<p>The other thing that is going on here is that an assistant principal who may be nothing more than a conscientious educator has been smeared in the national media.</p>
<p>Since the family started it, hit’em with every legal tool at your disposal.</p>
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<p>Yes it’s clear that the photo was taken, but I don’t see where it’s been demonstrated yet to the court’s approval that the laptop was in the home without permission. </p>
<p>The school says he inappropriatly removed a laptop from the school. The family says he had permission to have the laptop, from the loaner pool, at home. </p>
<p>I’d actually theorize a third possibility in that they’re both correct. Someone at the school gave him permission to take the laptop home but because of an administrative snafoo (they gave him the wrong one or didn’t properly record the laptop as being ‘checked out’) the school ‘thought’ it was lost/stolen. </p>
<p>It’s this latter possibility, whether it happened or not, that puts the school in a shaky position. Normally to conduct a covert monitoring of someone in their private premises you would require court permission following a demonstration of probably cause. If the school had filed a police report, as they should have done, and conducted their actions under the supervision of law enforcement then they would have a lot more solid ground to stand on. </p>
<p>However taking what is normally a court authorized action into their own hands, namely determining whether or not there was true probably cause (aka was the laptop actually missing/stolen) to conduct a covert surveillance operation really puts them on shaky ground. What if they were wrong… what if the laptop was in fact taken home with permission even if the administrative system for tracking it suggested otherwise. </p>
<p>A court can issue a warrant and if it ultimately turns out the item wasn’t stolen then so long as the court had probable cause at the time then it’s still OK. However if a private entity takes the law into their own hands and tries to make that determination, and gets it wrong, well then they’ve got a mess on their hands. (Again this all sets aside the issue of secertly bugging home-use school equipment in the first place). </p>
<p>Ultimately it’s both their decision to bug school equipment, sent home with students, in secret and their subsequent decision to ‘take the law into their own hands’ that’s landed these officials in hot water.</p>
<p>Any number of possible standing scenarios here. Discovery might clear them up.</p>
<p>In any event, given my view of the case, I’m not even sure I’d want to have it dismissed at this point. I’d love, for example, to have my attorneys depose the kid and ask him about illegal drug use.</p>
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<p>I’m leaning to a policy problem with the school district. Apparently, he had one and I presume that he paid the $55 insurance fee but it was broken so he got a loaner from the school. It would be interesting to see where his original laptop was. If it was at the school, then the loaner was a replacement until they fixed his (I assume that the purchase their laptops with AppleCare which provides free service for three years). If he still had it, then it was his issue though I would think that he’d bring it in for service right away as he then couldn’t do his homework. My guess is that he brought his in for service and someone gave him a loaner. The district found that he didn’t pay the $55 for insurance for the loaner and someone decided to take a few more snapshots than necessary to find the location of the laptop. They may have a hole in their policy for loaners when a non-loaner breaks.</p>
<p>If the student has nothing to hide
a hair sample/test will clear the students name as far as drug use/selling/illegal behavior.</p>
<p>Easy to clear up if the student has nothing to fear…as that can be traced in the hair long after a clean urine sample.</p>
<p>Oh, please. That’s a lot of panty-twisting (#242). No one is going to jail, no one is going to be fired, and no one will be paying big damages if the policy is as the school described and no one used the system otherwise. There will almost certainly be changes in how things are done going forward, and some of them may be legally required, but there was no need to file a lawsuit to make that happen.</p>
<p>Of course the court hasn’t determined that the kid wasn’t authorized to take the laptop home yet. It hasn’t determined that he had Mike & Ikes in his hands, not 'ludes, either. (What prescription medicines look like Mike & Ikes? Another mystery.) The court hasn’t determined a darn thing yet, except for preliminary motions, which are complex enough in this case and involve no fact-finding. It will be months, maybe years, before the court determines anything, and the case will most likely end before that happens.</p>
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<p>The case at hand is not about illegal drug use. I don’t think a judge would look too highly upon your attorneys for badgering a minor into answering such questions that have nothing to do with the case–about drugs or anything else. </p>
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<p>Again, this is entirely irrelevant. This case has nothing to do illegal drug use.</p>
<p>Actually, the student and his family have maintained that this all started because of a false accusation of drug use. to be fair, I’m not sure if it was mentioned in the complaint. If it was, they clearly opened the door. Even if not, I would argue that they have opened the door through their efforts to use this accusation to try this case in the press.</p>
<p>I agree with both JHS and Rocketman08.
The case is not about illegal drug use–real or imagined. It is about invasion of privacy.
Whether or not the family wins the case, the policy is going to change. It has already changed, not only in LMSD but in other districts which had the same bright idea of monitoring what students do in their own homes.</p>
<p>As this thing unfolds it does look like the AP is one of the victims of this mess. What can we reasonably expect an AP to know of cyber security, spyware and the laws that govern them? She was presented with some kind of evidence that suggested the possibility of illegal activity (drugs), and instead of contacting the police and making it a criminal matter she decided to make it a school disciplinary matter. Which was most defiantly in the students best interest… </p>
<p>All of which does not absolve the School District for the gross and widespread privacy violations which in my opinion do reach the level of criminality. But BTW, absent of any hard evidence of cowboy hjinks on the part of school staff, no criminal charges will be filed even if technically warranted, e.g., had a private company done the same. One government entity rarely goes after another government entity. Look instead for a finding of no criminal behavior but a serious concern regarding past events, and an agreement between to SD and US Attorney to monitor for some period of time. And the civil case will be settled out of court in the plaintiffs favor.</p>
<p>I should make the basic premises for my position clear.</p>
<p>I am not as exercised about the LMSD policy as many of the other posters. But if was a parent who strongly opposed the policy, a would go to the prinicipal, the superintendent, and then (if necessary) publicly to the school board. Until I had taken those steps, I would not file a federal lawsuit with the potential to cost the school district large sums of money and cause collateral damage to the reputations of administrators who were just trying to do their job (even if they made mistakes). but, of course, that wouldn’t get me an interview with Katie Couric.</p>
<p>So I think the district’s reaction should be “Fine. You want to play that way, I can play too. We’re going to use every legal device available to show you the true costs of such behavior.” The reason, as Napoleon said when he shot the general, is to encourage the others. What goes around comes around.</p>
<p>EMM, from your string of comments, I absolutely would not want you as my lawyer if I were LMSD – a bull in the china shop, wrong on the law, and creating more damage than helping.</p>
<p>JMS:
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<p>Careful what you wish for. LMSD’s best path at this point is “blame it on the rogue underling”. Set up the little guy for the fall (key to stop the knowledge chain below the executive level), and disclaim any organizational knowledge of the practice. Time for the higher-ups to head for the hills, and they clearly left themselves this path by their selective non-disclosure of “who knew what when” initially authorizing the spycam planting.</p>
<p>I probably wouldn’t want me as my attorney either. But my point is that by defending this case hard, (even at considerable cost) you discourage similar behavior by other parents in the future.</p>
<p>Fog @#245:
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<p>And I bet you fly a really big American flag on the 4th of July and march in the local parade. I think there is a seat on the House Unamerican Activities Committee with your name on it. God bless America.</p>
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<p>I certainly don’t see such behavior as being in any way a productive use of taxpayer funds. </p>
<p>The family has a constitutional right to have their grievance addressed in a court of law. You may not agree with them expressing that right… but to suggest that the school should turn around and use taxpayer money to ‘teach them a lesson’ is just plain wrong to say the least.</p>
<p>Well, if the LMSD is doing this “to discourage other families” (to misquote Napoleon), it certainly is discouraging other SDs from maintaining the policy!</p>
<p>It will be interesting to see what more comes out about the student’s use of the computer & whether it was lost, missing or stolen…or falsely claimed to be. It seems to me that both parties (ie. school & student) may have acted inappropriately in using the computer(s).
Whether it was enough to make a “federal case” out if it…from the plaintiff’s perspective I’d guess $$$ was of interest. We shall see.</p>
<p>Do we know that the family didn’t approach the school before filing their lawsuit? Or are some posters just assuming that?</p>
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<p>This case is not going to go away. Things are moving very fast and not in the district’s favor. This has now become a worldwide case on computer privacy and federal courts are giving it the deference they would give the highest publicity cases. (Such as announcing they are actually reviewing the case). The ACLU has now joined the fray. You can’t read news from Australia to Sweden without the case hitting the front page.</p>
<p>Now that the district has admitted it remotely activated the camera and took pictures of the student without his knowledge they have no defenses left against a charge of invasion of privacy. Vigilante spying is not a defense, especially when the use of the pictures was totally unrelated to theft recovery. A number of legal blogs including some of the most respected legal scholars agree that there is at a minimum an egregious violation of 4th amendment rights. Federal and state statutes have also most likely been violated. </p>
<p>The plaintiffs should have no problem sustaining the class action suit, with over 42 (admitted) similar incidents of undisclosed remote activation in the past year alone. All told there must be hundreds of similar cases between the various schools in the district since the covert program had been put in place several years ago. There won’t be a shortage of furious parents supporting the case against the district. </p>
<p>Between the IT spy master for LMDS boasting all over the web about his covert operations, to the school using the photographs for totally unrelated purposes to laptop recovery and the admission that parents were not informed about the webcam spying, there are plenty of smoking guns. </p>
<p>Heads will roll all the way to the top of the school district (which has had reputation of arrogance for years) and the case is going to cost millions for the district to defend. In the past few months alone, it spent over $130,000 on the case, and that was BEFORE the case gathered steam. The fact that the district hired a high priced representative for damage control to “investigate” while part of the same law firm that defends them in the lawsuit is not helping them gaining credibility with the courts. The district is no longer allowed to talk to the public without first passing it by the plaintiffs, cannot erase any of the computer drives and can’t contact any of the other students whose rights may have been violated.</p>
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<p>Just a clarification: there are two high schools in the district. At one (Harriton) the computers were given to students beginning last year (Fall 2008). At the other (Lower Merion) this was the first year of the program. Computers are not given out in the middle or elementary schools.</p>