School District Faces Lawsuit Over Laptop Spycam Scandal

Officials of a suburban Philadelphia school district are now claiming they would never use secret webcam monitoring to spy on students at home.

 

The Lower Merion School District, “in response to a suit filed by a student,” according to the Associated Press (News - Alert), has now acknowledged that webcams, which came standard in laptops issued to students – who were not told that the cameras could be remotely activated by the school district – were remotely activated 42 times in the past 14 months.

 

School officials claim the secret feature was “only to find missing, lost or stolen laptops,” according to the AP. Neither students nor parents were ever informed of the spycam capability the school district had secretly built into the laptops.

 

Yet the issue of the spycams came to light when Harriton High School Vice Principal Lindy Matsko called a student, Blake Robbins, into her office and allegedly showed him a photo the remote spycam had taken inside the Robbins’ home.

 

Robbins’s laptop was not reported as being stolen. School district officials have not explained publicly why the laptop’s spy feature was activated without Robbins’s knowledge.

“Despite some reports to the contrary, be assured that the security-tracking software has been completely disabled,” Superintendent Christopher W. McGinley said in a statement on the district’s Web site late Friday. He did not address the question of how quickly the capability could be re-enabled.

 

According to the AP, Robbins and his parents, Michael and Holly Robbins, “filed a federal civil rights lawsuit Tuesday against the district, its board of directors and McGinley. They accused the school of turning on the webcam in his computer while it was inside their Penn Valley home, which they allege violated wiretap laws and his right to privacy.”

 

TechBlorge wrote that “the laptop feature was discovered on Nov. 11, 2009 when Blake Robbins was summoned to Vice Principal Lindy Matsko’s office and accused of ‘improper behavior in his home.’”  As evidence of the minor’s alleged misdeeds, “he was presented with a print out of a photo taken from the laptop that showed the interior of his home.”

 

The family “later conferred with the school,” TechBlorge reported, “and discovered that the school can indeed activate the webcams whenever they see fit, although no documentation issued with the laptop, nor on any Web site, indicates that the school can do this, so no permission was ever sought or given in regards to this stealth feature.”

 

The suit, which seeks class-action status, alleges that Harriton vice principal Lindy Matsko on Nov. 11 cited a laptop photo in telling Blake that the school thought he was engaging in improper behavior. He and his family have told reporters that an official mistook a piece of candy for a pill and thought he was selling drugs.

 

The district’s Web site said 42 activations of the system resulted in the recovery of 18 computers, not 28 as district spokesman Doug Young had claimed earlier.