Philadelphia school computers captured more than 50,000 images of students

The row over a Philadelphia school district accused of secretly spying on pupils through laptop cameras escalated today after it acknowledged capturing more than 56,000 images of its students, many of them in their homes.

When the scandal first broke, it was believed that only a few pictures had been taken of one pupil, Blake Robbins. But court papers released this week showed that thousands of images were taken of Robbins and other students.

Robbins and his parents have filed an action against the school district of Lower Merion in an affluent suburb of Philadelphia. Court papers from the Robbins's lawyers said that at first it was thought that the laptops' "peeping tom" technology had produced a few images but they found more than 400 of Robbins, including images "showing him partially undressed and sleeping".

There were images of other students in their homes as well.

"Not only was Blake Robbins being spied upon, but every one of the people he was IM [instant message] chatting with were spied upon," said Robbins's lawyer, Mark Haltzman.

Henry Hockeimer, a lawyer for Harriton school which Robbins attended, revealed that at least 56,000 webcam pictures and other images were taken from students' laptops but he denied any were of a salacious nature.

The school district issued 2,300 laptops to students and said it activated the spyware installed in them to try to track 80 that had gone missing. The system has now been deactivated.

The row began when Robbins was confronted in November by a school official suspicious that he may have had drugs in his bedroom and was shown a photograph taken from his laptop.

Robbins said the "pills" were sweets. He and his parents launched the case, claiming violation of civil rights.

Robbins said he did not know why the spying device was activated as his laptop had not been reported stolen or missing. Other students, whose pictures were taken said their laptops had not been reported stolen or missing either.

The FBI is investigating the scandal and the Senate is to look at proposed legislation that would make it a crime to use webcams for spying.

An administrator at the school, one of the few with authority to track the laptops, was refusing to answer questions, citing her constitutional right to remain silent.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that 38,500 of the images came from six laptops that had been reported missing from the Harriton gym in September 2008. These apparently helped the police catch a suspect. Another set of images were from cameras in laptops which employees responsible for tracking failed or forgot to turn off.

In about 15 cases, it has not yet been established why the machines were being monitored. In a few other cases, images taken have not been recovered.

Hockeimer said a tracking programme in the devices automatically took images every 15 minutes, usually capturing a photo of the user and a screen shot at the same time.

The programme was sometimes turned on for weeks or months at a time, Hockeimer said.

"There were no written policies or procedures governing the circumstances surrounding activating the program and the circumstances regarding turning off the activations," he said.

The court papers, filed by Robbins' lawyers, said that the technology was activated between 20 October and 4 November last year, with most of the 400 shots of him while he was in his home, and included his family. "There were additional webcam pictures and screen shots taken of Blake Robbins which, to date, have not been recovered because the evidence was purged by the IT department," the court papers say.

His lawyers are trying to obtain access to the administrator's home computer to establish whether she downloaded any of the pictures. The court papers allege she may be a voyeur.

In one email, when an IT person commented on how the viewing of the webcam pictures and screen shots from a student's computer was like a "little LMSD (Lower Merion School District) soap opera", she allegedly replied: "I know, I love it."