For a couple of months now I've been following the Lower Marion High School laptop surveillance case in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. If the story's been dropped from your cache for whatever reason, earlier this year it was discovered that a school district in the vicinity of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania was using the laptops it issued to students to spy on them while they were off-campus. As it turned out some of the staff had been remotely activating the built-in webcams and using them to watch students. A cache of images taken through the webcams was found on some of their servers, some …

A couple of days ago word hit the newswires that a high school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania had been using the laptops issued to its students to spy on them. Word's gotten around (no surprise there), and the BBC was the first to throw the 'potentially undressed minors' flag (and rightly so, in this case). The district has claimed that the spycam feature of the monitoring software was only for the purpose of recovering lost or stolen laptops and says that they deactivated the software remotely. If you've been paying attention to this story I don't have to tell you that …

An article hit Boing Boing today that raised the hackles on the back of my neck as I read it. The Lower Merion School District just outside of Philadelphia received a grant a couple of years back for laptop computers to issue to its students to use as part of their coursework. In November of last year, the parents of student Blake Robbins received a disciplinary notice pertaining to something unspecified (referred to as "improper behavior") in the affidavit. The disciplinary notice was accompanied by a photograph of Blake while he was at home. The laptops issued by Lower Merion …

During the last presidential election, numerous dirty tricks were played in the weeks and months prior to votes being cast by anyone, such as absentee balllots not making it into the mail, voters being forced to wait so long that they couldn't cast their votes (because they had families to take care of or work to attend to), and unusual investigations were carried out that scared away potential voters. Many voters were wrongfully turned away at the polls in some areas. If what happened at Virginia Tech not too long ago is any indication, the political black ops are just …

The town of El Mirage, Arizona is in a state of shock right now because it was discovered that 12-year old Casey Price, a shy and relatively quiet seventh grade student was actually 29-year old Neil Rodreick III, a convicted sex offender and child molester posing as a twelve-year old. More's the point, his three male 'relatives' were also sex offenders who'd crept into the area. Rodreick used cosmetics and a shaving regemin to enhance his slight build and short stature to appear to be a preteen kid in the local school system. As far as they know, none of …