Over a year-and-a-half ago, in Huntsville, Alabama, Chris McRae, chief of security for the city's schools, claimed that he received a telephone tip from the NSA about a Facebook posting that included a threat to a teacher.

NSA has denied making any such call because a) they never, ever, ever spy on Americans at home and b) even if they did, which they never, ever do, they would not notify the school, but "any information about a domestic safety issue would be sent to another federal agency, like the FBI," according to reporting by the local Alabama newspaper, AL.com.

As a result of this NSA phone tip, the school superintendent, Casey Wardysnki, decided to start monitoring the social media of his students to the tune of $157,000 a year.



Acting on tips from students or teachers or others, schools security staff scour numerous social media sites, including Facebook, twitter, instagram, pinterest, and more. They look for evidence of imminent threats to the schools or of gang activity. Wardysnki said the program has led to about a dozen expulsions each year so far and that security is actively monitoring social media at all times.

Of the 14 students expelled last year, 12, or 86 percent, were African American, even though recent studies show that 78 percent of school shootings are done by white males.

The obvious over-representation of black students among those being punished with suspension and/or expulsion may have been what led the ACLU to send an open records request to the Huntsville School District in June of this year.



"A student whose online speech is deemed inappropriate could face punishment, including in-school or out-of-school suspension and sometimes even expulsion," the ACLU letter stated. "These punishments can constitute significant violations of students' rights to privacy and freedom of expression online." The ACLU letter said that in the 2011-12 academic year – the most recent data available – 41 percent of Huntsville's students were black but 71 percent of the students receiving out-of-school suspensions were black and 60 percent of students expelled were black.

The tip that started it all involved tweets made by Auseel Yousefi, then a student at Lee High School, born and raised in Alabama of Yemini parents. He claims the tweets were some very bad attempts at humor that were misinterpreted by the school administration. He told AL.com that the administrators mentioned NSA and an NSA affiliate in their discussions with him. Later, he texted the paper that he thought the name of the firm GEOCOP might have been included.

GEOCOP, like the NSA, has denied having anything to do with the tip. According to their website:



Geospatial Common Operating Picture (GEOCOP) is a Sensitive But Unclassified web-based voice, video, and data overlay technology that instantly connects people, Geospatial applications, and knowledge with operational processes. GEOCOP was invented by a former NCIS and FBI watch officer to provide law enforcement and intelligence agencies with an improved situational awareness tool. ...

They have, however, been credited with tipping off schools in Texas and Arizona to possible student threats. Firms like GEOCOP call these tips a "get," that are used as sales tools to demonstrate to the schools how GEOCOP can provide real-time information on possible threats.

But GEOCOP is only one of many firms that offer spying capabilities to their clients. STG Sentinel is another:



STG Sentinel is an open source social and platform media monitoring subsidiary of STG Group, Inc., combining Intelligence Community tradecraft with the world’s most advanced surveillance technologies. Our Mission is to provide our global customers with enhanced and proactive security and situation awareness services. In an unsettled world where security threats are pervasive, we rapidly evolve our state of the art technology and tradecraft to accommodate sensor and data infusion that equates to predictive threat detection and security awareness for the 21st century. We are not your traditional monitoring and alerting service. STG SENTINEL is Persistent, Predictive, and Preemptive.

And there is GeoListening , which specializes in spying on students and is providing monitoring for schools in Glendale, California:

James Risen, in his book Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War, wrote:

Now, another abstract fear was driving hundreds of billions of dollars a year into building the infrastructure necessary to wage a permanent war on terror, and it had grown like kudzu around the CIA, FBI, Department of Homeland Security, Treasury Department, Pentagon, and dozens of other smaller offices and federal agencies. The post-9/11 panic led Congress to throw cash at counterterrorism faster than the FBI, CIA, and other agencies were able to spend it. One 2012 estimate concluded that the decade of war had cost Americans nearly $4 trillion. ... The new homeland security–industrial complex operates differently. It is largely made up of a web of intelligence agencies and their contractors, companies that mostly provide secret services rather than large weapons systems and equipment. These contractors are hired to help Washington determine the scale and scope of the terrorist threat; they make no money if they determine that the threat is overblown or, God forbid, if the war on terror ever comes to an end.

Do you know where your student is? At school? On the bus? Paying for lunch in the cafeteria? Principals in thousands of the nation’s schools know the answer because radio frequency chips are embedded in students’ ID cards, or their schools are equipped with biometric scanners that can identify portions of a student’s fingerprint, the iris of an eye or a vein in a palm. Such technologies have become increasingly common in schools, which use them to take attendance, alert parents where their children get off the school bus or speed up lunch lines. ... Jay Fry, CEO of the biometric-in-schools firm identiMetrics, said biometric identification is used in more than 1,000 school districts in 40 states from Alaska to Long Island, New York. West Virginia uses the technology in 70 percent of its 57 school districts, he said.

It looks like some of them are not waiting for the war on terror to end, they are just refocusing on the threats, not from Al Qaeda, but from the boys basketball team.But wait, there is more. According to GovTech.com , modern technology can do more than monitor students' social media activity. Much more.Fortunately, many states are backing away from the use of RFID chips, partly out of respect for student privacy and partly out of a concern over the security of the student information that is being collected.

And according to "A day in the life of a data mined kid," an article at Marketwatch Learning Curve, that concern is well-founded. With the introduction of high tech into our schools, more and more data is being harvested from our students.



“We live in a 24/7 data mining universe today,” says Jim Steyer, CEO of Common Sense Media. “And I think most of us parents and teachers and kids don’t realize how much of our data is out there and used by other people.”

The promise of the massive database collection is to improve the educational experience of the students. The federal government has invested $600 million over the last decade in the program, hoping that the data will eventually be able to show us what works and what doesn't in the field of education.However, a study done by a Fordham Law professor, Joel Reidenberg, has pointed out some of the problems that the data-mining operations present. A total of 95 percent of school districts use cloud storage services "which are poorly understood, non-transparent, and weakly governed." Less than 7 percent of the districts restrict the use or marketing of the data stored by vendors in spite of FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) requirements to the contrary. Cloud service agreements with school districts generally do not provide for data security and often allow vendors to retain student data in perpetuity.

Jose Ferreira is CEO of one of the biggest of the data-mining firms, Knewton, which claims ...



... to gather millions of data points on millions of children each day. Ferreira calls education "the world’s most data-mineable industry by far." "We have five orders of magnitude more data about you than Google has," he says in the video. "We literally have more data about our students than any company has about anybody else about anything, and it’s not even close."

Nothing that any of the data-mining firms or the security-monitoring firms are doing is technically illegal. The problem is that our technology is, once again, outpacing our legal structure, making a Student Privacy Bill of Rights needed. Now.

Khaliah Barnes, director of the Student Privacy Project and administrative law counsel for the non-profit Electronic Privacy Information Center, has proposed these guidelines:



1. Access and Amendment: Students have the right to access and amend their erroneous, misleading, or otherwise inappropriate records, regardless of who collects or maintains the information. 2. Focused collection: Students have the right to reasonably limit student data that companies and schools collect and retain. 3. Respect for Context: Students have the right to expect that companies and schools will collect, use, and disclose student information solely in ways that are compatible with the context in which students provide data. 4. Security: Students have the right to secure and responsible data practices. 5. Transparency: Students have the right to clear and accessible information privacy and security practices. 6. Accountability: Students should have the right to hold schools and private companies handling student data accountable for adhering to the Student Privacy Bill of Rights.

Growing up is all about testing boundaries and defining characters. In addition to an education that encourages them to question authority instead of submitting to it, students need privacy to try on new personalities and to make some mistakes. To explore who they will become.

But mostly, they need to avoid being warped by the knowledge that they are being watched.