Huh? There is no doubt that someone took pictures. That's sufficient to bring charges. The court decides if the defendant is guilty, but the matter is serious enough to bring it in front of a judge.
The poor guy must have gone through some serious mental gymnastics to arrive at that conclusion. I'd be interested how he arrived there.
Seriously. We are righly afraid of out-of-control police, and that's why these are on a tight leash (at least in theory and before the Patriot Act) and need a warrant before they can gather evidence that is admissible in court. But private entities seem to be allowed to play by looser rules, and that's how we end up in Lower Meirion.
Well, for starters, wiretapping without sound isn't wiretapping. Then there's probably some verbiage about the difference between being unaware of the camera's presence and the camera's operation. I don't know, read the follow ups. There were Senate hearings to fix the law with a new Protect the Children Act or somesuch, which was no doubt roundly booed on reddit and HN.
Sorry, you are misreading the comment. I believe that invasion of privacy is a serious crime, and someone who engages in it on a sustained basis deserves jail time. One would hope that there are laws on the books against it.
One would also hope that the prosecution enforces the existing law, because the law isn't what is on the books, law is whatever is the established practice.
I am not misreading it, and suggest you reconsider the comment above about 'reasonable doubt.' What you believe and what can be proved in court are two different things. Typically, (though not always) you have to prove criminal intent as well as illegal action, and that is often easier said than done. The pictures in the case you mention are circumstantial evidence, but not conclusive of guilt. Further, a competent defense attorney could would begin by seeking to exclude them as evidence. Cases like this are usually a good deal more complex than you might appreciate from media reports.
Criminal intent is probably the easiest to prove here. If one defines "intent" as the desire to bring about an action, there has certainly been the intent to take pictures. After all, they do not collect themselves automatically, someone decided that they should be taken.
It's something of a tossup if Lower Meirion is covered by the wiretapping statutes - those tend to cover communication and it's a bit dubious if photographing someone in one's private space is covered by that. Perhaps one could invoke the Fourth Amendment, but then someone would have to argue that private entities are also covered.
It's likely that the student and the parents were informed of the spyware and has to sign an agreement to accept it, but then the laptops were required for classwork, one could not attend school without once, so one would have to consider if consent wasn't given under duress.
We notice that the family collected handsomely under personality rights. That is firmly covered under civil law, so the law has some teeth. However, when there is some entity, private or public, that makes a business of violating personality rights, at that point such actions impact society as a whole, and it's criminal law that must be invoked to to restrain them.
Pictures can be collected automatically, and accidentally. The standards of proof for criminal and civil law are significantly different; in civil law the standard is 'preponderance of the evidence', in criminal it's 'beyond a reasonable doubt'. Duress refers to an unlawful threat, and does not apply here. Further, a criminal case can fall apart on a wide number of procedural or evidentiary technicalities, many of which go unremarked in press coverage.
