Editorial: Eye spy for teachers

What would it take to turn one of the region's topflight school districts into an Internet punch line overnight?

Lower Merion School District officials just found out.

With the revelation last week that officials are being accused in a lawsuit of spying on teens with school-issued laptops, the Web was alive with seemingly justified wisecracks at district expense.

"Voyeur-U is open for fall enrollment," wrote one gadfly after the news broke. "Big Brother, eat your heart out," was another jab at the well-to-do district.

There's nothing funny, though, about the allegation that an assistant principal at Harriton High School called a student on the carpet for "improper behavior" on the basis of a photo from the webcam of his school-issued computer.

School officials dispute the claim, saying somewhat vaguely that the administrator was "unfairly portrayed" and that she was trying "to be supportive" of the student and his family.

It would be far better, though, if Lower Merion officials could deny the allegations categorically. The trouble is, it turns out the schools actually had the ability to spy on teens, although officials say that never occurred.

Lower Merion officials made the boneheaded decision to enable the remote-camera feature on the 2,620 Apple computers given students last year as a means of recovering any missing computers. The feature gave the schools' IT experts the ability to snap a still photo from the webcam.

This so-called security plan had more bugs in it than an old computer. For one thing, it was kept a secret from students and parents - a grave oversight that district officials now concede.

But the biggest glitch was that school officials risked invading students' privacy whenever they surreptitiously snapped a photo. They couldn't possibly know that a computer would be sitting on a kitchen counter, rather than in a teen's bedroom - with potentially embarrassing consequences.

While the lawsuit on behalf of Harriton sophomore Blake J. Robbins and other students in the district will work its way through the courts, school officials contend that the webcam feature was used only to help find missing computers.

Since that happened on dozens of occasions in the last year when computers went missing, the potential still existed for widespread instances where students' privacy could be breached.

The only saving grace was that, according to a district spokesman, the antitheft procedure did not include recording sounds along with video. But prosecutors are probing to see if wiretap laws were broken.

It's good that school officials plan an independent inquiry, because they owe Lower Merion residents a fuller explanation, along with a plan to prevent such snooping - inadvertent or not - from ever happening again.