Spying school took "thousands" of photos of students with covert webcam app

More details have come to light in the case of the Lower Merion School District spying on its students with covert laptop webcam software. The school district of the affluent Philadelphia suburb issued mandatory laptops to its students, each one loaded with software that could covertly activate the laptops' webcams, supposedly as a security measure to help recover stolen laptops). [...] The school claims that it only activated the webcam spying software on rare occasions, but this is contested by parents. One student, Blake Robbins, was called in for a disciplinary meeting for "popping pills" while at home (Robbins says he was eating Mike & Ike's candies). The revelation that the school had been watching him remotely resulted in a parent lawsuit. [...]

"Discovery to date has now revealed that thousands of webcam pictures and screen shots (.pdf) have been taken from numerous other students in their homes, many of which never reported their laptops lost or missing," attorney Mark Haltzman wrote in a Thursday federal court filing... [...] In February, the Lower Merion School District deactivated the webcam-tracking program secretly lodged on 2,300 student laptops.

source: Article 'Spying school took "thousands" of photos of students with covert webcam app, caught kids sleeping, half-dressed' by Cory Doctorow; boingboing.net/2010/04/20/spying-school-took-t.html; Boing Boing; 20 April 2010