School district agrees to preserve webcam evidence
The Lower Merion School District today agreed to preserve all potential evidence germane to a lawsuit that charges district officials with spying on students by using webcams on school-issued laptops.
The Lower Merion School District today agreed to preserve all potential evidence germane to a lawsuit that charges district officials with spying on students by using webcams on school-issued laptops.
The suit was filed last week in federal court by parents of a Harriton High School student. Attorneys for tenth-grader Blake J. Robbins, claimed the district planned to wipe clean the hard drives on the computers.
On Friday they filed for a temporary restraining order and an injunction that sought to bar the district from removing or changing any electronic data, files or storage media from the school laptops.
In U.S. District Court in Philadelphia this afternoon, Judge Jan E. Dubois stopped short of issuing an injunction but issued an order that prohibits the district from remotely activating any webcam in the computers.
Dubois also ordered that the computer issued to Robbins be turned over to a consultant who will make a "mirror image" of the computer's hard drive.
