here is the technology

2. For the time being I am going to accept as true the District’s contention that it has never used the ability for any reason except to track a missing computer. This leaves several possibilities, not all of them good for the District. First, assume that the plaintiff took a picture of himself. If he took a picture that was – let’s say – pornographic or something, I imagine that would be a violation of the District’s computer usage policy and therefore disciplinary action would be appropriate. On the other hand, if the kid took a picture of himself eating candy (as some of the stories suggest), then we have to ask ourselves whether – even if the District believed he was taking drugs – this would constitute a usage violation. If so, they may have been justified in disciplining him. If not, then they had no business disciplining him for it. It depends on what kind of usage restrictions he agreed to. Another possibility is that the photograph was taken by the District because the plaintiff’s computer was reported missing either by him or by the IT Dept (perhaps he didn’t sign it out properly or something like that). Suppose that the picture was taken for the purpose of tracking the computer and by chance happened to capture something that the District thought was a problem. Clearly such a situation could not violate any reasonable reading of a computer use policy, since this isn’t the plaintiff using the computer. Are there possibly situations in which a picture taken under these circumstances should cause the District to act? I would argue “yes,” but that those situations are very limited. Suppose the District happened to snap its missing computer tracking shot just as plaintiff was masturbating on his bed or – as seems to be the growing consensus – as he was holding up what looked like polls. To my mind, these situations CLEARLY do not give the District power to act against the student. The only thing the District could do in such a situation would be to consider the laptop found and delete the photographs. I would argue that if the picture showed a kid playing Russian Roulette or doing something that seemed to strongly suggest suicidal or homidical intentions, that the violation of privacy involved in using the information so gathered might be outweighed by the need to act to prevent a imminent tragedy. That is – I’ll admit – shaky ground, but I would not condemn the District too much if it acted in a situation like that.

In any event, it seems unlikely to me that this involved a shot taken by accident in the course of trying to track the plaintiff’s laptop. Either the school was spying – which is WRONG on so many levels I wouldn’t know where to begin (please, tell me this is not true!) or the student took a picture himself, in which case the only question here is really not whether his privacy was invaded, but whether the picture he took broke the District’s computer usage policies.

If this is true the school district is not going to fair well on this one…..

http://www.lmsd.org/sections/news/default.php?t=today&p=lmsd_anno

They confirm that the spy software exists, but they swear they never used it for anything bad. Yay.