Put a Bandaid on Your Webcam

Color me naive, but did you know your webcam can be remotely turned on? 


The FBI is investigating Lower Merion School District of Ardmore, Pennsylvania staff caught peeping on students by remotely activating the webcam on their computers.

Parents have filed for a protective order to stop the remote activation of webcam and the FBI is "looking into" whether federal wiretapping and surveillance laws were violated. 

Is it not painfully obvious?

School officials are defending their action by claiming they activated webcams on computers that were reported as lost or stolen.

A couple of problems:

Elsewhere in the motion, the Robbins labeled the camera functionality "peeping tom technology," and disputed the district's account that cameras had been activated only when a notebook was reported lost or stolen. "[Blake Robbins] was at home using a school issued laptop that was neither reported lost nor stolen when his image was captured by Defendants without his or his parents' permission and while he was at home," the motion said.

More importantly, wouldn't you call the police and let them handle turning on the remote webcams?

I'm still curious about why a school would ever need the remote feature to turn on a webcam if they weren't planning on spying on the people they lend their computers to?

According to the original complaint, Robbins was accused by a Harriton High School assistant principal of "improper behavior in his home" and shown a photograph taken by his laptop as evidence. In an appearance on CBS' "Early Show Saturday Edition," Robbins said he was accused by the assistant principal of selling drugs and taking pills, but he claimed the pictures taken by his MacBook's camera showed him eating candy.

The school district superintendent claims only two of the computers had the "theft-recovering" feature and denied the assistant principal had permission to activate the feature.

McGinley has admitted that students and parents were not told of the computer tracking feature or its remote camera activation capability. "There was no explicit notification that the laptop contained the security software," he said in his letter of Friday. "This notice should have been given and we regret that was not done."

Kooks.