In the States the the walls have ears. And the schools watch you when you sleep.

I'm going to keep this one strictly neutral for now and put my opinions at the end. Its a weird issue and i think it deserves strict journalistic impartiality.

A couple of days ago i was going through the inimitable archives of http://boingboing.net, mad world of awesomeness extroardinaire, when i came across this article, detailing how a school had decided that, no kidding, it was ok to use laptops- which were mandatory for that school, and had to be school issue- that spied on their students via webcam. The school, due to its utterly bizzarre rules regarding personal computers, had banned pupils using their own in school and had made it an offense to obscure the camera in any way. These rule applied outside of school as well.

As a result of this a school official had the police bust a pupil for taking drugs. He was actually eating sweets.

This enraged nerds (like cory doctorow, the boingboing staff and readership), me, the pupils and parents. It also attracted the attention of the men in black (thats FBI to you).

The details of the infractions commited by the school include:

• They installed a highly sofisticated piece of spyware in the laptop called LANrev, which was basically used to photograph the students whenever the admins wished (the mind boggles at all the possibility for abuse here).
• They decreed that any unmonitored personal computer would be confiscated.
• Jailbreaking resulted in expulsion. This means that if you wished to protect it against intrusion you would get chucked out.

The problem here I think is not so much the absolute failure of schools to understand the apreciate that spyware generally tends to be bad, but more the fact that they were so stupid as to think they could invade their pupils homes legitimately. Suppose the pupil had been putting personal information on his or her facebook page? The school could have, through the spyware, taken and stored a screengrab, detailing any personal aspect of their life, from a status update saying "OMG!!! Liek, mr Mcdwunkywitz is such a DOUCHE!!!" (childish yes, but still private. Oh wait, no it isn't, it's facebook) to their personal diary on any number of blogging sites, from dreamcast to myspace, to LJ. Furthermore these laptops would have spent a great deal of time in the pupils bedroom, potentially grabbing pics of them naked, in various states of undress or in similar compromising positions (but god forbid those kids should be munching on tic tacs. Call the Drug squad!).

Furthermore , I would personally judge the policy of confiuscating a personal item (providing it isnt being abused) as being a suspect one. Especially if the motivation for doing so is simply because it can't be monitored.

I think that in i would either do what the kid who got busted did and go to the press with it, or just post the most insane pictures i could find on the screen, combined with a "how d'you like spyware now?" sign in front of the camera and then proceed to jailbreak it.