Student foresaw Web-cam troubles

In hindsight, the e-mail looks eerily prophetic.

A high school student sent it to the Lower Merion School District's top technology administrator in 2008, weeks before the district began handing out laptops to students.

The teenager had done his homework, researching the software the district planned to load on every machine. He discovered the system would allow employees to remotely monitor students' laptops, and called it "appalling" that the district hadn't told anyone.

"I could see not informing parents and students of this fact causing a huge uproar," said the student's e-mail, which The Inquirer has reviewed.

In her reply, information systems director Virginia DiMedio told the student not to worry.

"If we were going to monitor student use at home we would have stated so," her e-mail said. "Think about it - why would we do that? There is no purpose. We are not a police state."

DiMedio ended her reply: "I suggest you take a breath and relax."

Twenty months after that e-mail exchange, the uproar the student predicted has engulfed the elite school district, fanned by a lawsuit and a federal investigation into how, when, and why Lower Merion officials activated the Web cams and tracking systems on students' laptops.

At a public meeting Monday night, a team of lawyers and computer experts hired by the district plans to report the results of their investigation into the Web-cam saga.

The lawyers, from the Center City firm Ballard Spahr, and the forensic technicians, from the company L3, have spent hundreds of hours poring over tens of thousands of e-mails, documents, and images. Midway through their probe, they had already billed the district for $550,000 in work.

Some of their findings are known: About 80 times in two years, the investigators have reported, district employees activated the Web cams and software, snapping more than 56,000 photos and computer-screen images, mostly on lost laptops. That was the system's purpose: to track down lost and stolen computers.

But in at least a half-dozen instances, no one turned off the cameras after the laptops were returned to students. For days or weeks, the cameras kept working, capturing tens of thousands of images, including photos of students and the interiors of their homes.

District leaders have for weeks acknowledged "serious mistakes" regarding the use and management of the now-disabled system, but they have yet to say who, if anyone, was to blame.

What has emerged, in interviews and a review of records, is a sense that a noble and groundbreaking initiative - leveling the academic playing field by letting every student, rich or poor, take home a state-of-the-art computer - became unglued over a lack of clear policies to protect students' privacy.

That became especially glaring when district officials realized Web cams had been running - snapping photos every 15 minutes - long after missing laptops had been found.

"There should have been a process in place that ensured staff knew when a laptop was found and/or an automatic alert should have been provided to administrators so the tracking could be turned off," the lead lawyer, Henry E. Hockeimer Jr., reported to the school board last month.

His full report, to be released at the board meeting Monday at Harriton High School, is likely to refer to e-mails and documents and, for the first time, precisely address what went wrong.

DiMedio said she expected to figure prominently in the report. She was the administrator who ran the technology operation for the district's 10 schools and administration and who approved the purchase and installation of the $150,000 software in 2007.

In an interview Friday at the office of her attorney, Nicholas M. Centrella, DiMedio said she had never envisioned the furor because she had never thought the Web cams and tracking software would be used for anything but their intended purpose: to find lost and stolen computers.

"I know I didn't do anything wrong," said DiMedio, who retired in June. "It's easy now to say, 'Why the hell didn't I think about privacy?' "

DiMedio said her e-mail reply to the student - whose name The Inquirer is withholding at his parents' request - had been based on her belief that the tracking system would never be used to snoop on students.

At the same time, she said, she believed that notifying everyone in the district of the tracking capability would defeat its purpose, effectively tipping off potential thieves.

DiMedio said she didn't know how to use or activate the tracking system and had delegated those tasks to system coordinator Carol Cafiero and a technician, Michael Perbix.

Cafiero, who along with Perbix is on paid leave while the district completes its investigation, told The Inquirer last week that the tracking system had been plagued by a lack of written policies or procedures.

DiMedio disputed that, saying she recalled drafting and sharing a memo on procedures. She could not remember the details and said the memo was probably in district files.

She also said that more than once during the 2008-09 school year she had asked to meet with a district lawyer to discuss the potential legal pitfalls of giving every student a laptop to take home.

"There was no model for us," DiMedio said. She said her requests had been ignored. Hockeimer, whom the district hired in March to lead its investigation, declined to comment on her remarks.

DiMedio said another reason she had not raised privacy concerns was that she had trusted her employees not to spy on anyone. "In my mind, it never would happen," she said.

District investigators have said they have found no evidence of any improper monitoring or images of students that might be considered "salacious."

The only spying allegation has come from Harriton sophomore Blake Robbins, who with his parents filed a civil lawsuit contending that the Web cams and tracking were an invasion of students' privacy.

Robbins, 15, said in the suit that he had discovered the tracking activity when an assistant Harriton principal, Lindy Matsko, confronted him in November with a Web-cam photo that showed him at home in Penn Valley.

The Robbinses' attorney, Mark S. Haltzman, contends the photo was among more than 400 that Robbins' computer surreptitiously snapped before the tracking system was turned off Nov. 4.

In court papers, Cafiero has said Robbins had "no legitimate expectation of privacy" from the camera on his school-issued laptop because he had previously damaged two such laptops and had not paid a required $55 insurance fee - contentions the district has neither confirmed nor denied.

But who ordered the monitoring on Robbins' computer and why remain unclear. A log sheet listing all the activations for this school year shows that a building technician at Harriton asked Perbix to activate the tracking but doesn't say why.

An initial attempt to settle the Robbinses' suit without a trial ended without an agreement. Haltzman has said there will be no new talks until he sees all the evidence in the case.

He is expected to interview Cafiero under oath this week.

As for DiMedio, she has not forgotten the years of work she and others devoted to launching the laptop project with the best of intentions for the district's 2,300 high school students. In a few weeks, she said, all that has been "just sullied by the kinds of things I've read in the newspaper."

She said no one who had worked on the project could have foreseen all this.

"There was nobody to say, 'You're out here and you're the pioneer, and you're going to get the arrows in your back.' "