PHIADELPHIA, Pennsylvania - April 16, 2010 - A Philadelphia-area school district secretly took "thousands" of webcam photos of students in their homes and tracked their web site visits and parts of online chats through spy software installed on the students' school-issued laptops, a Pennsylvania court heard yesterday.

In February, the family of Blake Robbins, a student at Harriton High School in Rosemont, sued the Lower Merion School District after the district admitted to them it had been spying on students via a remote-activated feature on the laptops it issued to all its 2,300 high school pupils.

In a motion filed in court on Thursday, Robbins' lawyers asserted that the school district had taken at least 400 snapshots of 15-year-old Robbins, including some of him sleeping. The motion also stated that "thousands of webcam pictures and screen shots have been taken of numerous other students in their homes," the Philadelphia Inquirer reports.

In a strange twist to the story, the lawyers also suggested that Carol Cafiero, one of two school administrators with access to the spying technology, "may be a voyeur" who spied on students for her personal gratification, as some of the images taken by the laptops may have ended up on her personal computer.