The Lower Merion School District and the parents of the accused and spied upon student have agreed to a 30 day hold as relates to the advancement of the lawsuit that is pending against the school system. This hold will be maintained in order to facilitate an audit of the surveillance that took place. This audit is being performed by a computer security firm out of New York. This audit, primarily being undertaken to ascertain the actual number of instances in which surveillance took place for any reason, may not return an accurate accounting of those events. Because the school system has no requirements that logs or evidence of such activity need to be maintained, there could be a lot of pertinent information that has already been deleted from the computers used to activate the surveillance system.
Also, it now appears as though the surveillance was illegal to begin with. Pennsylvania law apparently prohibits any type of visual or audio surveillance that intrudes into any domicile unless specific permission has been granted to do so. This is essentially the same requirement throughout the entire United States. Usually, said permission requires a warrant in any jurisdiction. The school system has neither claimed or established that it had obtained any form of legal permission to enter into the surveillance that was undertaken. It begins to appear as though the school system displayed a lot of excess hubris in their decision to essentially take the law into their own hands regarding claims of stolen or missing laptop computers. The fact that the upper echelon of the school board is stuffed with lawyers makes the decision to enter into such surveillance even more puzzling. One would think that they, of all people, would know better. Steve ************************************************************************* ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *************************************************************************
