George Orwell and A Pennsylvania High School

Most people are familiar with the George Orwell classic, "1984." Written in England in 1948, it hypothesizes about a future where freedom and liberty have disappeared and are replaced by an all powerful and all knowing police state form of a government. In his future, Orwell sees government snooping devices everywhere, even out in the middle of the woods.

Orwell's view of the future seemed appropriate for America after I read a disturbing article from the Associated Press (AP) today. Apparently, a highly rated Philadelphia suburban high school issues laptops to all students but the school administration has the appropriate hardware and software installed on those laptops so that school personnel can activate the web cameras on the computers and access them remotely. In other words, if a student left their laptop on in their bedroom, which, according to the article is where they tend to be used the most, school personnel could view the contents and activities within the bedroom that fell within the view of the laptop's web camera.

How did families find out that the government run schools had unauthorized video viewing access to their home? Two ways. First, an assistant principal actually told a student that school officials believed he had engaged in improper activity in his own home and to prove their point, provided a photograph of that activity from the student's laptop computer. Second, the school district acknowledged that they had indeed deactivated the feature which they deemed as a security feature to track lost and stolen laptops.

A whole list of issues and questions come to mind with this atrocity:

• If the feature was to only track lost and stolen laptops, why was the feature activated and being viewed of a student whose laptop had not been reported lost or stolen?
• You would expect an assistant principal to be an educated, relatively smart person. Why in the world would the principal tell the student they were spying on him and create the hardcopy photograph to prove it?
• How many other student's were spied upon outside of school grounds and what records were made of those spying events?
• Who had access to this feature and can its usage be tracked to see who was viewing who and when it was done?
• You would think someone in the school hierarchy would have either been smart enough or knew enough about the Constitution and privacy laws to stop the program and feature. What does that say about the people in charge of educating the nation's kids?
• However, the biggest question is if a high school was able to do this, can you imagine what the NSA, CIA, FBI, telephone companies, cable companies, and other government entities might be doing to us now?

Think about it from Orwell's perspective in light of just this high school capability. With GPS enabled cell phones and laptops, somebody, somewhere could probably track your movements pretty easily. Since almost the beginning of time, phone companies could tap your phones and now cable companies could be tracking what you watch and when you watch it. Email has to go through a computer that could easily make a copy without you knowing it. Right now as I type on my laptop, somebody could be looking in at me typing away through my own web cam. Who is to say that a future cable box will not contain a tiny camera that could broadcast out my living room activity or worse yet, be hooked up to my bedroom TV. Many cell phones today can record video, who is to say that now or sometime in the future someone could remotely turn on that video function and have what it sees broadcast back? As we get more and more wired, the potential for Orwell's world to come true becomes more and more possible in ways we never imagined.

Think about it: before this high school scandal, did you ever think that the web cam lens looking you in the eye could be used for eyeballing you? Remember the old saying, "just because I'm paranoid does not mean they are not looking at me."

The bigger question, of course, is not a high school administration spying on us but the government spying on us. Thus, three steps from "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" become very important from a liberty perspective:

• Step 20 - Determine the effectiveness of each part of the Patriot Act. An independent panel will conduct a comprehensive review , then propose whatever changes to the act that it deems necessary to balance security with freedom. A national referendum will vote on the proposed changes.
• Step 21 - Make it illegal to tap the phones, intercept the mail, monitor Internet activity or examine the phone or library records of any American without a warrant that shows probable cause.
• Step 22 - Require that the government at the end of any phone tapping activities, mail interception, etc. tell a vindicated American citizen what information the government collected and why.

Government and the political class have gotten way too big, petty, and powerful to assume that they are there to protect and serve us unless the above three steps are strictly enforced. In the meantime, I suggest that all high school administrators take a refresher cause in privacy laws and the U.S. Constitution. Certainly they do not want to find out the hard way like this Philadelphia area school which is being sued for the intrusion into students' homes



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