<p>If this happened to my kid, I would probably not run to a lawyer. I would take it to the administration and a public school board meeting. Any parent who chooses to speak publically at a school board meeting can easily engage the local media from there.
My gut reaction would not to be to attorney shop but I would not call anyone who chooses legal representation a “low-life”. Some people like to file lawsuits but the fact that they did in this case and in other cases in the past doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t have good cause here. </p>
<p>Hunt - I agree that it was probably ill-conceived as opposed to malicious. However - these people are supposed to be smart! They get paid to think things through - I would like to know what they really were thinking!</p>
<p>This would have likely been my first reaction too… although again as the district’s other legal troubles have demonstrated they’re often not too keen to fix their own mistakes unless taken to court over the matter–even when they’re told internally that what they’re doing is illegal. </p>
<p>To quote their own internal documents (recently made public) on other legal issues:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Again, there were complaints raised over the webcams and the school officials did nothing–until they were sued.</p>
<p>“Most of the anger relates to the Robbins’ failure to engage in the many community-based forums that exist for handling issues like this, and instead resorting directly to the courts.”</p>
<p>If the matter were frivolous and without merit there would not be an ongoing investigation by the FBI and the US Attorney. Further, other school districts who have implemented the same surveillance capabilities would not now be running like cockroaches when the lights get turned on.</p>
<p>In my opinion the LMSD engaged in illegal activity. Whether individuals will be charged and ultimately convicted of criminal activity remains to be seen. </p>
<p>Frankly I don’t understand either the attitudes of those who defend the school district and have a need to trash a family that is exercising its legal rights. I for one am grateful to the family for helping to preserve my constitutional rights.</p>
<p>I think there are two legitimate criticisms of the plaintiffs’ decision to become plaintiffs, i.e., to file a lawsuit. </p>
<p>First, obviously, is cost. Lawsuits are about 50 times more expensive than any other means of resolving issues. That’s especially a concern here, where there is a huge overlap between the class being protected (students and their families) and the class who will have to pay the cost of any settlement (students and faculty, through budget cuts, and township residents, through taxes). </p>
<p>Second is more subtle, and probably more important. The existence of a pending suit makes it virtually impossible to have a meaningful public dialog about what to do, how to fix the problems. That is especially serious if a case drags on. I have real experience of that in my business life (sorry, can’t give details). In effect, authority to resolve the issues is removed from democratic institutions (in this case, the school board and its frequent open meetings) and placed in the hands of lawyers, with modest oversight from a judge and clients. And whatever resolution they craft becomes extremely hard to fix when (as is often the case) it doesn’t work.</p>
<p>That is not to say that there isn’t lots to be said on the other side of the question. Students DID raise privacy concerns through less formal channels. They weren’t stonewalled, but they didn’t get the focused attention the suit provoked, either. More changed in the three days after the suit was filed than in the 18 months of laptop use that preceded it. At this point, I don’t think anyone believes the suit is frivolous.</p>
<p>It has had more widespread effects as other school districts around the country review their policies which I think is a good thing. It’s also created a great discussion topic for high-schools around the country.</p>
<p>I disagree. In fact, doing so is LMSD’s best and quickest way out of this hole and limiting its costs.</p>
<p>This is not a private litigant. It is a public entity which owes its public transparent and clear communications. As soon as an investigation is complete, LMSD can say, for example,</p>
<p>"We engaged WXZ forensics techs who did a detailed scrub on all uses of the spyware and any tampering with the access logs. We can/cannot verify that the webcams were activated x times, and a total of x images and screenshots were taken. For privacy reasons, we cannot identify specific families invovled, but we have shared the relevant details with each family impacted.</p>
<p>"We have confirmed that there was no spying intent among any LMSD staff [much tougher situation of it gets messy], but regret that our focus was on protection of property without sufficient attention to protection of individual privacy. We have learned form this occurrence and privacy rights will be a major consideration in all our actions going forward.</p>
<p>“We acknowledge our moral responsibility and are committed to working with the families involved and the entire LMSD community to ensure that LMSD becomes a beacon supporting awareness of the constitutional liberties that form the bedrock of this country.”</p>
<p>Some will say that is litigation suicide. I say it is both the right thing to do, and the best way for LMSD to limit its exposure.</p>
<p>BTW, what is in the water over there anyway? I just read John Yoo, the estimable Bush torture memo writer, grew up there (although went to a nearby private school). Is the Liberty Bell still standing?</p>
<p>I’d agree with BC Eagle. I’m willing to believe that the school district was clueless in adopting the software and using it, but somebody should have been smarter last November when the issue was first raised. The reported postings of their tech guy were positively creepy. </p>
<p>But LMSD wasn’t smart enough to recognize that they were WAY out of bounds, and now the full force of the law is descending upon them - state and federal, with both criminal and civil issues pending. Not smart on their part.</p>
<p>I’ve said it before: Mr. Miranda wasn’t a nice guy, but we all benefit from the protections provided by the Miranda decision. Frankly, if it had been MY kid surreptitiously photographed/captured on video at home, I would have gone ballistic. And at this point we have no idea how many images have been secretly captured. I wonder how many of those same parents who are tearing down the Robbins family would feel if they found that their child had been secretly photographed or recorded. The lawsuit also accomplishes a public good: the district has been ordered to preserve information, and had that not been ordered, it is hard to believe that they would have kept it around for public review.</p>
<p>I am reminded of our trip to Greece during the Chernobyl disaster. At first the French newspapers (the only ones we could read) were pooh-pooing the “over-reaction” of people in Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands – but when they learned that the radiation readings were much higher in France than the government had been reporting, the story was a much different one. LMSD could easily end up being the same.</p>
<p>Maybe instead of being angry at those who sue the school district officials for conducting illegal activities/practices these select district families should be angry at the school officials for engaging in such activity in the first place. Just a thought…</p>
<p>I mean seriously, this is like blaming the police for the expense incurred by your kid getting speeding tickets instead of blaming your kid for constantly speeding.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Mr. Miranda is completely irrelevant. He didn’t have a choice – he had to try to vindicate his rights, or go to prison (stay in prison, actually).</p></li>
<li><p>If your child had been secretly photographed, you would have gone ballistic . . . but I hope you would have gone ballistic to the principal, or the superintendent before going to a lawyer and spending three months preparing to sue. That’s what this guy didn’t do.</p></li>
<li><p>For better or worse, the “tearing down” of the Robbins family is based, at least in some significant part, on knowing them, not on imagining them. Everyone admits that their lawsuit has merit; everyone agrees that their prior legal problems are irrelevant. Many of the people badmouthing them don’t know them, but many do, or feel that they do and have some legitimate basis for that. This isn’t some ginormous community – they had two kids close in age at a high school with about 200 kids per class, and three other kids in middle school or elementary school. Lots of folks have run across them.</p></li>
<li><p>clueless, your lovely, idealistic suggestion is EXACTLY why litigation is such a last-choice way of resolving problems. That statement cannot possibly be made prior to a trial, which would be years down the road, and if it is made will not move the case an inch towards resolution (except to the extent it raises the settlement value for the plaintiffs’ lawyers, who are the real parties in interest here). One of the things that probably can’t happen is honest, direct communication between the District and any family that has in fact been damaged. Given that those families are ostensibly represented by the lawyers, the lawyers would have to have first crack at the information. or at the families.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>JHS, I can assure you that I do not trade in lovely idealism (although I do try to live by ideals).</p>
<p>This case clearly has legs, and LIABILITY is not in question. LMSD needs to focus on limiting DAMAGES. LMSD can do that by getting ahead of the curve, and building good will, or LMSD can keep digging in and prove the point that they must be “taught a lesson”.</p>
<p>As to the “surprise” lawsuit, the record is clear that school officials were repeatedly questioned about the spycam policy and repeatedly endorsed continuing it. The record is also clear that the Robbins family did not move to suit until a guidance counselor informed them in JANUARY that the incident was made a permanent record in Blake’s school file (so much for no “use” made of the spycam other than laptop recovery). They had already run into the brick wall of LMSD’s “supportiveness”.</p>
<p>So on top of that the Robbins’ should have said “hey, now we are going to sue you, so go scrub all the evidence before you get served”? No, I don’t trade in lovely idealism, so I would have brought the suit “first” at that point too.</p>
<p>And JHS, I am at somewhat of a loss to understand your repeated focus on the irrelevance of the popularity of the Robbins family. On top of irrelevance, these are hearsay cheap shots – you admit you have no first-hand knowledge of the family – and are not consistent with the integrity and intelligence generally a hallmark of your posts. Why are you trading in ugly, cynical gossip?</p>
<p>JHS - I am fuzzy on the chronology of all of this - did the parents not contact the school?
Did the school administrators and school board first hear about this when they were served with a law suit?</p>
<p>Even so - this is what bothers me. Public schools have policies. They have huge policy books and a policy for everything. The School Board must discuss and vote on each policy. This administration and school board must have had a policy concerning the lap tops and the tracking of such - unless the Technology director did this independently. If that is the case, he should be fired immediately and the school district should step aside and allow him to be prosecuted.
School administrators and school boards employ legal counsel. The LMSD school board president is an attorney. These are not stupid people.</p>
<p>Won’t the specific facts and circumstances of this case matter in terms of discretion to prosecute and certainly if it ever comes to potential penalties for violations? Putting aside for a moment just what the law “ought” to ensure(and I’m on the side of the majority on this), this kind of case, dealing with issues of privacy and cybertechnology in the tracking and potential for tracking of the district’s own stolen property has never come to court before. It may be found to be sufficiently unlike others that have to beg the question as to whether current laws that are in place are specific enough. There are currently privacy experts arguing both sides of the application of law based on past rulings. What the school district believed it was able to do with respect to monitoring its own stolen or lost property, the precautions and policies they had in place, the circumstances and details of the plaintiff’s case and their credibility, investigations into other times and places the tracking software was used and by whose authority - all will be relevant if the case is prosecuted. </p>
<p>On issues of privacy, I agree - no undisclosed webcams with the potential to be activated should be in my kids’ rooms or yours now or in the future. On the issue of the case itself - since the plaintiffs lawyers are the only ones talking now, I don’t think we are close to knowing all the details yet. I don’t believe we can fully judge this matter until we do.</p>
<p>I think it’s likely they did seek legal advice (not saying it was good advice). </p>
<p>Yes, the parents never confronted the school directly as far as I know. Allegedly they were mad that some record of the meeting with the AP was being kept (if this is true - just the plaintiff’s word for it) and had no further conversations with the school on the matter.</p>
<p>^^ Fully judge, no. But we do know that LMSD activated a spycam in a student’s bedroom and is continuing to hold itself out as unreprentant and entitled to have done so. Open and shut 4th amendment, regardless of what one thinks of the various federal and state law criminal exposures.</p>
<p>I am finding this as mystifying as anything that this school district has done, truly.</p>
<p>But back to the question of why bring a lawsuit–I think that the truly unrealistic idealism, nay, naivete, would be to believe that a private airing of questions about what happened in this case, and what is happening potentially with other students, would have brought about an examination and change of policy, in LMSD and around the country, as has actually happened. I think that it stretches believability to think *anything *would have been changed–apparently, when questions *were *raised, nothing was.</p>
<p>The old saw that sunlight is the best disinfectant seems applicable here.</p>
<p>I’m trading in gossip because I think that filing a lawsuit here without trying to resolve it through normal processes was an anti-social act. I believe that without knowing a darn thing about the people who did it. But then it’s interesting that others consider them anti-social people. And there is enough objective correlation for me to believe that. What kind of a jerk do you have to be to get sued by your synagogue?</p>
<p>All of that is irrelevant to the legal issues about Lower Merion’s system and conduct, but not to the policy questions about whether this suit was a good idea.</p>
<p>Anyway, my understanding, which is consistent with the complaint, is that the Robbinses did NOT raise this as an issue in November when they were called in by the Assistant Principal, or in January, and that the principal, superintendent and school board found out about their complaint from the press, who had the plaintiffs’ press release. The “permanent record” bit was not in the complaint (I think), but was color added by their lawyer talking to the press. Since it’s not in the complaint, and the school district hasn’t said anything, it’s hard to tell what he was talking about. We may or may not find out some day.</p>
<p>The LMSD school board has attorneys, but I believe that no one surfaced any privacy issues here. THAT’s the argument for filing the suit: the software got disabled (supposedly) within 48 hours, because the actual decisionmakers seem to have been pretty horrified with what they had supposedly decided to do. (Disclosure: I do know a couple of board members, and many partners of a third. I have not discussed this with any of them, or with anyone who has discussed it with any of them.) I note that the board president specializes in real estate development and financing, as does at least one of the other attorneys on the board. Just being an attorney does not mean that you encounter privacy issues all the time.</p>
<p>The leadership is all new here, by the way. Which is another reason why informal means had a good chance of succeeding. The board president was first elected in December, in a contested vote that essentially amounted to demoting the previous chair, and the superintendent started this past fall. Neither was personally involved in the critical decisions at issue in this case.</p>
<p>“I’m trading in gossip because I think that filing a lawsuit here without trying to resolve it through normal processes was an anti-social act. I believe that without knowing a darn thing about the people who did it. But then it’s interesting that others consider them anti-social people. And there is enough objective correlation for me to believe that. What kind of a jerk do you have to be to get sued by your synagogue?”</p>
<p>I fail to understand JHS’s continued defense of the LMSD and trashing of the family, both based only on inference and inuendo. Climbing the inference ladder several rungs at a time can be dangerous. Second and third hand “facts” and character attributions are not conducive to getting at the truth. What is a “normal” process for addressing potential criminal behavior anyway? JHS has admitted to being connected to several board members and/or spouses of same. I think this has created some serious blind spots with respect to the seriousness of what has taken place.</p>
<p>JHS’s statement that suing the district without trying to resolve it through “normal processes” (whatever that means) makes the Robbins family anti-social is infuriating to me. Even “low-life,” “antisocial,” unpopular, or downright evil people have Constitutional rights. I for one am grateful to the Robbins for filing the lawsuit. I personally believe that the LMSD engaged in unlawful activity. I have no trust that school officials would have been transparent in an attempt to resolve the matter informally. I am glad the FBI and US Attorney are conducting investigations. They would not be wasting time if the matter were trivial.</p>
<p>I do have empathy for the citizens of the district who may have to end up paying more taxes, but they have the power to remove those individuals involved, especially if wrongdoing is proven. If criminal activity occurred I hope that appropriate punishment is imposed. More importantly I want to see the constitutional rights of the public restored.</p>
<p>By the way, synagogues and churches are not exempt from engaging in inappropriate or illegal activities, either. JHS’s pretzel logic is mystifying.</p>
<p>Technologists are usually more sensitive to this as it should be in their training. If you go into a computer science or engineering program, you usually have to take one or more courses in ethics with one hopefully related to technology. One could just read Slashdot on a regular basis to keep up with technology issues in general and privacy issues in particular. I would think that lawyers of any kind would find this stuff interesting but apparently many don’t.</p>
<p>Good to know, and to put your spin posts in context.</p>
<p>Why would someone be sued by their synagogue? I don’t know, but it seems to be in the nature of a collections lawsuit (unpaid tuition, pledges?), as do all of the others. The lawsuits (I believe all AGAINST the Robbins) paint a picture of a family that was making good money, bought a nice house, and has since hit the skids and have had a hard time covering the bills. How hard do any of us have to look to find someone in similar circumstances? Yes, it is a crime in America – and apparently an unforgiveable one in LMSD – to fall from wealth.</p>
<p>I am not here to defend the honor of the family or to argue they should still be living in a house if it has become beyond their means. </p>
<p>But I now understand the basis for JHS’s repeated cheap shots. Shame.</p>