A high-profile privacy lawsuit against a Pennsylvania school district that allegedly used remote-controlled cameras on laptop computers to snoop on students may turn out to be a tempest in a teapot unless the plaintiffs can show the district had some voyeuristic purpose.

Blake Robbins

The Lower Merion School District (LMSD) has been at the center of a storm since parents of a high-school student filed a proposed class action in February over its alleged misuse of a system for remotely  managing and tracking lost or stolen laptops issued to students. Some have called the scandal “Webcamgate.”

The parents of Blake Robbins sued the district after the assistant principal at Harriton High School in Rosemont, Pa., allegedly reprimanded him for engaging in “improper behavior” at home, citing as evidence a photograph from the webcam on his laptop. Blake has said the photo showed him eating his favorite candy.

“They were trying to allege that when Blake was holding two Mike & Ikes in his hand ... that somehow he was involved in selling drugs,” the family's lawyer told reporters.

There is no doubt the district bungled badly by failing to inform parents that the laptops contained security software which enabled its technology staff to take a screen shot of a computer and a webcam image of what is in front of the computer. “This notice should have been given and we regret that was not done,” the district superintendent has admitted.

What still isn't clear is what injury students suffered from the alleged violations of their 4th Amendment rights by TheftTrack, a security feature included in the district's LANrev computer systems management software.

In their complaint, the Robbinses said they believed “many of the images captured and intercepted may consist of images of minors and their parents or friends in compromising or embarrassing positions, including, but not limited to, in various stages of dress or undress.”

The suit seeks punitive damages, alleging that “Defendants' conduct in remotely activating the webcams complained of, which resulted in the deprivation of Plaintiffs' and the Class members' constitutionally-protected right to privacy was intentional, extreme and outrageous.”

“At least one Court has termed such surveillance “Orwellian,'” the ACLU said in a brief supporting the Robbinses.

After the school board president issued a statement April 13 denying any “intentional misuse” of TheftTrack, the plaintiffs explicitly played the "peeping tom" card in a motion seeking access to the personal computer of Carol Cafiero, an IT specialist who was one of the two district employees authorized to use the tracking system.

“[E]mails suggest that Carol Cafiero may be a voyeur,” the motion says. “For instance, in one email, when one IT person commented on how the viewing of the webcam pictures and screen shots from a student's computer was like 'a little LMSD soap opera,'” Cafiero responded 'I know, I love it!'”

The district has not explained the alleged photo of Blake Robbins. But district counsel Charles D. Mandracchia says the allegation of voyeurism is “scandalous, malicious and abusive” and a printout of Cafiero's email shows it was part of a thread which discussed how effectively TheftTrack had responded to the possible theft of four laptops.

“The email in no way, shape or form even remotely suggests that Mrs. Cafiero downloaded any pictures from the District's LanRev webcam technology system to her personal home computer because she was a 'voyeur,'” Mandracchia insists in a brief.

At a public meeting last week, a special outside counsel to the school board said the preliminary findings of a forensic investigation of the district's computers show there were “five or six situations” in which tracking was mistakenly not turned off when a lost or missing laptop was recovered.

Some 12,000 to 13,000 images were taken from those computers, the lawyer said, but “[w]e have not seen any intentional or manipulative behavior in connection with those.” TheftTrack directs the webcam to take a photo every 15 minutes.

“Webcamgate” clearly should encourage school districts not to get too carried away with "leading-edge" technology. But on the evidence so far, Lower Merion's mess-up just doesn't seem the stuff that multimillion-dollar class-action damages are made of.

By Matthew Heller
4/25/10