Spirit of the age

A school authority in
Philadelphia accused ot
spying on pupils through
laptop computers has
admitted to having
captured more than 56,000
images ol students, many
of them in their homes. The
school district issued 2,300
computers with spyware
software. It said it activatod
the software only to track
80 laptops that had gone
missing. But when a school
official accused one
teenager, Blake Robbins, of
taking drugs, and showed
him a picture of what
looked like drugs in his
bedroom, the student's
parents took legal action.
The y s ubseq u e nt ly
discovered that the school
had obtained 400 images of
their son, including some
showing him asleep or
partially dressed. Ho claims
the "pills" spotted in his
bedroom were sweets.