Smile, You're On Lower Merion School District Camera! Part 2

An update on this story from last week of a school district who apparently took 50,000+ pictures of students using the webcams on the student-issued laptops.  The school's defense?  Rather typical, in fact.

Blake Robbins should have known better.

So says the official who ran the Lower Merion School District's controversial computer security system when it snapped Robbins' picture in his home and led to his invasion-of-privacy suit against the district.

Even in his own home, the Harriton High School sophomore had "no legitimate expectation of privacy" from the camera on his school-issued laptop, information systems coordinator Carol Cafiero contended in a court filing on Tuesday.

Cafiero - who is on paid leave while the district investigates the laptop controversy - claimed Robbins lost any legal protection from the Web-camera security system when he took a school laptop home without permission.

Robbins had previously broken "at least two" school computers and did not pay the insurance fee required to get permission to take home the Apple MacBook that later snapped his pictures, Cafiero's attorney, Charles Mandracchia, wrote in the filing.

"When you're in the home, you should have a legitimate expectation of privacy," Mandracchia said in an interview. "But if you're taking something without permission, how can you cry foul when you shouldn't have it anyway?"

You have "no legitimate expectation of privacy" as far as technology goes in 2010 as a high school student?  I see this case going up a little higher than just Philadelphia, frankly.  But in all respects, that's a terrible legal defense.  He voided his right to privacy by having the school issued laptop without paying the insurance fee to take the laptop home?  Why didn't the school simply contact Robbins and have him return the laptop?  Certainly if the pictures the security webcam software showed the location and user of the laptop as Blake Robbins, why didn't the school simply ask Robbins to return it, rather than continuing to violate his privacy?

Naah, let's keep taking pictures of the kid.  That's fair, right?

Short term, the school district's screwed on this one.  But long term, this is just the precedent-setting kind of stupidity that the Roberts-Alito-Thomas-Scalia bloc would love to sink their fangs into and declare a sweeping judgment that nobody has a reasonable expectation of electronic privacy in America anymore.