<p>"No criminal charges will be filed against a suburban Philadelphia school district that secretly snapped tens of thousands of webcam photographs and screen shots on laptops issued to students...The FBI and federal prosecutors announced Tuesday they could not prove any criminal wrongdoing by Lower Merion School District employees."</p>
<p>The</a> Associated Press: Feds: No charges in Pa. school laptop-spying case</p>
<p>The other thing that just happened is that the School Board adopted a new, comprehensive laptop policy, including much clearer privacy rules and rules about insurance payments. Some have criticized it, however, for not abandoning the remote-viewing software altogether.</p>
<p>On the litigation front, the original plaintiff’s attorneys are still trying to get the case certified as a class action, and to get the court to order the school district to pay their fees. They have a $400,000 “interim” fee request pending. The district is disputing the class action certification and the amount of the fee request. (Lots of valid and less-valid technicalities, which essentially constitute negotiation. The district will certainly pay the plaintiff’s attorney fees as part of the ultimate settlement.) The district’s own legal fees and the expenses of its internal investigation are about $1 million.</p>
<p>The plaintiff’s attorneys got one other student to hire them to sue the district over inappropriate surveillance; that’s out of about 40 identified students who were subjected to surveillance.</p>
<p>It’s not yet clear what is going to happen with the two techs who were running the system, and who have been on paid administrative leave since early spring. They are the ones who were front-and-center in the criminal investigation.</p>
<p>So this is what I get from PA:</p>
<p>A teenage girl who takes pictures of herself in various stages of undress and sends them to her boyfriend goes to prison and is labeled a sexual offender.</p>
<p>But adults who install spyware on student laptops and take pictures of them all day long, without their knowledge, and watch it like some kind of soap opera - that’s okay?</p>
<p>What the hell, man?</p>
<p>Student laptops that are owned by the school…</p>
<p>How exactly does your point bear on juillet’s point, Erin’s Dad? I’m not seeing it. If I planted a bomb in my car, then lent it to you to use and detonated the bomb while you were in it, it would not be much of a defense for me to point out that the car belonged to me.</p>
<p>Since it wouldn’t matter if you were driving the car or she were it is still illegal. In this case we are talking about software loaded by the school on its own laptops to deter theft.</p>
<p>The fact that the school owns the laptops does not make it OK for them to use the laptops to spy on the students.</p>
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<p>I can’t believe that anybody thinks this is a defense to anything.</p>
<p>Let’s test the idea some more. The hotel owns the room I rented from them, so they set up a spycam to make sure I’m not trashing the furniture.</p>
<p>The airline owns the airplane toilet, so they set up a spycam to make sure I’m not smoking in there.</p>
<p>Actually, sorghum, I think both of your examples are on the borderline. In both cases, what is owned is the entire environment you are in. You could argue that I have a perfect right to spy on your behavior while you’re in my environment. But in the case of the laptop, the owned environment is only the laptop itself. To be analogous to your hotel and airline examples, the school would have to confine the spying to the students’ use of the computer–what they do with it and on it. And I think many of us would have no problem with that. It’s the fact that they are using the owned environment to spy on an un-owned environment–the students’ homes and their behavior therein–that’s the problem.</p>
<p>Try another analogy: my office gives me a “company car” cellphone. It’s perfectly OK for them to monitor who I’m calling with it; maybe even to monitor the conversations. It’s their phone; if I want privacy I should use my own. But if the company activates a spyware app on the phone that allows it serve as a bug, recording and transmitting my private face-to-face conversations without my knowledge, then they step way over the line. Right?</p>