A student at Harriton High School in suburban Philadelphia was called into the assistant principal's office and accused of using drugs at home.
The evidence? A photograph taken from his own laptop camera while he was in his bedroom.
He had been eating sweets.
Blake Robbins had no idea the school-issued laptop on his desk had been watching him. The Lower Merion School District had installed software on every student laptop that allowed staff to remotely activate the built-in webcams without the student knowing.
Robbins had been photographed 400 times over a two-week period. Some of the images were taken while he slept.
When the full scale of it came out, the district admitted to capturing more than 56,000 images of students inside their own homes. The programme had been running since 2008. For nearly two years, school officials had the ability to watch students through their cameras at any hour. The images were shared with school principals.
Robbins and his family filed a federal lawsuit. The district settled in 2010 for $610,000, with $175,000 placed in a trust for Robbins.
The case, known as WebcamGate, became one of the first major legal battles over digital surveillance and student privacy in the United States and led to changes in both federal and state law around monitoring school-issued devices.
No criminal charges were ever filed against any school official