Posts tagged USA

A class action lawsuit filed in Federal Court in Philadelphia has shed light on a secret surveillance program targeting Americans, but this particular operation is not being run by the FBI or the NSA. It’s being run by the Lower Merion School District in Philadelphia, PA.

The laptops issued to high-school students in the well-heeled Philly suburb have webcams that can be covertly activated by the schools’ administrators, who have used this facility to spy on students and even their families. The issue came to light when the a high school student was disciplined for "improper behavior in his home" and the Vice Principal used a photo taken by the webcam as evidence. The suit is a class action, brought on behalf of all students issued with these machines.

If true, these allegations are about as creepy as they come. Most kids have their laptop in their room while getting dressed, having private discussions with friends & family, and so on. And it’s hardly necessary to mention the habit of regular masturbation of the average high school student which in many cases will involve using the very laptop. 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.

Schools are in an absolute panic about kids divulging too much online, worried about pedos and marketers and embarrassing photos that will haunt you when you run for office or apply for a job in 10 years. They tell kids to treat their personal details as though they were precious. But when schools take that personal information, indiscriminately invading privacy (and, of course, punishing students who use proxies and other privacy tools to avoid official surveillance), they send a much more powerful message: your privacy is worthless and you shouldn’t try to protect it.

Sources: Text partly from Boing Boing, Photo released under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License by bionicteaching and edited by Nimatek with a picture from the film 1984.

The following  text is an excerpt from an article on the Classically Liberal blog. We all worry about teens and the risks associated with sex. No one wants young girls to get pregnant or for teens to spread venereal diseases. Like it or not, to the extent that so-called sexting replaces actual sex as an expression of erotic needs, it replaces higher-risk sexual activities with lower-risk activities. But state laws make all teenage sex dangerous. It isn’t dangerous because there are consequences to actions that nature imposes. In nature there is always a cost to something. Governments, however, like to screw around with that premises.

So they minimize the risks of some bad things by subsidizing them. For instance, government will subsidize tobacco growing, help subsidize people who get cancer from smoking, provide “insurance” to people who build in flood planes, etc.  All of these are cases where government lowers the cost of risky behavior thus encouraging more of it. At the same time Nanny increases the risks artificially in other areas. Two teens exchanging dirty photos are clearly less at risk than if they were bonking behind the swingset unless the state gets involved. At that point it becomes very dangerous indeed. The fact is, that even the safest sex, for young people, is highly dangerous when politicians take note. This was what two randy students in Valparaiso found out recently. The middle school students had used their cell phones to exchange nude photos. Now these two kids are charged with being child pornographers.

The girl involved apparently forgot to turn off her cell phone in school. The phone rang and the teacher confiscated it. Local papers report: “The teacher told police the girl asked to delete something from the phone before it was turned over to the administration, but that request was denied.” Now this immediately raises some questions. While I can see the school requiring students to turn off cell phones, and I can even fathom why they might have the right to confiscate a ringing cell phone from a student, what I don’t see is how they had any right to search the contents. Merely asking to delete something from the phone is not a justification for a warrantless search.

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