‘Spy High:’ Amazon Documentary Probes Dangers of Online Student Surveillance

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It all began with a pixelated image of a Mike and Ike: the colorful, fruity candy that with a digital blur and authorities’ preconceived notions could perhaps be mistaken for a pill. 

That’s what happened to 15-year-old Blake Robbins, who was accused by officials in Pennsylvania’s affluent Lower Merion School District of dealing drugs in 2009 after they surreptitiously snapped a photo of him at home with the chewy candy in his hand. The moment was captured by the webcam on his school-issued laptop, one of some 66,000 covert student images collected by the district, including one of Robbins asleep in his bed. 

Robbins sued and the subsequent case, dubbed “WebcamGate,” is at the center of Spy High, a four-part documentary series now streaming on Amazon Prime, that examines the high-profile student surveillance scandal and the explosion of student privacy threats that followed it.

The Lower Merion School District, which settled the class-action lawsuit, was an early adopter of one-to-one computer education technology programs that provide school-issued laptops to students. Such programs have since become mainstream nationwide, particularly since the pandemic. So, too, have digital surveillance tools like Gaggle and GoGuardian, which alert educators when students express thoughts of self-harm or discuss topics deemed taboo, like sex, violence or drugs. 

Directed by Jody McVeigh-Schultz and executive produced by Mark Wahlberg, the documentary offers a cautionary tale about what happens when student monitoring initiatives — often intended to promote young people’s safety and well-being — go awry. It also explores how covert student surveillance intersects with far-reaching school equity issues involving race, disability, privilege and discipline. 

After years of reporting on digital student surveillance myself, I caught up last week with McVeigh-Schultz, whose other documentaries include Shiny Happy People about reality TV’s seemingly wholesome Duggar family and the Emmy-nominated The Murders at Starved Rock, which delves into the brutal 1960 killing of three women in an Illinois state park. We talked about what he wants viewers to take away from the Robbins’ scandal 15 years after it unfolded and the lessons it holds for contemporary student privacy debates and schools’ growing reliance on ed tech. 

The interview was edited for length and clarity. 

What motivated you to take a deep dive into the Robbins case, and why is it important right now?

I grew up just outside of Philly in a suburb called Cheltenham and I had heard about this story. I knew Lower Merion as the high school that Kobe [Bryant] went to. That’s what it was famous for, but I knew about the Robbins story and I was like, “That’s crazy,” when I heard about it back in 2010 and then I kind of never heard anything more about it. It was a really big story and then just kind of went away. 

When we talked to folks from wealthy suburbs outside of Philadelphia, I think it’s very clear to me that one of the key indicators of status is education. It’s more important than anything else to people. 

The public schools in Lower Merion are really highly rated and people care a ton about the quality of the education and the image of the institution. What are the real world implications of that? 

In this case, the way it played out, some of the things that happened were counterintuitive. Many folks from that community didn’t want to see a lawsuit come to bear against their school. It was like, “Oh well, you know, this actually is perhaps going to affect our home values,” if you’re selling your home and the biggest selling point is the quality of the education.

That’s something that you wouldn’t expect to be one of the first reactions to finding out that the schools may be surveilling your kids. But it was, and the fact that the Robbins family had lived in the community for a long time but just weren’t considered part of the in-group just because of who they were was very interesting and, I think, led to people being skeptical of them.

The documentary leaves it up to you to decide whether that skepticism is deserved or not.

Absolutely. The documentary certainly highlights how people are complex and have complicated stories. What did you learn about debates over personal privacy, especially when it comes to information about children?

People’s expectations of how much privacy you should be afforded, and how much you should expect without having to ask any questions, those expectations vary a lot. 

Somebody who was interviewed in a news piece that ran in 2010 said, “You know, this is the school district’s laptop, they could tap in at any time and rightfully so.” I’m a parent, I have a 2-year-old and a 7-year-old who’s in first grade. To me, that seems a bit absurd, but the truth is, I think there are certain contexts where a school-issued laptop is going to be surveilled. We know it’s going to be surveilled, but we don’t expect that it will be able to take pictures in our kids’ bedrooms. 

To me it’s a matter of where are [the] spaces where we should reasonably expect privacy? Transparency is the most important aspect of all of this. Not only were there no conversations going on like, “Hey look, these laptops are going to be surveilled in a number of ways. You should not be leaving them open in your bedroom, You should not be going on any website you wouldn’t want your principal to also see.” The IT department specifically thought it would be a bad idea if parents and students were alerted to the existence of the software that could take images. They felt like, “Well then we won’t be able to recover the stolen laptop because people will just put tape over it.”

Well, that is their decision not to have images taken of them in their bedroom, right? One of the journalists we interviewed said it was like trying to kill a fly with a bazooka. This level of surveillance was not required to track inventory. It just wasn’t. 

Hindsight is 20/20 but it’s obvious from what transpired that they spent a lot more money on legal fees and settling these lawsuits than they ever saved by making sure a handful of laptops were not stolen or lost.

What did you learn about the motives of the school district officials, the lawyers and the families involved?

When I’m making a documentary I’m never thinking in terms of quote-unquote good guys and bad guys. Everyone in this story thought they were doing what was best for the students involved. But in the end, I think there was this balance of protecting students ‘ privacy and protecting the image of the school district. When a mistake is made, there is a reluctance to admit and take responsibility and accept blame. Once you do that, you are admitting to what happened and then there’s all these legal ramifications. 

Multiple people are like, you know, these kids need therapists, they need somebody to check on them and to be like, “Hey, your privacy was violated, are you doing OK?” and that did not happen.

I can’t say why that didn’t happen but to me it seems likely that part of not offering people help is that the minute you say this person needs a therapist because of what we did, you’re admitting to a pretty major violation. 

The documentary doesn’t focus just on the Robbins case. It offers a deep dive into education policy debates around racial inequities, school integration, gender equality and LGBTQ+ rights. What did you find were the implications of surveillance for these populations? 

We talked to Elizabeth Laird at the Center for Democracy and Technology and one of the things she said she sees all the time is that when surveillance is ubiquitous and regularly used in education, vulnerable populations end up feeling the brunt of the negative repercussions. 

In this case, back in 2010, people discovered that a disproportionate amount of the students that were surveilled were African American. There was a sense that if this technology was being misused to discipline students or to check up on students then the chances are it was going to be misused for somebody that was a student of color. 

When we started talking to students of color who had their images taken, we started to understand, “Oh, there is this whole context to what they’re experiencing.” Somebody said you can’t understand the laptop issue without understanding all these other battles that were happening at the time. There was a history of an achievement gap there and African-American parents felt like if you wanted to get an equal education for your kids, you had to fight for it. In this context, there was a real lack of trust of the school district by African-American parents. 

Keron Williams and his mother really wanted to tell his story. It was a story of somebody suspecting him of stealing a bracelet and him being brought into the principal’s office. He says his laptop webcam was activated a couple days later after they searched his pockets and found nothing but a Boy Scouts handkerchief. 

There’s racial profiling but also this idea of the misuse of technology meant to keep laptops from being stolen. If something like this is misused, vulnerable populations are going to feel the brunt of it more. 

That brings me to one of the other stories we talked about, which was more recent. 

In 2020, with the pandemic, school-issued devices and remote learning became the norm. We talked to two students who started high school online, went to classes on Zoom, and they were using their school-issued laptops for everything. 

The way they communicated instead of seeing their friends at lunch was through a Google Hangouts chat. What they didn’t realize was their school was using monitoring software that essentially scooped up everything they wrote while logged into their school account, including private chats. They were brought to the principal’s office and were confronted with what they wrote. 

The context of it is that the school decided it was bullying. What we reveal is that they were using the word “gay” because they were. The term they used was “we’re a pretty gay friend group. Gay was a descriptor to us.”

One of these kids had to come out in the principal’s office with his father there. Luckily his parents were pretty great about it, but that’s a really awful position to put a kid in and, you know, again, a vulnerable population bearing the brunt of overzealous surveillance. 

The goal of this surveillance is to protect kids, it’s to make sure kids aren’t hurting themselves, hurting other students. There’s obviously a mental health crisis going on in terms of high school-aged kids, but there really has to be a discussion about whether these tactics are making the mental health crisis better or worse. 

You’re talking about the tools that schools nationally have increasingly used to collect and analyze reams of information about students in the name of keeping them safe. This includes tools like Gaggle and GoGuardian. Given the growth in these tools, do any guardrails need to be put in place? 

First of all, it’s so important that students know what is being used to surveil any device they’re using. The fact that kids hadn’t heard of Gaggle is really a problem. 

But if they know about it, that doesn’t solve all the problems because what you’re asking high schoolers especially to do is to find their own voice, understand how to freely express themselves, to be vulnerable. In some of my best creative writing courses my teachers were saying, “Look, if it scares you to write this, you’re probably going in the right direction.” 

The minute a kid realizes, “Well, everything that I’m writing in a creative writing class — a poem, a personal essay — is going through this software, maybe going to my principal, maybe going to law enforcement,” they’re going to express themselves differently. That’s just a really dangerous road to go down.

Students and parents have to be aware, but also I just think it should be less powerful. I don’t think we should be able to say there are no ways in which you can use our technology, which is kind of unavoidable if you’re a high school student, without being constantly surveilled.

In Minnesota, the story we cover, they changed the law to outlaw surveillance software. That’s a pretty huge step, and I think that’ll happen more and more as people become more aware of this stuff. 

 There are just places where we should not be allowing this.

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