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– Could it be happening here?

This one sounded too outrageous to be true, so I did a lot of checking before posting. Sadly, it looks like the outrageous indeed has happened.

A lawsuit filed earlier this week alleges the Lower Merion School District in Ardmore, Pennsylvania issued some of its high school students laptop computers with webcams – and secretly embedded software that allows the school system to spy on kids anywhere the computers are connected to the Internet – even at home!

The story first broke in the several days ago blogs, but now, even the Philadelphia Enquirer and the Associated Press are running stories that are showing up across the country.

According to this incredible story, the lawsuit alleges a child was spied upon at home – and then disciplined by the school system for whatever they saw via the webcam!

The inevitable lawsuit was filed as a class action in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

More blog articles indicate other students have already joined this class action suit.

If the parents prevail, I’d bet the cost to the district will be considerable.

There also may be an FBI criminal investigation because federal wiretap laws may have been broken by the school district’s activities.

Anyway, why is this of interest in Kentucky?

We know school systems here, such as in Louisville, have provided loaner laptops to their students to take home.

We don’t know if those computers also contained similar “security” software (can you say “snoopware”) that would allow the districts to remotely access webcams or internal microphones. However, the suit developing in Pennsylvania, and the potential criminal investigation, certainly are raising a host of questions that we need to ask here in Kentucky.

In any event:

If you are a parent or student:

Be advised that the technology exists to surreptitiously and remotely activate a webcam (or a built-in or attached microphone) in a school loaner laptop without the user knowing this is happening.

Schools can, and have, used such software.

Schools apparently operated under the presumption that they didn’t need to tell parents and students about the existence of such software in the loaner computers and that such software was legal.

If you don’t have kids:

A computer virus can do the same thing, taking over your webcam without your knowledge.

So, why are all of you running to get the electrical tape to cover over your webcam? Did you think about how to block your computer’s microphone, as well (do you even know where that is)? Tape might not work for that job.

Now you know why the Bluegrass Institute is concerned about government transparency and excesses. If the schools in Pennsylvania had been open about what they were doing, maybe a lot of grief and invasion of privacy could have been avoided.

In an effort to save money, the legislature is talking about dropping the two days they added to the school year several years ago.

Then, adding those days was critical to improving education.

Now, we’re told those extra days don’t matter.

And, legislators wonder why the general public gets upset with them???

In this edition of ‘liberty lovers and losers,’ see who’s who as columnist Jim Waters details actions of ‘educrats,’ smoking nannies and politicians.

Click here to read the latest Bluegrass Beacon.

The H1N1 Swine Flu issue last fall and the unusually snowy winter (where is that global warming we hear so much about?) are becoming excuses for a call to delay spring testing with the Kentucky Core Content Tests (KCCT) – again.

We went through all of this last year.

Last year’s test results came back too late for parents to make informed decisions about No Child Left Behind (NCLB) school transfers and too late for schools to use the results to help rework curriculum.

Apparently, we have some slow learners in Frankfort, because nothing was done to fix last year’s problems.

So, here we go again.

Because the KCCT are used for NCLB compliance, Kentucky needs to request a waiver from Washington to delay KCCT testing and reporting.

But, this will be two years in a row for a waiver request.

What if Washington says no way, this time? After all, some think schools need to get test scores on time. Worse, failing to fix last year’s problem doesn’t look very smart.

There is another message here. Part of our problem is due to the fact that we still use left-over, CATS era testing ideas in the current KCCT. The KCCT rely too much on difficult and time consuming to score open response written questions. That’s no longer necessary because advances in testing now allow most of the things we look for with open response questions to be tested with faster-scoring multiple-choice approaches.

Hopefully, people working on our new assessment program will learn from the endemic problems caused by too many open-response questions in our testing program.

But, then I hoped we would have solved last year’s score delays, as well.

And, once again, it’s beginning to look like Kentucky is going to subvert another parent choice option to get their kids out of failing schools.

Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., said recently he would have supported issuing a subpoena to force Toyota President and CEO Akio Toyoda to appear before his panel.

What most news stories don’t say is that Issa founded a company that manufactures vehicle anti-theft device. Somewhere in the past, he must have gotten the shaft by Toyota. Like his fellow union-loving buddies in Congress and the auto industry, who haven’t been able to compete with nonunionized Toyota, all that pent-up frustration is spilling out.

So here we have — some little guy on a big committee using his power to harass the grandson of the founder of one of the most successful companies in automotive history that employs thousands of Kentuckians at the Toyota plant in Georgetown — the largest outside Japan.

And the incumbents — of both parties — wonder why 75 percent of Americans want to throw all of them out of office?