PHILADELPHIA — A suburban school district secretly captured at least 56,000 webcam photographs and screen shots from laptops issued to high school students, its lawyer acknowledged Monday.
“It’s clear there were students who were likely captured in their homes,” said lawyer Henry Hockeimer, who represents the Lower Merion School District.
None of the images, captured by a tracking program to find missing computers, appeared to be salacious or inappropriate, he said. The district said it remotely activated the tracking software to find 80 missing laptops in the past two years.
Blake Robbins filed suit over the tracking practice, and his lawyer said the district photographed Robbins 400 times during a 15-day period last fall, sometimes as he slept in bed or was half-dressed.
The FBI has opened a criminal investigation into possible wiretap violations by the district.
Tennessee: Gunman kills one, himself outside hospital
A gunman opened fire outside Knoxville’s Parkwest Medical Center on Monday, killing one woman and injuring two others before committing suicide, police said. Police said the victims were female and current or former employees of the hospital. Police are still trying to determine a motive, saying it did not appear that any of the victims were related to the suspect or that there was any connection between them. The shooter’s name was not released.
D.C.: Haiti mission ending
The U.S. military mobilization in support of Haitian earthquake relief and recovery efforts is winding down and will be concluded for the most part by June 1. U.S. Southern Command chief Lt. Gen. Ken Keen said about 2,200 American troops are still there, and that by June only about 500 National Guard and Reserve personnel will be stationed in Haiti to help aid workers. The Jan. 12 earthquake was estimated to have killed as many as 250,000 people.
California: 282 arrested in border gang sweep
Sheriff’s officials say 282 people have been arrested in a gang sweep designed to target drug and human smuggling activities at the U.S.-Mexican border. About 165 pounds of marijuana, 21 pounds of methamphetamine, six pounds of cocaine, heroin and weapons were seized.
New York: White teen guilty of immigrant’s hate-crime death
A white former high school athlete was convicted on Monday of manslaughter as a hate crime in the killing of an Ecuadorean immigrant in Patchogue, a case that sparked a federal probe of police investigations of bias attacks against Hispanics. Jeffrey Conroy, 19, was one of seven teenagers implicated in the November 2008 stabbing death of Marcelo Lucero in what prosecutors say was the culmination of a campaign of violence targeting Hispanics on Long Island. The teens described the activity as “beaner-hopping” or “Mexican hopping.”
Florida: Shuttle landing expected today
Rain and overcast skies prevented space shuttle Discovery from returning to Earth on Monday, and Mission Control at Cape Canaveral instructed the astronauts to spend a another day circling the world and awaiting better weather. Clearer skies are expected over Kennedy Space Center today. If the clouds linger, however, NASA will try for the backup landing site in Southern California.
Iraq: Top two al-Qaida leaders killed, U.S. says
The U.S. and Iraq claimed a major victory against al-Qaida on Monday, saying their forces killed the terror group’s two top figures in Iraq in an air and ground assault on their safehouse near Saddam Hussein’s hometown. Vice President Joe Biden called the deaths of Abu Omar al-Baghdadi and Abu Ayyub al-Masri a “potentially devastating blow” to al-Qaida in Iraq. Also Monday, an Iraqi judicial panel ordered a manual recount of about 2.5 million ballots cast in Baghdad in last month’s national election, an action requested by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s alliance. The decision raised the possibility that al-Maliki’s Shiite-dominated coalition would now be awarded more parliamentary seats than his rival Ayad Allawi’s secular coalition, which won a slim plurality in the March 7 vote.
From Herald news services
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