Beware of Government Bearing Gifts

Many students look at the prospect of single-payer health care as a big step toward freedom. The thinking goes that, if government provides health care, everyday people will be “freed” from worry about health care and survival in order to pursue the higher things in life: art, inventing, writing, teaching, helping the community, etc.

Unfortunately, gifts from the government tend to come with strings attached, as students around the country are learning. In order to level the playing field, some school districts provided students with free laptops; others just use them during class. Sounds nice, right?

I can only imagine how cool free-laptops-for-all must have seemed to the students as they chatted on MySpace about their latest crush, Twittered about their ex-crush, downloaded music, played games, e-mailed their friends about teachers, did school work, or even just hung out in their rooms at home with a sweet new computer sitting on the desk.

So what’s the catch?

In true 1984 fashion, reports are coming out that government school employees use the laptops to watch the students in and out of class. By watch, I mean WATCH. In addition to monitoring everything done on the computer, school officials in Pennsylvania were turning on the webcams of the laptops when students were at home. It's one thing to monitor activities at school, but to watch everything at home is a tremendous overreach.

Here’s an excerpt from the class action civil lawsuit the Robbins family filed against Lower Merion School District in Ardmore, Pennsylvania:

Talk about a Trojan horse!

If you’d like to see Assistant Principal Dan Ackerman from Bronx’s Intermediate School 339 in New York watch students in class, check out minute 4:40 of the following video:

Disturbing quote of the day by Ackerman: “They don’t even realize we are watching… I always like to mess with them and take a picture.”

Remember, nothing in life is free. Government is a lot like your parents; if you don't want to be watched or told what you may or may not do, you have to provide for yourself. That's the price of freedom. If a seemingly-innocuous, free laptop comes with government voyeurs peeping in and out of school, what sort of privacy and freedoms do you think you’ll be sacrificing for the public option or a system of single-payer health care?