Schools are using surveillance tech to catch students vaping
apnews.com
apnews.com
>Students found vaping also can receive a misdemeanor citation and be fined up to $100. Students found with vapes containing THC, the chemical that makes marijuana users feel high, can be arrested on felony charges. At least 90 students in Tyler have faced misdemeanor or felony charges.
Imagine getting a felony as a high school senior for getting caught vaping weed by a sensor bought for a thousand bucks in COVID-19 emergency relief funds.
There's the saying "absolute power corrupts absolutely," but it's such a more boring banal inverted tyranny that allows well intended useful money to flow into such low life police state shit, and it ruins so badly the greater project & belief in doing stuff.
Cynicism seems ever on the rise, and it keeps seeming ever more warranted. More and more, nothing becomes as punk & contrarian as hopefulness & trying, in believing that we can surpass our mired shittinesses.
The technology for authoritarianism will continue to get cheaper and continue to proliferate. There’s no way to prevent that.
I noodled on a brief implementation on the Ethereum Blockchain, with a high level design of "anyone can issue and revoke to/from anyone else, and aggregate scoring is implemented by users", where my personal scoring system would have some kind of 3rd degree WoT evaluation, and normalize everyone's point-scores against the total quantity given by each of their point-givers".
Ridiculously heavy and expensive to implement on Ethereum, but I'm sure some other backing storage could handle the weight and transaction volume.
Probably worth writing up a whitepaper, as the cryptoderps say.
The fact is, people desire different things from society. Some people want to have other people take control, because they believe it provides them with security. Others want total freedom and the two are completely incompatible. I think the only solution is to leave behind the old way of people staying in the nation they are born. Different nations should be allowed to have completely different policies and people should be allowed to choose which policy sets best fit with their ideology and be allowed to freely move to the nation that applies.
I agree, that is a fact: a minority of people do desire different things from society, by definition, because what the majority wants is what society wants, by definition. How much does that matter in reality? Of course we can't allow a person to veto society, that would be minority rule, which is inferior to majority rule, all other things being equal.
I'm not sure why, but it feels like an unpopular minority has, over the last few decades in the u.s., been less and less accepting of this, and felt more entitled to veto the whims of society (a.k.a. the majority) in favor of their personal whims, rather than convincing the majority (a.k.a. society) to agree with them.
> Different nations should be allowed to have completely different policies and people should be allowed to choose which policy sets best fit with their ideology and be allowed to freely move to the nation that applies
I also agree here: it'd be great to be able to pick and choose countries, for a number of reasons, including the one you cite. One difficulty is, the other side of the coin is: each country also gets to pick and choose citizens as it sees fit. But if you disagree with a given country's society (a.k.a. disagree with the majority), it seems reasonable to want to leave it for one you agree with.
There are some major differences, don't get me wrong, but that seems to be trending towards more central control over at least the last 120 years.
I'm sympathetic with arguments against a lot of the surveillance we see in schools, but it does a great disservice to the anti-surveillance position when you try to use an example where it correctly identifies genuine misconduct.
The girl in the article says that this sort of thing doesn't work, yet in the next sentence she admits that it actually did work, "I’m never going to do something like that again, because the repercussions I faced were horrible." The system correctly identified her and as a result she decided to not partake in such behavior in the future. This reads like a young kid who doesn't think her actions should have consequences.
If I understand the article correctly, it's a misdemeanor and a small fine for nicotine vapes. This is far from ruining someone's life, I know people who got misdemeanors for more serious actions and they didn't have their lives ruined. In the vast majority of cases it does not seem that this is the issue you think it is. If a student is both an adult and is using flagrantly using marijuana in a school, and likely exposing their young friends' developing brains to the substance, then it is completely on them.
> A leading provider, HALO Smart Sensors, sells 90% to 95% of its sensors to schools. The sensors don’t have cameras or record audio but can detect increases in noise in a school bathroom and send a text alert to school officials, said Rick Cadiz, vice president of sales and marketing for IPVideo, the maker of the HALO sensors.
> The sensors are marketed primarily for detecting vape smoke or THC but also can monitor for sounds such as gunshots or keywords indicating possible bullying.
Gunshot detection is unreliable [1]. I don't think detecting keywords is much more reliable. Actually, I speculate that detecting keywords is less reliable.
But also, isn’t this a sort of victimless crime? Or is she, herself, the victim? It’s unclear.
Smoking in buildings is not victimless compared to drinking alcohol or even smoking outside away from entrances. Secondhand smoke [1] is more dangerous than it might seem.
False positives would only be a problem depending on how exactly the evidence is used. In the first example in the article Iglesias says she learned about the sensors in her own school when an admin came to the restroom after it was triggered. Despite it being triggered by actual vaping, she notes that the admin "ultimately let all the students go" which seems to indicate that, at that school, it wasn't being used blindly to convict students.
Could this system be abused or over relied upon? Definitely, but it doesn't seem that false positives are an issue if the school administration has appropriate standards of evidence.
Come on, mandatory minimum sentences for high schoolers? System of a Down was railing against this paradigm when I was a wee misanthrope and it wasn't even novel back then.
The old version of "actions not having consequences" was not getting caught. It can be enriching to rebel a little and get away with stuff. A lot of people grow into perfectly healthy adults and look back fondly on the stunts they pulled. Personally, I don't want my kids using any drugs but I don't think the answer is to put cameras in their rooms or supervising every play date until they're 26.
Perhaps the sensible solution is to make sure there is no system where children are getting legal charges for drug use. What an incredibly stupid system. They're kids. They are supposed to be making mistakes and learning from them in low-impact environments until they're old enough to be more responsible for their actions.
I am not surprised that kids have moved their social lives online.
One of my teachers smoked in his classroom during the lunch break and when we came into the room (we had him right after lunch), the room positively reeked of cigarette smoke. Young folks today have no idea just how wild the twentieth century was.
Edit, it was even worse:
> In 1988, airlines based in the United States banned smoking on domestic flights of less than two hours, which was extended to domestic flights of less than six hours in February 1990, and to all domestic and international flights in 2000
Can confirm, I still remember playing with the in-seat ashtrays and my mother telling me to stop, and then the whole rigamarole with the "smoking" and "non-smoking" sections and lights.
Hell I remember my father buying Marlboro reds from an old vending machine that was entirely mechanical.
It sounds like the real issue here is the insane punishment for a single infraction.
There's far too many instances where people simply get away with smoking, so, for those instances where solid proof is available that the person did smoke, they should, indeed, be punished for violating other people's right to pollution-free air on their first offence.
Otherwise, these people will simply learn to simply avoid the spots where they could be caught and reprimanded, whilst continuing to create a nuisance elsewhere, entirely defeating the effectiveness of enforcement.
So rather than introducing the equivalent of chewing gum bans like Singapore did, let’s move on.
I do not think it is an insurmountable task for a legal adult take their recreational drugs at home. Maybe legal adults can take responsibility of their future, rather than risking it on breaking rules that are pretty explicit, so much so that in any other workplace or public area that prohibits smoking incurs fines at the least, and jail time for repeat offenders.
It's really not hyperbole. It's an apt comparison.
Not all those qualities, but we did have metal detectors.
> It's really not hyperbole. It's an apt comparison.
I guess my standards are lower compared to you, I associate prison with complete lack of freedom where you cannot leave at the end of the day, most other things are representations of that. School was generally fine, and even quite fun some days for myself.
My workplace has a "smoking area" dedicated to drug use, and allows "smoke breaks" for the sole purpose of consuming said drugs. We have places called "bars" that exist for the sole purpose of taking drugs in public.
Are we actually giving these students equal opportunities to consume it legally, or are we saying "you're a prisoner for 8 hours, and we're going to abuse that authority to deny you any access to your perfectly legal recreational activities during that period"?
If we're going to crack down and say kids should go 8 hours without drugs, shouldn't we be OK enforcing that on the adults in the workplace, too?
Why are we holding these students to a higher standard? Why are we spending thousands of dollars on enforcing the rules for students, and nothing on the rest of society?
My workplace does not, bans all drug use. All buildings and employee locations are smoke free zones, and if they catch you, actually does enforce it, leading up to termination if not outright upon discovery. See all of big tech' campus rules as the most relevant example, then further to quite literally more places than just "bars" where people also maintain an occupation.
> Are we actually giving these students equal opportunities to consume it legally, or are we saying "you're a prisoner for 8 hours, and we're going to abuse that authority to deny you any access to your perfectly legal recreational activities during that period"?
Legal adults can remove themselves from school by dropping out, an option they have had since the very second they turned 18. Until then, they are either the responsibility of a dedicated guardian, or the institution. Meaning parents or the school, they are not their own person. School is also, not a prison, so your hyperbole stops as soon as it starts.
> If we're going to crack down and say kids should go 8 hours without drugs, shouldn't we be OK enforcing that on the adults in the workplace, too?
See above. 8 hours truly is not long, I would bet a fair amount of legal adults do reach that length of time without touching drugs every single day, even the ones that do drugs recreationally.
> Why are we holding these students to a higher standard? Why are we spending thousands of dollars on enforcing the rules for students, and nothing on the rest of society?
See above. I don't think legal adults are as clueless as you make them out to be.
> I think it's perfectly reasonable to complain about unequal enforcement.
No idea what this means.
Some amount, yes, but considering we, as a profession, are so addicted to caffeine that 2/5 of the most popular languages are named after it, and office coffee machines are considered table stakes, I'm not even sure you can confidently call that even a majority.
Sure, it would be rude to vape in an elevator or most workplaces. But compared to a high school bathroom, the scent isn't an issue.