Looks like hidden cameras in the home are the new fad!
Is my sarcasm detector on the fritz, or are you being serious?
I don’t even know anymore.
This is essential training for school officials, because it lets them observe where schoolkids might store their illicit advil. It increases the efficiency of the follow-up in-school strip searches.
The sad part is that this family, and the others who are in this class action suit, will probably get a pretty hefty settlement, paid for by tax dollars, all because one or two people did something really stupid.
I agree - if the plaintiff’s story is 100% factually true, federal prison time is probably appropriate. Sadly, it’s probably way more complicated than that as I can’t believe any person would think they could just spy on kids and not get in some sort of trouble. I mean, they sent a picture of them spying with the reprimand! You only do that if you think you’re legally covered or incredibly stupid.
I would totally believe that they had this software installed and didn’t tell anybody, and then were caught by a whistleblower or leaving the captures in a unprotected share on the school network. But just blatantly doing it?
You guys are attributing more competency to a school than you ought to.
I’m sure the details won’t be as sordid or 1984ish as you expect.
Saying that, I’ll add that it was a very stupid thing to do.
Maybe I’ve been out of high school for less time than you guys have, but you’re ascribing way way way too much intelligence to your garden-variety public school vice principal. I’m sure that there are good folks out there as well, but my experience is that 100% of mid-level public school officials are in that line of work because they a) hate kids and b) are vengeful assholes who get off on having their own private domain.
It’s a caricature, sure, but there’s a reason that we all hate this guy.
Look, until someone comes up with a scenario or method by which they could somehow avoid seeing naked children, any suggestion that they were “too stupid” doesn’t hold water. There isn’t a person in America that dumb, sorry.
H.
I’ve learned to never underestimate stupidity.
It’s more than a hard sell, it’s an impossible sell. Owning an object obviously doesn’t give you the right to use that object for illegal purposes. This amounts to a massive string of felonies and misdemeanors that warrants the harshest possible punishment that our legal system can possibly give to a school that institutionally violates the rights of its students: a court order to stop doing it.
From another website:
“If this violated child pornography laws, we will get the remarkable outcome that a school system is not allowed within 2500 feet of a school. So it’s not all bad!”
The Jack Bauer legacy–What could we do? Millions of people might have died.
I agree with all of you, but this is so cut and dried and obvious it makes me suspicious. I’m definitely following this story. Watch a particular teacher get hung out to dry for activating the webcam remotely without authorization or something.
He was in league with demons?
Things get more interesting:
The Lower Merion School District superintendent Christopher McGinley has issued an official response on its website, acknowledging “a security feature intended to track lost, stolen and missing laptops.” Going further, he says the district " has not used the tracking feature or web cam for any other purpose or in any other manner whatsoever" but that the matter is “under review.”
So…what if this kid stole some other kid’s laptop and they just turned on the webcam to catch him, and that this was what he got busted for?
If that’s what really happened, I don’t know what to think. Probably they shouldn’t really have the capability to turn on the webcam for any reason - who knows what they’re going to see on the other end? But if the webcam was only turned on as a security feature to “track lost, stolen and missing laptops” maybe it’s more innocent than previously assumed.
No, it’s not at all “innocent.” There’s a legal way for the government to spy on your bedroom. It involves them going to a judge and getting a warrant. The fact that getting a warrant leaves a paper trail is part of the point. If we’re in a “he said / she said” situation about whether your school’s assistant principal was fighting crime or just watching your child undress, then something has gone horribly, horribly wrong.
The excuse that “We were spying on the children their own protection!” is the sort of thing that the state really needs to prove with hard evidence. If they didn’t want to deal with that burden of showing that they acted responsibly, perhaps they shouldn’t have installed hidden cameras in people’s bedrooms without their consent.
Yeah, fair enough. If the laptop was stolen, they should have turned the matter over to police, who could then have gotten a warrant to turn on the camera and see who’s on the other side.
Yeah. I have no conceptual problem with the idea of using the camera to catch a thief. (Although having a “secret” anti-theft camera seems to be a massive fail as far as deterrence goes.)
My point is that that there absolutely needs to be a real paper trail to this sort of thing. Allegations of misconduct should be trivially easy to refute, because the system should have been built specifically to ensure that it could not be easily abused.
The Lower Merion School District superintendent Christopher McGinley has issued an official response on its website, acknowledging “a security feature intended to track lost, stolen and missing laptops.” Going further, he says the district " has not used the tracking feature or web cam for any other purpose or in any other manner whatsoever" but that the matter is “under review.”
That’s retarded. A webcam might be the least useful tool possible for tracking a stolen laptop. It basically only works if you’re able to recognize the person using it. And since when is it even the job of a school to track down property that was stolen outside of the school?
It was to be announced at the staff meeting on Monday. As you know, the Principal loves surprises.