Philadelphia City Paper
In this week's A Million Stories, we explored the messy Webcam scandal that's going down at Lower Merion School District. The district insists that it only peered through students' Webcams in order to find lost or stolen laptops, and did so using a security software called LANrev. Insanely enough, Douglas Young, the district's spokesperson, told us that it wasn't the only school district using such software: "The software feature isn't just utilized in this school district," says Young. "It's utilized by other school districts and organizations." (He said he couldn't name any offhand.)
Dude wasn't kidding. Young might be onto something. In the thoroughly creepy clip above from the PBS documentary Digital Nation, the assistant principal of Bronx's middle school IS 339, Daniel Ackerman, shows exactly how he can watch kids through their Webcams — what software or application he does it with, though, is unclear. Just wait for the part where he says, "They don't even realize that we're watching." Oy. Also: "I always like to mess with them and take their [Photo Booth] picture."
Now, it's unclear if Ackerman watches students from their homes, which is what Lower Merion is accused of doing, but still — the students don't even realize he's watching them? Seriously, he thought that was OK? Be sure to watch this clip on PBS' site, too (it's under part four). Not only is the doc great in general, but the reporter (whose face is obscured in the YouTube video) has an absolutely stunned, unamused look on her face as Ackerman is laughing about the whole thing.
UPDATE: I wasn't clear enough earlier about whether or not Ackerman was using LANrev to view these students — indeed, from this clip, it's impossible to know.