Federal prosecutors may have decided not to press criminal charges against school officials accused of spying on students using a webcam but the Lower Merion School District is not yet off the hook.
Two civil lawsuits are still pending against the suburban Philadelphia school district. A federal class action lawsuit filed in February by high school sophomore Blake Robbins and his parents Michael and Holly. The suit alleges that the Lower Merion School District secretly spied on its 2,300 students while in the privacy of their homes. A total of 56,000 images were captured using the iSight webcams on the school-issued MacBook laptops.
In July, Jalil Hasan, who graduated from the school this year, and his mother filed a second lawsuit against the school district. The two accused the Lower Merion of taking over 1,000 images of Jalil and his family.
The teen accidentally left his laptop inside the school premises on a Friday and it was returned to him the following Monday. The incident, which happened last December, triggered the start of LANRev (a PC anti-theft software installed on the computers) taking webcam photos and screenshots of Hasan’s laptop, according to the teen’s mother, Fatima. The tracking mechanism remained activated for months until the Robbins filed a lawsuit against the district.
The school’s officials insisted the remote tracking system was for laptop theft recovery but parents and bloggers described it as “disturbing” and a violation of privacy.
The school’s unusual PC monitoring system came to light after school officials called the attention of Blake over alleged improper conduct in his room. The Lower Merion School District’s assistant principal accused the 15-year-old high school sophomore of selling and taking drugs. The allegation was purely based on the images captured using LANRev. The teenager, however, claimed the pill-like objects shown in the images were just candies.
The school’s officials said they blocked the MacBooks’ camera activation feature after the Robbins filed the lawsuit.
According to reports, the images included those of students relaxing at home, sleeping, and even partially dressed. The software also tracked every website the students visited as well as captured all their online chat sessions.
No criminal intent
Six months after the Federal Bureau of Investigation launched a probe into the allegations, federal prosecutors announced that no charges would be filed against the school due to lack of evidence of criminal intent.
The Lower Merion School District welcomed this development, saying it validated the findings of the school’s internal investigation.
The school district has adopted new laptop monitoring policies following the spying brouhaha. The new policy stipulates that school officials need explicit written permission from students and parents before they could access school-issued laptops.
When a laptop gets stolen, a police report of the incident is required before the theft tracking device in the PC could be activated. The theft tracking software, however, is banned from capturing screenshots and images of on-screen texts, as well as taking video or audio recordings.
Some web users who were closely monitoring the case expressed displeasure over the FBI announcement. It showed that the U.S. had a weak policy regarding privacy protection, they said, and that the incident may set the stage for other schools to develop ways to pry into the students’ private lives.
Computer theft
According to the 8th Annual 2010 BSI Computer Theft Survey, about 5.5 million computers were stolen in the U.S. in the last 3 years. The recovery rate was put at a dismal 3 percent for computers that were not equipped with a theft tracking mechanism.
Laptops were the most commonly stolen, followed by mobile devices, and desktop computers.
The LANRev (now called Absolute Manage) tracking mechanism installed on the MacBooks issued to the students of Lower Merion School District was overseen by network technician Michael Perbix.
In a YouTube video he produced, Perbix admitted that the software was a good tracking feature in cases of laptops getting misplaced or stolen. The feature must be promptly turned off after the device had been returned to its owner, though; otherwise, images considered harmless could also be captured.
“It’s an excellent feature. Yes, we have used it, and yes, it has gleaned some results for us. But it, in and of itself, is just a fantastic feature for trying to—especially when you’re in a school environment and you have a lot of laptops and you’re worried about, you know, laptops getting up and missing. I’ve actually had some laptops we thought were stolen which actually were still in a classroom, because they were misplaced, and by the time we found out they were back, I had to turn the tracking off. And I had, you know, a good twenty snapshots of the teacher and students using the machines in the classroom,” Perbix said.
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