Free Republic

With lawyers' fees approaching $1 million, the webcam controversy in the Lower Merion School District has become a legal feeding frenzy best brought to a speedy conclusion. What Lower Merion students and their parents are waiting to learn, first and foremost, is that the highly regarded district has put policies in place to prevent any repeat of the surreptitious webcam photos taken of students with school-issued laptops reported missing.

Not a rare handful but 56,000 photos of Lower Merion students were taken by the school district's laptop spy system over the last two years including those of the kids in various states of undress and in their beds. Also, the websites they visited and online chats they made were also perused by district officials and appear to be the subject of faculty lounge gossip. As the scandal runs its course probably one or two heads are going to roll at the Pennsylvania district in the Philadelphia suburbs but a whole lot of those tasked with educating the young and...

Report: 56,000 Web Images At District LOWER MERION, Pa. - Philly.com says an attorney for the Lower Merion school district acknowledged at least 56,000 web-cam images were taken of students over a two-year period.The bombshell announcement on the Web site for the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News will ignite the already hot debate over the district's policy of using remote surveillance technology to track the students. The data was given to The Philadelphia Inquirer on Monday by Henry Hockeimer, a school district lawyer. That information was subsequently published on Philly.com. Hockeimer works for Ballard Spahr, a high-profile Philadelphia law...

The system that Lower Merion school officials used to track lost and stolen laptops wound up secretly capturing thousands of images, including photographs of students in their homes, Web sites they visited, and excerpts of their online chats, says a new motion filed in a suit against the district. More than once, the motion asserts, the camera on Robbins' school-issued laptop took photos of Robbins as he slept in his bed. Each time, it fired the images off to network servers at the school district. Back at district offices, the Robbins motion says, employees with access to the images marveled...

This investigation into the remote spying allegedly being conducted against students at Lower Merion represents an attempt to find proof of spying and a look into the toolchain used to accomplish spying. Taking a look at the LMSD Staff List, Mike Perbix is listed as a Network Tech at LMSD. Mr. Perbix has a large online web forum footprint as well as a personal blog, and a lot of his posts, attributed to his role at Lower Merion, provide insight into the tools, methods, and capabilities deployed against students at LMSD. Of the three network techs employed at LMSD, Mr....