Last fall, Blake J. Robbins learned that his Pennsylvania school had seen inside his bedroom through the remote activation of  a webcam after the school used images of the student in his bedroom taken by the webcam as evidence to punish him.

The school had leased laptops for students to take home and use. Robbins and his parents have filed a class action lawsuit against the school district for invasion of privacy and violation of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The Fourth Amendment protects Americans from “unreasonable searches and seizures.”  Spying on a student in his home is absolutely an unreasonable search because the school was the entity that was “searching.”

If  “probable cause” does not exist, a search can occur only if the person being searched consents. However, the student did not consent to this search; he did not even have knowledge of the search until after it had occurred. Neither this student nor his parents even knew that the webcam in the laptop even had the capability to be activated by the school as video surveillance.

Every day when we step foot on school grounds, we still maintain our Constitutional rights. However, the school is able to have a little more control over students than they would be subjected to on the street or in their own homes. In other words, the school no longer needs “probable cause” to search our lockers, but just “reasonable suspicion.”

Whatever the terminology, “reasonable suspicion” does not justify spying on a student’s home after school hours. The brief filed by the American Civil Liberties Union stated, “The right to privacy inside one’s home is sacrosanct … It is a “’basic principle of Fourth Amendment law that searches and seizures inside a home without a warrant are presumptively unreasonable”.

The school claims to have this technology in place to be able to recover laptops in the event of theft. It also claims that the student had not paid his fees for using the laptop. Therefore, the school turned the camera on to “check on” the laptop.

Even assuming that it is acceptable for school officials to have turned on the camera, are they allowed to punish the student for something he was doing in the privacy of his own home, not on school grounds? A judge will have to answer these issues. However, I believe the school should not punish the student. The school is not a police force for its students. A school can police activities that occur on its property, but only law enforcement should have monitoring and punishing capability off campus – and only if it conducts searches within legal limits.

This student is fighting back on behalf of the other students who had the same laptops provided by the school. A judge is now left to interpret the law and decide whether or not the school’s actions are justified. We as students should be protected from such violations of our Constitutional rights.