School district officials in Lower Merion were accused of remotely accessing laptops and taking thousands of images via the in built cameras, including photographs of students in their homes, screen shots of web sites they visited, and excerpts of their online chats.

It seems other schools across the country have been actively using the same or similar technology to monitor students for some time.

The following clip is from PBS FRONTLINE: Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier, broadcast in early 2010. The clip is from segment 4 of the show titled Teaching with Technology.

The Assistant Principal of the featured high school demonstrates how he effectively spies on students by remotely accessing cameras in their laptops. He monitors their activity and even takes pictures of them, much to his own amusement.