Korean Job Discussion Forums

[nester28]

our hagwon has just installed a video surveillance system with cameras in every classroom, hallway and in the teacher's work area...the cameras in the teachers' lounge are equipped with audio and our director sits in his office and is able to zoom in on us and hear our conversations big brother style....is this even legal? Are other schools doing this? Do i have any rights in this country?

[sojourner1]

Yes, you have rights, but CCTV is common in schools and many other public places. The recent installation sounds like a sudden fear and politically charged reaction over the recent high profile pedophile case, but has nothing to do with you personally. My school has had CCTV for years to my understanding and I see no problem being watched and recorded and then shown to parents.

As in America, it is legal to put you under surveillance at work as you are on their time and on their property, voluntarily.

Big brothers watch us and track us all with technology more than we actually know or realize as we sojourn through our lives. Big brothers justification for invasion of everyones privacy and making it like we are all in captivity is that we voluntarily work and go places and that surveillance is to protect innocent interests from any baddies with bad intentions such as to molest a child or blow a place up with a bomb.

American schools have metal detectors, video cams, microphones, and all the tense politics of fear, but gun fire still erupts in classrooms and middle school football games while pedophiles molest children most of which we could never know about. This Orwellian stuff only makes the innocent, the majority, those with no ill intentions; all very miserable. I hate that kind of environment myself where the system is set up to prove that you are wrong or bad. Guilty until proved innocent is what it ultimately sums up to. George Orwells 1984 is becoming our reality where we are all on trial to prove our innocence of having contraband or committing crimes of any sort, every day at work and while traveling.

[Young FRANKenstein]

[some waygug-in]

Learn the Japanese national anthem. That ought to smooth things over for you.

[Atavistic]

[Boodleheimer]

[genezorm]

[mrsquirrel]

If you have a GSM phone you could tape it near the camera and distort the sound coming out with the electromagnetic waves from your phone

[The_Conservative]

I can understand the cameras in the classroom, but in the teacher's lounge? That's a bit much. Be sure your hands are visible at all times though when you are near the students...there was a thread on here about another teacher who was accused because he was near a child and his hands couldn't be seen for a minute or two.

On a side note I once taught at a hakwon with a camera in the classroom. Darnest thing was...it kept malfunctioning...and the director could never figure out why.

[halfmanhalfbiscuit]

[Steve Schertzer]