Picket Fence Post

Item #1: Penn. School-Issued Laptops Used to Spy?

The family of a 15-year-old high school student in a suburb of Philadelphia is suing his school district, accusing officials of using school-issued laptops, equipped with web cameras, to spy on students in their homes, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.

An excerpt from the the news story about the lawsuit said:

“In a lawsuit filed [last week] in federal court, the family said the school’s assistant principal had confronted their son, told him he had ‘engaged in improper behavior in [his] home, and cited as evidence a photograph from the webcam embedded in [his] personal laptop issued by the school district.’

The suit contends the Lower Merion School District, one of the most prosperous and highest-achieving in the state, had the ability to turn on students’ webcams and illegally invade their privacy.

. . . Families in the 6,900-student district reacted with shock. Parent Candace Chacona said she was ‘flabbergasted’ by the allegations. ‘My first thought was that my daughter has her computer open almost around the clock in her bedroom. Had she been spied on?’”

While school officials claimed that the remotely activated webcam feature was used as a security measure if the laptops were reported stolen — an application they say was used 42 times this school year – they aren’t saying much more about the controversy, particularly because a federal judge has told them that they need to get legal permission to do so first, citing the pending civil case.  The Inquirer reported that federal prosecutors have also issued a subpoena for all school records related to this program and a criminal probe is ongoing. It’s not publicly known how many images were taken by the remote cameras.

When I read about this case my jaw dropped. How in the world, if what the plaintiffs say is true, would anyone, could anyone, think it’s okay for a governmental institution to surveil someone in his or her home without his or her permission and without a court order? It boggles my mind. Beware of school districts offering “free” laptops.

Item #2: Lost’s Jack Becomes a Daddy . . . Kind of.

The latest episode of Lost, called ”Lighthouse,” presented viewers with a new twist: The hero/anti-hero Jack Shephard (Matthew Fox) is the father of a young teenaged son named David. (Actually, one of the two Jack Shephards being shown in Lost is a dad, the other Jack, who exists in an alternate universe, never had a kid. Don’t ask. ‘Tis insanely confusing.)

It was, however, amusing to watch this character, a Red Sox-loving dad, try to bond with his kid with whom he doesn’t live most of the time. (Why, we don’t know.) Jack was, like a lot of harried parents, late in picking his son up from school, was bustling around trying to take care of stuff for his own mother, bought pizza for dinner because he had no time to cook and felt like he knew nothing about his son’s life. My favorite moment in the Jack’s-now-a-dad storyline: Jack’s son was walking around wearing iPod ear buds and Jack asked him what he was listening to. “You wouldn’t know them,” the boy said, refusing to provide a name.

Ouch. The cool-yet-troubled Jack finds out he’s not quite a cool hipster any longer. That’s a tough realization.

While I’ve decided that I’m no longer going to make my head throb by attempting to parse every frame of each Lost episode, won’t research literary and Biblical references packed into scenes — I explained why in my pop culture blog (I was getting angry that the show no longer made sense) — that doesn’t mean that I can’t enjoy it when someone else does the massive hyper-analysis. Over on the blog Jezebel,  the writer did a thorough examination of the latest Jack-centered episode, teasing out layers of meaning from every bit of the exchanges between Jack and his son David. 

Item #3: Mass. Anti-School Harassment (Otherwise Known as Bullying) Bill Moves Forward

In the wake of the horrendous death of a 15-year-old Massachusetts teen who, according to media reports, committed suicide after being severely and constantly harassed by her classmates, Massachusetts legislators are suddenly moving quickly on a bill which attempts to provide schools with more tools with which to deal with harassing peer-to-peer behavior. (I’m reluctant to call it “bullying” because I think that term minimizes what’s happening.)

Writing about the bill, Boston Herald columnist Margery Eagan said:

“This bill . . . would force all school employees — from bus drivers to lunch ladies to teachers — to report bullying to the school principal. It would force that principal to investigate, to contact parents of a bullied child and parents of the bully, to pursue criminal charges, if warranted.”

The Boston Globe reported that a committee summary said the bill would “prohibit bullying at school and at all school facilities; at school-sponsored or school-related functions; on school buses and at school bus stops; through the use of technology or an electronic device owned, licensed, or used by a school; and at non-school-related locations and through non-school technology or electronic devices if the bullying affects the school environment.”

However some critics are complaining that it’s toothless. A different Herald article quoted children’s victims rights advocate Wendy Murphy as saying, “Schools already have the power to discipline students. The only thing that was missing was to render it a crime. The reason people are bullies is because they know there’s no law against it. This changes nothing.”

The joint legislative committee on Education passed the bill this week and it goes to the Senate next, according to the Boston Globe.

Image credit: ABC via Jezebel.