Great idea to stop school shootings - precrime and surveillance!

[notimp]

US has now officially gone mad.

Aspiring terrorists are in every Iowa school, surveillance companies warn
https://www.thegazette.com/subject/...nitoring-surveillance-gaggle-securly-20200302

For Adam Jasinski, a technology director for a school district outside of St Louis, Missouri, monitoring student emails used to be a time-consuming job. Jasinski used to do keyword searches of the official school email accounts for the district’s 2,600 students, looking for words like “suicide” or “marijuana”. Then he would have to read through every message that included one of the words. The process would occasionally catch some concerning behavior, but “it was cumbersome”, Jasinski recalled.

Last year Jasinski heard about a new option: following the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, the technology company Bark was offering schools free, automated, 24-hour-a-day surveillance of what students were writing in their school emails, shared documents and chat messages, and sending alerts to school officials any time the monitoring technology flagged concerning phrases.

The automated alerts were a game-changer, said Jason Buck, the principal of the Missouri district’s middle school. One Friday evening last fall, Buck was watching television at home when Bark alerted him that one of his students had just written an email to another student talking about self-harm. The principal immediately called the first student’s mother: “Is the student with you?” he asked. “Are they safe?”

Before his school used Bark, the principal said, school officials would not know about cyberbullying or a student talking about hurting themselves unless one of their friends decided to tell an adult about it. Now, he said, “Bark has taken that piece out of it. The other student doesn’t have to feel like they’re betraying or tattling or anything like that.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/22/school-student-surveillance-bark-gaggle

Aggression Detectors: The Unproven, Invasive Surveillance Technology Schools Are Using to Monitor Students

Stress levels in voice recordings (?) are to be used for precrime to prevent school shootings, only slight issue - it doesnt work, but schools and hospitals are buying it anyways...
https://features.propublica.org/agg...nology-schools-are-using-to-monitor-students/

Schools are operating as testbeds for mass surveillance with no evidence, and no way to opt out

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/02/schools-are-pushing-boundaries-surveillance-technologies

https://web.archive.org/web/2020030...2/06/business/facial-recognition-schools.html


In the land of the surveilled, where every five year old learns that this is the social norm, without recourse or opt out. Because its cheap tech from china. Something something school shootings.

See how easy that was? To prevent school shootings the US didnt have to change gun law! No - it just had to surveil every one of their children in school - problem solved! Everyone feels safe again.

(My local paper did a summery on the available stories in that field today, most news items are from february.)

 

[FAST6191]

Are students really stupid enough to use their school emails to plan things and communicate such?
Going to have to go teach opsec it looks like.


Anyway that at least has some merit. I did see an article yesterday about people complaining about AI facial recognition, which does work, and how various companies are pulling back on deploying it.

 

[Taleweaver]

At this point, should they even pretend to act in name of the public interest?

A lack of information wasn't the cause for most recent criminal cases, but the uncertainty combined with an abundance of information. On hindsight, people question how "clear indications" could be missed, but they forget that information was hidden in a sea of tapped data on I don't know how many people at this point.

Start tracking information from innocents and the general signal-to-noise only increases, effectively Reducing the chance to find anything useful (and even so : who the fuck mails these things to anyone to begin with? Who the fuck under thirty uses mail outside school /work, for that matter)

... And of course the elephant in the room : TANSTAAFL (there ain't no such thing as a free lunch). If it's offered for free, it's because Jasinski already has a buyer for the mined data. Actually tracking potential terrorists is at best a side activity.

 

[0x3000027E]

Take a break from the news for a little while, friend.

 

[notimp]

Are students really stupid enough to use their school emails to plan things and communicate such?
Going to have to go teach opsec it looks like.

Probably not, but this is likely a case of management, raising their importance for their jobs not to be taken away.

All of this is a solution in search for a problem (if you have a hammer, and it was expensive, you better come up with some pretty strange stories on how you used it). Because - frankly, that kind of data is great to come up with correlations, or to modify mass behavior, but it is horrible to 'prevent the extreme case'.

Aside from a chilling effect all around, and children being acclimatized to surveillance state tech, the entire thing is useless. (Statistically - if it prevents one case, its useful - argumentation aside)

Text message on your cellphone once a shooter enters the building? Because auf automatic threat recognition? And what if they wear a coat? And what about false positives, and what...?

This is literally prefabricated tech produced in china, resold by US vendors to principals and majors that hear from the public a notion "that we have to do something" - and this qualifies as something.

Nevermind all the effects it introduces...

"A company is giving away email monitoring for school children for free?!" Are you freaking kidding me? You give them that data for free, and they do a keyword search on it once upon a time, then send some idiot a bleeping message on an app on his cellphone with 'threatlevel low' everything ok? Oh the psychological relief!

Children don't have to fear the shame anymore to talk about others self harming, when they see it? Because of automatic threat monitoring will catch it? Are you mad?

Oh, I've answered that question before I see...

--------------------- MERGED ---------------------------

Take a break from the news for a little while, friend.

Me: Literally translates an article from my local paper into english (listing all the sources they researched), and adds the same sentiment 90% of the comments in my country of origin had - as someone that has written his master thesis about pitfalls on big data decision making.

Typical US american: "You should become more stupid, you know - like we are. How about you take a reading break? Look at the pleasant things in life - while we move full speed into a totalitarian system, and start with the institutions meant to educate our children?"

And if you think, that this is hyperbole, because of the actual standstill in policy making, and the shere power concentration in the US senate, several intellectuals right now have raised alarms, that the US is in a deep democracy crisis - as we speak. Add more surveillance capitalism, while your president posts white power videos on twitter - what could go wrong.

Yes, my first plan of action would also be to tell anyone that points at that as problematic to shut up, and dont read the news for a while.
--

Oh - srcs on the US democracy crisis:
New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/why-democracy-is-on-the-decline-in-the-united-states
Foreignpolicy.com: https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/09/10/democracy-is-fighting-for-its-life/
Vox.com: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-poli...democracy-populism-republicans-daniel-ziblatt
The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/07/american-democracy-crisis-trump-supreme-court
The Atlantic: http://democracy.issuelab.org/resources/31228/31228.pdf
Cornell: https://www.pri.org/stories/2020-06...ocracy-been-so-grave-says-political-scientist
...

 

[0x3000027E]

Typical US american: "You should become more stupid, you know - like we are. How about you take a reading break? Look at the pleasant things in life - while we move full speed into a totalitarian system, and start with the institutions meant to educate our children?"

Well, thanks so much for the slander. That's not even an adequate paraphrase, so remove the quotes please.

And who said to take "a reading break"? Last time I checked, there are reading sources beyond articles written by half-assed journalists that are content with sourcing reddit.

 

[notimp]

I did't quote you, I did't paraphrase you I channeled the "archetypal american" - and let that fictional character speak in his 'inner voice'.

(Billy Bob says 'derp, something, derp' > overdrawn persiflage of a common attitude I, sadly, have identified as prototypical american.)

I dind't quote you, because I made the choice to overplay it a little, and it would have been entirely out of place to blame you for an attitude I have a hard time dealing with. I slandered a fictional character/and an anti 'intellectual' spirit in argument.

The idea is that you (and actually others) see the absurde in that statement. And can reflect on it.


Not that you think I called you Billy Bob and intentionally misquoted you. "" <.- direct speech, NOT a quote