Inconsistent policies. Shoddy record-keeping. Misstep after misstep. "Overzealous" use of technology "without any apparent regard for privacy considerations."Heads! Rolling. I do not believe the school district is going to be the victor in this case. I do wonder however if it will get appealed all the way up to the Supreme Court, and which side the Obama administration would take on such an issue.
Those were the conclusions a team of lawyers and computer experts reached after a 10-week investigation into how, when, and why the Lower Merion School District turned on the Web cams and software that secretly snapped thousands of photos and screen shots from student's laptop computers.
The report, released Monday night, found that the software activated by the district in the last two years captured nearly 58,000 images, mostly from lost or stolen laptops.
But because employees frequently failed to turn off the tracking system, more than 50,000 of those images were taken after the computers had been recovered and given back to students.
Many were photos of students, their friends, or families, in their homes or elsewhere, the report said.
A footnote mentioned "a number of photographs of males without shirts," but the report said no images contained "nudity" or otherwise appeared to show students in a compromising situation. Investigators said they found no proof that school staffers intentionally used the technology to spy on students.
But the report repeatedly faulted employees and administrators in one of the region's elite public school districts as enamored of their cutting-edge technology even as they were blind to its risks.
I'm betting the Eric Holder DoJ would side with Lower Merion and not the students, which tells you everything you need to know about my opinion of this administration on privacy issues.
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You're making a very big assumption if you think Eric Holder would take the side of Lower Merion. The school clearly violated the 4th Amendment rights of dozens of students. There is no way he would try to defend that.
Agreed anonymous, now as to which side the Supreme Court would take... looking at Scalia's statement on the recent instance of strip searching a student to find over the counter medicines in schools, well I'd be willing to put my money on student rights once again going down the drain.
It's incredibly hard to defend the school on this one. The school demonstrably knew where the computer was, and took webcam images and screenshots of the computer in the Robbin's home.
If the DoJ sides with the school, it's not only the students' rights inside the school that are gone. It's the families inside the family home as well.
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