FBI investigating school district for activating webcams in student’s home

A law-enforcement official with knowledge of the case says the FBI has opened a criminal investigation into a Pennsylvania school district accused of activating webcams inside students’ homes without their knowledge.

The lawsuit was filed in eastern Pennsylvania, but Team 4 investigator Paul Van Osdol reported that some school districts in the western part of the state also send students home with laptops.

Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School — based in Midland, Beaver County — has 9,000 students with take-home laptops. None of them has a webcam, and that’s no accident.

“The webcam would be in here at the top,” said Brian Laquinta, the school’s director of technology.

But the school removes webcams from all its laptops before giving them to students.

“Safety of our students is number one. We cannot allow any privacy concerns to get out,” said Laquinta.

Privacy is also a concern for parents of a student at Harriton High School in Lower Merion School District. In a lawsuit, the student says the assistant principal accused him of “inappropriate behavior” while at home. The evidence? A webcam photo from the student’s school-issued laptop.

The school says the webcams are activated remotely only to protect against loss or theft. But now the FBI is investigating whether the school district broke any wiretap laws.

“They should not have sent a webcam home with a student, period,” said Laquinta. “We never would have done that. That’s something that happens when people get into our business that don’t know what they’re doing.”

At Quaker Valley School District, every high school student gets a take-home laptop and they do have webcams. But a district spokesperson said the webcams do not have software that allows them to be programmed remotely, as was the case in Lower Merion.

The American Civil Liberties Union may go to court to stop Lower Merion School District from accessing webcams immediately.

The ACLU’s Vic Walczak told Van Osdol that he’d like to tell school officials to take a social studies class so they can brush up on the Constitution.

Lower Merion officials say they remotely activated webcams 42 times to find missing student laptops in the past 14 months, but never did so to spy on students, as the recent lawsuit claims.

The Montgomery County district attorney also is gathering information to determine whether to open an investigation.

There have been unrelated reports of hackers — or even people who the victims know — that are remotely activating webcams and microphones to spy on them. In most cases, the victims would not be aware that the devices are on.

To prevent that, an article on slate.com says you should keep your antivirus software up to date and should not open e-mail attachments from an unverified source — and if you want to be even more cautious, disconnect or cover your webcam when it is not in use.

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