No criminal charges will be filed against a suburban Philadelphia school district that secretly snapped tens of thousands of webcam photographs and screen shots on laptops issued to students. The FBI and federal prosecutors announced they could not prove any criminal wrongdoing by Lower Merion School District.
The FBI investigated the district for possible wiretap violations after a student's civil lawsuit brought the issue to the public's attention. Lower Merion High School student Blake Robbins alleged the district took photographs of him in his bedroom as he slept.
District officials said its technology staff only activated the remote tracking system to try to find laptops that had been reported lost or stolen. But the district soon acknowledged that the software system sometimes remained activated for weeks or months, even after a laptop was found causing the district to capture 56,000 webcam photographs and screen shots from student laptops. None of the images captured appeared to be salacious or inappropriate, school officials have said. The district said it remotely activated the software to find 80 missing laptops in the past two years.
Robbins maintains that he never reported his laptop missing or stolen, and doesn't know why the district deployed the surveillance software on his computer. He was one of about 20 students who had not paid the $55 insurance fee required to take the laptops home but was the only one tracked, his lawyer has said.
The district photographed Robbins 400 times during a 15-day period last fall, and also captured video chats and instant messages he exchanged with friends, according to the lawyer, Mark Haltzman. The tracking program took images every 15 minutes, usually capturing the webcam photo of the user and a screen shot at the same time.
