Loss of Privacy

If you have a child at Mrs Ethelston’s Church of England Primary School, in Uplyme, Devon, then you are now prohibited from taking photographs or videotaping your children.

A spokesman for the Devon local education authority said: “It’s a decision which individual head teachers come to, usually with consultation with governors.”

Parents, however, are not upset at the school, they are upset at the legislation that has been enacted which prohibits them from taking photographs.  If the head teachers have a say in the final decision, then they should be very angry with the school as well.

“It is all to do with the pictures getting into the wrong hands and the school has to follow its own code of conduct. “I am sure the school do not like it just as much as we do.”

Another parent, who did not want to be named, said: “Parents want to record achievements through their child’s life and not to be made to feel that they are all criminals and are going to upload dodgy photos to some porn site.”

It’s a shame that, in order to speak out against this legislation, the parent felt the necessity of remaining anonymous.  Not only can this parent not speak freely, they can’t even photograph their own children.

Unfortunately, the paranoid parents have probably won this battle due to their irrational fears of kiddie-fiddlers.  Combine this with the Section 44 law and, soon, you’ll not be able to take photos anywhere.

A primary school in Lancashire, UK will be shown a video that will, supposedly, teach young children, aged 10 and 11 how to spot a terrorist.  They are being urged to report anyone who expresses extreme views to authorities.

A lion explains that terrorists can look like anyone, while a cat tells pupils that [they] should get help if they are being bullied and a toad tells them how to cross the road.

The terrorism message is also illustrated with a re-telling of the story of Guy Fawkes, saying that his strong views began forming when he was at school in York. It has been designed to deliver the message of fighting terrorism in [an] accessible way for children.

Children should never be put in the position of ratting out people for what they say.  They should, instead, be playing tag, football, swinging on swings, or any other manner of fun for a 10 year old.

Guy Fawkes should also be seen as someone who was trying to oppose a tyrannical system.  It is much the same as the founding fathers of the United States.  At the time, they were terrorists, but they, too, were trying to overthrow a government they felt was corrupt and in need of a change.  What the government is doing here is creating a system of spies who will readily report you for anything you say that is contrary to government teachings.  One only need look back a short way in history to the Stasi and the National Socialist Schoolchildren to understand this concept.

As Bruce Schneier has said many times before, “If you ask amateurs to act as front-line security personnel, you shouldn’t be surprised when you get amateur security.”

The ACLU is suing two Tennessee school districts for blocking several gay-rights web sites.  The schools are blocking web sites that discuss issues pertaining to lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgendered people, however, they are not filtering any sites that advocate reparative therapy that encourages individuals to turn away from being gay.

“Not only does defendants’ blocking policy discriminate on the basis of content in violation of the First Amendment, the policy further constitutes unlawful viewpoint discrimination,” the suit said. “Under the defendants’ policy, students may access websites that promote anti-gay views and that advocate that persons should change their sexual orientation through so-called “reparative therapy,” but not the web sites of organizations such as the Human Rights Campaign, which is one of the largest civil rights organizations in the United States working to achieve equality under the law for LGBT persons.”

The blocked sites include the Human Rights Campaign, Marriage Equality USA, the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network, the Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation and Dignity USA. Unblocked sites include National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, People Can Change, The Americans For Truth Against Homosexuality and the Traditional Values Coalition.

The school districts are currently blaming the filtering company, while the filtering company is blaming the school districts.

A sixth-grader was told that she could not give a report on the slain gay activist Harvey Milk unless her classmates’ parents gave permission for their children to hear the report.  Now, the ACLU is threatening to sue the school district.

District officials told Natalie Jones and her parents that a report on Milk fell under the school board’s life and sex education policy, which requires parental consent before any instruction on the topics of reproduction and human sexuality.

Natalie, 12, is a student at Mount Woodson Elementary School and did the report last month as part of an independent research project class at the school. Students in the class are required to do PowerPoint projects on a subject of their choosing.

The ACLU says that the school district is violating her free speech rights.

Blair-Loy, in his letter to the school district, said the girl was told the subject was “sensitive.” School officials later told the girl’s mother, Bonnie Jones, that the presentation only could be shown to students whose parents had signed a permission slip in advance.

Superintendent Robert Graeff and Grace cited the board policy dealing with sex-education matters. The policy states that parents will be notified in writing about any teaching on the subjects of sex or “family life, human sexuality, AIDS or sexually transmitted diseases.”

Natalie gave the presentation to about half the class, Blair-Loy said. The ACLU wants the district to apologize to Natalie, send letters “reflecting such apology” to parents who received the school district permission request, let Natalie give the presentation to the whole class and clarify that the board policy applies only to course content for sex-education instruction. The group also wants the district to say situations like this won’t happen again.

“We think the school district singled out and discriminated against Natalie’s speech because of its content,” Blair-Loy said. “This is not sex education. This is a presentation about Harvey Milk, a historical figure who happened to be gay.”

While discussing sexuality can be a sensitive issue, there is no reason to put the assignment in the category of sex education.  Yes, Harvey Milk was gay.  Only extremely naieve 12-year olds wouldn’t know what that meant.  Would permission slips be needed for others, such as Bill Clinton, Gavin Newsom, Alan Turing, President Buchanan, Tennessee Williams, or Oscar Wilde?  Their biographies would be sexual in nature as well, at least according to this school district’s policies.

Pedophiles and those who “supposedly” possess child porn are the new communists as the world has entered a new “McCarthy” era. Merely being accused is ruining people’s lives and careers while others jump the gun, declaring people guilty before all the evidence can be collected.

One such case is the story of Ting-Yi Oei, a 60-year-old assistant principal at Freedom High School in South Riding, Virginia. It all started when rumors flew about students sending one another naked pictures of each other on their cell phones. Known as sexting, several teenagers across the country are participating. Oei was asked to check it out. Oei found a student who had the photo and showed it to him.

The image depicted only the torso of a girl — later determined to be a 17-year old student — wearing only underpants, her arms mostly covering her breasts. The boy claimed he didn’t know who sent him the photo or who the girl was.

Oei says he showed the image to his boss, Principal Christine Forester, who told him to preserve a copy on his office computer for the investigation. A computer neophyte, Oei didn’t know how to transfer the image from the boy’s cell phone,  so the teen sent the picture to Oei’s phone,  and told him how to forward it to his work e-mail address. When the process was complete, Oei instructed the student to delete the image from his phone.

More students were investigated, but the identity of the girl in the photo was not discovered at that time. It was concluded that the girl probably wasn’t a student at the school. Oei informed the principal of his findings and the matter was closed.

Two weeks later, the boy caught with the photo was in trouble again — he’d pulled down the pants of a girl in class. The school suspended the student for 10 days. But when the boy’s mother learned from Oei about the earlier photo incident, she was outraged that Oei hadn’t reported the picture to her. She called his house at 7:00 a.m., screaming at him that the suspension had to be revoked.

Oei refused, so the mother called the police to report the incident of the photo. The police had to help Oei retrieve the photo from his phone and learned that the girl was indeed a student at the school.

A month later, the first charges were filed against Oei: failure to report suspicion of child abuse, a misdemeanor. The charge alleged that Oei had a legal duty to report the girl’s photo to her parents, and to state agencies or law enforcement.

How is Oei supposed to report the photo to the girl’s parents if he was unable to identify the girl?  And why is a pissed off mother allowed to destroy a man’s career just because she’s angry at school officials for disciplining her son?

The photo didn’t show sexual activity or genitalia, and even the sheriff’s office conceded it was “inappropriate” but not “criminal” — making it unclear what the “child abuse” was supposed to be. In any event, as a matter of law, Oei was only required to report suspected abuse to his principal, which he’d done.

The principal didn’t defend Oei in the case. Oei did what he should have done, but it was the principal who dropped the ball. Unfortunately for Oei, the prosecutor in the case, James Plowman, decided to proceed with the case. Politically motivated, Plowman wanted to be tough on crime and was going to make an example of Oei. When Oei refused to resign, Plowman changed the misdemeanor charge into a felony charge. Oei’s life then became a nightmare.

“We had to tell all our friends when they sent us e-mail that police could seize computers at any time so anything they wrote us could be accessed,” Curling says. “Any phone call they made to us could be recorded.”

Oei suffered the usual humiliation of someone who was arrested on child porn charges. He endured and, with the help of many, he continued to fight.

Then last month, Oei’s defense attorney, Steven Stone, filed a motion to dismiss the charges on the grounds that the photo didn’t constitute child pornography. In a ruling on Tuesday, Loudoun Circuit Court Judge Thomas Horne agreed. Citing a long history of state appeals court decisions, Horne noted that nudity alone is not enough to qualify an image as child pornography. The image must be “sexually explicit” and “lewd.”

Plowman still contends that Oei was wrong and should not be in the education profession. Oei, who was able to keep his job and his pay throughout the ordeal, isn’t sure he wants to return to a school where the principal won’t back him up, but he is also stuck with the reality that no one else will want to hire him. Though the charges were dropped, a google search will turn up his name, likely preventing him from finding work elsewhere.