This situation created an untenable situation for the school: they are legally required to intervene if they observe life-threatening behavior. At least during school hours, on school property. And you get into this good-faith habit of looking after your students. So if you have an (illegal?) computer-observation program set up, and you see your kids in trouble, do you do something? Do you NOT do something?

In California, at least, as a school-district employee I was held PERSONALLY responsible for student welfare: if I suspected a kid was a victim of child abuse, and didn’t report it, I could be held accountable if it later turned out that the child was being abused.

This situation sucks. Clandestine webcam observation of students is stupid, stupid, stupid. But *given* that the observation program was in place, the vice principal did *exactly* what I would have done in that situation. Or maybe I would have called the cops right away — now THAT would have been an awesome fsck-up!

If that’s true then it means the lawsuit’s just a smokescreen.

No, what we have gotten from the school district thus far is.. We use it only for lost and stolen laptops. Although IF we were to have used to for other means it wouldn’t have violated policy.

We also have a regrettable situation where a student and his parents have misunderstood the good intentions of a teacher to give assistance to the student. Which I am sure was what the administrator was doing, but had gotten that (possibly wrong) information through horribly duplicitous means.

However, I can see the difficulty if they thought the kid was taking drugs – you don’t necessarily want to involve the cops. I’m not sure what the rules are there.

But – wow, they just really shouldn’t have been LOOKING in the first place!

Did no-one there see the potential for this situation to arise? No-one? I mean, if they take their mandated reporting responsibilities seriously, it must have occurred to them.

At the very least, they’re incredibly stupid. Throw in the potential for ‘involuntary’ (at best) child porn creation and distribution, and they’re just criminal nitwits.

It’s pretty immaterial – NO reason is good enough for what they did. By taking the picture they’re committing an invasion of privacy which — even if they have overwhelming evidence that a laptop was stolen — requires a warrant. Which would be issued by a judge to police, not to school officials, who are not empowered to carry out law-enforcement functions – certainly not off school premises.

It is entirely possibly that I am pissed because of what the manufacture of the software and the finds from the above listed site have indicated. The software took pictures when first opened and periodically during use, as well as when they requested.

However, if the school was in the right then there wouldn’t be a “misunderstand” from a benevolent school employee who was misaligned by the media. It is obvious there is something behind the drug issues, because the school has basically said that the assistant principal was dealing with the kid and then parents… but is being misrepresented.

Great point though, and thanks for taking my temper down a notch. Now I have to go re-find and re-read the whole school district (Mr. Young’s) release.

And that a list of who has access to that shared folder will surface?

The Hilarity that would Ensue would define ‘EPIC’.

On a related note, I just can’t conceive of the mindset of such a person who would do this. I’d like, just for a minute (because that’s all I really think I could stand) to be inside their heads. What emotional responses do they have to these issues? What senses of entitlement and responsibility do they think they hold? How do they justify to themselves what they are doing and how do they really feel about what they’ve done? Was there ever a moment of cognitive dissonance that they suppressed? How do people like this become like this?

It seems they are part of a larger culture of domination that affects many people in law enforcement, politics, military, etc. I’m reminded of what Reich and Fromm and Arendt said about authoritarian and totalitarian personality disorders… I think we can actually use this incident as a “teaching moment” to help people see the pattern as it exists in other realms that seem perhaps more removed– such as the increasing surveillance state, militarization of policing, prisoner torture, and other forms of expanding totalitarianism that continue to spread.

Because it is by no means clear hat what “these school administrators” is actually analogous to a neighbor (gotta be a man, right? hmm) doing that. Local police immediately going to people’s homes and dragging them out in handcuffs is almost never a good idea. Yeesh. At least you didn’t wish for the angry mob, too. Outrage is appropriate, rushing to judgment is not.

On another note, if these had been disabled in the BIOS, they could not have been “activated” by the school. Just sayin’ to anyone who has a laptop supplied by a school, disable the camera in the BIOS and you’re good. If the software can’t see it, it can’t use it.

I hope everyone involved in perpetrating this outrage gets fired and blacklisted from ever working in education again.

Bet some one in the school has a cute collection of kids in their underwear though.

Mmmm… mike & ike. I always preferred Hot Tamales though.

Then _this_ happens. Truth is at least as strange and disturbing as fiction.

1) What if that was his medication that you saw him taking? “Pills” = drugs? High school vice principals know better than doctors now?
2) High school vice principals now have warrantless wiretap and prosecutorial powers? Since when?
3) Why hasn’t the vice principal and the school’s IT administrator (who should know better) been suspended yet?