Source: www.techdirt.com
by Tim Cushing

To go to school is to be surveilled, on campus and off. The average school hosts a number of cameras, and the average school administration is always looking for more ways to keep tabs on students, even after they’ve gone home.

The move towards pervasive surveillance of off-campus activities is generally justified with the meaningless assertion that if it stops one person from shooting up a school (or just shooting themselves), it’s all worth it. Two articles based on public records requests — both written by Benjamin Herold of Education Week — show there’s a surveillance state being built one school district at a time. (h/t Amelia Vance)

Documents obtained by Education Week via open-records requests show that over the past year, state agencies have discussed the possibility of sharing a breathtaking amount of data. That included more than 2.5 million records related to Floridians who received involuntary psychiatric examinations, records for over 9 million people placed in foster care, diagnosis and treatment records for substance abusers, unverified criminal reports of suspicious activity, reports on students who were bullied and harassed because of their race or sexual orientation, and more.

This database is currently on hold as education officials try to figure out how much of this incredibly sensitive info they can share with other agencies, much less collect in the first place. But once these details are ironed out, the rollout will continue, urged along by Governor Ron DeSantis, who has publicly expressed his frustration that schools aren’t placing students under round-the-clock surveillance quickly enough.

It’s not just medical, psychiatric, and criminal records. This program also seeks to hoover up as much data as it can from students’ social media accounts and internet activities. The data-sharing concerns are being mitigated by a loophole in federal privacy laws. The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) prohibits sharing of much of this info, but provides an exception for “school officials.” Schools want to hand this information to law enforcement and law enforcement officers in schools (usually referred to as “school resource officers”) are the loophole districts are using to circumvent FERPA’s protections.

While the collected documents listed above are concerning enough in their implications — that implication being that schools consider at-risk students to be “threats” — the addition of social media to the mix increases the number of students viewed as threats because algorithms and haystacks tend to ignore important things like context or frame of mind. The software being sold to schools may expedite the collection of posts containing flagged terms but they’re completely useless when it comes to doing more human things, like recognizing humor or sarcasm.

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