As reported in the May 7, 2010 edition of InfoTech & Telecom News, three U.S. Senate Democrats are hoping to close a loophole in federal wiretapping laws that allowed a suburban Philadelphia school to spy on students via a laptop camera, a case indicating how advances in technology continue to present problems older laws aren’t sufficient to handle.

Pryor Cashman Partner Jeffrey Johnson, in an interview with InfoTech & Telecom News, said: “I think [the proposed legislation] is a necessary patch on a huge legislative problem to the extent which the current capabilities of information technology make it difficult to protect a person’s privacy rights.” He calls the bill an “important, necessary step to protect privacy.”

“There is no way of knowing whether [Web camera] photos are taken with innocent intentions or for a more nefarious reason,” Johnson said. “The school district should never have taken those photos, regardless of the reasons why.”

Although the Lower Merion case has received much attention, Johnson suggests other school districts, government agencies, and even private companies might be engaging in secret photographing. “The ‘Big Brother’ problem here is that it might not be just one person [seeking the surveillance],” Johnson said. “In this case it was a school. But because this activity is not explicitly illegal, other state or local governments could be doing this—or large corporations such as a Microsoft or a Google.”

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