Reports from the Lower Marion School District in Pennsylvania now say that 56,000 photos and screen shots were taken from security software on student’s school laptops.
The district was sued in federal court in February by the parents of a student who was disciplined after school security personnel accused him of taking drugs. They showed him photos of himself taken from the web cam on his school-issued laptop. He claimed the images show him eating candy and his family said in court filings that they were never told there was monitoring software on the machine.
As we reported in February, the FBI is investigating.
The LANrev monitoring software on the machines was to be used only to track stolen machines and only two members of the IT staff had access to it, the district said. IT staff had switched on the cameras of missing computers 42 times this school year and recovered 18 machines, they said.
“In addition, discovery to date has now revealed that thousands of webcam pictures and screenshots have been taken of numerous other students in their homes, many of which never reported their laptops lost or missing,” an attorney wrote in a filing in the case.
TechHerald story here.
The suggestion that the software was activated and webcams switched on for voyeurism has hung over this case since the beginning. The possibility of a class action suit also is hanging over the district.
Tom Kelchner