Yet More US School Paranoia.

Remember, spying on teenagers behind a bush or with a pair of binoculours is weird. Whereas, spying on teenagers via school computers is perfectly acceptable. Rememeber, it's for your own good:

A school district in Pennsylvania spied on students through web cameras installed on laptops provided by the district, according to a class action lawsuit filed this week.

Lower Merion school district, in a well-heeled suburb of Philadelphia, provided 2,300 high-school students with Mac laptops last autumn in what its superintendent, Christopher McGinley, described as an effort to establish a "mobile, 21st-century learning environment"...

...The district retained remote control of the built-in webcams installed on the computers – and used them to capture images of the students, according to a lawsuit filed in federal court this week.

The ruse was revealed when Blake Robbins, a student at Harriton high school, was hauled into the assistant principal Lindy Matsko's office, shown a photograph taken on the laptop in his home and disciplined for "improper behaviour"...

...n a letter posted on the school district's website, McGinley said the district had installed on the laptops a security feature that allowed the webcam to photograph the computer operator in the event the laptop is lost or stolen. He said that following the suit's filing, the district disabled the feature amidst a review of technology and privacy policies. He said the feature was activated only to help locate a lost or stolen laptop.

"The district never activated the security feature for any other purpose or in any other manner whatsoever," he wrote. "We regret if this situation has caused any concern or inconvenience among our students and families."

You only get such sincere apologies from people who've been caught out. It does raise a pertinent question though, especially in the CCTV-sodden UK (and London, where you can't scratch your nose without being spotted). Why do we so easily submit to surveillance, even though we don't know who's at the other end? Paranoia makes us vulnerable to the real thing, it seems.