ABA Journal: School District Snapped 56,000 Images on Student Webcams

An upscale suburban Philadelphia school district accused of secretly snapping photos of high school students at home via webcams on their district-issued laptop computers has completed an investigation.

And it apparently supports at least some of the claims made in a federal lawsuit filed by the parents of one sophomore. The district says school officials remotely activated the webcams 146 times, snapping a total of nearly 56,000 images, reports the Philadelphia Inquirer.

While many of the records could not be recovered, images found included photos of students, at least some photos inside their homes and screen shots showing programs or files, investigators state. Most of the time, technicians turned on the webcam when a laptop was reported lost or stolen and then turned it off when the machine was found. In some cases, however, the webcam wasn't turned off and simply kept snapping a new image every 15 minutes, accounting for some 13,000 of the total tally, according to the newspaper.

Read the entire story here.

Commentary: Apparently, George Orwell's 1984 isn't on the required reading list at this Philadelphia high school in the Lower Merion School District. The true crackpots are the people who hatched this idea, and it's really hard to believe that nobody involved this from the beginning didn't raise a question about this - nobody? This is a big Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.

Why couldn't just put a GPS software or device in the computers to see where they were if they were reported lost or stolen.

And what on earth did the school official who contacted the parents of the boy who he thought was popping pills think would happen when he said there were pictures of their son doing this? Did he just think they'ed turn around and thank him for it? If this is the case, then he's a frickin' moron.

The people who oversaw this program need to be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law, and the school district should be sued into bankruptcy. What a bunch of crackpots.