Lower Merion High School - Laptop Controversy

Laptop Controversy

In the 2010 WebcamGate lawsuit, plaintiffs charged that Lower Merion School District (including Lower Merion High School and Harriton High School) secretly spied on students enrolled at the two high schools by surreptitiously and remotely activating webcams embedded in school-issued laptops the students were using at home, and therefore infringed on their privacy rights. The schools admitted to secretly snapping over 66,000 webshots and screenshots. Those included webcam shots of students in their bedrooms. In October 2010, the school district agreed to pay $610,000 to settle the Robbins and parallel Hasan lawsuits against it.

Two parents filed the lawsuit against the school district on February 11, 2010. The plaintiff was a student at one of the two district high schools. A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction ordering the district to stop its secret webcam monitoring, and ordered the district to pay the plaintiffs' attorney fees.

In July 2010, a Lower Merion High School student filed a parallel second suit. The school was also put on notice of a third parallel suit that a third student intends to bring, for "improper surveillance of the Lower Merion High School student on his school issued laptop", which included taking over 700 webcam shots and screenshots between December 2009 and February 2010.

A U.S. Senate Judiciary subcommittee held hearings on the issues raised by the schools' secret surveillance, and Senator Arlen Specter introduced draft legislation in the Senate to protect against it in the future. The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), U.S. Attorney's Office, and Montgomery County District Attorney all initiated criminal investigations of the matter, which they combined and then closed because they did not find evidence "that would establish beyond a reasonable doubt that anyone involved had criminal intent". The civil lawsuit has a much lower burden of proof, and is unaffected by the decision. Lower Merion Police Superintendent Michael McGrath said: "This would appear to be a matter to be resolved in civil court." An investigative report prepared by the law firm Ballard, Spahr LLP–the firm that the Lower Merion School District had hired to defend it–did not find evidence that the system "was used to 'spy' on students", but was unable in many instances to find who had authorized that the system take surreptitious photographs, for what reason, and to find copies of photographs that had been deleted from the school server.