School for spies- the Pennsylvania scandal gets bigger

David Heath
Tuesday, 20 April 2010 12:42

IT Policy - Regulation

Previously, the Lower Merion School District has insisted that they only ever spied on lost or stolen school-owned laptops.  The latest court filings show this is patently false.  School for spies, or spies for school, you decide.

This story first broke a few weeks ago with claims by high school student Blake Robbins and his parents that Blake's school had spied on him at home. 

For those unfamiliar with the original story, Blake's parents were "summoned to the Principal's office" to be informed of some inappropriate behaviour he had undertaken.  The problem was that this behaviour took place in Blake's bedroom and was presented to his parents in the form of a series of still images captured by the web-cam in the school-supplied laptop that happened to be on the desk in his room.

For most readers, that's enough to set off some very loud alarm bells.

It did for Blake's parents Michael and Holly who filed suit in the US District Court alleging all kinds of malfeasance.

Late last week, they filed a revised action which has greatly expanded the range of unreasonable behaviour.

The new filing also puts lie to the claims that the use of remote monitoring systems was confined to lost / stolen computers.  Note that with this in mind, there has been some dispute regarding the status of the Robbins' laptop- there are reports that he had a loan laptop and others have suggested that it should not have been off school grounds as the required insurance cover had not been purchased.

This does not excuse any of the subsequent behaviour.