reading this, beyond the obvious sickness, I just gotta know when did the parents or the teachers sign an agreement that the school will be the children's moral guardians. I think we all got away from the fact that school is to be about learning. Us as friends and family instill the morals, they instill the knowledge. Barring the gross injustice of secretly bugging the homes... what right do they have governing the domain of their students?

Their authority is at school and school alone. They have gone outside their scope on issues they aren't even empowered on. This is so wrong, I'm pass shocked and found myself headlong into numb from the sheer stupidity.

This could be the grounds for a really ugly lawsuit and criminal charges against the school, the schoolboard and the staff for unlawful surveillance.  If the police have to get a warrant for this kind of thing, shouldn't the education system be subject to the same restraints, at least off campus?

That's... that's... how the hell does a school think it can do something like that?  I mean... you'd have to have the parents sign some sort of waiver or something, wouldn't you?  How... bwuh?

Stories like this make my brain hurt.  Stories like this also make me quite perturbed, to say the least.  If I was a parent, there'd be a row at the principal's office at the very least.  At the least.

I can guarantee you that there were at least a few parents like us.  We not only read every form that comes home, we will also edit before signing if something is not to our liking, and follow up with the administration if needed.  We've never found anything outrageous enough to contact media, but if we'd ever been asked to sign something that said the school could spy on us in our home, we'd be calling every media outlet we could get a hold of.   We aren't paranoid, but we are very protective of our rights, and do know that once in a while, somebody - well intentioned or otherwise - crosses a line.  In this case, I'm frankly having a hard time figuring how this could even be called "well-intentioned".

Gudy is right. The FBI should come down on them like a ton of bricks. I'm sure the school administration wants a few dozen agents searching their computers and cellphones looking for anything amiss.

You guys are forgetting another type of fascist bullshit this country has been doing lately. Creation/possession of child pornography is currently treated as a strict liability crime. If the schools possess child pornography because they have saved the streams from these cameras, then the parents and children are child pornographers.

Given the community here has already hit the media as a victim, it is possible that the DA would have better sense than that, but objectively innocent people of all ages have been rung up on this shit before for everything from trading pictures with same-age friends, to happening to be naked near a camera, to accidentally having child porn while looking for bangin' tunes, to not having child porn and clicking on a suspicious link.

You get some shit of a DA in that courtroom, and he'll try and likely succeed in convincing the jury that the parents are to blame for not paying enough attention and that the children are to blame for having sexuality, which is obviously something meriting further investigation into the parents... It sounds farfetched because it's absolute horseshit, but DAs have pulled off exactly this type before. Their sole metric of success in the public eye is number of convictions for particularly unpopular crimes. They often have no scruples when chasing that.

Posting a picture of themselves holding up a sign that says "City Name High School sucks dick!" on /b/ :V

Maybe some kid posted a youtube video showing how badass his new asissted-open pocketknife is!

I keep seeing this as kind of an "entitled" argument.

Since the school district issues the laptops to the kids as a part of the curriculum, the agreements force parents to take the laptops with the agreement in place. If I said I wasn't going to be beholden to the school district's terms and that I'd issue my kid their own school laptop thank you very much, I'm not sure I'd be able to get that by the school in this instance.

Therefore the school's property is being issued to the kids, entitling the school to EVERYTHING the kids do on that laptop.

I don't put personal work on my work laptop for that reason, because well, yeah, I could use it for personal stuff, but work has access to it, and I'm not going to do my web sites on there.

But here's the flipside - the school's parameters of access are in violation of home network security, and if my child's computer was illegally accessed within a home network, then that's electronic communications fraud.

Personally if the kid was pulling whatever he was doing on the school network, the school, in my mind, would have had jurisdiction.  But until I activate the work VPN and access the work network, my work laptop is not allowed to connect to any other system out there.

The other thing is, the school hasn't said what the kid did. The evidence that the kid got whacked for hasn't been brought out. So at the moment all this tempest is about something that nobody's talking about or describing. Is the kid picking his nose and wiping it on the mascot? Is he wanking for the camera? Is he singing classic American musical numbers dressed like RuPaul? We have no idea. Nor is the school releasing that information.

I bring this up because it -could- have been an issue of the principal in question seeing images from the laptop in the school and warning the kid not to use the property like that; then telling the kid he knows what the kid's using the laptop for outside of school property, and suddenly having the whole thing spiral up.

But again, we don't know.

I -do- know that crossing that boundary is something all school districts that hand out electronic components to children with limitations on the components' use need to be exceedingly aware of, but schools are also not workplaces.

Blue masking tape over the camera works just fine for me - the students don't need to be using those. I put masking tape over work laptop cameras unless I'm using it for teleconference precisely for that reason.