All would be illegal. First it is illegal for anyone to spy on anyone else unless they are law enforcement and have a court order stating probable cause that a crime is being committed.
Second, and more problematic is the question “What if they had caught underage kids or their parents for that matter, nude." At best the school district would be guilty of providing the tools for peeping toms and pedophiles who are monitoring the cameras.
Thankfully I don't believe this story is true. It isn't as easy to snoop on people as this story would make it seem. The resources required to monitor every student that received a free laptop would be prohibitive, especially considering most of the activity they monitor would be innocent computer usage.
Not many people deal drugs or abuse children or murder or bully or plan mass murder in front of their lap top computers. If you think about it even if they were dealing drugs or planning a Columbine event “on-line” with others how could you tell by looking at their faces?
I suspect the kid sent out naughty pictures of himself to some of his friends or acquaintances and one of them was passed along to the assistant principal. The kid probably told his parents that he was innocent and that the school must have got the photo by spying on him. The parents would have to be pretty gullible to believe him but considering how many on this thread believe him, that isn't so hard to understand.
The fact that the lawyers took the case suggests there must be some merit to it.
No doubt, there's more to the story. No one is defending the student. We don't even know what the student did. That doesn't change the fact that the school handed out laptops with cameras that worked both ways and that the school could spy on the laptop users, without informing them in advance of this capability.
It actually should be pretty easy to determine that. The angle of the picture, the background, the resolution and the source information should prove one way or another... also the district isn’t denying this. In fact apparently the school said up front that they took this picture.
And speaking as a parent, although my daughter is less than a year old, it wouldn’t matter to me if the picture was from his friends or his school, if my kid were misbehaving he’d get punished. The behavior and the spying are two seperate matters.