Actually the New York Times did get a hold of some documents back during the Vietnam War. It ended up in the US Supreme Court (look up "Pentagon Papers").
Secrecy is necessary. There is no question of that. But then KEEP IT SECRET! After 9/11 when the government got slapped for not sharing intel, they responded by letting everybody and their uncle read this stuff. That's not the way to keep secrets.
Trying to wrap your head around what intel needs to be kept and who really needs to be able to see it is a huge task. One that has not been handled well.
For some other disucssions around this topic check out the Secrecy Blog ( http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/ ).

Incorrect. The storage spanning is part of the OS itself. You can even encounter this issue when you are trying to design apps that have a larger footprint than physical memory in the device. No hardware required. This is an OS thing.

My question is: why we didn't hear about these requirements (the internal storage is spanned onto the expansion microsd storage--with vague requirements) when the devs started getting kits and working with this almost a year ago. So much for getting good advance info about this fantastic new product into the ether. Nah: We'll just spew the marketing cruft instead. It's easier. >sigh

I do not see anything in the complaint about what software (or in a more general sense: HOW) the school administrators were able to remotely take control of the webcams.
Does anybody out there have any idea what was used for this purpose? Or has anybody gotten to place hands on one of these laptops to take a look at what was loaded?
And would it have been possible for someone knowledgeable to find and defeat this software as part of a normal computer cleanup process?