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Comment by rahuldottech | Hacker News Reader

THIS IS NOT OKAY.

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.

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The flip side of the coin is that kids learn from a very early age what it takes to slip past the surveillance net. The smart ones watch everyone around them get caught for infractions. Taking note. Quietly gathering data. Towing the line, purposely being caught for the occasional minor infraction so as not to appear too good to be true. Until one day, they disappear from prison in the middle of a storm and take the entire foreman's investment portfolio with them.

Oh wait, I think there was a movie about this...

Then most people are still living in a surveillance dystopia / prison to stick with your analogy

I‘d rather not be in prison than hoping I‘m the chosen one who gets out

This scenario ends up being fairly elitist. Everyone should be free, and not everyone can crawl to freedom through five hundred yards of shit-smelling foulness I can't even imagine -- or maybe I just don't want to. Five hundred yards... that's the length of five football fields; just shy of half a mile.

My daughters teacher was monitoring her and her friend instant-messaging each other on school issued laptops.

The got around it by using a Google doc to chat in real-time.

Google-Docs-as-chat is extremely common in schools. Tons of schools use Google docs so they're not blocked, permissions (who you can bring to a doc) are usually wide-open, and monitoring's non-existent if you don't attract attention.

What movie is it? I would watch it.

Shawshank Redemption

Funny this article coming from the Guardian which I believe is a British publication. And London being the only city in the top 10 for surveillance outside of China. https://www.comparitech.com/vpn-privacy/the-worlds-most-surv...

My local corner shop has about 16 CCTV cameras in it, covering as many angles in the shop as they can. This is common. Very common.

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.

Imagine each one of those cameras were being held by a person. How would you react then? This is the true nature of the situation.

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.

The video on those systems usually is turned over every month. The video isn’t accessed unless there was an event.

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.

Yep. That's exactly the kind of rationalization I'm talking about. You don't know any of that for sure for each machine camera and certainly don't know what a random person will do with a taken video.

Amazing how you got downvotes for that. I was just thinking why some people reacted so aggressively towards the guy filming. And tbh he behaves really annoyingly. If he really wanted to teach people a lesson about constant surveillance this certainly doesn't play in his favour.

But I think it also has to do with the fact that at least with him people actually have someone to be mad about. As opposed to their usual mode of surveillance where they are being filmed by a 'security' camera (hey, it's security people! nevermind if it doesn't actually make anything any safer) operated and owned probably by their boss or someone who they are not on equal grounds with.

It makes me kind of sad.

Do you think the people being filmed would've behaved less aggressively if the camera man had told them that he only keeps footage for a month, doesn't run tracking and ID-ing software on it and only ever re-watches it when there was 'an event'?

I bet the moment unlimited storage is cheap, shop owners will do it.

people hate being watched

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?

I don't understand that, either. I don't use instagram, nor do I take "selfies"; I regard both as profoundly narcissistic, privacy concerns aside.

That said, the reason people get depressed by platforms like instagram is that they don't show real life but a photo-shopped, re-touched, carefully-curated version of life. People only see what others allow them to see.

Furthermore, I know that most of the footage taken by a surveillance camera is discarded. Most of the footage filmed by humans is created for a specific purpose and will be used. Someone else will likely watch it.

Finally, if I walk into a grocery store with a camera, I am going into someone else's establishment informed. If someone walks into a classroom and films me (like in the "Surveillance Camera Man" videos), there was no such agreement, implicit or otherwise.

I really do hate being watched, and hate others taking video. I hope surveillance cameras go out of use, and people stop recording everything on phones. However, there is a difference between that and some silly two-bit social network.

I'd say it's the latter. The selfie obsession is all about curating how you present yourself and your lifestyle. No one would want an IG or Facebook account with someone else at the helm.

> people hate being watched

in the old days we'd have God watching over our conscience.

now we have cctv.

Crime never occurred in the good old god fearing days, huh?

Crime doesn't occur these days, huh?

Funny how some people choose to react when the concept of 'God' is dropped into a response, irrespective of the author's belief or sincerity.

I prefer god. He at least doesn't talk to other people about his observations.

I prefer CCTV. Then we can actually go look at the footage and see what really happened, instead of arguing pointlessly and having no neutral reference.

I helped build a product a while back that helped those owners give access to the local police. Depending on what the owner wanted to do this could be just the street cameras or everything.

Do you sleep well at night?

No personal attacks please.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Sorry you see that as personal attack. It is not mean to be directed to one person. It is mostly against the lack of ethics in the profession at large.

I can understand less and less how other programmers can do this kind of work.

Everyone got to put food on the table, but if the money comes from destroying personal freedom, I could not sleep at night and I would take any other job.

Actually I do. I don't feel bad about writing any legal software. If laws suck they should be changed.

Mind showing me a camera that you can definitively say the government (or other actors) don't have the potential for backdoor access to?

I certainly can't.

Nope, and in case of crime, most local police forces can simply walk into local stores and request recordings from the last X days, so quite why they'd need illicit backdoors, I don't know.

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.

Not to mention camera technology that only records “junkies and thieves” and not the thousands of innocent people going about their day. There is nothing ok about pervasive, constant surveillance of law abiding people.

Any CCTV system that's air-gapped from the internet (records to local storage only) reasonably meets this definition.

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.

Raspberry Pi Camera Module?

Unless you believe governments have backdoored SSH, I would say it's good. Definitely not a turnkey solution though.

That sort of acceptance is why amazons ring is so dangerous: there are new business models around aggregating and automatically processing and mining that footage

Wouldn't be hard to hook them all up to the government's backend, if it one day became mandated. For safety.

> And London being the only city in the top 10 for surveillance outside of China. https://www.comparitech.com/vpn-privacy/the-worlds-most-surv....

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.

> London being the only city in the top 10 for surveillance outside of China

Only if you ignore Atlanta, GA at #10.

The source for the London figure is this article: https://www.cctv.co.uk/how-many-cctv-cameras-are-there-in-lo...

Unfortunately, the source for that article costs £100.

Why would the situation in London influence your perception of the article's content?

I think London is there mainly for the amount of CCTV cameras everywhere. The difference between this and place like China is how these tools are used - British society is fair and democratic to a high degree, in China this was never the goal. Of course priorities might change over time.

I think part of the problem of polarization is distrust in the respective other political isle. Constant surveillance and constant crises are probably key drivers here.

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.

I'd say that part of the problem is that surveillance data is monetizable, which increases every vendor's incentive to make that capability a fundamental part of the value proposition for the product or service.

I was born in the 80s and my dad was a network engineer with a hobby of privacy invasion. All computers in our house were open to remote login from him and all of our emails had to be through an email server he ran out of our home. Constant surveillance backfired on him in that it taught us how to be increasingly good at hiding activities and covering our tracks. Obviously that doesn't make up for the downsides of constant privacy invasion.

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.

When I was in highschool flash games were rising to prominance, and the admins naturally banned our favorite websites from the school network. We weren't savy enough for VPNs but we used proxies.

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.

I do not think so either.

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?

The horse has left that barn. They're under surveillance from the moment they enter the maternity ward. The population of HN'ers who let a babysitter take care of their kids w/o a webcam is probably way below the general population.

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.

Maybe. Quite a few of us are raising kids free range.

Ideally, we can also pass along what life can be like.

What free range options exist for urban techs? I do find it reassuring to see more Jr High aged kids on Muni recently.

You gotta go take trips. Find some outdoors place and visit it often.

What about friends? If enough of you agree, the range is more free for the kids.

Finally, in your home, you can be permissive.

I hate to say it, but it's perfect training for the world they'll live in once they enter the work force. It's the same thing there - you have no expectation of privacy when you're using the organization's equipment, if you want to do something sensitive you have to use your own equipment and data plan, and even if you do that, you risk being disciplined for doing something personal on the organization's premises/time.

>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.

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.

The bigger problem is the issues that led to the surveillance - the get an AR15 and shoot up a school culture in the US or the iffy government in China. Both those would be / have been a problem without any surveillance (eg. 30m + deaths in China earlier). On the other hand in our evolutionary environment we lived is small groups where everyone knew what everyone was up to and in the modern world your tech tracks you - it's just kind of part of life that doesn't really cause problems if people are nice.

What if exposing them to surveillance is actually educational? What if it helps them form models in their head that make noticing it’s overstep easier?

Maybe this elaborate demonstration of surveillance is being used as a teaching moment by a woke English teacher?

If you think that's bad. Check this out: https://www.wired.com/2010/10/webcam-spy-settlement/

This among the many reasons I don't want my children in the education system.

You have people teaching nihilism. This is the result of nihilism. If you want to eliminate this problem, then eliminate nihilism.

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.

Can you explain who is teaching nihilism to whom and where? In school, while I did not have a clear backpack and quite obviously had internet monitoring on someone else’s network, I was never, not once, taught nihilism. In fact, in my education through grade 12, most everything was filtered through a compassionate lens.

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

I was taught nihilism in grade 12, as part of my epistemology class, by the same teacher that made high school kids read Nietzsche. At the time, no-one adopted it, because we all still thought grades and test scores were somehow important.

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."

>in my education through grade 12, most everything was filtered through a compassionate lens.

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.

[Citation Needed]

You need a citation to believe that "the rejection of all religious and moral principles" would incentivize people to make their own "screw the system" morals? Really?

As if "religious principles" in any way inhibit immoral choices and create a moral system outside of one beneficial to itself.

If you insist on linking morality with religion, yeah, I do need a citation

.....?

Which bit of this are you upset with specifically? Monitoring internet access on school devices? That's been standard in every single school and workplace for decades.

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.

> Monitoring internet access on school devices? That's been standard in every single school and workplace for decades.

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.

Every large corporation I have worked with in the last 10 years has monitored internet access. Some block as well as monitor. The either monitor and block via network proxies and/or via locally installed software. When done locally the logs from the software are sent to a central logging system for the software. What the corporations do with that information has varied. Some don't actively look at it unless an issue arises and some send managers regular reports detailing the internet usage of their direct reports.

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.

Yes, and the point being made is that it's wrong.

> Monitoring internet access on school devices? That's been standard in every single school and workplace for decades.

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.

am in the US, but even today many small and medium sized companies do not monitor internet

Every URL accessed via a proxy will be logged, even no one is actively reviewing those logs regularly

In the early 2000's, I used to work at a medium size public company and managed the firewalls and proxy servers. I would regularly tail the logs for my own amusement. The amount of pornography streaming into that place was extraordinary.

When I was in high school, the admin regularly blacklisted new flash game sites as we started discovering and using them regularly on the school network.

Monitoring is done everywhere and has been done for a long time. Whether or not they check it depends on how lazy IT is.

I know for a fact BofA was doing it 10 years ago, because a family member tried to show me a YouTube video on their work laptop and it was blocked by the BofA firewall, even though they were at home. I doubt that there was a reprimand or anything, but I bet it was logged somewhere “just in case”.

That's still blocking, not actively monitoring. Probably because it runs all network traffic through their VPN.

Software like Forcepoint/Websense logs blocked attempts by default and can be configured to log all traffic. I don't believe there's a reliable source on what companies do.

The Levandowski incident at Google revealed that they had VERY extensive logs. They appear not to look at them routinely, but the logs are there when needed.

Was that the IP incident between Google and Uber? can you say more about the evidence here or post a source? just curious.

Yes. Here's the indictment: https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/press-release/file/1197991...

How do you block specific websites without monitoring which website is being visited? That doesn’t make any sense.

You can do it a couple of ways. You can whitelist sites, where all sites not on the list are automatically blocked, or you can blacklist them, where sites matching certain characteristics or on a particular list are blocked. Neither way necessitates logs or monitoring.

Hmm, what about this approach - monitoring adds a certain action on top of that blocked (or not) website you try to access. It gets reported, your credit/social/whatever score goes down. As a kid, you might have a talk with counselor, or your parents with principal. As working adult, you might get a warning or get fired. Your access to foreign travel, sim card, voting etc. might get altered.

That's both monitoring and blocking. I'm not sure you can block without monitoring.

Banks are strict on their work laptops. - Everything is tunneled through VPN

- 2 FA

- geofencing at VPN level (you can't take work laptop to Russia, India, China, etc)

- everything is whitelisted. Some employees can only access x.theirBank.com, everything is else blocked. This is the case with tellers, folks in the retail banking

- even for IT/dev, one should get explicit permission to get access to youtube, github

- every work laptop comes with an agent like ZScalar, which enforces these policies by coordinating with a central server.

...but that sounds like monitoring?

For example, downloading a list of prohibited domains to your device and running a local firewall. “Monitoring” in this context implies that someone will be able to later review the websites you’ve visited or tried to visit.

Every enterprises local firewall I know of can report back to a central system for logging.

I don’t have any special knowledge of enterprise firewalls; parent just asked how it was possible.

> That's been standard in every single school and workplace for decades.

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.

Plenty of places in the EU routinely monitor customers and block certain websites. Rail companies blocking streaming sites for just one very reasonable example. It can’t be as simply illegal as you say it is.

Monitoring and blocking are entirely different.

How can you block without first monitoring what sites people are trying to access?

There's usually a legal distinction. Blocking does require looking at the request, but the accept/request decision is made instantaneously and is usually based on a static blacklist (or whitelist). It doesn't necessarily require logging.

Monitoring usually means logging all activity and then automatically or manually sifting through the logs to look for things, possibly much later, and possibly in response to other subsequent events.

Monitoring is considered by most people to be worse, and may come with more legal liabilities.

Blocking certain internet resources has been in place for decades, not constant monitoring.

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?

You really shouldn't cite China as an example of anything being justifiably "normalized".

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.

> Which bit of this are you upset with specifically?

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.

The odds of being shot at school are incredibly low (~1 in 614,000,000), and have been falling since the 90's. It's just that when it does happen, it's so horrific that we cannot bear even the 1 because that 1 might be ours - myself included. That's ripe territory for companies to come in a make some good money on those mathematically irrational fears. The ones who suffer, though, are still the kids. While the likelihood of getting shot is lower than that of dying while simply traveling to school in the morning, the odds of being stressed and paranoid about it in school are now fairly significant.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/school-shootings-are-...

Nothing drives an economy like fear.

I read a book a while back, and it is even more relavaent today.

The Culture of Fear - Barry Glassner

https://www.amazon.com/Culture-Fear-Americans-Minorities-Mic...

Parents subjecting their children to their own fears should be made aware of what they are doing.

> But then again with all the school shootings I don't blame the security companies, it's a deep cultural/societal issue.

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.

> 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

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.

>To me the upsetting part is that these kids must feel unsafe / monitored.

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.

Kids do stupid things. But the "solution" presented, in form of increasing security measures, does not sound like a solution to me.

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.

It's not just internet access though. They flag private emails as well, is that not a violation of privacy?

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.

>They flag private emails as well, is that not a violation of privacy?

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.

Sure. Step 1, replace everything with a service. Step 2, make half of these free and employer- or government-provided, because people don't have time and money for dealing with subscription crap. Step 3, announce that if people want privacy, they should use their own devices.

Isn't that what is done essentially? The school provides the tech on loan and a school email account, just like companies do. And just like companies do, you keep work shit on work shit and personal shit on personal shit.

I'm most upset by internet monitoring. If I had had access to school devices and it had monitoring then I wouldn't trust the school with anything, because they wouldn't trust me with anything.

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.

Security Theater at its finest. If something happens they can always claim: "Look -- we did something -- it was utterly stupid and had no effect at all, but we did it, what else could we do?!?!"

>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.

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

>In China, you now have to submit your face to be scanned into a database to get a new phone.

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.

Not that it makes it more or less effective, but my public school in Birmingham Alabama required clear backpacks back in 1996

If you experienced that yourself, or know people who have, how did that requirement feel? Was there self-monitoring or worrying, at the very least for personal hygiene or medical items?

I was 9, so didn't really think much of it.

>The clear backpacks are silly I'll admit, and also pointless.

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.

It's still crazy. It's not like opaque lunch boxes and paper bags are luxury items. Concealing a handgun or drugs isn't all that difficult.

A few observations:

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.

> If it's not, then why do we allow open carry/concealed carry permits in public spaces?

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").

It's not so much about how good or how bad you secure your weapons. It's about how likely are you to become insane when you have access to weapons. It seems to me that adults have been active shooters as often as children.

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)

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