School used student laptop webcams to spy on them at school and home

[UofM-TKE]

This is the latest from the Lower Merion Webcam case. I live kind of close to the area.

Pa. district took 56,000 images on student laptops.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_laptop...ng_on_students

By MARYCLAIRE DALE, Associated Press Writer – Tue Apr 20, 8:24 am ET
PHILADELPHIA – A suburban school district secretly captured at least 56,000 webcam photographs and screen shots from laptops issued to high school students, its lawyer acknowledged Monday.

"It's clear there were students who were likely captured in their homes," said lawyer Henry Hockeimer, who represents the Lower Merion School District.

None of the images, captured by a tracking program to find missing computers, appeared to be salacious or inappropriate, he said. The district said it remotely activated the tracking software to find 80 missing laptops in the past two years. The Philadelphia Inquirer first reported Monday on the large number of images recovered from school servers by forensic computer experts, who were hired after student Blake Robbins filed suit over the tracking practice.

Robbins still doesn't know why the district deployed the software tracking program on his computer, as he had not reported it lost or stolen, his lawyer said.

The FBI has opened a criminal investigation into possible wiretap violations by the district, and U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, of Pennsylvania, has introduced a bill to include webcam surveillance under the federal wiretap statute.

[UGAalum94]

Even when you subtract the 38,000 that came from six stolen computers, it's mindboggling.