their SOs while pretending to be on board with the witch-hunt.  Though it also doesn’t pay to underestimate how bulletproof even pedophiles might think they are if they’re operating under the color of authority and have a “legitimate excuse” for recording teens in risque circumstances.  God knows how many cops have been busted by their own dashboard cams engaging in sketchy or blatantly illegal behavior.  The best example’s still got to be the cop who deliberately used his dashboard cam in the pursuit getting a) fired and b) put on a list.

If I understand this correctly, the school administrators could spy on the students at any time the computer was on, right?  I mean, they didn’t just watch in while the students were using the cameras, but they could turn the camera on at any time remotely.  So, what if the students have the laptops in their bedrooms, where they change clothes and are sometimes naked?  It’s always bad to spy on naked people, but it’s especially bad when those people are minors.

Sadly, I saw similar treatment of students when I was in high school, but it has escalated.  I got out of high school about 8 years ago, and it was pretty bad.  There were certainly some great teachers, but there were just as many who really got off on controlling students and throwing their weight around.  They treated teenagers like toddlers, at the expense of our education.  There were several classes where we didn’t even get through one quarter of the required curriculum, partly because the teachers would waste so much class time enforcing trivial rules and lecturing us about how terrible we were.

We also had zero tolerance.  I was always perfectly behaved through middle school, and all my high school teachers would consider me a model student, but even I had to break some of the rules.  In fact, my parents told me to break the rules.  Our school nurse hated us, and assumed that every student was faking just to get out of class.  You could come in with a broken arm and she’d still doubt you.  So when I was diagnosed with asthma, I had to leave my inhaler with her, which might seem reasonable except she gave me such a hard time about whenever I needed to use it.  So the following year I just hid my inhaler deep inside my purse.  I probably could have been suspended for it, but when I’m having an asthma attack, I don’t have time to meekly beg someone who is getting off on her power trip. 

We also had a rule that we couldn’t have any cell phones at all.  I think it’s a great rule to require cell phones to be turned off in class, but we weren’t even allowed that.  However, the pay phones didn’t work and if I went to the office to call my mom after school, the secretaries would give me a hard time over it.  There were several times when my clubs were canceled and they gave us only a few hours’ notice, and I would have been stranded at school without a phone.  There was also a time on the bus that some other students were acting up, so the bus driver drove back to the school to kick them off.  However, she said that anyone who got off the bus (to go inside and inform parents that they’ll be late) would not be allowed back on the bus.  I got home an hour late and my parents had no idea what was going on, so they insisted that I bring a cell phone with me and keep it hidden.

In some schools, dominance and a power struggle are far more important to teachers than education.  And it seems to only be getting worse.

Let me start out by saying that what this school did was so far over the line, they can;t see the line in their rear-view mirror with a telescope.

But I do see a difference between passing a note in class and putting things on the Internet and sending them over phones. The latter can be done so quickly and to exponentially more people than a paper note can. Your teacher stopped the note from falling into public domain and causing a widespread disruption in school, and even if she hadn’t, you would have eventually done so yourself by putting it on your pocket. If you had put in online, neither of you would be able to do anything about it, and it could start interfering with the atmosphere of the classroom.

Oh yeah, and I just thought of something even more ridiculous that my school did.  Someone left a bomb threat in one of the bathrooms, which is certainly serious business.  However, for some insane reason, the school decided to just shut down all the bathrooms.  Of course, you have to allowed students to use the bathroom, so they opened up one set of them in the entire building, which spanned half a mile from one end to the other.  So students would have to miss a lot of class just to pee, if someone left another threat it would be even harder to narrow down who did it, and it didn’t solve anything or help anyone.  It was just a silly thing to make the point that they officially disapprove.  It was essentially a way to punish the person who did it by punishing literally everyone.  It was also about showing the students who’s really the boss.  FWIW, they never caught the person who did it.

What happened to the youth honor system?

They found themselves a goober who’s gotten an early start on resenting not automatically having sexual access to the people he finds attractive, that’s what.

Except that, honestly, I very much doubt they’d use a student for something like this, if for no other reason than the negligible likelihood that he’ll keep his mouth shut. Honestly, can you imagine a single person you knew in high school participating in something like this—1800 bugged laptops, remember!—and not telling anyone about it? You’ll be lucky if he doesn’t start his own porn site!

What I really don’t get about this is that the assistant principal was apparently so clueless about how totally egregious it was to spy on kids in their homes that she actually tried to punish a kid by showing him evidence that she was spying!  I mean, seriously?

to Cerb@ #40.  Lower Merion is $$$$.  Each school their district website claims has a website run by a teacher - in other words, those tech head students of your era grew up into the salaried adult cooperators of today.

On reflection, I can a mostly innocent but extremely stupid way that the school district could have gotten itself into the wiretapping and underage-porn business. I bet somebody asked themselves the question of what would happen if kids used the laptops to look at porn, hot-chat with each other, or do any of the zillion other embarassing things some people do with computers.

When I read about this, I also thought that the way it may have started was that the administrators were worried that the kids were using the computers for sexy time.  But (a) wouldn’t this have occurred to them before giving out the computers? and (b) it’s a big leap from being concerned that students would use the computers for sexual purposes to thinking it’s okay to spy on them in their homes.  It’s not a mostly innocent explanation.

So, is this some new thing that’s developed?  Or was I just lucky?  Does anyone understand this phenomenon?  Can you fill me in on what the fuck is going on here?

What’s going on is that our nation is moving inexorably towards a total-surveillance authoritarian police state, starting with the executive branch of our federal government. And the fish rots from the head down. This shit is ratcheting up, and is never gonna ratchet down. Thank fucking god I have no kids, cause the world we are creating for them is a fucking horror show.

I have to say that this all stems from adults BEING AFRAID of teenagers. WHen I was young, there were occasional “all ages” clubs that had bands and sold NO alcohol. These All Ages clubs were CONSTANTLY hassled by the police to an extreme hard to imagine, because the adults were THAT SCARED of the teenagers.

Is there anything to indicate that this story is actually true?

I should add, what I mean is IRRATIONALLY afraid of teenagers!

“If you had put in online, neither of you would be able to do anything about it, and it could start interfering with the atmosphere of the classroom.”

What?  How public do you think private posts and IMs are? You know, without somebody being an asshole in the same way somebody with a physical note and access to the advanced technology of Kinko’s and tape could be an asshole.  There’s a world of difference between posting something to an open forum or an unlocked livejournal entry (the equivalent of loudly announcing whatever in public) and instant-messaging your friend or putting a friends-locked picture on Facebook (the equivalent of passing the note to a friend).

I wouldn’t be so naive as to paint this as a “right wing authoritarian” thing.  A quick scan of “republican” identified websites commenting on this matter says that they are as outraged by the intrusion in the sainted home as we are!

My god…in my day students would smoke/drink/get high on the private property ACROSS THE STREET from the high school. If you had good enough eye sight you could see who was out there and what the given intoxicant was.

Being caught with drugs in school would merit a call to parents and a 3 day suspension. My friends an I made a video of us getting high for a class project. No one got in trouble.

What worries me, though increasingly is that he got some tech head to grant him this sort of remote access and set it up for him, likely a student if it worked anything like back in my day.

I’d doubt that - back in my day (late 90’s) whitopia schools already had a full time IT guy, who was in charge of putting ridiculous controls on most, but not all, of the computers in the building.  Any school rich enough to distribute that many laptops is well rich enough to have a few full-time guys to set that up.  The student techies usually have to find another place to play.

I should add that the school in question was in a similar income area, but administration was nowhere near as high-handed as these d-bags. As I recall the only way someone could have gotten expelled or suspended for more than a few days was to assault a teacher/administrator/student badly enough to need decent medical attention and/or bring a deadly weapon to school.

Anything below that would barely warrant a public call out.

There’s a world of difference between posting something to an open forum or an unlocked livejournal entry (the equivalent of loudly announcing whatever in public) and instant-messaging your friend or putting a friends-locked picture on Facebook (the equivalent of passing the note to a friend).

Unless someone wants to be an asshole. This is high school, remember.  If you pass a note to a friend she has to physically photocopy it to burn you; once she has the digital equivalent it becomes easier to make A Big Deal out it in the case of inter-friend drama.  Anything on the internet has a greater potential to go very awry, and any mess made in that manner is much harder to clean up.  And of course kids learn this the hard way - hell, adults, too.  Remember AutoAdmit?  I can see where dim bulb administrators would be paranoid and make poor technology decisions, although that doesn’t excuse the pedophilia-tinged epic fail of this particular idea.

Alkaloid, please see this site. The case was just recently filed and has not yet been posted on the District Court’s crappy website, and Lower Merion has a few more weeks to respond. And they are quick to point out that this contains allegations only, and that this is not a ruling. They also have a scanned copy of the class action case for review. Now, I’m just a simple hyper-chicken from a backwoods asteroid, but it looks legit. Maybe someone a little more legally-oriented than little ol’ me could have a gander and let us know if there’s anything that looks like it’s a crock of shit.

I wouldn’t be so naive as to paint this as a “right wing authoritarian” thing.  A quick scan of “republican” identified websites commenting on this matter says that they are as outraged by the intrusion in the sainted home as we are!
Comment #60: Ms Kate on 02/18 at 01:36 PM

Yep.  And it looks like the Dems won the last partisan school board election, though the boards are not always privy to what actually happen sin the schools. .

“If you pass a note to a friend she has to physically photocopy it to burn you”

Which is really not a difficult thing to do, especially now that scanners are common, good cameras on phones are common, and photocopiers are super-common.*  Though my larger point was that “putting something on the internet” is not a monolithic thing that’s essentially the same as renting out the jumbotron during the playoffs.  If you’re using more private channels, somebody has to actively decide to fuck you over before everybody’s seeing what you posted—just like private conversations or correspondence in real life.  It’s not like you put it on the internet in a private setting and it “just happens” to go public.

*Though your friend could also do what kids did back in my day, and just pass the note around or show it to other people.

I could maybe—maybe—see electronic monitoring of how those laptops were used, on the grounds that they’re school property and not supposed to be used to access Hot Horny XXX Teens.com or whatever.

But a webcam? A fucking WEBCAM????

There is simply no way to pretend that’s not perverted.

Not only did they give these students laptops, they WENT TO ALL THE TROUBLE to make it possible to spy (perhaps this was easy), and THEN THEY SPIED.  I’m with you, WTF?

Of course, they probably only spied on the ‘trouble makers’.  And the cute ones.  So, that’s more efficient.

*Though your friend could also do what kids did back in my day, and just pass the note around or show it to other people.
Comment #67: preying mantis on 02/18 at 02:00 PM

Which is what happens when said “friend” and we all remember how that status can change on an hourly basis in h.s. decides to do so on the Net.  People, in general, are lazy.  And physical passing around requires some effort and means NO anonymity - while the internet?  what 3-5 clicks at most, and pretty easy to claim an oops if caught?

Sure, preying mantis.  Everything you say is right, and it goes back to the theory that kids can be major assholes to each other.  The internet ups the ante for this kind of behavior in weird ways, but the solution is hardly going all 1984 on the kids.  If I were an school administrator, though, my concern would be that What Goes on the Internet Stays on the Internet, and that it can be harder to clean up the mess if you make a mistake or become someone’s target.  The solution, of course, is that the grownups need to calm the hell down and the kids need to be aware of what can go wrong on the internets.

There is simply no way to pretend that’s not perverted.

I’m would be amazed and surprised if at least one Judge or high ranking police official doesn’t have kids or grandkids in this school given the affluence factor.  One might hope that a search warrant will be issued for the administration’s electronic files aimed at intercepting sexual images taken from activated cameras in children’s bedrooms.

I would guess that this is actually a feature developed for corporations that buy and issue laptops to their employees.  Like we buy internet security software, and it acts as a firewall.  But we can also use it to keep employees from downloading software onto their computers, and to track their internet activity.  Looking to buy a large order of laptop computers, this might have been standard software that the laptops came with.  This isn’t to say that what they did isn’t creepy, but they might not have had to go out of their way to do it.

I wonder how many company-issued laptops have this software on them, and how widely it’s used.

This just means it makes no sense in a completely different way. First, you’re never going to stop kids from goofing off in class. That’s just what kids do when they’re bored. Second, if you don’t want want kids to be goofing off on their laptops during class time, don’t give them free laptops.

That’s why the next word after what you quoted from me was almost.  As in, I can almost see an argument for using the remote camera thing during classtime.  I don’t agree with that argument, because even aside from privacy issues, like you said, you’ll never stop kids from goofing off and giving them laptops just facilitates the goofing off.  But I can almost see where someone could make a legitimate argument for doing it during class time.  I disagree with that argument, but I wouldn’t call it pervy or completely out of bounds, just stupid because it won’t work.

Triplanetary Comment #12:
Yup, yup, yup.  This is the policy (even if it isn’t arrest, the punishment for each participant is equal) in my school.  I tell my students that they must refuse every bone in their body which tells them to fight back.  It’s a hard message to pass on to a group of kids who are living in tough situations already, who have parents telling them to fight back.  Whenever I’m witness to a fight, I only ever write up the one that started it and as best as I can leave the one who was assaulted out of the disciplinary loop.  It ain’t easy :(

The scary thing, Amanda, is that the school’s invasion is nearly universally agreed to be constitutional (according to courts…not to real human beings).  Kids just don’t have the same rights as adults.  A kid can be suspended for failing a drug test, fighting off school grounds, assault at home.  The power of school districts to bully kids is growing, and it’s terrifying.  We see this playing out in disgusting situations like this one.  Sad sad sad.

I remember just after I graduated high school (which puts this at around 1987-88), the Supreme Court handed down a ruling in favor of a school that had censored a story about reproductive rights in the school newspaper.  The students sued, and the Court eventually handed down a ruling that said, in essence, that maintaining order and discipline in a school trumped the students’ Constitutional rights.  I imagine that ruling alone emboldened a lot of petty-tyrant fuckwits, and it’s been the slippery slope ever since then.

I think I may have started the hoax - sorry, but the initial article Amanda linked to was pretty vague - which raised my initial suspicions.  Now there are names and dates - better.

I wouldn’t be so naive as to paint this as a “right wing authoritarian” thing.

I’m not sure if you’re responding to my comment about authoritarianism, but I am not seeing any reference in this thread at all to this being related to “right wing” anything. If there is one area of governance in which the United States has achieved unicorns and rainbows bipartisan nirvana, it’s the implementation of the total surveillance authoritarian police state.

Trivial question: Isn’t “butthurt” one word?

UltraMagnus, this is off topic, but I think the narrative of religious sexual oppression as a main factor in the Salem witch trials is largely false—I blame The Crucible.  Most of the accused were older women, and were convicted based on spectral evidence and torture-induced confessions.  The burning, dunking, and searching for scars frequently associated with witch hunts were more typical of the Inqisition;  I have heard the theory that Kramer and Sprenger, the two priests who literally wrote the book on witch hunting, were so sexually frustrated that they invented reasons to inspect naked women’s bodies, but I have always thought that they were gay.

Ahahahahahaha.

Sorry, I grew up in Upper Darby, and Lower Merion was always one of those “fucking rich people” districts.  I also now take classes at St. Joe’s, which is across the street from Lower Merion Township.  They always give the school crap about those “stupid college kids” coming into their town and causing a ruckus.  So I’m having some schadenfreude at the expense of the adults there (oh you assholes can afford to give every kid a laptop with a webcam to spy on them, but you can’t plow your fucking roads that touch my county???)

I do feel bad for the kids, though.  The crazy just keeps escalating.

THe below is from the Main Line Times comment section (yes, the legit local newspaper there)  so, looke like it is legit. http://www.mainlinemedianews.com/articles/2010/02/18/main_line_times/news/doc4b7d7d9ce9a28395335138.txt

““As a recent graduate of Harriton, I thought I could shed some light on the situation. These laptops were 2.0ghz 2gb Macbooks issued out to all the students for the entire year to do whatever they wanted and this was the 2nd year of the program. The webcam couldn’t be disabled due through tough tough security settings. Occasionally we would notice that the green light was on from time to time but we just figured that it was glitching out as some macbooks do sometimes. Some few covered it up with tape and post its because they thought the IT guys were watching them. I always thought they were crazy and that the district, one of the more respectable ones within the state, would never pull some s*** like this. I guess I was wrong. I am a little surprised because nobody in the past had be disciplined for doing anything inappropriate during school or outside of school. The only thing coming close was a kid performing a simple hack to make another account in order to install games. This specific incident was traced through the network by the IT dept. While I still think there might be a chance the vice principal/ disciplinarian doesn’t have these specific images as she is quite the type to make a bluff like that, it sounds to me like this is legit. If they have been watching all of us and looking at our logs and looking at what we type, I can assure you that they have seen lots and lots and lots of dirty things.”” “

Not that I am implying that older women are non-sexual, but just that it wasn’t really a case of creepy middle-aged men trying to sneak a peek at adolescent girls.

Someone needs to hand every kid in that district a copy of “Little Brother”, stat.

Not that I am implying that older women are non-sexual, but just that it wasn’t really a case of creepy middle-aged men trying to sneak a peek at adolescent girls.

What makes you think that the principals were the only people remotely activating the cams, viewing the pictures, or looking at/for indiscretions on camera?

I could maybe—maybe—see electronic monitoring of how those laptops were used, on the grounds that they’re school property and not supposed to be used to access Hot Horny XXX Teens.com or whatever.

I think you’ve perfectly highlighted the problem.  Some restrictions are fine, and most schools (and workplaces) already use web filters and such.  I’ve even worked at places that could theoretically proxy in an monitor what you’re doing, but they rarely need to resort to that.  But there’s a huge difference between a web filter and spying on naked teens without their knowledge.  However, if you try to make this point, people who support this will act like you don’t want any restrictions at all, and that you want give teens access to porn sites.  Some people just don’t understand balance.  For them, it’s all or nothing.

Anyone else seen the absolutely hilarious webcam scene in “It’s Complicated?”  One can only hope in a spirit of you deserved it, that some school admin snoop got a closeup of something “aesthetically unappealing” they would really rather not see - and I hope it gives them nightmares for life.  THough that would still be an invasion of privacy - but just a tiny bit of karma justice.

I wonder how many company-issued laptops have this software on them, and how widely it’s used.

All of them and virtually never.

Various remote desktop tools (and SSH) allow me to do pretty much anything I want to the laptops on my network or VPNed in to it and a couple of changes will allow me to have the laptop automatically, and secretly, connect to the VPN when it is outside the building. In fact, our laptops are set up to contact a server whenever they are connected to the internet and verify that they have not been stolen. If they’re on the stolen list they will squawk home all the info they can AND they will take photos with the built-in camera every few minutes and send those as well.

But I sure as shit don’t have either the time or the desire to spy on the boring ass shit my users do when they’re AT work, much less when they’re not. But yea, the boss wants to know what you’re doing while at work? We can tell and/or show him. He wants to know what you’re doing at home? That I would no more do than give competitors our access passwords… that is to say, I’d do it for a lot of money but not for free.

What Sarcastro said @ 90.  I can, in theory, be fired for using my work laptop for any non-work function, and yes there is tracking software.  Almost no one ever is unless they have been actually caught (as in someone sees over there sholder) with really not-acceptable-for work place viewing content during work hours or major nasty malware systemic crashes beyond their own hardware.

Sure: There’s an ever-growing notion in our culture that people under 18 aren’t fully human and don’t deserve rights.

I think that attitude has been there for years, but now this is yet another way to control their students. I’ve always felt that (some)teachers also use bullies as a way of keeping order and enforcing the horrible high school structure of Jocks/BMOC at the top, and the geeky/cool kids as bottom feeders. (I hate the whole sport culture, esp. in High School.)
It’s creepy as hell that they are spying on them. One wonders how many of them masterbated while watching the students. Ugh.

Helen, there is a difference between a user using work devices for non work activities and using a work device to spy on a user at home through remote activation.

But it isn’t ONLY the students.  As the suit rightly pointed out, they were also spying on parents, grandparents, visitors and other minors in no way affiliated with the system, in the place where one is supposed to be entitled the most privacy, one’s own home.

“But I sure as shit don’t have either the time or the desire to spy on the boring ass shit my users do when they’re AT work, much less when they’re not”

Aye, not only would it be a firing offence at my company to do the creepy stalker thing, but most companies dont approve of IT guys checking up on HR people inputing payroll info, the Legal dept inputing sensitive data from an ongoing lawsuit, etc, etc

(the fact that we have access to the servers and DB where this info is kept not withstanding)

phylosopher, I would find it tempting to take the device to my bedroom (for parental control of media time and use reasons, of course!) and, when the green light went on, get busy with my husband.

On teh one hand MS KAte, I’ll indulge in some adolescent scatolgical fantasy - like taking the laptop away from the kid and just happening to put it on the floor next to the commode.

Or, better yet, having the admin turn it on to snoop and finding his/her spouse having a bit of fun with the unrelated child’s parent.  Now THAT would be some divine retribution.

(Oh, and just for clarification, when I said “innocent but extremely stupid” I was including in the “extremely stupid” the inability to see that massive privacy invasion could be a problem. Once I worked for a publication where the editor in chief, who was not very tech-savvy, wanted to know if the network could be set up so the he could see everything people were typing as they were typing it, and break in to insert comments if he wanted to. He truly thought things would be much more efficient that way.)

That is absolutely crazy that they though that they could get away with this. Is this what they would call leading by example…Wow!

What kills me is the fact that these administrators don’t realize how their actions make them LOOK. Seriously, is there any other thing to think other than these people are a bunch or perverts?

This is also more proof that educrats are even more intellectually/educationally deficient than your average K-12 teacher.  There’s a reason why so many of my former high school teachers, teacher friends, and even many ed grad school students regard educrats/aspiring educrats as more intellectually duller/academically deficient counterparts. 

Doesn’t help matters that the one time in recent memory my high school ended up with an educrat with an excess of political connections in the board of ed, but no previous teaching history/experience there was the time the school was almost ran into the ground and everyone from students to teachers treated almost like inmates.  Things got so bad it actually galvanized many students and teachers into uniting for said principal’s ouster after a few years.  It pained me to hear friends who graduated a year or two behind tell me I was so damned lucky to have graduated before that educrat showed up.  Incidentally, most of our principals including the one who presided while I was there and the current principal tended to be veteran teachers with at least 2 decades of teaching at my school.

The students sued, and the Court eventually handed down a ruling that said, in essence, that maintaining order and discipline in a school trumped the students’ Constitutional rights.  I imagine that ruling alone emboldened a lot of petty-tyrant fuckwits, and it’s been the slippery slope ever since then.

IIRC it has escalated to the SCOTUS limiting students’ First Amendment rights when off school property as well, and Clarence Thomas wanted to rule that high school students have no First Amendment rights at all (the majority was less extreme).

This is what I mean when I say that kids aren’t enjoying an excess of freedom to do as they please, or display contempt for teachers, in the U.S.  Children and teenagers are treated as the property of their parents and/or the state.

I work with teenagers, most of whom assume that since I’m over 30, I have some sort of visual and/or auditory impairment. (That, or they just haven’t learned indoor voices yet.) At any rate, I unfortunately catch a good deal more of their gossip and out-of-school activities than I want to know, and trust me, their personal lives are generally as deeply uninteresting to me as my personal life is to them. As it should be. I would pretty much assume that any school administrator who spies on kids in this manner is not only an Orwellian creep, but also probably a pervert who should not be working with children.

I see a less extreme version of this in that our administration checks our work e-mails and monitors all of the computers in the school. It’s a more justifiable scenario, since the computers are located on school property and thus, only class time activity is being monitored, but situations like the one in this post are a logical extension of the idea that workers and students are the property of the school.

http://www.post-trib.com/news/lake/2038666,lcpaper0209.article

http://www.post-trib.com/news/lake/2045663,lake-news-0213.article

http://www.post-trib.com/news/lake/2038799,lc-edit-210.article

This is the latest flap at a local h.s.  Seems the kids are in trouble for following the rules because the administration tries to change them as they go.  And note the administrations total acceptance of football player threatening behavior.  The last is a copy of the actual editorial - tell me if I’m missing something, but I see it as totally non-inflammatory and conciliatory

Professor Avenger taught at the local community college, Mother Avenger always said that he preferred to tell the truth too much to ever be considered as a candidate to be an administrator.

Of course, this was Chinese cynicism about one’s spouses own limits to succeeding at work, her grandmother didn’t like the fact that Great-grandfather Monk didn’t take advantage of his position at the English Consulate in Shanghai to make money through bribes and the like, as an old-fashioned Englishman he preferred the OBE that he received towards the end of his life to mere money, and it didn’t help that he would always bring the petty cash stuff home so that Great-grandmother Monk could settle the accounts.

Now I know why some of the best school administrators I have seen went from the military to the corporate world and then switched over to teaching and seeking higher qualifications.

I can easily imagine Mother Avenger remarking that since success in the military and the corporate world requires a certain talent at CYA, that would be in line with the demands of being an administrator.

Every member of the UN except Somalia and the US has ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and Somalia is shortly about to.

The Convention includes the right for children’s privacy to be protected and for children’s lives not to be subject to undue interference, among many other things of course.

I’m not entirely sure what my point is here, other than to point out that the law and practice of the US is ridiculously far out from accepted standards in the rest of the world.  I’m preaching to the choir I’m sure, but maybe things like campaigning for the ratification of Conventions like this might offer a way forward?

Ms Kate @93:
It was a school computer that in all likelihood was supposed to be used for school related work only.  My work computer is still subject to monitoring when I take it home.  This was likely the school administration rational.  The webcam thing though, not acceptable for anyone, ever.

tiggrrl said:

Someone needs to hand every kid in that district a copy of “Little Brother”, stat.

+1 Wouldn’t be surprised if Cory hasn’t mass-emailed it out to them already… ;D

I am going to chalk this up to Americans´obsession with controlling the private lives of others, especially the young. See also abstinence education and daddy-daughter purity balls.

“Sure: There’s an ever-growing notion in our culture that people under 18 aren’t fully human and don’t deserve rights.”
More like RE-growing, really. Wasn’t that long ago they were working kids to death in factories and the like…

I think what’s new about this s the ability to do it.When I was in school there was no way the administrations could get cameras in my bedroom without anyone knowing.

The mentality, the suspicion of students, the presumption that they’re up to something and the teachers have to figure out what it is and stop them? That goes back decades if not centuries.

Dr Psycho (24):

This situation is in some ways worse than Orwell: people are voluntarily allowing spy cameras into their bedrooms, because it benefits them in various ways

Heh, well, Orwell didn’t, best I recall, go into detail about the generation or two preceding 1984. In other words, the Oceanians may have done it voluntarily too, for the same reason.

I just wonder if, from the school’s side, the computer loans were a way to get cameras in the kids’ homes, or if they realized while working out the logistics of the computer distribution that they had or could have this capability.

PhysioProf (55):

What’s going on is that our nation is moving inexorably towards a total-surveillance authoritarian police state

I don’t think it’s a shift in the culture, though. Or, at least,not as big a shift as the advancement in technology.

I’m a paranoid curmudgeon, and that’s why I have a bit of scotch tape over the built in camera on my laptop.

I mean, I don’t use it anyway, and I can always peel the tape off if that changes…

(It’s so the gnomes can’t see me, of course.  Stop looking at me that way.)

Apologies for the thread necro, but how is this different than what most employers do to potential job seekers? You know, looking for such embarrassing stuff like naughty Facebook/My Space/etc photos? Or monitoring of computer usage by companies? Its the Surveillance State run amok, both by the government and the public sector.

Amanda—because when you post something to facebook, or surf on company time, you are actively putting data out there. If you post a photo of yourself on facebook doing a bonghit and you don’t bother to make it private, then YOU have taken the action to put your information out there, and someone else has taken the action to view it.  For example, if you are in a public park, even a relatively private corner of a public park, and you change your shirt, and someone happens to see your titties, there’s a degree of “well, you shouldn’t have changed your shirt in public if you didn’t want people to see your titties.” Especially if you happened to tell people you were going to be in the park (people should expect their employers are going to do a cursory internet search when they apply for a job. It’s really not that hard to make potentially incriminating stuff private for a few months. Who the fuck cares, anyway?)

In this event, you did not put information out there. You took *no* action, someone else actively took action to invade your privacy. They drilled a peephole into your bedroom and watched you change so they could see your titties. You were not in public, you were doing things in the privacy of your home for the express purpose of privacy.

Or monitoring of computer usage by companies?

I assume you’re talking about things like ISP’s monitoring *home users’* internet traffic, and not companies trying to prevent workers on the job from wasting all of their time surfing and causing potential liabilities.