School District Really Sorry For Inadvertently Turning Students Into Camwhores

In February, a Philadelphia-area teen and his parents sued the Lower Merion school district for allegedly spying on the 15-year-old via Webcam-enabled tracking software that had been installed on his school-supplied MacBook. The district, countering, claimed that the software was there to find lost or stolen computers, and that Blake Robbins’ machine was being watched via Webcam photos (the one at left that was snapped while Blake was napping with his laptop, according to the Robbins family) and screenshots because of his failure to pay insurance on the laptop. The district was pretty adamant that it had done nothing wrong-until earlier this afternoon, when it released a statement saying that, oh, yes, there actually might have been some inappropriate remote surveillance going on, and that its servers were actually storing thousands of images culled from students’ computers. Oops?

This all started over some confusion regarding the narcotic nature of the somewhat gross candies known as Mike & Ikes.

Blake Robbins, a Harriton High School sophomore, says Assistant Principal Lindy Matsko confronted him in Nov. 2009 for engaging in “improper behavior” at his home.

The 16-year-old from Penn Valley, Pa. claims Matsko showed him photos remotely taken with the built-in webcam on his MacBook, according to the suit.

In the photos, the teen was allegedly holding two pill-shaped objects, says Robbins’ attorney Mark Haltzman. School officials believed they were drugs, while the family maintains they were simply Mike-N-Ike candy.

“They were trying to allege that…those were pills annd somehow he was involved in selling drugs,” Halzman said Friday.

When the family protested the webcam use as an invasion of privacy, the district claimed they had the right to “24/7 access” to the systems, the suit says.

Whether or not the family was part of some grand icky-sweets-related coverup, the district denied charges of spying and a number of parents seemed to side with it, organizing against the Robbins’ lawsuit and generally grumbling about the Waste Of Their Tax Dollars that would result from a protracted legal action.

But then one employee of the school — Carol Cafiero, the information systems coordinator who the school district placed on leave in March — irritated the Robbins’ lawyer by attempting to quash a subpoena last month and then repeatedly invoking the Fifth Amendment (you know, the one about self-incrimination) during her deposition last Friday. Even though she hadn’t been personally named in the initial suit. Which meant it was time to go through her inbox! From a motion filed yesterday and subsequently granted by a Federal judge:

Second, emails suggest that Carol Cafiero may be a voyeur. For instance, in one email, when one IT person commented on how the viewing of the webcam pictures and screen shots from a student’s computer was like “a little LMSD soap opera,” Cafiero responded “I know, I love it!”

Man, for someone who “works in tech,” Carol Cafiero apparently is not so good at hiding potentially incriminating e-mails. Not to mention leaving somewhat-cheeky speculation about why one might be engaging in certain behaviors for non-online conversations!

Lower Merion’s statement noted that all those students who were caught playing unwitting roles in the “soap opera” would be individually notified as the district’s internal investigation unfolded over the coming weeks. (The parents, for their part, have yet to respond.) It’s like drama club callbacks, only with no auditions!