The motion, part of an ongoing case alleging unauthorized webcam spying on the student by the school, accuses the IT department at the school of snapping images of various members of Robbins' family, including pictures of the boy partially undressed and sleeping. Numerous screenshots of private instant messenger communication between Blake and his friends were also harvested, according to the filing.
The motion also alleges that the IT department has poached some images, making it difficult to retrieve them for legal purposes. "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," the motion said. Incidents allegedly included a student with a similar name to another reporting a laptop missing, causing webcam pictures and screenshots to be taken off the wrong individual.
The lawsuit also documents the plaintiffs' suspicion that one Lower Merion School District employee may have been downloading pictures obtained by the LANRev monitoring technology to a home computer, based on invocation of the Fifth Amendment when asked about the subject. "Second, emails suggest that [employee] may be a voyeur," said the filing. "For instance, in one email, when one IT person commented on how the viewing of the webcam pictures and screenshots from a student's computer was like 'a little LMSD soap opera', [employee] responded 'I know, I love it!'."
The plaintiffs pressed the court to let them obtain access to the employee's computer in order to image the hard drive.
In a response filed the following day, the Lower Merion School District argued that it was not appropriate for anyone other than the investigators to dictate the timing of the investigation and the release of complete findings. "A substantial number of webcam photos have been recovered in the investigation," it said, explaining that it had proposed a process to the judge to notify the families involved and give them the opportunity to view such photographs.
"While we deeply regret the mistakes and misguided actions that have led us to this situation, at this late stage of the investigation we are not aware of any evidence that district employees used any LANRev WebCam photographs of screenshots for such inappropriate purposes," added David Ebby, president of the school district's board of school directors.