Lower Merion’s notorious ‘WebcamGate’ scandal to become an Amazon docuseries
Mark Wahlberg is executive producing “Spy High,” a four-part series premiering this spring.
The new docuseries Spy High follows the 2010 scandal about Lower Merion School District laptops secretly photographing students via webcams.
The show will follow Harriton High School student Blake Robbins, a 15-year-old accused of selling drugs. The evidence? A photograph captured on his school-issued laptop without his knowledge or consent, in which he was holding a Mike and Ike candy that officials claimed was a pill.
That incident led his Penn Valley parents, Michael and Holly Robbins, to sue the school district for allegedly spying on students through remote-activated cameras, violating the Fourth Amendment and other privacy laws.
Another student in the same district at Lower Merion High School, Jalil Hasan, also sued for similar reasons. The scandal, dubbed “WebcamGate,” led to months of hostile legal battles that resulted in the school district paying a $610,000 settlement. Robbins received $175,000, most of which was placed in a trust, and Hasan received $10,000. The rest went to paying the families’ legal fees.
In 2008, the district lent 2,300 students Apple MacBooks equipped with tracking software that allowed remote operation of webcams in case of loss or theft. Once activated, the software captured webcam photos and screenshots of the laptop every 15 minutes. Though Robbins and other impacted students had not reported missing or stolen devices, some laptops were being tracked because they had failed to pay required insurance fees, and thus the district considered them unauthorized users.
Over the course of two years, the system stored more than 56,000 images, the majority coming from missing laptops. That number also included photos of some 40 students whose devices continued taking photos after the laptops were returned. Robbins’ laptop took hundreds of photos of him in his room, including while he was sleeping and shirtless.
WebcamGate rocked the Philadelphia suburbs with debates over student privacy and school surveillance, which have become thornier issues in the past 15 years with more technology used in classrooms.
Spy High will bring the spotlight back to this dark chapter in Lower Merion School District history. Mark Wahlberg is an executive producer through his company Unrealistic Ideas. The four-part series will premiere at SXSW in March and will begin streaming on Amazon Prime Video in April.