When I was in school they would monitor everything that you did on the computer and then when the students attempted to get around the blocks with simple proxies, they would have to get new proxies each day as they were banned.
I personally was one of the people who was supplying new proxies to students at the school, and they went after me taking away my ability to connect to the internet using my login for the remaining years of my high school experience. I eventually had to use other peoples logins (with their permission of course) to be able to continue using the computers at the school.
All this is to say, if you try to create a surveillance system at any given school, kids will find a way to not engage with it or fight back if they are able. People in the discussion below aren't giving the kids enough credit to stand up for themselves.
Yes but cameras and microphones are different than network monitoring. The monitoring of computers is individualized, whereas cameras monitor groups. It might seem minor to some, but the presence of cameras in british schools is really changing things for the good.
American schools use cameras to look into crimes. They are not generally accessible immediately by teachers, but many British schools now have very elaborate camera systems designed for immediate use. When two kids get into a fight there is little debate about who started it. Teachers can, within minutes, have the footage on a tablet at their desk. Having that unbiased video evidence immediately at hand radically changes bullying prevention. Some kids and most parents may not like cameras, but that kid who is afraid for his or her physical safety wants those cameras working.
Microphones are a more sensitive issue, but I could see them being equally effective in addressing harassment. They would need different protections, perhaps a 30min recording limit, but there is potential.
I did the exact same thing! I somehow managed to combine PHProxy with Wordpress and a plugin that would let me charge users through PayPal. If my domain got blocked, I'd just buy a new .info domain and email it to all my users. I even had a teacher who paid me for an account. My proxy was especially popular because it worked for YouTube and MySpace, and it was hard to find web proxies that consistently supported the both of those.
We used to have so much fun with this in school. Wrote scripts to disable the surveillance software, proxy our traffic over SSH, exploit permissions gaps to help students run games on school laptops, etc..
Even discovered that the "teacher" version of the software could be used for complete surveillance and control of every student computer on the network.
Despite doing nothing malicious, I was reprimanded heavily for describing to the principal the severity of the issue after other kids were caught doing less than savory things with it.
I learned something then. And it seems the "real world" isn't much different.
My high school didn't block https traffic. The work around, literally, was to append an 's' after http. (Of course, that only worked for sites that implemented SSL, but a good number did at the time).
Yep, and I think it's easier than ever right now. School IT systems will often whitelist browsers including Chromium and its derivatives for installation without admin privileges. That means any student can download Brave, access Tor, and get to any site they want. All GUI, no hassle.
I remember I was in a small CS class in High School. It was a mix of hardware geeks and software geeks.
The teacher had a script which would turn off all our screens when she was giving lectures. One of my buddies (SW geek) developed this script which would get around the teachers script and turn our monitors back on, but it was buggy and didn't always work.
The Hardware geeks just unplugged their ethernet cables. Go figure.
This was being praised on NPR recently. The young host was ecstatically talking about how the CEO of some company says "we kinda gave up our rights to privacy with the digital age", and that these surveillance measures are able to spot trouble students.
The host then talked himself into making the comparison between this activity and how Russia treats surveillance, and confusedly asking his guest "wait, we're not like the Russians are we? That can't be right..." After some interaction, the host was eager to talk about the programs again.
Why are people so willing to give up their rights?
Why are people so willing to give up their rights?
A lot of people are very happy to lead docile, ignorant lives, and be "protected" from any (real or imagined) threats. I think it's mostly a "I'm not doing anything wrong, why should I care?" type of thinking. As the infamous saying goes,
"Those who give up freedom for security deserve neither."
I know your question was half-rhetorical, but people as a group follow authority figures. Asserting one's rights requires self-actualization, correctly extrapolating narrow rights into actions that remain within the bounds of those rights, going against a "professional" who is in charge, going against the social herd (and your own mirror neurons) who are judging you for not simply complying, generally making your position worse off than if you had complied, and then repeatedly doing this hoping that it will catch on.
IMO the US style adversarial system where eg cops can outright lie to you to nullify your rights are mindlessly naive. Having to do all of the above is basically market inefficiency, with the default being set by only the regulations the professionals have to follow. In retrospect the ethos couldn't have been better designed to foster totalitarianism.
Straw men such as not being "like Russia" or "like China" just prop up the cognitive dissonance. That is what happened to that radio host who accidentally made the badthink connection between US surveillance and Russian surveillance.
People on NPR are specifically being paid to advance these viewpoints, so I wouldn't view them as representative. Meanwhile ad blockers are ubiquitous, indicating most people aren't "kinda" into giving up their privacy.
All this - being spied on 100% of the time - ostensibly to prevent something that has about a 1 in 600,000,000 chance of happening to you, ever. Oh but it must be a real and ever-present danger - I saw it on the news!
By that logic we should have facial recognition too, just to make sure JLo doesn't walk in. She's been all over the news for 20 years, so it must be an epidemic.
The critique in this article focuses on technological unreliability without addressing the profound wrongheadedness of the idea in the first place. Perhaps that's been discussed plenty elsewhere, but I for one could stand to have that part of the critique repeated ad infinitum until it sinks in.
US students (general population as well) are way more stressed than students in other countries. Like way, way, way more stressed.
People respond to prolonged stress with aggression. Instead of doing surveillance, maybe think about ways to reduce student stress.
E.g. in Austria, the school is legally required to provide a day between two major tests (IIRC). In the US, lol, finals are crammed into like 3 days where you have major papers/projects due as well, so like 6 major things due in like 3 days is normal.
Maybe school is just supposed to prepare from being managed inefficiently.
> Asked whether his algorithms could prevent a mass shooting, van der Vorst said: “I wouldn’t claim that we could prevent a crazy loony from shooting people.”
Call me a crazy loony, but I think someone who would phrase it that way isn't on the same planet as taking the problem space seriously.
Because taking the problem seriously isn't the point of their participation.
Computer recognition of the natural world does not work without training and human confirmation/QA, and they aren't going to train each individual installation on corpuses derived from each individual school because that would eat their profits. It's all a scam, the only reason anybody's even talking to them is because they're using tax dollars as free R&D funding and calling it "progress."
It seems to be working. The sane people have stopped shooting up groups of strangers and now only the crazy loonies are left, as one can plainly see from their interviews, social media posts etc
While the cameras in the article seem to run on some stupid software that doesn’t help, I don’t think I would have cared as a student about cameras in general. In fact I may have appreciated the fact that cameras mean the teachers can’t get away with the privilege of being more trustworthy than the kids.
Catching cheaters would be nice. Catching bullies would be nice. Reducing the rate of false sexual assault claims and actual sexual assault (my year had one of each teacher:student).
But... it probably opens doors to worse things. Dumb cameras would be good. Smart cameras would be bad. As would software run over the dumb cameras.
As a former teacher I 100% support surveillance (hopefully video) monitoring in the classroom. Parents need to see first-hand how bad student behavior can get.
Adolescents require a sense of privacy in order to properly grow into functional and successful adults. I was under constant surveillance as a child and wasn't able to start "being me" until I'd left home. My development was straight up stunted by constant surveillance. There are too many abusive / helicopter parents out there for this to possibly be a good thing.
I can only imagine what life would be like if my control-freak step-grandmother had access to tapes of me learning how to interact with my classmates and participating in cognitive rebellion against their draconian, hyper-religious control over my personality. Instead of being punished 75% of the time it would have been 100% of the time. I would not have been allowed to contact any of my friends because they all grew up in more sensible households and represented threats to my guardians' control over me.
And this doesn't even touch the fact that normalizing children to surveillance is objectively a bad thing if you give a rat's ass about the future of this planet and peoples' ability to be individual.
Maybe it sounds like a good idea at face value but you should resist espousing such views without thinking about every last detail.
The worst of my teachers' behavior when I was a kid was beyond the pale, but no one took kids at face value.
Fact is, school is a horrible environment with disgusting power dynamics in every direction, which doesn't do anything to bring out the best in people. No one believes how bad it gets in there, and for some reason, promptly forgets what it was like in school when they were growing up. Or they just didn't comprehend it at the time.
ESL teacher here. I agree with your comment (although not necessarily with the reasoning).
This week inwasnput incharge of the whole technology deot behind out school and the boss asked me to find a way to forward the cameras to their main office.
They asked it was possible and I gave a non committal answer promising to get back to them next week, purely because I know some teachers are uncomfortable about this.
Personally I'm all for it. I've seen it in Korea (I'm in Japan btw), where parents can see real time feeds of the classrooms.
Personally, i don't have an issue. I have a full audio and video camera in my room, and I'm willing to open that to the owner(and if they want the parents) in real time.
A lot of teachers over here seem to take it as an insult though. As if their personal freedoms are being enchroached.
I think there is more reason than to show how badly their children are acting though. A co worker was accused of sexually assaulting a student a few years ago (different school). They happened to still have the recordings on hand and after showing the full month in question to the oarentx the student admitted to makjgbitnuo to try and stop doing extra after school studies. That's one reason it's damn important, and the converse side of course.
I'm of the mind that having a camera(and audio) in a classroom that parents can access in real time is not just an excellent safety precaution, it's also a great way for parents to learn about their children's study and learning methods!
There is a huge difference between what is described in the article, and a simple video recording that you're describing.
A video system is ultimately a facilitator of human-scale behavior - recorded footage can be played back as objective evidence or representative examples. A proper video system would have an append-only audit log of what was accessed by whom, available to the entire community. But even without that, the limit of abuse is confined to what a petty school administration could accomplish. Whereas the system in the article is practically begging to create perverse incentives that lead to mechanized abuse ("your son has been suspended for repeated aggression incidents" - meanwhile it's simply something about their voice that sets off a poorly implemented trigger). The fallout from these problems then gets default-labeled as "nobody's fault" because the non-techie bias is to trust machines' biased interpretations as if they're facts.
OMG lol i was going to agree with you with all the recent tragedies lately and then you had to drop because of student behavior. well i have seen teachers take it out on students too...
This is a crazy idea. Even if they worked, this would be a bad one. Most kids who get angry and aggressive never shoot up a school over it, and all this will result in is a bunch of kids who get in arguments being hauled in front of the cops and being interrogated about "where is the gun, and what day are you doing it?".
This applies to the whole "report suspicious behavior" thing too. Most of the time, when a kid is acting like an edgy teen he's just... being an edgy teen. I don't like the whole spanish inquisition rat-out-your-buddy direction this thing is taking.
It's a little surprising that this article approaches the issue from the perspective of the gizmo working, rather than ever-widening surveillance.
Imagine that some automated surveillance technology proved itself to be 100% effective at spotting aggressive behavior. The only catch is that it records, with perfect fidelity every sneeze, cough, conversation, and laugh in a way that uniquely associates each instance to an individual. Part of the efficacy requires all audio and personal identification to be stored in a giant database.
Should such a technology be deployed in US public schools?
No. Surveillance is a bad by itself. I don't want a social model where morality is the product of fear. I don't believe in authoritarian virtues; they will inherently lead to aggression and violence themselves.
As a sidenote, most surveillance technology is unproven, at least in the sense — that there is no good scientific proof for increased security by using it.
I believe most surveillance tecchnology is better suited for ass covering/acountability than for any real increase of security and safety.
This is the difference between stopping something from happening vs figuring out afterwards what caused it.
One thing I don't get is why the hell so many people's definition of 'good child development' involves setting up dystopias that only a few decades ago would have been panned as heavy handed and unrealistic.
It isn't very weird that these smart surveillance thingys go off on the wrong things. What do they have to train those AI? They can't have that many "sound bites" from actual school shootings right? Maybe they actually have some but probably not enough to train a reliable AI on imo. I wonder how they did to create more data. Did they hire some actors and tried to create some "aggressive noises" themselves? I really wanted the journalists to ask the companies this.
Most people only attend a single high school. What qualifies anyone to speak about how most US schools are, much less compare student experience between US and European ones?
There's too many comments here that are just conjecture.
[+] [-] threwawasy1228|6 years ago|reply
I personally was one of the people who was supplying new proxies to students at the school, and they went after me taking away my ability to connect to the internet using my login for the remaining years of my high school experience. I eventually had to use other peoples logins (with their permission of course) to be able to continue using the computers at the school.
All this is to say, if you try to create a surveillance system at any given school, kids will find a way to not engage with it or fight back if they are able. People in the discussion below aren't giving the kids enough credit to stand up for themselves.
[+] [-] sandworm101|6 years ago|reply
American schools use cameras to look into crimes. They are not generally accessible immediately by teachers, but many British schools now have very elaborate camera systems designed for immediate use. When two kids get into a fight there is little debate about who started it. Teachers can, within minutes, have the footage on a tablet at their desk. Having that unbiased video evidence immediately at hand radically changes bullying prevention. Some kids and most parents may not like cameras, but that kid who is afraid for his or her physical safety wants those cameras working.
Microphones are a more sensitive issue, but I could see them being equally effective in addressing harassment. They would need different protections, perhaps a 30min recording limit, but there is potential.
[+] [-] ravenstine|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TazeTSchnitzel|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abstractbarista|6 years ago|reply
Even discovered that the "teacher" version of the software could be used for complete surveillance and control of every student computer on the network.
Despite doing nothing malicious, I was reprimanded heavily for describing to the principal the severity of the issue after other kids were caught doing less than savory things with it.
I learned something then. And it seems the "real world" isn't much different.
[+] [-] JMTQp8lwXL|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] theLotusGambit|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JustSomeNobody|6 years ago|reply
People anywhere don't give children enough credit for how clever they can be at getting around stuffy rules.
I really hope parents take up this battle though. This is your job as a parent.
[+] [-] tj-teej|6 years ago|reply
The teacher had a script which would turn off all our screens when she was giving lectures. One of my buddies (SW geek) developed this script which would get around the teachers script and turn our monitors back on, but it was buggy and didn't always work.
The Hardware geeks just unplugged their ethernet cables. Go figure.
[+] [-] dgzl|6 years ago|reply
The host then talked himself into making the comparison between this activity and how Russia treats surveillance, and confusedly asking his guest "wait, we're not like the Russians are we? That can't be right..." After some interaction, the host was eager to talk about the programs again.
Why are people so willing to give up their rights?
[+] [-] userbinator|6 years ago|reply
A lot of people are very happy to lead docile, ignorant lives, and be "protected" from any (real or imagined) threats. I think it's mostly a "I'm not doing anything wrong, why should I care?" type of thinking. As the infamous saying goes,
"Those who give up freedom for security deserve neither."
[+] [-] mindslight|6 years ago|reply
IMO the US style adversarial system where eg cops can outright lie to you to nullify your rights are mindlessly naive. Having to do all of the above is basically market inefficiency, with the default being set by only the regulations the professionals have to follow. In retrospect the ethos couldn't have been better designed to foster totalitarianism.
Straw men such as not being "like Russia" or "like China" just prop up the cognitive dissonance. That is what happened to that radio host who accidentally made the badthink connection between US surveillance and Russian surveillance.
[+] [-] adamnemecek|6 years ago|reply
Students have no rights. I find it despicable but it's a fact.
[+] [-] astazangasta|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JetezLeLogin|6 years ago|reply
By that logic we should have facial recognition too, just to make sure JLo doesn't walk in. She's been all over the news for 20 years, so it must be an epidemic.
The critique in this article focuses on technological unreliability without addressing the profound wrongheadedness of the idea in the first place. Perhaps that's been discussed plenty elsewhere, but I for one could stand to have that part of the critique repeated ad infinitum until it sinks in.
[+] [-] adamnemecek|6 years ago|reply
People respond to prolonged stress with aggression. Instead of doing surveillance, maybe think about ways to reduce student stress.
E.g. in Austria, the school is legally required to provide a day between two major tests (IIRC). In the US, lol, finals are crammed into like 3 days where you have major papers/projects due as well, so like 6 major things due in like 3 days is normal.
Maybe school is just supposed to prepare from being managed inefficiently.
[+] [-] 0xcde4c3db|6 years ago|reply
Call me a crazy loony, but I think someone who would phrase it that way isn't on the same planet as taking the problem space seriously.
[+] [-] rhizome|6 years ago|reply
Computer recognition of the natural world does not work without training and human confirmation/QA, and they aren't going to train each individual installation on corpuses derived from each individual school because that would eat their profits. It's all a scam, the only reason anybody's even talking to them is because they're using tax dollars as free R&D funding and calling it "progress."
[+] [-] xkcd-sucks|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] b_tterc_p|6 years ago|reply
Catching cheaters would be nice. Catching bullies would be nice. Reducing the rate of false sexual assault claims and actual sexual assault (my year had one of each teacher:student).
But... it probably opens doors to worse things. Dumb cameras would be good. Smart cameras would be bad. As would software run over the dumb cameras.
[+] [-] tsss|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phpdragon|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soulofmischief|6 years ago|reply
I can only imagine what life would be like if my control-freak step-grandmother had access to tapes of me learning how to interact with my classmates and participating in cognitive rebellion against their draconian, hyper-religious control over my personality. Instead of being punished 75% of the time it would have been 100% of the time. I would not have been allowed to contact any of my friends because they all grew up in more sensible households and represented threats to my guardians' control over me.
And this doesn't even touch the fact that normalizing children to surveillance is objectively a bad thing if you give a rat's ass about the future of this planet and peoples' ability to be individual.
Maybe it sounds like a good idea at face value but you should resist espousing such views without thinking about every last detail.
[+] [-] arkades|6 years ago|reply
The worst of my teachers' behavior when I was a kid was beyond the pale, but no one took kids at face value.
Fact is, school is a horrible environment with disgusting power dynamics in every direction, which doesn't do anything to bring out the best in people. No one believes how bad it gets in there, and for some reason, promptly forgets what it was like in school when they were growing up. Or they just didn't comprehend it at the time.
[+] [-] marak830|6 years ago|reply
This week inwasnput incharge of the whole technology deot behind out school and the boss asked me to find a way to forward the cameras to their main office.
They asked it was possible and I gave a non committal answer promising to get back to them next week, purely because I know some teachers are uncomfortable about this.
Personally I'm all for it. I've seen it in Korea (I'm in Japan btw), where parents can see real time feeds of the classrooms.
Personally, i don't have an issue. I have a full audio and video camera in my room, and I'm willing to open that to the owner(and if they want the parents) in real time.
A lot of teachers over here seem to take it as an insult though. As if their personal freedoms are being enchroached.
I think there is more reason than to show how badly their children are acting though. A co worker was accused of sexually assaulting a student a few years ago (different school). They happened to still have the recordings on hand and after showing the full month in question to the oarentx the student admitted to makjgbitnuo to try and stop doing extra after school studies. That's one reason it's damn important, and the converse side of course.
I'm of the mind that having a camera(and audio) in a classroom that parents can access in real time is not just an excellent safety precaution, it's also a great way for parents to learn about their children's study and learning methods!
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jancsika|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dgzl|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abecedarius|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mindslight|6 years ago|reply
A video system is ultimately a facilitator of human-scale behavior - recorded footage can be played back as objective evidence or representative examples. A proper video system would have an append-only audit log of what was accessed by whom, available to the entire community. But even without that, the limit of abuse is confined to what a petty school administration could accomplish. Whereas the system in the article is practically begging to create perverse incentives that lead to mechanized abuse ("your son has been suspended for repeated aggression incidents" - meanwhile it's simply something about their voice that sets off a poorly implemented trigger). The fallout from these problems then gets default-labeled as "nobody's fault" because the non-techie bias is to trust machines' biased interpretations as if they're facts.
[+] [-] blondin|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m463|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gweinberg|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bin0|6 years ago|reply
This applies to the whole "report suspicious behavior" thing too. Most of the time, when a kid is acting like an edgy teen he's just... being an edgy teen. I don't like the whole spanish inquisition rat-out-your-buddy direction this thing is taking.
[+] [-] apo|6 years ago|reply
Imagine that some automated surveillance technology proved itself to be 100% effective at spotting aggressive behavior. The only catch is that it records, with perfect fidelity every sneeze, cough, conversation, and laugh in a way that uniquely associates each instance to an individual. Part of the efficacy requires all audio and personal identification to be stored in a giant database.
Should such a technology be deployed in US public schools?
[+] [-] astazangasta|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thoughtstheseus|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qball|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ganzuul|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atoav|6 years ago|reply
I believe most surveillance tecchnology is better suited for ass covering/acountability than for any real increase of security and safety.
This is the difference between stopping something from happening vs figuring out afterwards what caused it.
[+] [-] TazeTSchnitzel|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ddingus|6 years ago|reply
How did it get so damn authoritarian?
[+] [-] Nasrudith|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] olodus|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Evidlo|6 years ago|reply
There's too many comments here that are just conjecture.
[+] [-] bombom|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xnLAP|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]