BIG TEACHER IS WATCHING YOU

Blake Robbins probably thought it was pretty neat when his school, Harriton High School in the wealthy Philadephia suburb of Ardmore. sent a new Macbook laptop computer home with him. His school district, one of the wealthiest in the country, had issued the laptops to its high school students.

But when Blake was called into the Vice-Principal's office and accused of '”inappropriate behavior off school grounds,” he discovered another use for the computers that neither he nor his parents knew about. According to a lawsuit filed in Federal Court, Blake was confronted with pictures of himself, allegedly taking drugs. The pictures had been taken by the built in camera on his own computer.

Now, anyone who's had any contact with the justice system here in the 21st century can probably tell you about defendants who've been undone by taking pictures of themselves brandishing weapons, ingesting drugs, or showing off ill-gotten gains, then posted them on their MySpace and Facebook pages (yes, some criminals really are that dumb).

But that wasn't what happened in Blake's case. He found, to his (and his parents') horror, that the computers contained software that allowed school administrators to turn the cameras on remotely and photograph whatever was in the room with the computer.

At first, the school admitted that it had turned on its all-seeing eyes a total of 42 times, but insisted that the system was only used to track “lost or stolen” laptops. This did not address the question of how Blake's machine, which was neither lost or stolen, had its camera activated so that school administrators could peer into his home.

Later investigations by the Philadelphia Inquirer showed that the network administrator responsible for the laptop program apparently had not gotten the memo about only using the program to search for purloined hardware. In a case of almost too-perfect irony, the administrator, Mike Perbix, had posted his own video on line touting the neat things that could be done when you turned school computers into surreptitious surveillance devices. It showed him, for example, snapping “as many as 20 photos of a teacher and some students without their knowledge while in the classroom.” Perbix apparently thought this was a keen thing to be able to do: “It's a fantastic feature," the Inquirer quotes him as chuckling. I don't know about you, but the idea of some geeky IT guy chuckling over his ability to spy on kids without permission creeps me out.

Blake's parents have now filed a class action suit against the school district. The FBI is also investigating for potential violations of Federal wiretapping laws.

For years, under the banner of “maintaining order”, the schools have demanded increased power to encroach on the privacy and free-speech rights of students. They've also moved to criminalize every behavior problem, to the point where students who commit infractions that would at one time have gotten them sent to the office end up in court, charged with crimes. And the courts, on all levels, have pretty much let them have their way, especially in the post-Columbine world, in which it sometimes seems as if every student is regarded as a criminal by default. In one case that I've written about in this column, a student was locked up when his response to the prompt “write a scary story” led to...well, a scary (and violent) story. In another, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a student could be suspended for a drug-related joke made off campus. In such an environment, why shouldn't a school feel entitled to send surveillance devices home with a student? Especially if he was caught doing drugs?

Except that those “drugs” Blake was supposedly taking turned out to be candy. Something called Ike and Mikes. I'm sure we're all glad that this brave new technology is being deployed to protect us and our children from sugary snacks.

George Orwell, in the book “1984”, wrote about a society in which everyone had a “telescreen,” a device in the wall that provided propaganda broadcasts, but which could also be used by the totalitarian government of Big Brother to keep an eye on citizens. You never knew when the screen was being monitored, so you had to live at all times as if you were being watched.

In 2010, is Big Teacher watching you?

Groucho For GOP Chairman

Wow, THAT Was Quick

Scott Brown Votes For Jobs Bill, Wingnuts Go Nuts On Twitter

How's that upcoming Republican majority workin' for ya?

H/t Balloon Juice

GOP: No Matter What Happens, America's Losing

Latest Newspaper Column:

First off, it seems that we need to start with a correction.

Last week, we discussed the silliness, hypocrisy and downright dishonesty of the wingnut tantrums over the fact that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a.k.a. the Undiebomber, was read his Miranda rights immediately upon being taken into custody. As it turns out, he wasn't "Mirandized," as they say, for almost nine hours.

According to a timeline released by administration officials, and reported in The Washington Post, Abdulmutallab was taken into custody and then taken to a hospital for treatment of the burns he suffered in his botched attempt to detonate the explosives in his undershorts.

He was interrogated about three hours later by a specially picked pair of questioners (one a bomb specialist), with the questions -centering on immediate emergency concerns, like whether there were other bombs about to go off. During this session, the report asserts, the agents got "some useful intelligence."

Then Abdulmutallab went back into surgery. When he came out, a second FBI team questioned him again. At that point, the report says, he stopped talking, and only then was he Mirandized.

This report clearly shows that assertions by Republicans like Kit Bond, Pat Buchanan and Lindsey Graham that the Undiebomber was "read his rights within 50 minutes" were dead wrong. I await their retraction. And wait, and wait, and wait...

Of course, wingnuts being wingnuts, whatever the truth of the matter may be, they'll probably find some way to spin it as being some colossal failure by the Obama administration in the War on Terror.

Nowhere was this more clear than in a recent editorial in the journal Foreign Affairs, where former Bush speechwriter turned regular Washington Post columnist Marc Theissen complained that the Obama administration was killing too many terrorists.

"With every drone strike that vaporizes a senior al-Qaeda leader," Theissen groused after such a strike killed the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, "actionable -intelligence is vaporized along with him. Dead terrorists can't tell you their plans to strike America."

But wait. Didn't Dick Cheney just tell us that Obama wasn't treating the fight against terrorists enough like a war? And now the problem is that he's killing too many of them?

Wait, it gets better. A recent joint operation between U.S. and Pakistani forces captured the military leader of the Taliban in Afghanistan, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar. This mook was the highest-value target captured in the Afghan War since 2001. But that, according to supposed "terrorism expert" and perennial Fox News commentator Michael Scheuer, was "no big deal," because "you win wars by killing people, not capturing them."

To the casual observer, this might seem a tad confusing. Are the Republicans saying we're killing too many terrorists, or not enough? Do they contend that killing top al-Qaeda and Taliban extremists in Afghanistan is a good thing or a bad thing? What's the overriding principle here? Or is it that they have no real principles at all?

Well, there is one principle operating here, of a sort. I've noted here frequently that the Republican Party during the Bush years abandoned every principle it once claimed to stand for - fiscal responsibility, limited government, the rule of law - in favor of a single belief, that everything's permissible if you're a Republican.

And the principle here, if you can call it that, is the flip side of that: Everything a Democrat does or proposes doing is wrong. It's the same double-think/double-speak that lets the congressional Republican caucus scream about how deficits are destroying our future while voting, purely along party lines, against the same "pay as you go" rules that cut deficits in the '90s and left George W. Bush a surplus to squander.

Back during the height of the controversy over the Iraq War, one of the most infuriating slanders by the Right was that liberals "wanted us to lose." Now an increasingly hysterical right wing seems unconcerned whether we're actually winning or losing against terrorists, because they're so determined to call everything a loss.

HAW! HAW! HAW!

Babbin Jokes About IRS Plane Attack:

At the CPAC conference, Human Events editor Jed Babbin introduced Grover Norquist, the top anti-tax conservative activist in the country. During his introduction, Babbin joked about the recent airplane attack on an IRS building in Texas, which reportedly killed both the alleged perpetrator and a person who was in the building.

"And let me just say, I'm really happy to see Grover today," said Babbin. "He was getting a little testy in the past couple of weeks. And I was just really, really glad that it was not him identified as flying that airplane into the IRS building."

Those zany wingnuts! They're so crazy!

Which leads us to the question: Why are so few conservatives funny? PJ O'Rourke's the only one I can think of that actually makes me laugh. The rest of conservative "humor" just comes off as severe dickishness.

RUN, SARAH, RUN!

Palin lashes out at `Family Guy' - Yahoo! News

Sarah Palin is lashing out at the portrayal of a character with Down syndrome on the Fox animated comedy "Family Guy."

In a Facebook posting headlined "Fox Hollywood — What a Disappointment," the 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee and current Fox News contributor said Sunday night's episode felt like "another kick in the gut." Palin's youngest son, Trig, has Down syndrome.

Seriously. She gets this upset over a stupid joke on Family Guy? Yes, it's cruel, yes it's offensive, but its' a stupid TV show.

This sort of thing is why I really wish that Caribou Barbie makes good on her threat to run for President. She is easily the most thin-skinned politician on the national stage. She cannot lay her head down at night until she's found someone or something that she thinks is insulting to poor Trig (or Bristol, or whoever) and then try to blow it up into a national scandal. Even her resignation speech when she quit the Alaska governorship cold be shortened to "people are mean to me and my family, so I quit, Nyaah." It plays well to those whose entire political philosophy is based on resentment, but as the man once said, "politics ain't beanbag."

I guarantee that, if she does run, someone will say something to set her off. It's how presidential campaigns are. Jesus, they questioned Obama's faith, his patriotism, his very citizenship, and wingnut blogs were posting pictures of Michelle Photoshopped to look like a character from Planet of the Apes. If Palin gets a tenth of that kind of flak, she will crack like an egg. She will then have a messy and very public meltdown that will drive away everyone but the most fanatical Palindrones.

So...RUN, SARAH, RUN!

Correction

It seems that the Undiebomber was not, as the wingnuts so indignantly put it, read his Miranda rights "within 50 minutes" after being apprehended. According to this at washingtonpost.com, it was more like 9 hours:

The first questioning of the suspect, which took place more than three hours after his arrest and without him being read his Miranda rights, ended after 50 minutes when doctors said his medical condition had deteriorated, according to the chronology. When interrogation resumed, some five hours later, the Nigerian refused to answer further questions and was then read his Miranda rights.

Think Kit Bond and Mitch McConnell will correct their statements? Do you also believe in the Easter Bunny?