NASHVILLE, TN – Members of a girls’ basketball team visiting Livingston Middle School in Tennessee were wary when they spotted a camera high up in a corner of the ceiling in the visitors’ locker room that seemed to be peering down at them. “It seemed to look out over the changing area,” said the girls’ lawyer, Mark Chalos, after having filed an official complaint at the United States District Court in Nashville.

The girls continued changing clothes despite the camera, unwilling to believe they were actually being recorded. The camera was later mentioned to the coach, who confronted the principal at Livingston. Court papers contend that the coach was told the camera was not in a position to observe the girls changing, but after parents pressed the issue, the video was reviewed and a school district official reported that it revealed the girls in “bras and panties.”

Parents were further outraged when they learned that the video content was available online, through the school’s unsecured server. Server logs indicate the content was accessed several times by outsiders.

The growing number of surveillance cameras and home webcams is creating unprecedented concern with regards to issues of security and personal privacy. Unsecured cameras can be detected on the internet, and it’s easy to find explanations detailing how to tap into thousands of raw webcam feeds through a few easy Google searches.

According to The Yankee Group, a market research company, as many as 13% of American households have a webcam connected to their computers, usually sitting on top of or beside the computer in a bedroom or household living room.

Just like a web page, each webcam on the internet has an address. Unless the camera has been protected behind a firewall, their web address is not only identifiable, but also searchable.

According to a New York Times article published earlier today, “A Google search one day last week indicated more than 10,000 such Web cameras, showing everything from bedrooms and living rooms to coin-operated laundry businesses and shoe stores to plasma reactors and mountain ranges. (Some of the cameras required passwords for access to the video.)”

Other sources of online video content are mainly security cameras, traffic and weather cameras.

Gaining access to a secured camera without authorization is illegal, regardless if the password is publicly known. The question in this case becomes one of whether it is legal to view unsecured webcams found as the result of a Google search.

“It’s probably not illegal, but you never know,” said Annalee Newitz, policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights advocacy group. “That would be the court case–would a reasonable person consider these cameras to be public?”

Jennifer Stisa Granick, executive director of the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society, agrees that it is a gray area. “The law states you have to know that you’re not authorized to look at this information,” she said. “But if it’s available through Google, most people would reasonably think that it was all right. But what if a person didn’t realize that their Webcam image was going out over the Internet? Do they have an expectation of privacy?”

The question of “expectation of privacy” is at the center of the case in Tennessee that families brought against the Overton County school board.

“You should never, ever, ever put cameras in locker rooms, period,” Chalos said. “Any student undressing in a locker room has the right to privacy. And the school has to protect that.”

The cameras at Livingston Middle School were installed in 2002 by EduTech of Dyersburg, Tennessee, a company that specialises in installing school cameras. The installed cameras took pictures twice per second of the school’s hallways, exits, as well as the changing area of the visitors’ locker room. The school’s lawyers say that the locker room camera was meant to face the door and was mounted incorrectly. EduTech maintains that the camera was installed according to the school’s instructions.

The original complaint against the school was filed in June 2003, on behalf of 17 students. Since then, Chalos has determined that the locker room camera recorded at least two other visiting teams. His submitted a modified complaint last week on behalf of 34 students. They are seeking millions in damages.