US schools sued for using laptops to ‘spy’ on children

A school district in the United States is being sued after it admitted taking photographs of its students using webcams on laptops it loaned to them. Lower Merion School District in Philadelphia began handing out Apple MacBooks to its 2,300 high school students two years ago, but never told them that the laptops would be able to take screenshots of the desktop or photographs from the built-in webcam.

Yesterday, investigators reported that the monitoring programme was activated 146 times in two years and that 56,000 photographs were taken.

The scandal first emerged in February when Wired reported that the district had turned off the cameras after being sued by a pupil, Blake Robbins, for invasion of privacy and wiretapping among other offences. Robbins's lawyers allege that school administrators used "LanRev peeping Tom" software to spy on the high school student in his home and that the laptop webcam took pictures of Robbins in various states of undress.

The lawsuit claims that the school district's surveillance operation was discovered in November 2009 when administrators told Robbins they suspected him of engaging in "improper behaviour in his home". An assistant principal confronted Robbins with a webcam photograph taken by his school laptop, which he was told showed him taking drugs. Robbins says the 'drugs' were in fact sweets.

Only two school district employees - information systems coordinator Carol Cafiero and network technician Mike Perbix - could actually turn the surveillance programme on or off.

Lawyers for Robbins have demanded Cafiero's home computer be seized and examined to determine whether she had downloaded and viewed any photographs of pupils. The documents say Carol Cafiero "invokes the Fifth Amendment to every question… including as to whether she had ever downloaded pictures to her own personal computer, including pictures of students who were naked while in their home".

Robbins's lawyers also allege that Cafiero is a "voyeur". They claim that when a colleague commented in an email that screenshots and webcam pictures from a student's computer were like a "little LMSD soap opera", Cafiero replied: "I know, I love it."

Cafiero's lawyer says she has cooperated with federal investigators and is perfectly happy for her computer to be examined if a judge orders it.

Investigators said yesterday that they had found no evidence that Cafiero or Perbix had monitored laptops without being asked.

But they did discover that the surveillance programme had been activated 146 times in two years and that 56,000 photographs had been taken over this period. The vast majority of these photographs were taken after laptops had been reported lost or stolen, but occasionally the technology was activated because a student had taken their laptop home without paying a $55 insurance fee.  Robbins claims this was the case with his laptop, although a lawyer for the school district would not confirm this.

A full report will be given at a school board meeting on May 3, but the civil action brought by Robbins threatens to snowball into a class action suit now that the school district has admitted that many other high school students were spied upon.

Meanwhile, an FBI investigation continues and the case has whipped up so much public outrage in the US that it has inspired a Democratic senator to propose a new law that would make remote spying on people's homes an offence. ·