Lower Merion report: Web cams snapped 56,000 images

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/breaking/20100419_Lower_Merion_details_Web_cam_scope.html

The situation involving the Main Line school district of Lower Merion does not seem to be fizzling out at all. Ever since the national news outlets caught hold of this sensational story, there are many around the country and the world as a whole who are clamoring to see how this case will play out. The fact that the school used laptops to take pictures of students is not completely analogous to a potential situation in which a private company were to use this process of taking pictures from the laptops web-cam to locate stolen or missing equipment. The Lower Merion school district essentially just used the tax dollars of the rather wealthy parents of these children to spy on them. The fact that the students got to use a shiny new laptop does not make up for the rights of these children being neglected in the slightest bit. Apparently the school district's attorney Henry Hockenheimer stated that, "none appeared to show salacious or inappropriate images but said that in no way justified the use of the program." How he intends to prove this is beyond me. It is not like some teenager is going to come forward and say "I was having intimate relations with another student while the laptop was sitting right on a desk in front of us." It is not likely that there was no inappropriate material on those databases whatsoever being that they were intended for the use of teenagers. The case against the school is not as strong as it could be given that the school has undoubtedly removed any scandalous photos from their databases and any evidence that those students were ever probed in the first place by these laptop web-cams.