Also this report by Julian Sanchez at Cato, which is where I got the stydehax link.

or maybe they are spying bastards…

Either way this woman seems evil.

1. The kids takes a picture of himself using the camera in his school-issued laptop.
2. Whether he posts it on his Facebook for the school administration to find, or the school retrieves it from his laptop when he is back on school premises, is largely immaterial. No privacy laws or public trust was violated. What’s on the school-owned laptop is property of the school. Probably figures prominently in the agreement that the kid or his parents signed without reading.
3. The kid is informed that he is in trouble for what he is shown doing in the photo. Whether it is school’s business what the kid does at home (smokes pot, masturbates, surfs for porn, tortures kittens) is arguable, but that is not the point of the law suit and is just a side issue in the online discussion. My guess it was something serious (say, sex with a minor) that got his parents worried enough to come up with a law suit idea.
4. When the parents turn the heat up on the school, Ms. Matsko ill-advisedly tells them that the school has ability to remotely activate the camera. My opinion is that she wanted to either impress or scare them, herself not being savvy either technically or legally of what she was talking about.
5. The rest is more or less part of the public record.

Am I missing anything?

I called the ACLU. I recall the gentleman that I spoke with stated that “many high school administrations believe that their students’ rights end the moment they step onto school property.”

I’m finding this whole story more and more believable. Also, I still don’t have my @$!!% High School Diploma.

its spyware: designed to bypass the OS’s security, secretly take pictures, and then erase all traces of itself once its sent the photos on to IT.

The students who noticed the telltale green camera light were told it wasn’t really recording.

How anyone could think something so perverted, and orwellian was okay. They obviously never read their science fiction literature.

In my experience, graduate programs in education (which is where you go if you want to become a school principal, university president, etc.) are a joke. They tend to attract less qualified students*, the level of work those students produce is often rather poor, and the theory taught in their classrooms is often divorced from reality.

*see: http://www.ncsu.edu/chass/philo/GRE%20Scores%20by%20Intended%20Graduate%20Major.htm

Doesn’t she have people? In Southern California, everybody has people. They touch up your concealer and slip you a pill and tell you what to say on camera. The spy-cam story is now less interesting than her monumental PR fail.

What caught my eye – aside form the mention of the plaintiff family history of legal and financial troubles – was the last (as of today) paragraph in the Wiki article:

“In a statement Blake made to the press on February 24th, he emphasized that the case was neither about his vice principal’s misconduct nor his own, but about the undisclosed spying capabilities which the district covertly maintained.”

Obviously, he has not read the complaint – or the headlines it has spurned.

…she looks forward to the day that she can respond to the allegations without pending legal action getting in the way.

I wonder how well that excuse works when students are called into the principal’s office.

Q: “Your teacher claims that you flipped him the bird in class. Is this true?”
A: “I look forward to the day when I can respond to that allegation without pending disciplinary action getting in the way.”

ultimately, they should have disclosed that they have the silent-stillsnap capability for use in stolen equipment recovery upfront. although in some ways i can understand why they’d want to keep it quiet since it would be easily thwarted once it’s common knowledge that it exists.

then again, maybe the vice-principal is totally guilty of abusing the system. if so, she deserves what she’s getting. i don’t, however, like premature internet mob vilification when all the facts have not yet been sorted. it’s like an internet trope, except it tends to stomp all over real people in the real word, often times when they don’t necessarily deserve it.

Sure, lady, but who cares how you “find” the allegations. Are they TRUE?

If you want sooper sekret spy powers, you can’t use the information you’ve gathered as actual evidence.

Which, actually, plays pretty well to the narrative that this was not so much Orwellian, as just clueless. The tech tries to maximize information gathering because more information must be better; the administrator is totally ignorant about WTF the tech is doing, but takes the tip from the tech, because drugs are bad, m’kay. . .

The press conference looks similar to the rest of the student surveillance fiasco – unplanned & badly done.

-unrelated- I agree with anon #64 that -gate as a scandalous suffix sucks, but disagree with the idea that this is worse than Nixon. I mean, Nixon was really pretty bad.

This is a good case that can set a precedent for schools to not spy on kids , specially at home.

If the schools are worried about theft..put a GPS on the laptop and inform the authorities.

It also doesn’t help that I had HORRIBLE assistant principals to deal with when I was in junior high and high school. That sort of stuff leaves a very lasting impression. I don’t find it easy to trust people in school administration, and I am sure I’m not alone in that.