Tech workers put on leave amid school webcam probe

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March 5, 2010

By MARYCLAIRE DALE The Tribune-Democrat Fri Mar 05, 2010, 10:44 PM EST

PHILADELPHIA — Two information-technology workers at a suburban Philadelphia school district that secretly activated webcams on students’ school-issued laptops are on paid leave amid an FBI wiretap investigation.

Lower Merion School District officials insist the move is not meant to suggest wrongdoing by the veteran employees. They have said the webcams were activated only to find missing laptops, not for any rogue purpose.

“Placing them on administrative leave with pay is not a reflection of any wrongdoing on their part. It is a standard, prudent step in an investigation such as this one,” the district said in a statement Friday.

Technician Michael Perbix and systems coordinator Carol Cafiero were put on administrative leave two weeks ago, after a student’s lawsuit revealed the district practice of taking webcam photos and screen shots when laptops are reported lost or stolen.

The district admits it remotely activated 42 webcams in the past 14 months, successfully locating 18 of the computers.

School officials have declined to describe the resulting photographs or say if any were taken inside students’ homes.

The district has halted the practice amid the lawsuit and state and federal criminal probes.

In the civil suit, Harriton High School student Blake Robbins accuses school officials of invading his privacy by photographing him in his bedroom without permission. A vice principal later approached him, he said, and warned that school officials – based on webcam photos in their possession – suspected him of selling drugs.

Robbins, 15, denies the drug allegation. He contends Vice Principal Lindy Matsko mistook Mike & Ike candies for pills.

“Ms. Matsko does not deny that she saw a Web-cam picture and screenshot of me in my home,” Robbins said in a statement he read last month outside his family’s sprawling Penn Valley home. “She only denies that she is the one who activated the Web cam.”

Matsko read a statement aloud at her attorney’s office.

She insisted that she never monitored students through the webcams or authorized anyone else to do so. But she stopped short of addressing whether she saw the webcam photos of Robbins or spoke to him about suspected drug use.

“If I believed anyone was spying on either of my children in our home, I, too, would be outraged,” said Matsko, who has two children in high school.

Lower Merion, a wealthy district on Philadelphia’s Main Line, issues the $1,000 Macintosh laptops to each of the 2,300 students at two high schools.

Perbix, who earns $86,000 as a technician, and Cafiero, who makes about $105,000, were the only people authorized to remotely activate the webcams, Perbix’s attorney said.

“He was not the person that went through these images,” attorney Marc Neff said. That task was left to school administrators and, in the case of stolen laptops, Lower Merion police.

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