FBI Investigating Lower Merion School District’s Use of Laptop Webcams to Allegedly Spy on Students and Their Families!

Did you hear about the lawsuit filed against Lower Merion School District? In the case of Blake J. Robbins v. Lower Merion School District, the suit claims that laptops were issued to Harriton High School students with webcams that can be covertly activated by the schools’ administrators. The suit claims that the administrators were able to use this webcam feature to spy on students and even their families.

The issue came to light when the Robbin’s child was disciplined for “improper behavior in his home” and Harriton High School Vice Principal used a photo taken by the webcam as evidence. The suit is a class action, brought on behalf of all students issued with these specific webcam equipped laptops.

The Lower Merion School District officials gave all their 1,800 high-schoolers laptop computers to guarantee they would have access to school-based resources. The lawsuit brought by the student and his parents, Michael and Holly Robbins, claims Lindy Matsko, an assistant principal at Harriton High School, spied on the student at home by remotely activating the webcam on his laptop.

The suit alleges that Matsko informed the boy that he was engaged in inappropriate behavior in his home, and cited as evidence a photograph from the webcam embedded in his laptop. The student told his parents about the incident, the suit claims, and the boy’s father confronted Matsko. The suit claims Matsko acknowledged the school could start the webcam and take pictures whenever it wanted to. The lawsuit charges that, “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.”

If these allegations are true, how creepy is this for the students and their families? Think about it . . . I’m sure that a number of these kids have their laptops in their bedrooms where they may be getting dressed, or how about if the laptop is located in an area where there are private discussions with the students families. It is one thing if a school district has the ability to monitor emails or mark inappropriate website visits but to use these computers as ‘bugs’ is horrifying.

Schools all over this country are worried about kids divulging too much personal information online, concerned about pedophiles, embarrassing uploads of photos, etc. that may affect college acceptances or future job opportunities. Kids are taught by parents and school administrators to threat their personal details as though they were precious. And now we have this revelation in nearby Lower Merion School District?

It is my understanding that Lower Merion School District has admitted that the laptops were shipped with software for covertly activating their webcams, but is denying wrongdoing. Late today, the Associated Press is reporting that the FBI is now involved in the case. The FBI is investigating the Lower Merion School District over allegations that a high school in the school district spied on students through their laptop webcams. The official, speaking to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity, says the FBI will explore whether Lower Merion School District officials broke any federal wiretap or computer-intrusion laws.

Lower Merion officials say they remotely activated webcams 42 times to find missing student laptops in the past 14 months, but never did so to spy on students, as the Blake J. Robbins v. Lower Merion School District lawsuit claims.

What is Tredyffrin Easttown School District’s policy on computer usage outside of school hours?  Does the school district have a similar laptop program to Lower Merion?  I don’t think our school district assigns laptops to individual students, correct?  Are any of the district’s laptops permitted to leave the schools?

Community Matters Was Down Yesterday . . . What Actually Happened?

As some of my closest friends will attest, around 4 PM yesterday I was in overdrive over Community Matters.  With no apparent explanation, the screen went dark and Community Matters disappeared from the Internet.  Convinced it was my computer, I madly called friends only to discover that no one could find Community Matters online. 

A very calm ‘computer’ friend assured me that it was probably a Word Press issue, and had nothing to do with Community Matters.  But I was convinced that there were people who had hacked in to the system to assure that Community Matters was offline permanently.  The funny thing is that it wasn’t just me . . . I had a number of Community Matter junkies who are dedicated followers of the blog that were likewise convinced that someone had done serious damage to my site somehow. One friend actually tracked down an administrator at Word Press and was assured that it was a network-wide problem, not just Community Matters. All I could think of was all the work that I had done and all the comments from readers . . . would we ever be up and running again? 

Within a couple of hours the Word Press system was repaired and Community Matters was back online.  To those who watched it disappear and were concerned, thank you!  I guess it was just a bit of over-reaction on my part. 

I received the following explanation from Word Press who hosts Community Matters, and thought you might find their explanation of interest. If all life’s problems could be so easily solved!

      WordPress.com Downtime Summary

WordPress.com was down yesterday for approximately 110 minutes, our worst downtime in four years. The outage affected 10.2 million blogs, including our VIPs, and appears to have deprived those blogs of about 5.5 million pageviews.

What Happened: We are still gathering details, but it appears an unscheduled change to a core router by one of our datacenter providers messed up our network in a way we haven’t experienced before, and broke the site. It also broke all the mechanisms for failover between our locations in San Antonio and Chicago. All of your data was safe and secure, we just couldn’t serve it.

What we’re doing: We need to dig deeper and find out exactly what happened, why, and how to recover more gracefully next time and isolate problems like this so they don’t affect our other locations. I will update this post as we find out more, and have a more concrete plan for the future.

I know this sucked for you guys as much as it did for us — the entire team was on pins and needles trying to get your blogs back as soon as possible. I hope it will be much longer than four years before we face a problem like this again.

St. Davids Golf Club on Agenda for Board of Supervisors Meeting . . . Lawsuit on Hold Pending Outcome of Meeting

Late yesterday, the township posted the agenda for Monday night’s Board of Supervisors Meeting, which includes St. Davids Golf Club.  Or, rather under Township Business, the agenda item actually reads, ‘St. Davids path’.  I think that this is a good first step and shows a degree of willingness on the part of the supervisors to continue the dialogue with the residents. Although I am pleased that our supervisors have agreed to add St. Davids to the agenda, for me the true test will come Monday night.  I am hopeful that the voices of this community have been heard and that the supervisors will make the right decision about St. Davids.

Along the same lines, John Petersen’s complaint against the township and Supervisors Lamina, Kampf, Olson and Richter is now on hold; it will not be filed today.  With the addition of  St. Davids to the agenda for the Board of Supervisors meeting, John has decided to hold off filing the lawsuit until after Monday night’s meeting.  Right now we are all in the ‘wait and see’ mode until Monday night; but depending on the outcome of the Supervisors Meeting maybe a lawsuit will no longer be needed.

Community does Matter. I am excited that our voices are being heard . . . Come Monday night we will see if the supervisors are listening.  This will be an important meeting and I encourage you to attend or watch the meeting from home.

********************************************************************

Post Update:

Since this morning’s post, John Petersen has done an interview with Blair Meadowcroft of Main Line Suburban Life.   John reiterates his decision to put the lawsuit ‘on hold’ pending the outcome of Monday’s Board of Supervisors Meeting. To read the article, here is a link.

_________________________________________________

We don’t accomplish anything in this world alone . . . and whatever happens is the result of the whole tapestry of one’s life and all the weavings of individual threads from one to another that creates something.

– Sandra Day O’Connor