School Laptops Spied on Teens in Their Bedrooms

On one day in 2010 Blake Robbins, 15, a high school sophomore, was relaxing in his bedroom popping Mike and Ike candy, “fruity, chewy candy … bursting with five fun flavors.” He was soon called to the principal’s office at Harriton High School, in a community west of Philadelphia. Blake was accused of selling drugs.
 
Blake, along with 2,000 other students, had received a laptop computer from the school district that he was allowed to take home with him. What parents were not told was that the laptops’ cameras would activate and transmit an image every 15 minutes – capturing teenagers in their bedrooms, and any family members who happened to cross in the path of the very-watchful eye.
 
Keron Williams, an African-American honors student, says images were used to profile him to promote a false accusation that he had been stealing. In all, it is alleged that 56,000 webcam images of students and their families were captured through the donated laptops.
 
Keep an eye out for more on this story on Spy High, a documentary produced by Mark Wahlberg, that will stream on Amazon April 8. (Check out the Spy High trailer on People.com.)
 
You might dismiss this as an old story – and one that was well reported in the local media. It was also adjudicated in the courts. The Robbins family received a $610,000 settlement from the school district. But this story remains startlingly relevant, in two ways.
 
First, the incidents behind Spy High were not outliers but omens of things to come. As we reported last year, Gaggle safety software is reviewing student messages and flagging issues of concern. In one Kansas high school, students in a high school art class were called in to defend the contents of their art portfolio. Software had flagged digital files of their art for “nudity.”
 
A report compiled by the Center for Democracy & Technology found that over 88 percent of schools use some form of student device monitoring, 33 percent use facial recognition, and 38 percent share student data with law enforcement.
 
Second, this story is relevant because it warns us that there are wide swaths of American officialdom that are either dismissive or blithely unaware of the Fourth Amendment and its warrant requirement. To be fair, there are plenty of disfunctions and dangers in the modern American high school that administrators need to anticipate and counter. But placing spyware over all student messages and content seems like overkill. The price we pay is that the next generation of Americans is learning to accept life in a total surveillance state.

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