eek

Wow, so, here's an article to invoke the paranoid in all of us. Seems a school in Pennsylvania was using the webcam on school issued laptop computers to spy on its students. This, of course, leads to the questions "who else is doing this?" and "are they doing it to me?".

Bonus Paranoia: The new iPod Nano comes with a webcam. How hard would it be to load each of those with a program that would take pictures and send them on to somewhere whenever the Nano was hooked up to the computer?

OhGodMoreParanoia Bonus: Phones almost all have cameras on them these days. Where does it end? Oh, and they can track you with them, too.

via Gerry Canavan

Okay, seriously, it seems possible that the school was not spying on the kid in his home using the webcam. Possible. If you read the comments, you'll find some from actual kids who went to the school saying that the cam-light on their computers sometimes went on at random times. True? Or runaway imaginations? It's also said that the computer in question was reported stolen, which may also be true, or not.
All that is irrelevent to the simple idea that someone can access your webcam, and take an image of you and whatever is in front of the camera. According to some of the commenters, it's a fairly simple hack, easily done, deliverable through the usual malware that infests the internet at all times.
Oh, and your antivirus and antispyware - dont count on those, because they can only alert you to the ones they know about (or are allowed to block).