District Took 56,000 Pictures From Laptops

(April 20) -- A suburban Philadelphia school district secretly snapped nearly 56,000 pictures with webcams on computers given to students during the past two years, investigators say.

An attorney for the Lower Merion School District, Henry Hockeimer, said none of the pictures were "salacious or inappropriate," but he added that the innocent nature of the images did not excuse their existence in the first place.

"The taking of these pictures without student consent in their homes was obviously wrong," Hockeimer said at a school board meeting Monday.

Most of the images were shot by anti-theft software on six laptops that had been reported missing in September 2008. The software is programmed to take a picture every 15 minutes while activated and is meant to be activated only if a computer is stolen or if a student doesn't pay a $55 insurance fee.

But in at least five cases, administrators left the software on for several days or weeks after missing laptops were found, sending 13,000 images back to the school, The Philadelphia Inquirer reports. And in 15 cases, investigators couldn't determine why the software had been turned on.

The investigation into the tracking software began with a February lawsuit alleging that the district had illegally taken pictures of Harriton High School sophomore Blake Robbins in his bedroom through the webcam installed on his laptop. Robbins' lawyer, Mark Haltzman, said the district downloaded nearly 400 images of Robbins, some of which show him partially undressed and sleeping.

Robbins discovered he was being spied on in November when an assistant principal called him into her office and reprimanded him for behavior caught on the webcam. Robbins said her evidence was a picture of him in his bedroom with a handful of capsule-like Mike and Ike candies, which she had mistaken for drugs.

"I think it's a very big case because it's such an extreme example of government thoughtlessly intruding in our lives," Mary Catherine Roper, a staff attorney at the ACLU Pennsylvania, told AOL News. "It highlights what can happen when nobody is paying attention."

The ACLU-PA is representing another Lower Merion student, Evan Neill, as an additional plaintiff in the case. They are hoping to keep the pictures from being released to anyone other than the families involved and want the school barred from having remote access to the computers.

Only two school employees had the power to turn the tracking software on and off. One of them, information systems coordinator Carol Cafiero, raised eyebrows at a deposition earlier this month when she refused to answer any of Haltzman's questions by invoking her Fifth Amendment right. Cafiero has been placed on paid administrative leave, according to a motion filed by Haltzman.

The case led Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pa., to introduce legislation on Friday to amend federal wiretapping laws to include video surveillance. Currently, the law makes it illegal to secretly record conversations in a room or on a phone and to intercept e-mails without a court order. But it does not cover video surveillance.

"Many Americans would be surprised to learn that there is no federal statute to protect them from being secretly videotaped in their homes," bill co-sponsor Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., said in a statement.

The Surreptitious Video Surveillance Act would change the law to treat video surveillance in a person's home in the same manner as electronic communications.