'Webcamgate' findings

They knew Blake Robbins had the laptop. And they knew he'd taken it home.

Yet, at 1:10 p.m. on Oct. 20, Lower Merion School District officials decided to start capturing webcam photos and screenshots from the Harriton High School sophomore's school-issued Apple MacBook - by activating a controversial tracking feature that was supposed to be used only to recover missing or stolen laptops.

At 3:55 p.m., Mike Perbix, a network technician, e-mailed building-level technician Kyle O'Brien to inform him that "TheftTrack" was running on Robbins' computer, according to an independent investigation into the "Webcamgate" scandal.

"Now currently online at home," Perbix wrote, referring to Robbins' loaner computer, which school officials say he shouldn't have taken home because he hadn't paid the insurance fee.

Over the next 15 days, the program would capture at least 210 webcam photos and 218 screenshots, including a photo of Robbins sleeping, one of him partially undressed, and one of his father, Michael, inside their Penn Valley home.

Images of Blake Robbins' instant messages and video chats with friends were also sent to the district's servers.

The long-awaited report, conducted by the Ballard Spahr law firm and a computer-forensics company, was released last night after investigators reviewed about 500,000 pages of documents and interviewed 42 witnesses, in addition to the data collected by Lower Merion's laptop-tracking software.

Investigators retrieved from the district's databases nearly 58,000 webcam photos and screenshots, many of which were captured by laptops that had been found after having been reported stolen or missing.

The report was critical of the Main Line district's "overzealous" information-services staff, who activated the program "without any apparent regard for privacy considerations or sufficient consultation with administrators."

No evidence has surfaced that employees intentionally misused the technology to "spy" on students, but the lack of a written policy on when the program should have been activated and deactivated led to the "unwarranted collection of thousands of images of students." A federal judge is overseeing the process of contacting the affected families.

The 69-page report appears to confirm the Robbinses' assertion that the district was aware that Blake had taken a loaner laptop home, and that TheftTrack should not have been activated because the laptop's location was known. In February, the family filed an invasion-of-privacy lawsuit in federal court. They are seeking class-action status.

"By their own rules, they were only supposed to take pictures on lost or stolen computers, and Blake's was neither," his mother, Holly, told the Daily News. "They never once asked us to turn Blake's computer in."

"They handed it to me," Blake added.

The report disputes Holly Robbins' statement that she had tried to contact school officials before filing the lawsuit. It said investigators had "found no evidence that Ms. Robbins left messages with District personnel to that effect." The Robbinses' attorney, Mark Haltzman, said she had tried to reach an assistant principal, and possibly a guidance counselor, but got nowhere.

Technology personnel "withheld information" about the theft-tracking feature from the school board, district administrators and students, partially because they felt that publicizing the technology would "defeat its purpose," the report states.

Investigators concluded that the staff was "guarded when discussing TheftTrack's capabilities with District constituents" outside of the information-services department, but "they internally expressed zeal for what TheftTrack could do."

The FBI and Montgomery County detectives opened a criminal probe after the lawsuit was filed.

Nicholas Centrella, the attorney for Virginia DiMedio, the district's former top technology official, said DiMedio brushed aside a student intern's privacy concerns in 2008 because the software was supposed to be used only to find missing computers.

"I suggest you take a breath and relax," DiMedio e-mailed the student.

But Centrella said yesterday that if the program had been used to monitor Blake Robbins' computer because his family hadn't paid the insurance fee, "then it went beyond what she had authorized it to do." DiMedio retired last summer.

O'Brien, the district technician, has testified that Harriton High Assistant Principal Lindy Matsko had told him to activate the tracking on Robbins' computer, but Matsko testified that she never gave that order, according to the report.

"Had Blake not come forward, who knows?" Haltzman, the family's attorney, said. "This thing was spiraling out of control, clearly."