Clear backpacks, monitored emails: U.S. students under constant surveillance
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Of course they think that, they’re still kids. Who’s going to protect them from surveillance?
IMO this is way over the top - and it’s conditioning future generations to accept this level of surveillance as adults.
Once we're all dead this won't even be an issue.
Maybe your old enough to remember a time when you could walk away and live somewhere without anyone from your old life being able to find you...I'm not.
Maybe you remember when "everyone" 15+ didn't have a constant connection to the internet or at least the police....I'm not.
Maybe you remember being able to go places alone as a child... I don't.
I remember being able to break school rules (running in the hall) and evade punishment because there was no way to prove it... these kids will not.
My great grandparents remember a time when going to another country didn't require the permission of your home country, when leaving your country meant you weren't a part of it anymore... I'd bet you do not.
--Edit (added conclusion)-- It seems like with each generation we become used to a little less freedom and a little more control. A little more comfort and a little less connection with the non man made world. Maybe this is how it's always been. Maybe it's just another by product of the agricultural revolution drawing us all closer together.
This has probably been true to a certain extent ever since we began organizing into tribes. However, I would put forward that even if you aggregate all of the liberty concessions humankind has made for the last few millennia, it would pale in comparison to the supreme control afforded by technological improvements of the last 20 years.
Fahrenheit 451 is a view of that future.
It seems to me that that public acceptance of such surveillance is a side effect of the mainstream media pushing scares and sensationalist coverage (because this is the only thing they have a chance of selling), not some grand evil plan, but not sure.
Are there laws in the UK that allow the police to enter your house and steal all your tools? For people who didn't click on the link: It is a picture with literally nothing but tools supposedly found during a "#weaponSweep"
This is fucking dystopian
What's your basis for saying that they're commonplace? One silly tweet doesn't really show anything.
The link points to one example.
The OP didn't support their assertion that constables commonly confiscate screwdrivers during weapons sweeps, but I don't think OP intended the picture prove that, just to show the definition of "weapon" in use.
It's almost as if fear sells.
When someone's selling fear, only cowards are buying.
These topics are much easier to tackle than the real issues effecting students.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2019/11/10/778015261/experts-worry-activ...
Counterpoint to your conditioning point: kids tend to rebel against oversight, and will probably include this in the list of things they reject.
The public school system functions as a major conditioning environment to get children used to the norms of society, including deference to authority, following rules, and other things that are generally accepted as good. This is the ideal time for those things to happen because of how pliable the young mind still is.
However, we must be very careful how constrained we make such environments and the idea that safety is guaranteed by subjecting kids to what is effectively zero privacy means we've traded, yet again, liberty for security, thus relinquishing the effective right to both.
This will be as effective at rooting out violence in schools as bombing 3rd world villages has been in rooting out terrorism. Until the underlying issues are addressed (mental health, social disparities, racial divides, etc.) the kettle will continue boiling over and more-and-more unpredictable and chaotic ways.
Which may very well be fine; perhaps it's a useful normal.
All currently under surveillance and have been since the invention of the security camera. No one bats an eye, these are to document crimes that have occurred.
Suddenly public schools also use cameras for the same purpose, and this is where the line is drawn? Personally, I feel much more comfortable having a government that represents me and offers me a recourse in charge of security footage than some asshole who runs the gas station and does who knows what with the footage when he gets home.
In the US, we used to consider dueling to be a freedom and a proper behavior for gentlemen to engage in. We changed our minds on account of the unnecessary death. Maybe people in the future may consider "dropping off the grid" to be weird and quirky, or downright dangerous.
Maybe that's okay. We've known for millenia that unlimited freedom is more damaging on average than partially-constrained freedom. In the era of these new technologies, I don't think we're sure yet where the constraints should be.
They will absolutely never be free of surveillance in a modern society, whether private or by government, anyway. Might as well get them used to it. They will always have devices on them that track everything they do. Society is beyond caring about privacy. Having toys and convenience is much more exciting. Hopefully they're also conditioning future generations to become docile slaves of their workplaces.
Not only does the poor kid have a school-issued laptop with heavy monitoring tools installed on it, but they are also required to bring a smartphone to school! My Aunt had made them tape over the laptop's webcam and explained that everything the kid typed could probably be seen by the school, but she was still concerned about the microphone. And the kid is completely incapable of avoiding the more toxic aspects of social media and adtech, because the constant use of smartphones has become a central part of their education. At the age of what, 11-15?
I can only imagine what this is teaching the child. When we caught up over the holidays, they seemed to be more fed up and disgusted with technology than interested in it.
There's already a plethora of studies about the negative impacts screen time may have on early child development and the development of their brains in particular. But even from the observable social aspect, the interactions with our smart devices with notifications always vying for our attention and flashing widgets distracting us, I'm really worried for kids who already have struggles with focus and attention.
I know that we get tired of the "sky is falling" rhetoric, but I will just point out that many aspects of modern life that have become "normal" for us are still bad. Sedentary lifestyle, short attention spans, need for constant entertainment, less time spent outdoors, larger processed food consumption – the health and social problems associated with all of these are just accepted now, and a couple of generations ago we didn't have them (at least, not to the same degree).
Was everything perfect before? No, of course not. But let's not lose the forest for the trees. We can adopt technology and progress responsibly, rather than w=recklessly as we have for the past few decades.
Often modern home schooling looks more like private school (because almost no one actually does it home, they send their kids to parent run “co-ops”) and you won’t have to deal with most of this stupidity.
The Co-op my sister went to banned smartphones inside the building. IMO that was a little extreme and made logistics more difficult than they needed to be but it meant they just focused on school work.
Smartphone applications are designed to be addictive and have demonstrably negative effects upon the mental health of adolescents. Their usage should be vigorously discouraged by anyone who cares about the mental health of school students.
Not a great analogy, since the effects on alcohol are quite different than the effects of using a smartphone.
Only in the past several years, and in that time there's been a lot of pushback to it and a growing consensus that it is likely harmful when people don't moderate their usage. I was in high school less than 10 years ago, and phones of all kinds were banned. If a teacher saw an iPhone, it would be confiscated and your parent would have to pick it up.
The schools are optimizing for convenience and cost, not the cultural zeitgeist.
We can't have children being used to constant surveillance and accepting this as a part of life. It sets them up for so many problems in the future, where they won't understand the serious implications of constant tracking and surveillance.
And sure, nothing too bad comes out of this stuff right now in most of the world, but have you seen China? The minute a government decides to do so, all that data that's been collected on you your whole life will be used against you to give you a flawed AI-generated social "score" that determines what you can or cannot do, or to determine whether or not you're a "threat" (see: someone who speaks out against wrongdoings) to such a government.
Oh wait, I think there was a movie about this...
I‘d rather not be in prison than hoping I‘m the chosen one who gets out
The got around it by using a Google doc to chat in real-time.
I'm totally OK with that kind of apparently 'pervasive' CCTV coverage - we're not talking government-owned networked cameras linked up to face/gait/whatever recognition systems or deep cold storage banks, we're talking small store-owners keeping an eye on junkies and thieves.
The oft-regurgitated "x cameras per thousand people" narrative tends to overlook obviousness like this.
Surveillance Camera Man made it explicit, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mP5ZVPwP7bg : people hate being watched. Doing it with machines is an exploit for the human psyche.
These systems aren’t integrated into larger systems to help track and ID people.
That said, some of this could change if many shops go to nest or ring solutions... but most shop owners will not keep video footage indefinitely in the cloud as it’d be cost prohibitive.
So what's the deal with the selfie obsession and the instagram obsession and so on? Is it that people dislike being watched live? Or is it that people dislike other people having control of the footage?
in the old days we'd have God watching over our conscience.
now we have cctv.
I certainly can't.
I'm also entirely fine with this.
Backdoors in cheap CCTV being accessed illicitly at a mass-level is an entirely different problem, and one which I'd agree would need questioning.
I doubt there's much value in that concern for another decade, until the majority of CCTV cameras are ultra high resolution/30+fps, which they're not.
Yes, there are possible exfil paths, but not ones that can reasonably be executed on a large scale. Realistically, the danger from break-in and hard drive theft (or warrant/subpoena) is greater for the average user.
Unless you believe governments have backdoored SSH, I would say it's good. Definitely not a turnkey solution though.
While I've no doubt that London is highly surveilled, that data is, to put it bluntly, horse droppings, and should never be cited.
If you look at the sources they cite for stats like "There are 2,985,984 cameras in Shanghai" (Wow, look at the precision on those figures! Six decimal points, if we express it in scientific notation!), you will find that they take a random unsourced number from a blog post from 2013, then add 20% to it 6 times over, because they assume (Also unsourced) 20% year-over-year growth.
Meanwhile, that same source claims that there are only 3,600 cameras in San Diego. As anyone who's ever been in a convenience store, bank, airport, or workplace can tell you, that's complete baloney. You can probably visit enough businesses in a normal day that will have you walk past 3,600 cameras. (And the source for that number? A news article about the city government installing 3,000 new intersection cameras. Apparently we are to believe that across all the businesses, government buildings, and private residences of San Diego, there are only 600 cameras.)
I'm not sure if the authors in question are just incredibly stupid, or incredibly intellectually dishonest... But my money is on the latter.
tl;dr - please think critically about your sources, especially when they reinforce a pre-conception that you hold. Most of the 'data' you can find on the internet is garbage.
Only if you ignore Atlanta, GA at #10.
Unfortunately, the source for that article costs £100.
Some say it benefits security, but I think the calculation is flawed. You will never get engaged citizens in a open-air prison. People implementing these policies should be deeply ashamed of themselves.
One side of things that has me worried is I recently spoke with my brother over the holidays and he's a highschool teacher. ALL of his students use VPN's to bypass the schools monitoring and blocks on what they can do. What has me concerned is how many of these students understand the implications of funneling all of their private data through VPNs and vetting their VPN choice in the first place.
At this point I have a pretty flippant attitude to my private data because of how much is out there. Telemarketers know my number and personal details. Spam emails do too. Even snail mail junk.
My info has been bought and sold dozens of times by now, probably originally from Verizon as telecoms openly engage in this practice. VPNs leaking my info is the least of my worries, the cat is already far out of the bag.
However, what can these companies even do? Not like I engage with their targeted advertisements or junk mail. If my identity was actually stolen, credit card numbers sold, it would probably only be mildly annoying for a month or two rather than some catastrophic thing.
My own kids escaped much of this, and I was an active parent.
Turns out, I am going to have to help another one, my granddaughter due to son's big fail and meth. (Not good, I have no words. It is all insane hard for him now)
Maybe we can largely home school, or potentially move.
When I compare my school experience to this mess?
Who knew? It all seems crazy and so very unnecessary.
The other disturbing trend is criminal records at increasingly young ages. When do kids get to learn from mistakes without being badly marked before they even come of age?
Your kids will raise theirs under the watch of Alexa AI-Webcam and Apple Watch Child Protection kit.
And one day they'll sit on courts and find the Fourth Amendment quaint.
Ideally, we can also pass along what life can be like.
What about friends? If enough of you agree, the range is more free for the kids.
Finally, in your home, you can be permissive.
Credit Scores, Cell Phones, Social Media. These kids will be tracked for the rest of their lives whether they have clear backpacks and ssl mitm or not.
Maybe this elaborate demonstration of surveillance is being used as a teaching moment by a woke English teacher?
The solution to keep people from killing should focus on teaching others that life is not meaningless or worthless. Also, teaching kids humility wouldn't hurt either.
Edit: Perhaps this should be obvious, but teaching about nihilism is not teaching nihilism. People teach nihilism more, if anything, through their actions.
It’s not like I was taught that the Holocaust will happen again because humans are inherently bad and such everything is meaningless; instead it was that if we seek the goodness in the world we can prevent something like that happening again. Furthermore, if we were taught anything about nihilism, it would be that the Nazis used it to justify mass murder, which we were taught is the worst thing ever, because it is. Just my experience
The moral philosophy of the high school student is "get grades that are good enough to graduate and/or get accepted into your 'safety school'". If objecting to or evading surveillance, or using a non-clear backpack, risks suspension or expulsion, it is therefore a moral imperative to use a clear backpack and submit to panopticon surveillance.
It is only later, after graduation, that the experience of being treated like criminal suspects at all times is applied to their developing worldview. And their conclusion will be "the elder generations are all paranoid assholes". They won't be wrong.
I get the sense that the backlash will probably take the form of "You want to strip away my privacy and pry into my personal life? Fine. I will push so much of my personal information onto you that you will recoil in absolute cringe at my oversharing. Here are pictures of me doing all the things you find abhorrent, like having nontraditional gender and sexuality, or voting for a democratic socialist."
The phony compassion delivered by public schooling taught me to be nihilistic. I think that's what the parent poster was getting at. It wasn't a strict adherence to some system I once got a lecture about (because I didn't get one either), but as a natural response to the platitudes they taught.
I could shake off that "wrong" way of thinking because I was under the impression it was abnormal and needed to blend in with the crowd. So in retrospect from writing this post... I guess what they really taught me was doublethink.
The clear backpacks are silly I'll admit, and also pointless. I agree that kids getting conditioned to be okay with surveillance is bad, but this is all coming from the private sector right now.
In China, you now have to submit your face to be scanned into a database to get a new phone. This has already been normalized by all the face swapping apps, like Zao. Kids in the west wouldn't think twice about accepting the Ts and C's for Snapchat or IG or anything else that includes face scanning tech.
Blocking has been standard in some workplaces, and stricter blocking has been standard in schools, but monitoring isn't. Small and medium businesses and academia often have little or no blocking.
No-one gets any alert if I write "I want to kill myself or maybe the president" here (over TLS), nor will they when you download this page. For some children, this does generate an alert -- even on a secure site.
There hasn't been a company of any size I've worked for in the last at least 25 years which didn't require signing an acceptable use agreement which includes notification that all activities may be monitored.
What country are you talking about? Honest question, just curious. I am in the US, but even today many small and medium sized companies do not monitor internet (block parts, sure, but not monitor) and 10 years ago even large companies did not do it.
Every URL accessed via a proxy will be logged, even no one is actively reviewing those logs regularly
Monitoring is done everywhere and has been done for a long time. Whether or not they check it depends on how lazy IT is.
Monitoring work or school internet use without specific prior suspicion is illegal in the entire EU; so this level of surveillance may be "standard" in some countries, but hardly globally.
> In China,
Not exactly the reference I was looking for, though from this perspective any level of surveillance is normal.
Schools have started constant CCTV surveillance. Often with flawed AI systems in place. Clear bags and all these practices condition them to value their privacy less, which is a very bad thing.
> Kids in the west wouldn't think twice about accepting the Ts and C's for Snapchat or IG or anything else that includes face scanning tech.
Surely you understand why that's bad, right? What they're taught hasn't been updated in decades, whereas the world around them has changed so much. They're taught as kids not to trust strangers. Why are they not taught to not trust random apps?
Furthermore, children can't actually accept T&C's as a matter of binding law. The fact they just push the button notwithstanding.
What has been normalized is legal predation (something parents should be paying attention to and warning children about as they get older), and apathy toward actively slapping down abusive corporate business models. This is showing indications of turning around, but there is still a lot of work to be done.
In terms of monitoring Internet usage at schools; it may be done to a point, but I'm far more concerned with the trend toward omnipresent physical surveillance through facial recognition or device fingerprinting. It's one thing to try to police content to appropriate subject matter for a school; it's completely different to start holding a child accountable to having a digital footprint to manage all the time. Adults can't even manage that responsibly, and I don't think forcing them to do it while they are young will play well with ensuring they understand how to navigate the physical world well.
Given the adversarial objectives of most technology companies, I can't see the sense in putting in the effort to basically manufacture "trained consumers" for big tech. I'd rather see them taught computing in general and gradually introduce them to software creation and program awareness so they can make their own decisions. Of course, that seems to end up the kind of thing you get at vocational schools instead of primary Ed nowadays.
To me the upsetting part is that these kids must feel unsafe / monitored. Which is exactly what they shouldn't go through in school, it's far from a good start in life.
But then again with all the school shootings I don't blame the security companies, it's a deep cultural/societal issue. It's similar to what happened in Europe in the last few years, now it's business as usual when soldiers in full gear + assault rifles patrol the streets in major cities or during big public events. It sucks but there isn't a perfect answer to the problem.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/school-shootings-are-...
Nothing drives an economy like fear.
The Culture of Fear - Barry Glassner
https://www.amazon.com/Culture-Fear-Americans-Minorities-Mic...
Perhaps we should. Companies exploiting peoples' irrational fears and inability to do math are huge part of the problem. It would be less bad (but still bad) if they only scammed people, selling school shooting protection charms or other magical items. But instead, they're selling ineffective solutions with bad side effects, taking away freedoms, creating stress and feelings of insecurity.
Few things irk me as much as people making money from hurting other people.
I've not seen a lot of that.. More at US Christmas markets.
At any rate, I view policing events in that fashion or China adding security guards for their knife attack problem as not actually the same as US schools. In most cases the perpetrator is an adult that is dropping out and hard to reach. The US is worried about youth going through their social integration system who become violent as a result and that it apparently doesn't catch deteriorating preemptively as much as other societies. Many arguments can be made as to why, i.e. a litigious society leads to little personal risk to address abnormal problems.
A child who goes to a US school and observes the precautions should become paranoid about trusting themselves and their friends not to go on a killing spree. A child going to a Chinese school should mostly be more afraid of a scarier world.
Many larger schools have their own police officers, because they have to. My fiance is a high school teacher and just out of her classes in the past 2 months she's had one student arrested and expelled for bringing a firearm to school and another for bringing nearly a pound of marijuana (in a state where it is illegal at the state level) to school. Earlier this year they had two students expelled for having sex in a classroom after school while filming part of it with one of their phones.
Even from 1998-2002 we had school police. We had multiple people dealing marijuana, MDMA, LSD, and probably other stuff I wasn't aware about. We had several students investigated pre 9/11 for threatening to deploy pipe bombs at the school, we had more than one overdose (all MDMA I think), I'd watch a girl in study center once or twice a month sit there and rub her face the desk or her binder with pupils the size of saucers, we had students drinking on school property in the middle of the day. We had at least one student that I know of on an ankle monitor for most of high school. If you went out for a sport you would be drug tested regularly, without notice, pulled out of class at random and people would occasionally fail. While we had students doing FFA and being volunteer junior firefighters after school we also had people with extensive juvenile records and children.
When I was in middle/high school 16-21 years ago you could buy drugs/pornography/bootleg cdr movies/alcohol/other things that were age restricted like ephedrine (we abused ephedrine so much I have no idea how I didn't have heart failure) in the hall or bathroom between classes just by walking up to any number of people. I've found talking to people this is not a unique experience and most of the same is still occurring in high schools right now.
Many schools across the country simply are not utopian dream lands. If I had kids, I'd be 100% fine with them being forced to have clear backpacks and I'd go a step further and suggest they only be allowed to and from their locker upon arrival/departure and not allowed between classes. It's one small step that considerably reduces the risk of a kid lugging a weapon, explosive device, non-personal use amounts of drugs. Sure, I could have hidden a small arsenal and a large quantity of drugs on my person between my hoodie and jnco jeans in high school but a clear (or no) backpack drastically reduces the likelihood of these things being taken to school.
Maybe the schools need to change, and kids need to be integrated into the real world, instead of being retained in relatively pretty prisons with bad food until they're adults.
Also, I find this part highly disturbing: “They don’t really give you a list of things not to do,” he said. “Once you’re in trouble, they act like you knew.”
This is eerily close to a typical oppressive state. See a troublemaker, make up a rule that you can prove they broke, punish them. Not a similar scale, of course, but it's still pretty bad.
No. If you are using a school/employer provided email account you should be using them for school/work stuff. If you are using a school/employer device, you should be using them for school/employer stuff.
If you want to tell Jack or Jane that they fuel your fire and you want to do sexy time or that you violently soiled your pants and wondered if they could bring you their gym shorts to the upstairs bathroom then use your own device on your own service.
Clear backpacks is such an absurd thing that I still find it difficult to believe that adult human beings came up with such an idea in the name of security. It's something I'd only ever expect to encounter in a novel about a dystopian future.
I think you'll find the opposite effect. Kids are being taught to hide things far better than before. Increasing their privacy skills for their adult lives :D
Is it not possible to buy a used phone there? I got my last several phones on Ebay; like cars, they depreciate a lot in the first year or two, so getting a 1-2 year old model will save you a ton.
My fiance is a high school teacher, in the past two months they've had a student come to school with a handgun and be expelled and handed over to the police and another expelled for having legit dealer quantities (nearly a pound) of marijuana (packed and placed in mason jars in her backpack) in a state where it isn't legal at a state level.
I can see why some might want clear backpacks.
1. Active shooters, while rare, have completely eroded our trust in our fellow humans. Either a gun is safe to bring into a school or it's not. If it's not, then why do we allow open carry/concealed carry permits in public spaces? Active shooters have been both kids and adults. You might make the case that kids can't handle firearms safely -- though I was once a kid with access to firearms and I knew how to handle them safely. (Don't take this paragraph to mean I'm pro/anti gun control. It's just an observation)
2. Public Schools are public property. Private schools are private property. In either case, it's perfectly legal to have a surveillance system.
3. Parents feel more comfortable knowing the school has a means to keep their children safe. After all the school is responsible for the children while they are at school. Worse, should something happen to a kid on school property, there will be a lawsuit claiming the school did not do everything in its power to protect the children -- hence the need for surveillance.
It's often not allowed to carry in places like schools (varies depending on district or state). However, many pro-gun supporters make the argument that CC supposedly makes public spaces safer because active shooters don't really need a license to murder people anyway, so anyone carrying during a situation has more defense (just stating the argument, not certifying it's correctness). But I'm interested in hearing how often it's the case that some licensed idiot badly secures their weapon in a public space leading to an active shooter situation (and for this reason I definitely wouldn't trust students to CC. But I'm also not in favor of clear backpacks, as that similarly feels like a case of "solving the wrong problem").
Note that in most of the geographic US, concealed carry is the norm, not the exception:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8c/Conceale... (blue and green are either constitutionally protected rights, or the state is legally required to give a permit)
* Car crashes (teach people to drive more defensively)
* Suicides (provide better mental health services)
* Violence that occurs outside of school (intervene to stop conflict before it becomes an issue, which would also help prevent these shootings)
* Opiods
No, it looks insane to the 6 countries mentioned in your article that have significantly less schools shootings.
The other 188 countries in the world are purposely not discussed, since many of them have extremely high violent crime rates despite restrictive gun control laws...
19th highest in the world is Argentina and it has less than half the deaths US has.
In top 30 there are countries with less than 1/4th the deaths.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r...
That's not a reason not to implement these policies but infringing on privacy, which should be considered a fundamental right, for an at best insignificant decrease in the homicide rate is.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intenti...
I wonder why :)
Have you considered the possibility that easy access to guns make suicides more common?
Which includes suicides & accidents.
It also ignores the overall homicide rate, which is much more important. Do dead people care whether they are murdered with a gun or a knife?
Which are more common when the access to guns is easier.
> Do dead people care whether they are murdered with a gun or a knife?
Deaths caused by guns are easily preventable. Why not prevent them?
The risk of being involved in every other incident class I listed is higher, so that is where we should be focusing our efforts because ultimately a death is a death regardless of what people are scared of. This is basically the terrorism problem: terrorism in the US is this big scary boogieman until you actually look at the data and realize that there's very little terrorism. The school shootings make the news precisely because they are very rare and surprising (and because some media outlets have readership that is in favor of strict gun control so it will play well).
If you want controls to stop school shootings anyway then why not just put in place general healthy population controls: stop bullying, keep a cop visibly on school grounds to deter criminality, engage with parents, and create a healthy environment for learning. All of that costs basically zero dollars and would likely do far more overall good than these silly, expensive, and invasive surveillance systems.
Using the same criteria there were 0 gun-related deaths in schools in my country (10% of USA population) in last 50 years, probably more. And it's not hard - you simply have to be rational and control the guns where it's easy (at the point they enter the market, when they enter the market) instead of controlling them where it's hard (in every school every day).
It's the low-hanging fruit of death prevention. It would save you money and hassle (no need to check every kid every time it enters the school, no need for transparent backpacks and all that security theater).
> If you want controls to stop school shootings anyway then why not just put in place general healthy population controls: stop bullying, keep a cop visibly on school grounds to deter criminality, engage with parents, and create a healthy environment for learning. All of that costs basically zero dollars and would likely do far more overall good than these silly, expensive, and invasive surveillance systems.
You should do all these things anyway (except for keeping cop in every school - that's just absurd and shows how far into irrationality USA has gone).
> All of that costs basically zero
Hiring 100 000 cops full-time costs basically zero? I would disagree :)
Don't forget ownership. Bloomberg never discloses that their owner has spent hundreds of millions to circumvent 2A when they cover mass shootings or gun politics.
Automobiles are something of a sacred cow. Even outside your neighborhood school, prioritizing pedestrians & cyclists, traffic calming, and the like are an uphill battle because it is inconvenient to drivers.
I agree that there is a bit too much reliance on technical measures (ex: monitoring software) to police computer usage. This can be in absence of teaching kids personal responsibility. However, in a classroom environment it helps teachers immensely. While 80% of your students might handle themselves mostly, trying to police those remaining manually can eat up a lot of instructional time.
One point on the article:
> Teenagers are warned that the school is tracking what they do, and that they can get in trouble for visiting inappropriate websites.
If the school gets gov funds for IT, they have to be CIPA compliant[0]. This includes filtering adult websites and logging access to them. Fail to do so and you lose access to a lot of government funding through E-Rate[1]. The law is vague and somewhat up to school admin interpretation. I've seen some pretty intense surveillance regimes implemented in the name of CIPA.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Internet_Protecti... 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Rate
A 4 year old girl was killed crossing the street to school in my neighborhood just over a month ago, horrible tragedy:
https://laist.com/2019/10/22/pedestrian_deaths_vision_zero_p...
This article shows it's not only LA that is failing at vision zero. https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/11/vision-zero-d...
Surely the US has by far the highest gun murder rate in schools among developed countries.
EDIT: The down votes are interesting - are you down voting because what I said is not true, or because you just don't like that it is true?
It might be true that France has by far the highest stray-golf-ball death rate in the world. But this wouldn't mean it is a significant cause of mortality, or an important object of public policy.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/switzerland-gun-laws-rates-o...
If the progressives were willing to accept the Swiss laws in the US under the stipulation that they would never again be made more strict, the US gun owners should be thrilled.
Part of the problem is that US gun laws are often motivated by misunderstanding or spite rather than reason or compromise.
[1] https://www.fedpol.admin.ch/dam/data/fedpol/sicherheit/waffe...
There are just way too many guns in the US (i.e. "it's just way too easy to get a gun in the US").
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g...
US has a mental illness problem. At some point, a societal sickness entered the country. A sickness of nihilism and hopelessness. A sickness where (mostly men) feel lonely and unloved and powerless to change their futures. A sickness where hatred for peers is harbored for years until it festers and explodes out in a violent way.
Why does America have these kinds of people at such high frequencies compared to Switzerland?
The question is always where the tradeoff point should be, not whether there's any tradeoff.
Consider that the news cycle and FUD have created a terrible availability bias in our country that increasingly leads to draconian actions like those mentioned in the article.
https://quillette.com/2019/11/29/the-availability-heuristic-...
The bodycount might not be "spectacular" but the rate of school shootings in the U.S. dwarfs other developed countries. Fatalities 200+ so far. At any rate, you don't know what they were 'estimating' exactly.
> The vast majority of shootings are between criminal gangs - making the guns illegal will not magically make criminals into upstanding citizens.
Criminals retrieve their weapons through underground networks. School shooters do not. They're just students. They've either grabbed what was lying around at home or bought them. Such that, accessibility to school shooters is hampered were it the case that legal distribution were more restricted.
Add to the fact, circulation of guns in the underground is only possible and bloated because of the sheet number of legal guns.
..., the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, ...
1) in the context of the constitution, "person" or "persons" is used when referencing an individual or individuals but "people" is used when speaking generally about a collective group. This can also be seen in the 4th amendment:
The right of the **people** to be secure in their **persons**, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures...
Bearing this in mind, I do not believe that the 2nd amendment was written as a right provided to individuals but instead as a right afforded to states.
If you want to argue that the "persons" part means the individual, then that would require that you ignore the first part. This contradicts what you said earlier about "being modified by what comes before it".
But liberals don’t care because they live in their mansions, far away from any danger. And rich SV CEOs throw money at anti capital punishment efforts while they relax in their mansions where they are sure to never encounter anyone that it might be used on.
Gallup conducts a firearms poll every year, and the closest thing to a total ban question is a total ban on handguns.
"Do you think there should or should not be a law that would ban the possession of handguns, except by the police and other authorized persons?"
should be: 29
should not be: 70
no opinion: 1
I don't think anyone sane would read that page, the questions, and in particular trends, and come to the conclusion that gun regulation is a "very unpopular opinion".
But on this site: yes, it's unpopular.
This sounds more like, in common with most polls, it shows how the manner of asking a question alters the answers given?
I'd be really interested in how the poll would go without "the police and other", and with using a construction based on "allow ..." instead of "ban ...".
Because the grown-ups can't figure out how to solve the top-level problems, they are instead dealing with the low-level symptoms and applying band-aids.
It also reeks of political pork to me.
I admit that enumerating the top-level problems is politically fraught, but I think they can be neatly condensed into:
* that mass shootings occur, ever
* that we cannot control childrens' use of the internet in any meaningful way
* that children are seeing through the thin veneer of meaningfulness that life in the US is supposed to have (notably traditional career paths and religion)
I don't pretend to have easy answers, but see-through backpacks is security theater that is the stuff of Bruce Schneier competitions.
Would we rather live in a society where people are only doing the right thing because they're being watched, or where people do the right thing because they've internalized morals and ethics so it doesn't matter if they're watched?
I'd argue the latter is better. Merely pleasing your watchers is not personal responsibility. It's control and confinement to whatever you think the watchers want to see. But, when/if the surveillance rails come off, then what happens? Then we have people who have never stood on their own ethical two feet.
The rights of children have historically been neglected, and so we inflict on them what we dare not inflict on ourselves.
I realized as a child that my parents were sending me to a fucked up place. They did it because they were out to lunch and not paying attention. I've never understood why most people, who sincerely love their children, send them to these places.
Education per se is the secondary reason for their existence. The primary reason is conformity, which they are much more successful at achieving (than education.)
The single, simple metric to tell whether or not your school system is actually educational is the ratio of teachers to children. The range of 1/6 is probably the upper limit. You might get away with 1/10 if the teacher is truly magical. The modern ranges pr 1/20 - 1/40 are absurd. Fucked up Lord of the Flies shit goes down when you get that many kids together w/o adequate supervision. You were all children once, you know what I mean.
Modern "school" systems are hell-worlds. If you love your children, don't send them to hell-worlds.
Recently I’ve had a change in opinion though. I started volunteering at a daycare because I am so passionate about the shortcomings of public schools. And working with the kids has made me realize that most of them have no problem with public schools. Most of them aren’t smart enough to benefit from better education. True intellectual curiosity is very rare. And most of them enjoy the petty games of social hierarchy that dominate in public schools.
The one aspect of my opinion that hasn’t changed is that there should be more discipline. Bring back the paddle and rules. Boys need it psychologically, order and structure and consequences.
I think "Transparent Society" has the right idea; these technologies are ubiquitous and cheap, and the question of the near future isn't going to be whether they're deployed but who controls the feed. If we pretend the answer can be made to be "nobody," we're dodging the conversation that needs to be had.
"Ban cameras" isn't going to cut it, because if you make it an issue of either-or, society's definitely going to choose stores being able to protect themselves over the relatively low risk of occasional homosexual outing. So we need a better approach than "ban cameras" (maybe the store owner is fined for sharing private information unredacted that's unrelated to a store security issue? Or we find out that that sort of thing happens all the time, so maybe homosexuality isn't a horrible society-destroying perversion that ignorant people were assuming it is?).
Given the huge range of drinks available in the USA, especially soft drinks, I'm curious to know what colour isn't acceptable.
(That was sarcasm.)
Why respect authorities or society at all when it's arbitrary like that. It teaches learned helplessness and corruption and creates crappy people. Public schools don't have money, and when they get it, they spend it on this? Private schools and homeschooling programs seem to have a bright future.
All of these epiphenomena will get worse until we take social trust seriously.
[1] - https://www.bi.team/blogs/social-trust-is-one-of-the-most-im...
That being said schools shouldn't feel like prison. Students shouldn't feel like their privacy and agency is forfeit. They should not feel subhuman.
As an aside my brother-in-law has been battling his childrens school for several years because he refuses to allow their school issued laptops to connect to his home network. The laptops use a proprietary WiFi setup dialog that states the network password will be saved to the cloud with no option to opt out. The school doesn't understand why he would be concerned with that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Brother_(Doctorow_novel...
Download the book for free: https://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/
The environment, for example, though I could pick obesity, teaching to the test, or any number of other examples. The "Crying Indian" public service announcements from the 70s https://www.inc.com/joshua-spodek/remember-single-tear-anti-... reveal that the amount of plastic and waste that we once considered a crying shame, we produce monthly today, and is increasing.
We consider pollution normal that our ancestors cried at. Remember the first time you saw a picture of a beach covered in plastic junk? Now there are millions of such images. How many of us have plastic bottles next to our computers despite a tap giving healthier water a few steps away? How many of us ordered junk we knew we'd throw away manufactured twelve time zones away, knowing the pollution it would cause, but everyone else does it and that's just the way things are now?
We used to consider splitting atoms a crazy alternative to lower population growth. Now, especially in this community, people want more of it. Do you consider nuclear energy a solution instead of a symptom of deeper problems? Think of it from the perspective of the past, when there was more natural abundance per person. At the same time, think of how future generations may value greater encroachments into their freedom and privacy that we would consider unacceptable today.
The top post on this thread starts, "THIS IS NOT OKAY." How much that we consider okay today would past generations have judged "NOT OKAY"? If we would want future generations to claw back to now if these trends continued, should we claw back to a less-polluted world? To a more fit world? To an educational system that helps mature children into responsible, capable adults, not excellent sheep?
Gun rights at the expense of privacy rights
No, but these are important lessons for kids to learn.
1. Don't trust somebody else's device, such as a school- or work-issued device.
2. Learn to use social media responsibly. Your public social media output is.... public. Don't put things on social media if you don't want them potentially used against you.
Death from terrorism is 4000X over represented in the news
Prescient.
When will this country start addressing the root cause?
Consider how much news coverage was given to the Las Vegas mass shooting. That resulted in 58 dead and 413 wounded.
Compare that to how much national coverage is spent on car accidents. About 40,000 Americans per year are killed by cars. That's about two Las Vegas massacres worth of dead each and every day of the year.
The news industry thrives on sensation. Politicians don't even wait for the blood to dry before leveraging drama for their cause. The schools are now just mirroring the public's ill-formed opinion. This is all great if you are preparing your kids to be cogs in a surveillance state. It is less great if you care about freedom.
The US has already done about all it can to regulate cars to maximize safety. There is, perhaps, more to be done, but since the Constitution doesn't include a right to keep and bear cars, regulation and law in the space of publicly-operated vehicles is already large and mature.
The same is not true for firearms, which is why it's such a contentious topic in the US.
Also, people feel more in control when they drive, and who doesn’t like to think they’re a better driver than others?
Halving speed limits on highways and interstates would save many lives. But we'd prefer to "move fast and break things"
Texting while driving. Hypothesis disproved.
Now that it reached your own kids, only now, it is outrageous.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/w...
"Make sure"? Yeah right.
But the reality is that schools are a lot more dangerous than they were just 10 years ago.
If our response to that shouldn't be cameras and backpack checks, then what's an appropriate response? (Perhaps the bigger picture political answer is "gun control", but that's not something schools can sit around a wait for to happen)
> If our response to that shouldn't be cameras and backpack checks, then what's an appropriate response?
Money. This country is literally running out of teachers. We do not have enough adults in a typical school to tutor, observe, and guide students. Adults don't want to do the adulting anymore and the kids are having to learn to fend for themselves. None of these technological "solutions" are there to make kids learn or keep them safe. It is there to save some money for responsibilities the schools no longer meet.
Work to heal the divides in the country and improve social cohesion. Figure out how to reinstill the sense of community that prevented these things over the course of history. Help all students find a supportive peer group.
Do you have a source for this?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/resizer/V8zMSpOAM50-sxWp--S6J...
Shootings are still rare, just less so.
Compare 2000's to 2010–2014 to 2015 to 2019.
Keep in mind that the site was founded in 2001, was growing rapidly through the 2000s, and (along with much the rest of the Internet) saw a huge boost in use and access with the spread of mobile devices.
Inconsistency in reporting is a general problem with crime (and other human activities), with reporting rates rising and falling for numerous reasons. But a standardised crime reporting database would be preferable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_shooting#United_States
> Then what's an appropriate response?
Get rid of the security theater and actually do something about the causes.
Only in certain places in the western world, due to the governments refusal to implement gun control. Most countries haven't had a school shooting in decades (or ever).
Gun control doesn't work? Go tell that to the graves of children who died due to school shootings, just because the country they were born in refused to implement gun control.
It's frankly ridiculous to the rest of the world how easily people can buy guns in the US.
This is not a problem that can or should be solved with surveillance. It's a gun problem, that should be solved by making guns harder to get.
Edit: Why the downvotes? Is anything I've said not true? Please do explain.
Then how come gun ownership is negatively correlated with homicides?
https://medium.com/@tgof137/gun-ownership-rates-do-not-predi...