Later On

Ed Brayton:

The situation in Lower Merion schools outside Philadelphia is even more absurd than anyone imagined. The school’s own investigation has concluded that more than 56,000 pictures of students were snapped through laptop webcams.

Lower Merion School District employees activated the web cameras and tracking software on laptops they gave to high school students about 80 times in the past two school years, snapping nearly 56,000 images that included photos of students, pictures inside their homes and copies of the programs or files running on their screens, district investigators have concluded.

In most of the cases, technicians turned on the system after a student or staffer reported a laptop missing and turned it off when the machine was found, the investigators determined.

And there’s more:

But in at least five instances, school employees let the Web cams keep clicking for days or weeks after students found their missing laptops, according to the review. Those computers – programmed to snap a photo and capture a screen shot every 15 minutes when the machine was on – fired nearly 13,000 images back to the school district servers.

The data, given to The Inquirer on Monday by a school district lawyer, represents the most detailed account yet of how and when Lower Merion used the remote tracking system, a practice that has sparked a civil rights lawsuit, an FBI investigation and new federal legislation.

The district’s attorney, Henry Hockeimer, declined to describe in detail any of the recovered Web cam photos, or identify the people in them or their surroundings. He said none appeared to show "salacious or inappropriate" images but said that in no way justified the use of the program.

"The taking of these pictures without student consent in their homes was obviously wrong," Hockeimer said.

A federal magistrate judge is expected this week to begin the process of arranging for parents whose children were photographed to privately view the photos.

The fact that the school is admitting this publicly now after its own investigation and admitting it was wrong suggests to me that none of this happened intentionally or systematically. Now I imagine the school will reach some sort of consent decree and settlement with the families affected and hopefully fix the whole system.