Who’s Spying On You Now?
by Paul McGoldrick

We’re all used to being monitored by others. Maybe for you, as for my daughter, it started in your crib with that innocuous baby monitor; perhaps one of those dastardly early devices that connected rooms through the power cabling and which also picked up activity next door and was so fussy over polarization. Those monitors worked, although we had a cat at the time who was much more intense in keeping an physical eye on the human child that had been thrust into her world, wondering what sort of kitten it could be and what kind of threat it might possibly be to her lead position as head honcho of the household.

Now all this monitoring can be done on your iPhone or BlackBerry: aural and visual. You can monitor your home for intruders; have the authorities scan for the location of your stolen car; make a dinner reservation; check on whether you will have space on the next ferry; order a taxi and prepay it; arrange for the ordering and pick-up of that pizza on the way home. All of these things – with many more applications to come – have exposed us to at least some kind of public scrutiny, and many of us have allowed it to happen.

How many times have you been physically followed, without benefit of electronics? For most of us the answer is none, or not often; but, in fact, if there was a professional team doing the following you would almost certainly never have known about it. With electronics that stalking could be happening every day, perhaps nowhere more intensely than in London.

As of the end quarter of 2007 there were 10,524 publicly-funded (£200 M) CCTV cameras in 32 of London’s boroughs. The crime clear-up rate in those boroughs suggests that the cameras help little, to nothing, in the fight against the baddies, but the first instructional cry of an officer handed a case in London is “download the CCTV footage.” A senior Metropolitan Police officer has described the London CCTV network as “an utter fiasco,” with over 1000 cameras needed to solve a single crime.

Those 10,000+ cameras, which do not include thousands more at railway and underground stations (and those on private premises watching parking lots, hotel access points, ATMs, etc.) are part of the 4.2 M public CCTV cameras in operation in total in the UK. One of the more draconian uses they are now being put to is the issuing of parking tickets where an operator spots a vehicle parked too far from the sidewalk, at an expired meter, or parked on double yellow lines.

Within twenty-four hours of a visit to London – probably just about coinciding with the fact your brain no longer notices the 50 Hz flicker from the TV – you ignore the cameras. Surely the same thing happens in reality TV shows, and the like, when the contestants start to say things about one another that they would normally be more cautious about. But the idea of someone spying on me at home would still stir my pointy ends rather a lot.

And, now, the news that a Pennsylvania school district has been apparently spying on some of its students has nasty connotations.

Harriton High School – whose Google Earth tag is “These ladies keep things moving at Harriton High School…” (what the heck does that mean?) – is in the Lower Merion school district of Bryn Mawr (Welsh slang for “big hill”) about twenty miles Northwest of Philadelphia. It is a wealthy community and includes the original Bryn Mawr College (one of the three Quaker foundations in the area), whose four days of annual traditions allow events like the celebration of May Day and a requisite skinny dip in the Cloisters Fountain at graduation (including alumna Katharine Hepburn, it turns out). Bryn Mawr is also within a stone’s throw of Villanova University.

The spying accusations stem from one student: 15-year-old Blake Robbins was accused of improper behavior with the evidence of a web cam photo presented to him by the school, a photo that Robbins’ attorney says the school allegedly shows him handling “pills.” The attorney says that the pills were actually Mike and Ike candies which are apparently spicy fruit-flavored jelly beans from a company called Just Born (excuse my ignorance).

In trying to explain its apparent privacy dilemma, an insistent Assistant Vice Principal declared she had never monitored a student, nor even authorized the monitoring of a student.

The school district has admitted that the students’ computers were installed with software that allowed IT to activate the web cams on their MacBooks at any time. They have insisted, however, that the facility was only used to track lost/stolen computers and that they have since stopped such activities. The FBI is now involved.

So this wealthy community has issued to students in the school district over 2500 MacBooks (only 889 students are enrolled at Harriton High School). Why? In many parts of the US allowing students to wander around with expensive hardware is tantamount to guaranteeing their mugging. From an academic point of view the school district has, presumably, plenty of computer power in the schools themselves, and few of the students' households involved can possibly be strapped for a computer at home. But can the district afford the challenges over privacy all the way to the Supreme Court?

Retroactive apologies are in order, all these laptops need to be recalled, and at least the IT people involved need to be fired, together with anybody in administration who “overlooked” the monitoring facility being put into place. And in person - not via BlackBerry.