A Million Stories

All the news we care to print.

by Jeffrey C. Billman and Holly Otterbein

Evan M. Lopez

If you're like us — and we know you are because we've seen you in the shower — you spent last week wondering what in the holy hell is going on in Lower Merion Township, where school officials were accused of secretly spying on their students via Webcams in their district-issued laptops in a potential class-action lawsuit filed earlier this month. And like us, you've got more questions than answers.

Let's take a moment to ponder the possibilities, shall we?

According to that lawsuit, on Nov. 11, a Harriton High School assistant principal "informed [student Blake Robbins] that the School District was of the belief that [he] was engaged in improper behavior in his home ." And how did they know that? The school administrator "cited as evidence a photograph from the Webcam embedded in [Robbins'] personal laptop issued by the School District," the lawsuit says.

How did they get such a thing? "[The District], in fact, has the ability to remotely activate the Webcam contained in a student's personal laptop computer ... at any time it [chooses] and to view and capture whatever images [are] in front of the Webcam."

Before diving in, we should note that the district's decision to supply each of its nearly 2,300 high school students with a MacBook, paid for by state grants, is exceedingly cool. That said ... oh Lord, where to begin?

First, the official explanation: The Lower Merion School District posted a statement on its Web site Feb. 18, which did absolutely nothing to clear things up. The remote tracking software the district installed, according to the statement, was designed "to help locate a laptop in the event it was reported lost, missing or stolen so that the laptop could be returned to the student. ... Upon a report of a suspected lost, stolen or missing laptop, the feature was activated by the district's security and technology departments."

That feature, the district pledged, was never used for nefarious purposes, and it has since been deactivated.

Neither the Robbins family nor their attorneys returned our calls, but they did grant interviews to NBC 10 over the weekend. According to Blake Robbins, school officials believed that the photo Blake's Webcam had snapped showed him popping illicit pills; he says those pills were Mike and Ike candy.

Again ... oh, boy. District spokesman Douglas Young says this isn't the first time the district used this security feature. In fact, officials have used it "a handful of times" — 42 times in 14 months, according to the Associated Press. Adds Young: "We only used it when a laptop was reported stolen, lost or missing." Does that mean Blake stole the laptop (which the lawsuit claims was the one school officials issued him)? "I can't refer to the specifics of the case, but I can say that the feature would not be activated unless it was reported stolen. A student or family member would have to report that it was stolen for us to use it."

According to NBC, other Lower Merion students have reported seeing their laptop Webcams activate at random. School officials reportedly told the students that this was a glitch.

Young says the district takes the allegations seriously, and calls it a "mistake" that parents weren't told about the feature beforehand. "We recognize the concerns that are out there," he says, "and we need to conduct a full review of the policies, procedures and process that made this happen. That being said, we intend to defend ourselves vigorously and intend to win." Translation: "We didn't do anything wrong, but we're really sorry and we won't do it again!"

According to NBC, the FBI is investigating. According to The Philadelphia Inquirer, federal prosecutors have issued subpoenas. According to A Million Stories, this saga of Main Line weirdness is going to get a lot weirder before it's over.

Here's some cheery news: Philadelphia's is the least healthy of all 67 Pennsylvania counties! According to a new nationwide report from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin's Population Health Institute (read it at countyhealthrankings.org), we're collectively fat, smoke too much, drink too much, die in car crashes too often, die prematurely too often, have too much violent crime, have too many teenage and single parents, and are generally more poor and miserable than everywhere else in the Keystone State. The upside: We're above average (No. 26) in health care, and not as bad as you'd think (No. 52) in environmental health. Of course, the long-documented link between poor health and poverty plays out here, too. Most of our richer, whiter, suburban enclaves — Chester, Montgomery and Bucks counties, specifically — fall in the state's top 10. Chester is the state's healthiest; Delaware County is near the state's median, at No. 36; and there we are, dead last, emphasis on "dead."

Have another cheesesteak, Philadelphia. Extra Whiz.

Dept. of Sex Pervs

Remember last week, when this esteemed publication spilled its ink detailing Gov. Ed Rendell's plan to plunder the state's forests for the billions of dollars in natural gas they contain [Cover Story, "Drill, Baby, Drill!", Feb. 18, 2010]? As writer Isaiah Thompson explained, there are lots of reasons why this is a bad idea. To name two: Oversight is lacking, at best, and groundwater contamination is more than just possible, it's already happened

Evan M. Lopez (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

But here's one Thompson didn't mention: Perverts. According to an article in the journal Conservation Biology, researchers studying the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem in Wyoming documented a steep rise in the number of registered sex offenders in towns whose economies were based on the oil and gas industries.

As University of Montana scientist Joel Berger explains in the press release, "Our research identified social markers to reveal the negative elements associated with changing human economies and to gauge both community composition and services. One of these markers was the increase in sexual predators."

Over the nine years of the study, towns whose economies were dependent on oil extraction saw two to three times the increase in sex offenders than towns that depended on agriculture and tourism. "The number of sex offenders increased most rapidly in counties dominated by oil and gas extraction," the press release says.

This is more correlation that causation: Having an oil rig in your town doesn't turn your menfolk into mouth-breathers. Rather, it's a result of "the dramatic social upheaval caused when a large influx of people are attracted to energy boomtowns due to high rates of employment and high salaries," researcher Jon Beckmann of the Wildlife Conservation Society says in the release.

If you build it, they will come .

HEY! We didn't mean it that way. Get your minds out of the gutter.

This week's report by Jeffrey C. Billman and Holly Otterbein. E-mail us at amillionstories@citypaper.net.