A suburban Philadelphia school district embroiled in a webcam spy scandal was hit Tuesday with new allegations that a student-issued laptop secretly recorded more than 8,000 images.

The latest accusations, which were said to occur during a six-month period ending September 2008, has left the high school student "shocked, humiliated and severely emotionally distressed," (.pdf) according to a federal invasion-of-privacy lawsuit, which seeks unspecified monetary damages.

As part of an FBI investigation and a lawsuit brought by a different student, a judge had contacted the boy's parents informing him of the breach, and invited them to view the pictures. The youth's parents were shown 4,404 webcam photographs and 3,978 screenshots captured with the Lower Merion School District–issued MacBook.

The amount of photos represents the largest publicly known number of images secretly recorded in the webcam scandal.

The latest lawsuit follows the October out-of-court settlement in which the district agreed to pay $610,000 to end two privacy lawsuits brought by two students who were also victims of the webcam spying scandal. Federal prosecutors had announced two months earlier that they would not prosecute administrators.

Prosecutors and the FBI opened an inquiry following a February 2010 privacy lawsuit accusing administrators of spying on students with webcams on 2,300 district-issued laptops.

The 7,000-pupil district was originally sued in federal court on allegations it was undertaking a dragnet surveillance program targeting its students – an allegation the district has repeatedly denied.

The original suit was based on a claim by a sophomore who was reprimanded for "improper behavior" based on photos the computer secretly took of the boy at home. One picture shows him asleep at home.

In all, about 400 photos were taken of that sophomore. The senior who settled in October claimed his laptop snapped 1,000 images.

Photo: Magic Madzic/Flickr

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