The original content of Democracy Now! Headlines appears under the Creative
Commons BY-NC-ND 3.0 License (United States). For more, including their other
shows and media, visit www.democracynow.org.
April 20, 2010

56,000 Images Captured on Monitored Student Laptops at Pa. Schools
------------------------------------------------------------------



And in Pennsylvania, a suburban Philadelphia school district has
admitted to capturing at least 56,000 photographs and screenshots from
cameras on computer laptops issued to its students. The Lower Merion
School District has previously acknowledged it monitored students by
remotely activating the laptops’ cameras. School officials have claimed
they were trying to recover missing or stolen computers. The family of a
student targeted by the monitoring has filed a federal lawsuit against
the Lower Merion district. The student, Blake Robbins, was photographed
over 400 times during a fifteen-day period last year, sometimes as he
slept or was half-dressed. The district used images from Robbins’ laptop
to accuse him of consuming drugs, only to realize that what it thought
were drugs was actually candy.



.