Big Brother is Watching

A tip of the old hat goes to Dvorak Uncensored for this story. A federal class action lawsuit is bring brought forth against the Lower Merion School District. The school district issued laptops to each child with an integrated web camera which the school was able to remotely turn on and spy with. From the article:

Michael Robbins thereafter verified, through Ms. Matsko, that the school district in fact has the ability to remotely activate the webcam contained in a student’s personal laptop computer issued by the school district at any time it chose and to view and capture whatever images were in front of the webcam, all without the knowledge, permission or authorization of any persons then and there using the laptop computer.

Additionally, by virtue of the fact that the webcam can be remotely activated at any time by the school district, the webcam will capture anything happening in the room in which the laptop computer is located, regardless of whether the student is sitting at the computer and using it.

Scary stuff. Several question arise from this. First what was the purpose of being able to remotely enable the web cameras? Was it to spy on the children to ensure they weren’t doing anything wrong? Was is because there are perverts in the school district who get their jollys off of underage kids on camera? The implications of this could be rather astounding.

This also further proves a motto in the security industry, trust no one.