Boing Boing isfollowing a story out of the tony Philadelphia suburb of Lower Merion, where the parents of Blake Robbins, a sophomore at Harriton Senior High School, are suing the school district for behavior that's straight out of an as-yet-unwritten screenplay for a dystopian, Orwellian movie.
The district has a program where each student is issued a laptop when they matriculate to high school. These laptops come with webcams and a piece of software that could be remotely activated to allow the district to see a stream of video taken by it-or, in other words, spying on its students (at least in theory). Apparently the vice principal at Harriton punished Robbins for "improper behavior"-which the administrator found out about via the webcam.
Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow sums up how grotesque this incident is better than I could:
If true, these allegations are about as creepy as they come. I don't know about you, but I often have the laptop in the room while I'm getting dressed, having private discussions with my family, and so on. The idea that a school district would not only spy on its students' clickstreams and emails (bad enough), but also use these machines as AV bugs is purely horrifying.
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