> The report also found that the surveillance fostered an atmosphere of distrust: 32% of 14 to 18-year-old students surveyed said they felt like they were always being watched.
Only 32% felt they were always being watched, but in reality 100% of them were always being watched.
This seems wildly optimistic to me. We see the same complacency and/or unawareness with e.g. Flock in society - the truth is most people really just don't think about it, or even mind when they do.
Not 100% of nationwide schools in the survey _always_ watch people. It'd've be interesting if the survey had been able to compare schools still primarily using "normal" surveillance of students vs the kinds for the school discussed in the article and how much of an impact just these changes were having.
Worth mentioning that "no digital recording devices in bathrooms" is something explicitly called out in the boy scouts' anti-child abuse training, mandatory for any adult volunteer.
It's actually "cameras and digital recording devices". My guess is that they meant to say "don't have your phone out in the bathroom" but someone in the meeting went "well my son records stuff on his Nintendo DS all the time" and they changed it.
If you're the kind of guy to bring a tape recorder in there and argue about splitting hairs, I don't think they will look kindly upon you.
Probably because the creepy boy scout leaders used analog video recorders and had a meeting to exclude them. Realistically it's just an oversight... hopefully...
To be fair, Beverly Hills isn't quite as squeaky clean as popular media would lead you to believe. Parts of it are extremely nice, of course, but it can't help but fall prey to the general sketch that encompasses most of LA county
That's to say, every society has its discontents who take their anger and frustration and discharge it on innocent civilians. Some societies manage their mentally ill people better than others. We do a pretty pitiful job at it.
You are well-intending, but don't do that for factual information. I have seen discussions derail because of hallucinated parliamentary history; and the concept of truth became irrelevant.
Prohibition has historically been proven to not work. Even so, the effectiveness of gun laws can't be measured when neighboring states don't have equivalent restrictions. Saying we have 20,000 gun laws and that they don't inherently work is somewhat misleading.
The exact definition of "civilized world" is doing a lot of work here. What specific regions or poltical jurisdictions do you think count or do not count as part of the civilized world?
Yeah, it's obviously a gun control issue. But the US has such a deeply ingrained cultural association with owning guns, and thinking that this means "freedom" in case the government turns on the people lol, that I doubt banning them happens in our lifetime.
You don't need to ban them, though. Isn't that the actual lesson at the end of _Bowling For Columbine_? That Canada has a huge number of guns and isn't so fucked up?
What you need to do is undermine the culture of machismo and trollishness around guns:
Start with "anyone who poses with guns in their family Christmas photo is to be treated as if they will use them on your family or their own kids without a moment's hesitation for their own gain".
(Like, if you get a Christmas card from a family with guns in their photo, why would you consider that anything other than a threatening communication? It clearly is.)
Move on to "anyone who has more usable guns than they can hold in their hands is probably a broken person and maybe you should consider keeping your distance".
Move on to "anyone who owns a bump stock is insane or compensating for a tiny penis", and "anyone who doesn't keep their guns in a gun safe is not safe to be around at all".
Move on to "open carry does not mean ostentatious carry". Start thinking about whether open carry is, in fact, a necessary conclusion of the right to bear arms.
Move on to fucking investigating NRA corruption properly. Don't just point it out.
Move on to humiliating politicians who take gun lobby money. Don't just point it out as if it's some form of conflict of interest or a sign they won't be serious about gun crime. Laugh at them. Call them spineless cowards. Humiliate them for their craven foolishness.
Aim for a process that preserves the right to bear arms but makes gun nuts seem as untrustworthy and dangerous as it turns out they so often are.
And if you are a gun owner and you believe guns should be treated with caution and respect, and you know someone who doesn't, tell them in no uncertain terms, and if you ever see them get violent, tell the police of your concerns.
You act like guns some weird anachronism, but from my perch, it seems that the need for civilized people to maintain firearms is increasing, not decreasing.
Consider that we have a documented justice system in many places that is repeatedly releasing violent criminals onto the streets, such that they are going on to set people on fire on the train, knife innocents on the subway, swinging and hitting elderly women with nail-embedded boards on the sidewalk. Note these crimes happened despite their lack of firearms. Should we not have guns to defend ourselves from these barbarians?
If the justice system were perfect, and crime rates far lower, then firearms would be less necessary, but never unnecessary, because civilization in a local phenomenon, and it only takes one barbarian to disrupt civilized order for the peaceful people of the world. It takes one civilized person with a gun to restore order.
In many places in the west, immigration policy has given rise to rape gangs in England, gangs that bomb in Sweden, etc. Should these peaceful people not have guns to defend themselves from these barbarians?
"I need my guns to defend myself from the (((barbarian hordes)))" is exactly the kind of rhetoric that leads the rest of the planet treats gun nuts like the nuts they are. Unfortunately for the US, the US valorizes this particular psychosis
> Start with "anyone who poses with guns in their family Christmas photo is to be treated as if they will use them on your family or their own kids without a moment's hesitation for their own gain".
That seems hyperbolic to me. I don't understand liking "tactical" Christmas decor, but I know some people who do.
In my experience, this kind of hyperbole tends to increase polarization around an idea instead of leading to any consensus.
Ah no, I’m pretty certain allowing the sale of military-grade automatic weapons is the issue. That’s a tool for warfare, and you have deadly shootings every day.
Automatic weapons aren't being sold en masse and are rarely used in violent crime. The most common culprit are regular hand guns. The banning of which would require draconian laws. Laws that would need to be enforced, failing a massive culture shift resulting in the vast majority of gun owners voluntarily turning in their arsenals.
My buddy saw a sign on a gun store where they had a "3 for the price of 2" promotion on M240 machine guns, like who in their right mind would need two of these, let alone three? They proudly displayed "No ID Checks" in their window lettering, too.
At least part of this is a lie. A transferable M240 is like $400k-600k. And in order to sell those, they have to run a background check as an FFL which requires some form of identification.
Yup. NYC public high school bathrooms were notorious for not having doors. The reason given was the heroin or whatever drug epidemics warranted removing the doors so students couldn't hide in them to shoot up and pass out. That supposedly started in the 60's or 70's and still going on in the 90's into the 00's.
My school had ONE boys bathroom and the rest were closed and used as storage. It was located outside of the lunch room main doors where a security guard sat. No stall doors. The normal protocol was you never shit in school. If you really had to go you prayed no one was in the last stall and covered your lap with your book bag OR try to use the one in the nurses office by claiming you were nauseous. I have on more than one occasion feigned sickness to get my mother to pick me up so I could go home and take a dump with dignity.
> The surveillance system spots multiple threats per day, the district said.
… multiple threats a day?! At 1 high school?! Citation needed on that. I know that US high schools have a reputation of being unsafe, but I highly doubt there’s near-HOURLY thwarting of “threats”. Are we talking about rule breaking (vaping in the bathroom, skipping class) or bullying? I would assume so.
The fact it’s then immediately followed up with stats about gun violence does sort of imply we’re talking about serious threats…
Sure, maybe you go full-prison mode if there’s an hourly murder, but that’s so outside the realm of reality that I’m not willing to even entertain that as being a possibility. You would’ve run out of students by now.
> The fact it’s then immediately followed up with stats about gun violence does sort of imply we’re talking about serious threats…
Yes, the juxtaposition does strongly suggest that that is the narrative that the piece is trying to push, even before it explicitly states that by following the stats with “Given those appalling metrics, allocating a portion of your budget to state of the art AI-powered safety and surveillance tools is a relatively easy decision.” (And that emotionally-loaded language isn't paraphrasing any figures named in the story, its the "news” stories own voice!)
But with on the order of 50 fatalities nationally per year, and a single high schools system detecting "multiple threats a day", if we are talking about the same kind of threats, then the false positive rate is virtually indistinguishable from 100%. And, if we aren’t, then the juxtaposition is irrelevant as well as emotionally manipulative.
I guess there's two ways to read a ratio like that. Either A) the false positive rate rounds to 100.00000%, or B) the correct positive rate rounds to 100.00000% and the few that slip through are great tragedies due to "just not investing enough", thus making the false positives worth it.
I'm glad B) at least wasn't made /explicit/ in the article, but damn... they do point at it by implication. You're totally right about the juxtaposition being manipulative.
> The company isn’t aware of any school shootings where its tech was deployed.
A thing that happens 50 times a year, across the entire US has not occurred at any of the small number of pilot schools... where apparently "threats" occur multiple times a day?
> I guess there's two ways to read a ratio like that. Either A) the false positive rate rounds to 100.00000%, or B) the correct positive rate rounds to 100.00000% and the few that slip through are great tragedies due to "just not investing enough", thus making the false positives worth it.
I think for (B) to be a justifiable reading, the national stats would have had to have been much higher before the roll out, with a significant share of those national stats being from the particular schools that happened to be the leading implementors.
But, yeah, I agree that that is a possible implication of the presentation on the surface.
My daughter hears about gun threats at her high school weekly. I don't know how many are actual threats, but they have implemented a transparent bag policy, it's a real problem.
> they have implemented a transparent bag policy, it's a real problem.
This makes the assumption that all policies have a reasonable justification, so that the existence of a real problem can be inferred by the implementation of a policy which would only make sense if (1) there was a real problem, and (2) the policy was an effective mitigation.
I would suggest that this assumption is both false and dangerous, in that it makes one trivially manipulable by anyone in a position to set policy.
When I was in school, the administration would work itself up into fits about "gangs infiltrating the schools" because an 11 year old wore a red or blue hat to class, clearly gang colors and a sign of the times.
This was in a wealthy suburb where people like that have to make up imaginary threats in order to feel something, and what better population to fret about than the kids.
I'm sorry, I hope I don't come off like I'm minimizing a real problem here, but from the outside looking in, it just feels like an entirely alien line of reasoning that could only describe a solution to an imagined problem. However, I'm also missing the lived experience of what being in the US is like right now, and especially missing the context of being a child with peers that make threats like that weekly. I'm empathetic to that situation, but not to the framing that surveillance is somehow stopping those weekly rumours from being weekly atrocities. That's a huge leap.
> However, I'm also missing the lived experience of what being in the US is like right now,
I’m in the US and this story feels extremely foreign to me. Even hearing a rumor about a gun threat at my kids’ school or any of my friends’ kids’ schools would be a topic of discussion for the next year with parent-teacher meetings, the school communicating with parents to shed light on what happened, action plans, and so on. Fortunately nothing like that has happened, but this is the level of communication that happens for even rumored threats.
The US is a huge place, though. Some times I don’t think outsiders understand how big and diverse this country is.
> The fact it’s then immediately followed up with stats about gun violence does sort of imply we’re talking about serious threats…
Do we trust surveillance peddlers enough that we should believe what they don't even say directly, but only "sort of imply" it? In this case, we have an easy test: has the number of attempted homicides at this school decreased by multiple per day since the surveillance was implemented?
If it has, I'm sure the surveillance vendors would be eagerly pointing to the dramatic drop in homicides on a graph, coinciding with their invasion of the school, and not just sort of implying it.
Civilized places don't treat "criminals" like that. You'd need further qualifications there to make this kind of thing acceptable (as in "violent criminals" or something like that).
Except kids already voluntarily gave up their own privacy to such an extent that they don't value it whatsoever. The government is lagging here. Kids will record you without consent anywhere and everywhere, post it online, live stream everything they do, overshare with no limits. They don't understand the idea of privacy. They don't even like the idea of privacy.
99% of students had cafeteria lunch and I was one of a couple with a lunch box. Teachers in the hallway would see it and get mad until I showed them my sandwich lol.
While he stood at the urinal he managed, with a little more fingering, to get it unfolded. Obviously there must be a message of some kind written on it. For a moment he was tempted to take it into one of the water-closets [toilets] and read it at once. But that would be shocking folly, as he well knew. There was no place where you could be more certain that the telescreens were watched continuously.
Coincidentally I just watched this Defcon talk on these popular bathroom 'smoke detectors' that can detect vapes and listen in on conversations - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCnojaEpF2I
There was a bit of discussion around that: It Looks Like a School Bathroom Smoke Detector. It Could Be an Audio Bug (17 points, 4 months ago, 12 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44915338
This would constitute illegal wiretapping. You have a legally-defensible reasonable expectation of privacy in your domicile in the absence of a warrant.
As it turns out, the constant state of fear and paranoia is more profitable than gun control. I'm sure many parents even support it, knowing that their kid can be shot any day at any time, and not having much political power for an alternative solution.
At what point is anyone going to say enough is enough? When will somebody stand up and call out their gaslighting excuses and insist on them stopping their false pretense of concern and altruism? When will see the perpetrators being confronted for their real criminal intent?
Only 32% felt they were always being watched, but in reality 100% of them were always being watched.
Digital is most of the market now but analog video cameras, analog video recorders, and analog tape recorders are still made.
If you're the kind of guy to bring a tape recorder in there and argue about splitting hairs, I don't think they will look kindly upon you.
That's to say, every society has its discontents who take their anger and frustration and discharge it on innocent civilians. Some societies manage their mentally ill people better than others. We do a pretty pitiful job at it.
EDIT: I used ChatGPT 'thinking mode' to get that number for USA. Where mass shooting >= 4 people injured.
And did the surveillance equipment catch the perpetrator?
Same principle applies with cameras. The tool is not the issue.
What you need to do is undermine the culture of machismo and trollishness around guns:
Start with "anyone who poses with guns in their family Christmas photo is to be treated as if they will use them on your family or their own kids without a moment's hesitation for their own gain".
(Like, if you get a Christmas card from a family with guns in their photo, why would you consider that anything other than a threatening communication? It clearly is.)
Move on to "anyone who has more usable guns than they can hold in their hands is probably a broken person and maybe you should consider keeping your distance".
Move on to "anyone who owns a bump stock is insane or compensating for a tiny penis", and "anyone who doesn't keep their guns in a gun safe is not safe to be around at all".
Move on to "open carry does not mean ostentatious carry". Start thinking about whether open carry is, in fact, a necessary conclusion of the right to bear arms.
Move on to fucking investigating NRA corruption properly. Don't just point it out.
Move on to humiliating politicians who take gun lobby money. Don't just point it out as if it's some form of conflict of interest or a sign they won't be serious about gun crime. Laugh at them. Call them spineless cowards. Humiliate them for their craven foolishness.
Aim for a process that preserves the right to bear arms but makes gun nuts seem as untrustworthy and dangerous as it turns out they so often are.
And if you are a gun owner and you believe guns should be treated with caution and respect, and you know someone who doesn't, tell them in no uncertain terms, and if you ever see them get violent, tell the police of your concerns.
Make gun obsession weird again.
Consider that we have a documented justice system in many places that is repeatedly releasing violent criminals onto the streets, such that they are going on to set people on fire on the train, knife innocents on the subway, swinging and hitting elderly women with nail-embedded boards on the sidewalk. Note these crimes happened despite their lack of firearms. Should we not have guns to defend ourselves from these barbarians?
If the justice system were perfect, and crime rates far lower, then firearms would be less necessary, but never unnecessary, because civilization in a local phenomenon, and it only takes one barbarian to disrupt civilized order for the peaceful people of the world. It takes one civilized person with a gun to restore order.
In many places in the west, immigration policy has given rise to rape gangs in England, gangs that bomb in Sweden, etc. Should these peaceful people not have guns to defend themselves from these barbarians?
That seems hyperbolic to me. I don't understand liking "tactical" Christmas decor, but I know some people who do.
In my experience, this kind of hyperbole tends to increase polarization around an idea instead of leading to any consensus.
My school had ONE boys bathroom and the rest were closed and used as storage. It was located outside of the lunch room main doors where a security guard sat. No stall doors. The normal protocol was you never shit in school. If you really had to go you prayed no one was in the last stall and covered your lap with your book bag OR try to use the one in the nurses office by claiming you were nauseous. I have on more than one occasion feigned sickness to get my mother to pick me up so I could go home and take a dump with dignity.
… multiple threats a day?! At 1 high school?! Citation needed on that. I know that US high schools have a reputation of being unsafe, but I highly doubt there’s near-HOURLY thwarting of “threats”. Are we talking about rule breaking (vaping in the bathroom, skipping class) or bullying? I would assume so.
The fact it’s then immediately followed up with stats about gun violence does sort of imply we’re talking about serious threats…
Sure, maybe you go full-prison mode if there’s an hourly murder, but that’s so outside the realm of reality that I’m not willing to even entertain that as being a possibility. You would’ve run out of students by now.
Yes, the juxtaposition does strongly suggest that that is the narrative that the piece is trying to push, even before it explicitly states that by following the stats with “Given those appalling metrics, allocating a portion of your budget to state of the art AI-powered safety and surveillance tools is a relatively easy decision.” (And that emotionally-loaded language isn't paraphrasing any figures named in the story, its the "news” stories own voice!)
But with on the order of 50 fatalities nationally per year, and a single high schools system detecting "multiple threats a day", if we are talking about the same kind of threats, then the false positive rate is virtually indistinguishable from 100%. And, if we aren’t, then the juxtaposition is irrelevant as well as emotionally manipulative.
I'm glad B) at least wasn't made /explicit/ in the article, but damn... they do point at it by implication. You're totally right about the juxtaposition being manipulative.
> The company isn’t aware of any school shootings where its tech was deployed.
A thing that happens 50 times a year, across the entire US has not occurred at any of the small number of pilot schools... where apparently "threats" occur multiple times a day?
EDIT: confirming I agree, emphasis on /explicit/.
I think for (B) to be a justifiable reading, the national stats would have had to have been much higher before the roll out, with a significant share of those national stats being from the particular schools that happened to be the leading implementors.
But, yeah, I agree that that is a possible implication of the presentation on the surface.
This makes the assumption that all policies have a reasonable justification, so that the existence of a real problem can be inferred by the implementation of a policy which would only make sense if (1) there was a real problem, and (2) the policy was an effective mitigation.
I would suggest that this assumption is both false and dangerous, in that it makes one trivially manipulable by anyone in a position to set policy.
This was in a wealthy suburb where people like that have to make up imaginary threats in order to feel something, and what better population to fret about than the kids.
I’m in the US and this story feels extremely foreign to me. Even hearing a rumor about a gun threat at my kids’ school or any of my friends’ kids’ schools would be a topic of discussion for the next year with parent-teacher meetings, the school communicating with parents to shed light on what happened, action plans, and so on. Fortunately nothing like that has happened, but this is the level of communication that happens for even rumored threats.
The US is a huge place, though. Some times I don’t think outsiders understand how big and diverse this country is.
How dare some teenager thumb their nose at the almighty rules of the state by <checks notes> vaping in the bathroom.
Do we trust surveillance peddlers enough that we should believe what they don't even say directly, but only "sort of imply" it? In this case, we have an easy test: has the number of attempted homicides at this school decreased by multiple per day since the surveillance was implemented?
If it has, I'm sure the surveillance vendors would be eagerly pointing to the dramatic drop in homicides on a graph, coinciding with their invasion of the school, and not just sort of implying it.
Or they're trying to appeal to the emotion of "the usual demographic suspects" who they need to simp for this.
While he stood at the urinal he managed, with a little more fingering, to get it unfolded. Obviously there must be a message of some kind written on it. For a moment he was tempted to take it into one of the water-closets [toilets] and read it at once. But that would be shocking folly, as he well knew. There was no place where you could be more certain that the telescreens were watched continuously.
- George Orwell, 1984
this shit makes me want to move into a hollowed out tree trunk and forage.
This would constitute illegal wiretapping. You have a legally-defensible reasonable expectation of privacy in your domicile in the absence of a warrant.
We need to stop this nonsense. Fear, surveillance, and distrust are out of control.
Is this what I think it is?