More details are coming out about the case we wrote about yesterday concerning the school district that could (and did) turn on webcams on student laptops. The district is now claiming that, yes, it had the ability to do so, and in fact did so 42 times (though, it never told students or parents it could do this). However, the district claims that it only did so to try to track down lost or stolen laptops. That doesn’t explain how this resulted in a student being reprimanded for “improper behavior in his home” though.
Either way, it looks like this is going beyond a civil case of the families suing the school district. The FBI is now investigating the case as well, to see if the district violated either wiretapping or computer-intrusion laws. Now, it’s not unheard of to have capabilities like this turned on to find lost or stolen laptops — so perhaps that is understandable. But the fact that this kid was reprimanded for stuff he did in the privacy of his home while caught on camera definitely seems questionable. No one seems willing to say if this particular laptop was ever reported “lost or stolen,” so perhaps the district’s argument is that the student had taken the laptop. But if that’s the case, you would think they would have come out and said so, rather than the vaguely worded denials put forth already.
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