This will condition children to think this sort of surveillance is normal, and when they’re adults the ones who think it kept them safe from mass shootings will try and advocate using our existing mass-surveillance powers to proactively monitor everyone like this. Please, we need to stop terrifying children with this lazy oppression, this is not worth the damage to society we’re causing by conditioning kids this way.
password321 · 1d ago
Half the point of school has always been to condition them to behave and think a certain way for adulthood.
astura · 1d ago
This sort of surveillance is normal, though. Most platforms are monitored for threats of violence. Are you thinking the outcome would have been much different if she threatened to kill Mexicans on Teams at work instead?
malwrar · 1d ago
The child in OP sounds to me like she thought she was making a bad-taste joke in a private forum, and was shocked when it promptly led to an entanglement with an unfeeling system who was looking over her shoulder. I’ve never threatened to kill anyone in my work DMs, but I’ve definitely written stuff that I wouldn’t post in public threads. I think we all to some degree use these “private” systems this way until it burns us, only then do we adjust. Privacy is much more a feeling than a technical reality.
In that sense, it isn’t “normal”, it’s just “something that’s happening in theory but eh maybe it only affects scary people or whatever idk”. I feel like this tolerance we’re developing for outside forces invading “private” spaces, nominally for these loose justifications of harm reduction, will be what _actually does_ make it normal.
Once it’s truly normal, and people think it’s what keeps them safe from mass shootings or whatever, it will be too late to get rid of it. I think fear and normalcy will motivate its spread to places beyond school chat platforms and Snapchat.
No comments yet
giantg2 · 22h ago
"Are you thinking the outcome would have been much different if she threatened to kill Mexicans on Teams at work instead?"
Yeah, she'd probably get fired but law enforcement wouldn't get called because there was no specific or credible threat and the company doesn't have the mandatory reporting requirements that the school does.
potato3732842 · 18h ago
Not only does the company not have mandatory reporting, it has a financial incentive not to piss away the man hours of it's HR team on stuff that's obviously bullshit.
giantg2 · 16h ago
That and avoid negative PR.
assword · 18h ago
[flagged]
zahlman · 23h ago
> Among them is Tennessee, which passed a 2023 zero-tolerance law requiring any threat of mass violence against a school to be reported immediately to law enforcement.
> ...
> Gaggle’s CEO, Jeff Patterson, said in an interview that the school system did not use Gaggle the way it is intended. The purpose is to find early warning signs and intervene before problems escalate to law enforcement, he said.
> “I wish that was treated as a teachable moment, not a law enforcement moment,” said Patterson.
Of course they didn't do things as the Gaggle CEO describes. They were legally compelled not to.
I love a good complaint about corporate meddling as much as anyone, but sometimes it really is the government to blame.
pavel_lishin · 22h ago
> The purpose is to find early warning signs and intervene before problems escalate to law enforcement, he said.
The purpose of a system is what it does.
senderista · 19h ago
This faux-profound cliche contributes absolutely no real insight to any discussion.
tremon · 7h ago
On the contrary, it short-circuits the usual knee-jerk apologetic responses that seek to defend a system's bad effects with (unrealized) good intentions. Killing thought-terminating cliches early allows for a deeper discussion.
senderista · 1h ago
But the usage of "purpose" here simply doesn't make sense on any plausible interpretation I can find. Scott Alexander tried as well and failed:
It is important to challenge claims to legitimacy based purely on good intentions regardless of outcomes. But surely we can do this without pulling the dishonest rhetorical trick of asserting that all bad outcomes are intentional (which is what "purpose" implies)? Something like "judge a system by its outcome, not its intent"?
zahlman · 22h ago
> The purpose of a system is what it does.
If you take this view, then a fair assessment recognizes that "the system" in this case consists of more than just the Gaggle software.
potato3732842 · 19h ago
Of course. The school, the police, the local and state governments that made them what they are are all culpable here.
kayodelycaon · 1d ago
Strip searching a 13-year-old girl and locking her in a jail cell for a joke? Wow. And they did all this without telling her parents.
potato3732842 · 18h ago
They didn't do it because it's reasonable. They did it to send a message. Ain't no different than the health inspector or building commissioner acting way too big for their britches knowing full well there will be no consequences.
Look at public schools as just another municipal enforcement department tasked with making sure the kids all meet state standards and it makes sense (or at least to the same extent that all the other indefensible shit done in the name of government makes sense).
bryanrasmussen · 1d ago
I remember when in high school in Utah we went on a field trip to a halfway house, for some reason - it was during the time when scared straight was real popular so of course every kid should be scared straight whether they have juvenile offenses or not. It was some sort of law class I think.
Anyway they took us to look at the inmates in the halfway house who were behind bars and then they could come out to the bars and as their part of the whole scared straight exercise they would of course yell stuff at us, which was mainly about how they wanted to have sex with the approximately 16 year old girls on the trip.
Gosh, Utah sure is a morally upstanding place.
yard2010 · 1d ago
This is nefarious.
7thaccount · 1d ago
Absolutely horrifying
sofixa · 1d ago
A joke which could, out of context, be interpreted to be a threat of violence:
> on Thursday we kill all the Mexico’s
Especially considering the frequency of violence in American schools, can't really blame the school for jumping to conclusions.
giantg2 · 1d ago
"can't really blame the school for jumping to conclusions"
Of course you can blame the school. They were too lazy to look at context and determine if the threat was real and credible. They took the determination of a complex tool as an unquestionable fact. The system supplies the fact that the user's account made the comment. All other facts need to be made by investigation. This statement provides a reasonable suspicion to investigate, but should not exhibit probable cause for an arrest as it requires a threat be credible, incite panick, etc per the specific terrorist threat law. This requires investigation and thought.
potato3732842 · 18h ago
And they stuck to it despite the fact that the situation became "serious".
Like if you're gonna do "make the news" shit you oughta at least have someone check your goddamn work first.
sofixa · 1d ago
> Of course you can blame the school. They were too lazy to look at context and determine if the threat was real and credible
Do you think whoever is doing this at the school is a qualified professional, e.g. a child/teen psychiatrist that knows the kid in question well enough, to be able to determine if the threat was real and credible?
tremon · 5h ago
Being unqualified to make a decision and then still making that decision only makes you more culpable, not less.
1718627440 · 1d ago
Educating children is literally the schools profession. If you are looking for a state employed child psychiatrist it will be in the school.
giantg2 · 1d ago
You don't have to be an expert to read the context. In normal terroristic threat cases the people involved are not psychologists. The police aren't using any child psychologists either. The problem here is the brainless reliance on what a system spits outs. The world would have ended by now if we relied on automated systems without using common sense (see multiple ICBM radar false positives during the cold war).
jacquesm · 1d ago
Kids saying shit is now equivalent to 'normal terrorist[ic] threat cases'? Or did I miss something. If you can't evaluate the data, don't collect the data.
sofixa · 23h ago
You missed the amounts of kids that committed massacres, which has made US schools understandably paranoid.
potato3732842 · 18h ago
We're a quarter way through the century and you can about count the number that did a good enough job to make national news on one hand. It isn't something that a first pass filter ought to be looking for.
jacquesm · 18h ago
What is the false positive rate of this system?
If you want to solve this problem solve it at the root, not by overreacting to teenagers.
giantg2 · 1d ago
"Kids saying shit is now equivalent to 'normal terrorist[ic] threat cases'?"
It's terroristic threats. That's the law most of the school shooting threats would get charged under. The real problem is that most states have automatic reporting laws, which means you have to report anything that sounds like a threat even if it isn't. This is the main difference between regular cases and school cases - you end up with a lot of junk being reported and potentially causing more harm than it was intended to prevent.
jacquesm · 1d ago
A 13 year old girl is not able to make a credible generalized terrorist threat against a large swath of the population, and besides, the first thing you should do when a kid starts making dumb statements like that is check in with them and their parents, not to call the police. Automatic reporting laws that lead to 13 year old girls being strip-searched are not something anybody should want.
There is an easy way to stop 99.9% of all school shootings, and it isn't 'automatic reporting laws'.
potato3732842 · 18h ago
>Automatic reporting laws that lead to 13 year old girls being strip-searched are not something anybody should want.
Don't worry, the people who want these Orwellian things will find a more "marketable" way of describing it.
I find proximity to weapons a fairly good indicator of whether or not you're at risk of being shot. If teachers were armed that would be the last time my kids went to school.
1718627440 · 1d ago
Children don't do "threads", that's why they are literally not of age. At most they say stupid shit that would be a threat if an adult had said that. The schools job is literally to teach children to not (want to) say that.
astura · 1d ago
It's a threat of violence in context as well.
IshKebab · 1d ago
Even ignoring the whole idea being awful, their response to someone who they think might want to enact a school shooting is to strip search and imprison them. What effect do they think that is going to have?
Not the sharpest bullets in the barrel...
paradox460 · 18h ago
An important, if unfortunate, lesson to learn: you are being spied on, by people who demand your trust and give you none in return
Back when I was in school the web filtering got so draconian those of us in the know started keeping Tor browser on a thumb drive, and carrying it to whatever computer we were using. Some went as far as to reboot from a Linux image on said thumb drive. That was nearly 20 years ago, can't imagine it's any better now
tyleo · 1d ago
I don’t like this article. It mixes two things together:
1. Schools running and monitoring their own communication platforms. This seems fine.
2. The US government monitoring private communication platforms like Snapchat and arresting kids on school grounds. This seems bad.
The way it’s written though mixes these together and makes it look like schools are monitoring the private communication of students. I think it’s fine for schools to monitor there own platforms but weird for the government to monitor all platforms haphazardly.
chasd00 · 1d ago
US schools have way too much authority over children. A student can goto a party on Saturday night and get a ticket for MIP or some other infraction and then face punishment at school in addition to the fine. US schools are quasi authoritarian regimes for teenagers. I don’t believe that is right at all.
pavel_lishin · 22h ago
> A student can goto a party on Saturday night and get a ticket for MIP or some other infraction and then face punishment at school in addition to the fine.
I'm not saying this doesn't happen, but I am saying that this has never happened to me or anyone I know.
potato3732842 · 18h ago
It's one of those things they threaten kids with and could plausibly try and do but never actually take all the way because it'd get fought and perhaps reigned in if the did.
cogogo · 1d ago
I mostly agree with you. But the same is true with your employer in the US. You do something stupid outside of work like an OUI and there will likely be consequences with employment - either current or future. Not terrible to internalize that early when the consequences are relatively forgettable.
Hizonner · 1d ago
You are not required by law to subject yourself to your employer, or to any employer.
kelseyfrog · 1d ago
Unfortunately, that doesn't have any practical relevance. Structural coercion is still coercion.
potato3732842 · 18h ago
You are generalizing way too hard to white collar employment.
cogogo · 4h ago
Plenty of blue collar jobs where you could get fired or couldn't get hired because of behavior outside work like an OUI. Anything requiring a CDL, security, some retail to name a few.
kayodelycaon · 1d ago
Schools have already monitored student’s social media outside of school and punished them for breaking rules outside of the school.
How long before they use AI to do that?
Permit · 1d ago
AI has nothing to do with this. It’s trivial to build a keyword based system to detect someone threatening/joking that they will kill all the Mexicans at their school.
AI hype is at play here as well, not only in the breathless press releases from AI companies.
chasd00 · 1d ago
I don’t believe a school has a right to monitor students outside of school but getting wind of a mass murder threat and turning it over to the authorities is the right thing to do.
giantg2 · 1d ago
"1. Schools running and monitoring their own communication platforms. This seems fine.
2. The US government monitoring private communication platforms like Snapchat and arresting kids on school grounds. This seems bad."
Public schools are government.
1718627440 · 1d ago
Public schools get money from the government. That doesn't mean they're are the private arm of the government.
giantg2 · 1d ago
Public schools are run by officials elected in public municipal elections. How is that not government?
AnimalMuppet · 1d ago
Public schools are not the US government. They're usually city or county.
giantg2 · 1d ago
There are many federal laws and policies enforced in the schools. The police arresting kids on school grounds are also usually state or local.
abtinf · 1d ago
You have no problem with the opening example in the article?
tyleo · 1d ago
I have a problem with the degree of punishment but not that the student was punished.
A student said, “on Thursday we kill all the Mexico’s,” on a schools private communication platform. The school should correct that behavior.
Unfortunately they involved law enforcement. Thats where I see the problem. A better solution would be detention and informing the parents.
worldsayshi · 1d ago
> Unfortunately they involved law enforcement
Sounds like they could've reasoned that they face the least chance for liability if they pushed the responsibility to law enforcement.
kayodelycaon · 1d ago
When I was a kid, detention over a stupid joke would have been an extreme overreaction and would result in the teacher being pulled into the principal’s office, not the kid.
JumpCrisscross · 1d ago
> detention over a stupid joke
When you were a kid gun laws were stricter.
giantg2 · 1d ago
Not exactly true. You don't know how old the person is nor their jurisdiction.
Some states have fewer laws, others have more. At the federal level, there are more laws and rules than there were in the 60s or 70s (overall more than at any prior time).
And of course enforcement varies. I remember many people coming to school with guns in their cars during hunting season even though it's not legal.
JumpCrisscross · 1d ago
> You don't know how old the person is nor their jurisdiction
One can impute it from the content assuming it’s relevant, i.e. in America.
giantg2 · 1d ago
Gun laws vary dramtically by state. If we are only looking at the federal level, then there has been no substantial reduction.
kasey_junk · 1d ago
There was a federal assault weapons ban from 1994 to 2004.
potato3732842 · 18h ago
You mean the "ban on a random assortment of features that accomplished approximately nothing"? I think his point stands. Federally not much has changed.
giantg2 · 22h ago
Yes, and there have been additional law and rules changes since then (NICS, trusts, etc). Thus the number of laws and rules are not substantially lower than in the recent past.
kasey_junk · 22h ago
Access to assault weapons is substantially easier now than it was in 1996. There maybe the same number of laws or whatever but in real terms access is easier now than then.
giantg2 · 20h ago
And what does that access mean? How many of the weapons used in school shootings would have been banned? They've done studies on the effectiveness of the ban and showed no real effect over that decade, but speculated that there could have been an effect if it went on longer. The other issue is that the ban was largely cosmetic and could easily be avoided by not including certain features that have limited utility in most domestic shootings anyways (launcher lug, flash hider, etc) as evidenced by continued AR-15 post-ban model production. So to me, the claim that there is more accessibility doesn't provide any evidence of causality.
kasey_junk · 20h ago
I’m not making a claim about the usefulness. You made a claim about access not changing. That’s simply untrue. Access has gone up.
As for the feature bans those are clearly municipalities attempts to get around either constitutional or political impediments to the bans people actually want. Magazines fed semi automatic rifles are what people want to ban, banning rifles with muzzle shrouds is how they get there.
Studies on this topic are fraught because the gun industry has long prevented the normal research funding issues on this topic and have fought tooth and nail any data collection efforts.
potato3732842 · 18h ago
You're doing a very good job dancing around the fact that you don't actually know much about the subject. The points you're making could be backed up really easily, no citing of cherry picked studies or reports needed, if you knew what to google, but you don't. And you're way off in the weeds with the whole AWB and rifles things.
Yes there's more legal access federally than in the 90s but the difference is pretty much wholly on a state by state basis with some states having no or slight change and some states having large change.
kasey_junk · 7h ago
I think you maybe arguing with someone else. They made a straight forward claim that is incorrect:
> If we are only looking at the federal level, then there has been no substantial reduction.
There _was_ a significant reduction at the federal level. They acknowledged that and then changed the goalpost.
I then claimed
> Studies on this topic are fraught because the gun industry has long prevented the normal research funding issues on this topic and have fought tooth and nail any data collection efforts.
This is true. The Dickey Amendment prevented first the CDC and then the NIH from collecting gun violence statistics from 1996 until today. Though in 2018 they were able to add a rider to it to make it a little easier.
FOPA makes it impossible to collect registration information for federal use, including in data exchange for studies around gun ownership.
I'm not sure what more you want me to backup. Would you like the actual legal citations on those?
potato3732842 · 7h ago
>I'm not sure what more you want me to backup. Would you like the actual legal citations on those?
Screeching about whatever fed law changes or lack thereof the Brady Campaign told you to screech about is pointless. Fed law directly affects only a tiny minority of buyers because people buy what's available and no recent federal law changes have increased/decreased the legal buyer pool and sales volume.
You don't need the CDC or the NIH or whatever other "authoritative" source who's boot you prefer the flavor of in order to make assessments of how things have changed over time. State law changes and sales data are very easy to come by. Those are where the real meat of the change is. Many states over the past 20yr went from it being a hassle to "just toss a pink Ruger in your purse" to a simple retail transaction.
kasey_junk · 6h ago
Gotcha.
chasd00 · 1d ago
A threat like that has to be reported to the authorities. In 99.9% of cases it’s nothing but you never know. You can’t threaten the president without getting investigated, you can’t threaten mass murder at school without getting investigated.
giantg2 · 1d ago
"A threat like that has to be reported to the authorities."
This forced reporting necessarily creates false reports. Under the law, things like terrorist threats are required to be credible or incite panic. Reporting things that aren't credible is arguably a violation of law under any other context, yet they choose to ignore that with these mandatory reporting laws. Basically it creates a situation where nobody is allowed to use their brain - automated conveyer to the criminal system.
FpUser · 1d ago
Investigation is ok given how much shooting happens. Punishment however is way out of proportion. It was a bad joke. Does not deserve any real punishment except maybe couple of hours in a class that explains why jokes like this are bad.
giantg2 · 1d ago
Inappropriate comments or jokes could easily be handled with parent-teacher intervention and some detention. If it's possibly credible, then reporting it to the police to kick off an investigation is good. It seems that nobody really used their brain in the example given - everyone just trusted some automated system's determination instead of making their own.
potato3732842 · 18h ago
>seems that nobody really used their brain in the example given
Brain users get jaded and a) stop b) seek alternate employment.
Schools don't just crush kids.
JumpCrisscross · 1d ago
> Unfortunately they involved law enforcement. Thats where I see the problem
Eh, terminal violence was potentially threatened. Calling the cops seems fine if no teacher or administrator can vouch for the kid. (Particularly if, as is true in this case, the law requires “any threat of mass violence against a school to be reported immediately to law enforcement.”)
To the extent someone fucked up, it’s the cops who allegedly caused the 13-year old to be “interrogated, strip-searched and spent the night in a jail cell.”
soulofmischief · 1d ago
Police are a volatile, uncontrollable solution for anything other than white collar crime. If you introduce police into a situation where your life ot belongings aren't in immediate danger, you should be prepared for them to make someone miserable or hurt someone and you're culpable if they do.
1718627440 · 1d ago
Police exists to deescalate conflicts and prevent harm. If they don't you should file a disciplinary complaint.
NoGravitas · 1d ago
To whom? "We have investigated the complaint against ourselves and found that we were not at fault."
kelseyfrog · 1d ago
Why would we believe that an organization's existence is something that it routinely and consistently fails at? Are we delusional?
1718627440 · 1d ago
The police officers I experience are quite calm and seam reasonable. Sure there are also allegedly incidents at some demonstrations. But those are demonstrations I expect to be violent without police intervention.
NoGravitas · 1d ago
I have been to many protests and demonstrations in my life, and not a single one of them has turned violent without police intervention. Occasionally there is property damage, but even that is the exception rather than the rule.
kelseyfrog · 1d ago
How would you determine if your experience was an outlier?
1718627440 · 1d ago
I don't. It just shows that the police doesn't need to be escalating and we shouldn't shrug and accept it as it is.
> Police are a volatile, uncontrollable solution
No they don't and shouldn't be.
> If you introduce police into a situation
I think informing the police about a dangerous attitude in some child isn't the wrong solution. The police not showing up at the parent's place and sending a therapist, but instead treating a child like a criminal adult is criminally neglect.
Also right here in the comments we have somebody mentioning that people behave how you treat them. That doesn't apply soly to children. If you treat the police like a militia and don't show respect they will behave like that to you.
soulofmischief · 23h ago
I am not required to respect the police. They are required to respect me, a democratic citizen who has authorized their right to exist－not the other way around.
> I think informing the police about a dangerous attitude in some child isn't the wrong solution
I was regularly beaten at home by religious zealots, before finally being kicked out onto the street and becoming homeless at 16. The police were over at my house every three weeks or less, constantly threatening me with foster care and juvie if I didn't respect my grandfather's right to beat me.
The man would routinely make me choose a weapon, often but not always a belt. He would then beat me savagely with the metal buckle like a whip, all over my body, until I would stop crying, because "men do not cry, I'll teach you how to be a man", and "I'll give you something to cry about".
Every ounce of state intervention made it worse, because of police and administrative corruption. Don't even get me started on how they surveilled me through my school.
Yeah, we do have ideals. And regulations, which... don't always match those ideals. And then we have reality, which... doesn't always match regulations. To ignore reality and say that the regulations are the true reality is honestly a very ignorant and dangerous thing to do, especially when you try to instill this perspective into others.
1718627440 · 23h ago
> I am not required to respect the police.
You are one citizen. The police represent the other million citizens. They have the monopoly on violence, so that all the other citizens can't do that. I think this is way better than every citizen caring weapons and doing self-justice. Even when the police is going crazy, that is still better than civil war. They do have checks and regulation even if they don't always work, the other citizens haven't.
That being said, I can absolutely see, how you distrust the police. I can't imagine what justification the police gave to their superiors in your case. I would expect public outrage if this became public, but maybe your country truly doesn't care.
Of course you shouldn't report such issues to a corrupt militia, which your police seams to be posing as. However that is not what I would call a police and it should be reported to the police if you had such a thing in your region.
When you ignore children with violent intentions this will lead to a stabbing or shooting later on. The police will treat a single claim very differently than recurring threats for violence. Informing the authorities early one makes them able to send therapists the first time. When they only ever hear about problems once things went violent or even only at the time of the amok, they need to send the violent force on the first occurrence, because they can now only try to shield the victims not help the delinquent child.
potato3732842 · 18h ago
What? What in the hell? They exist for nothing of the sort.
Police exist to enforce the laws within specific parameters. They are basically a modern formalized take on midlevel men at arms. They mostly only de-escalate conflicts and prevent harm incidentally.
1718627440 · 1h ago
And what do you thing the law is? It's a written agreement, because even if it doesn't give justice in every situation, it is better to peacefully agree on something instead of constantly fighting over everything. In other words a deescalation measurement.
A concept of a written law is very different from a rule by decrees and the will of the ruler. The difference is that deciding whether something is lawful is outside of the ruler or the enforcer. (i.e. separation of powers) This is what differentiates a liberal democracy from a dictatorship, but also 19th century and modern monarchies from absolutism. So no police is not modern men-at-arms.
Hizonner · 1d ago
> Police exists to deescalate conflicts and prevent harm.
Somebody should tell them that.
> If they don't you should file a disciplinary complaint.
... which will be ignored. They may or may not laugh in your face.
I wish I lived in your dream world.
1718627440 · 1d ago
They regularly get education on how to deescalate. At least the media reports that. Also police officers get prosecuted for misconduct or promotion of right-wing ideology. Not every country has a weird dysfunctional police.
soulofmischief · 1d ago
I don't know who would laugh at this more in my state, the criminals or the police themselves.
I was personally given a maximum sentence of 6 months in jail as an underage, first-time offender because a police officer who had been stalking my friend group planted weed on me at the scene of an accident. I was denied the right to a trial by jury, they refused to let me out of jail until I'd signed a paper giving up that right. I was homeless and needed to graduate high school, so I had no choice. My defense attorney was then forced off my case so that I could be given another attorney under the thumb of the prosecutor and judge's racket, and so this was never addressed.
Seven cops came up one after another and gave wildly different testimonies of what happened, then the judge gave me my sentence because "I think you're lying". When I moved to appeal, my compromised attorney refused to let me, saying, and I quote, "The judge is my boss. If I let you appeal his decision, he'll make my life miserable."
See, the prosecution was pissed off that I tried to fight my charges, and so they worked with the judge to give me maximum possible jail time, despite being a homeless kid who had never been arrested before.
And the officer who stalked me, planted weed on me and arrested me is a known methamphetamine producer and distributor. I have personally witnessed her roll up in her cop car with a toothless old woman in the passenger seat, and watched that old woman grab as many boxes of pseudoephedrine as she legally could and bring them back to the cop car. This is called smurfing.
Presumably it was on a day when her regular chemical supplier was unavailable, and presumably they hit several such stores that day in order to amass a large supply. Some people I know literally murdered her brother over a meth dispute, and the police found a giant meth lab on his property.
Oh, and the mayor was the prosecutor's dad. So, can't tell the DA, can't tell the mayor... Maybe the state police? No, they work with them. FBI? No, I have left anonymous tips several times and nothing ever came of it. The only investigation I ever caught wind of mysteriously dissipated.
I even went to journalists, but no one took it seriously and those who did left it alone.
Everyone in that town knows the racket. Everyone. The mayor retired a few years ago, the prosecutor is good friends with my extremely abusive grandfather, and no one will ever answer for my mistreatment.
1718627440 · 23h ago
Sometimes I think, maybe sending the worst criminals, the most dangerous heretics and the poor to another continent with rich resources wasn't the smartest ideas of the Europeans. Sure it helped get rid of problems in the short term, but is now centuries later starting to bite us.
throawaywpg · 4h ago
stuff like this is why I want to move to Europe
fn-mote · 1d ago
> the law requires “any threat of mass violence against a school to be reported immediately to law enforcement.”
The article specifies this is a Tennessee law.
The school is in Kansas.
Agreed that the cops screwed up, but the school is also responsible.
Welcome to global privacy trends in 2025.
abeppu · 23h ago
I think 1. is still pretty bad. It's sounds like students are often obligated to use school-issued accounts for their own school work, and contents are searched and reviewed by the vendor's staff before either the student or the school are notified, and without any prior reason for individual suspicion -- that _does_ seem like a 4th amendment issue.
But also, is the school creating a blindspot for itself where it has _less_ information than if these systems were not in place? From one of the court documents linked in the article:
> The District and Gaggle—acting at the District’s behest—do not merely infringe students’ Fourth and First Amendment rights—they do so in a way that actively undermines the very safety concerns the District claims to address. Acting with the District’s knowledge, Gaggle automatically and unilaterally seizes student materials containing an undisclosed list of “trigger words” or phrases, without regard to context. This sweeping censorship extends to all student documents and content within the Google Workspace/Suite on District platforms. As a result, when students use their school-issued accounts to seek help or report concerns—particularly about mental health—Gaggle frequently intercepts and seizes those communications before they can reach their intended recipients, including teachers, counselors, and even parents. Such censorship denies some students the help they may need, contrary to Defendants’ articulated purpose for using Gaggle.
... i.e. the school is inadvertently quashing students attempts to ask for help or report problems
> When The Budget’s editor-in-chief investigated via requests under the Kansas Open Records Act why Gaggle continued to operate in violation of the purported exemption for student journalism, the findings responsive to her requests were, ironically, suppressed—apparently unbeknownst to the District officials tasked with responding to the requests—by Gaggle. Like the fox guarding the henhouse, Gaggle prevents parties from learning about how and when it operates.The District was made aware of Gaggle’s actions with respect to student journalists, but took no action to eliminate the problem.
... i.e. the school is generally unaware when it is itself silenced by its "safety management" software, even when this brings it out of compliance with legal requirements.
I live in and my wife works for the school district mentioned here.
I think most of us can agree that if kids are using Chromebooks or something provided by the school district they should be held accountable (similar to how if I say something awful in a work chat or email I'll be held accountable.
It is the overreach like you said that is the problem. People thinking that we "must protect the children" at all costs is the problem.
The specific district here has a "no bullying" agenda which, as a father formerly with kids in the district, is not a thing. But they promote it and they are the top performing schools in the state so whatever they can do to pander to parents is what they will do.
There's also a large Protestant population here with mega maga churches, and moms against liberty (real name: Moms for Liberty, but I like to call a spade a spade) is heavily enmeshed in the school system. Whatever the parents say goes, and this is just another example.
I always told my kids: I don't care who is asking - a teacher or the police. The answer to "show us your phone" is always "you need to call my parents". I am so glad my kids are no longer in the school system here.
Many of my friends are teachers, lots in this district, and I have to say the state of education has really gone backwards in general and specifically here
SeanDav · 1d ago
What the article seems to have glossed over is this:
>>> A court ordered eight weeks of house arrest, a psychological evaluation and 20 days at an alternative school for the girl.
If one assumes that the court did take into consideration context and age, it appears to largely validate the follow up decision once flagged. (I don't agree with lack of parental contact, to be clear.)
kayodelycaon · 1d ago
I’ve been at small courts. I wouldn’t assume the court took any of that into consideration.
If the police were willing to make an example out of someone, the judge they work with is likely to do that as well.
clwncr · 1d ago
School officials make the dubious claim that "the technology has detected dozens of imminent threats of suicide or violence."
Oh, really? Do they have data that shows a significant reduction in violence since surveillance started, or is this just reframing false positives (that can result in arrest, eight weeks of house arrest, a psychological evaluation and 20 days at an alternative school) as a net benefit. My money is on the latter.
kotaKat · 1d ago
Guaran-fucking-teed the bullied kids are still getting bullied just as bad and the system is still failing those kids while the school can put an outward appearance to the rest of the community that nothing is wrong and everything is perfectly fine inside the walls.
The victims will still be victims, they’ll just be punished by the system even harder for being a victim.
paradox460 · 18h ago
I'm hoping the school installs tiger repellent rocks soon. You know that every school that installed the rocks saw no tiger attacks after the fact?
Atreiden · 1d ago
This is utterly dystopian. We say some stupid things as kids, because they're just words and we're missing greater context at that age.
Immediately and automatically engaging law enforcement, and even the FBI, is horrific. Kids have always had greatly restricted freedoms in schools, but transcending the classroom and monitoring their digital lives is just training them to accept the surveillance state.
worldsayshi · 1d ago
The fact that this technology exists might make decision makers feel compelled to always to add as much surveillance as possible and acting on it as diligently as possible. Because it's their responsibility to create safety. And the most short term solution is to always enact more control over everything.
1718627440 · 1d ago
The fact that weapons exist, might make some people feel compelled to always shoot as much as possible.
Sure, these people exist. They are dangerous.
doctorwho42 · 1d ago
Adding more and more safety and control is always a self-defeating policy. It always ends with creating uncontrollable societal discord.
Same thing with unfettered capitalism, the systems only work if we continue to support said systems. When the rules break down, so do the desires of the collective to maintain said systems.
worldsayshi · 1d ago
It seems that a deeper cause of this is lack of trust in long term solutions and the ability to come up with a plan that beat the short term knee jerk solutions - which could make the problems worse.
If we can somehow win back trust in our collective ability to democratically solve problems... that should solve the problem.
I think that involves some creative solutions to collective decision making.
doctorwho42 · 1d ago
I agree, though I find that society has been throughly indoctrinated in thinking only about profit/economic motives and impacts. That is going to be the first major hurdle, teaching enough people that economics aren't the only metric for running a society, community, and life.
Refreeze5224 · 1d ago
> thinking only about profit/economic motives and impacts.
> teaching enough people that economics aren't the only metric for running a society, community, and life.
I agree that this is the major problem with society today, but I don't see a solution when this is exactly the desired state of affairs by anyone with any amount of money.
It's funny how only in economics is a secondary effect (efficiency/production/profit) optimized for, and we just hope or assume that it will result in wide-scale health/happiness/wellbeing. In any other situation, we would just design the system around the desired outcome.
worldsayshi · 23h ago
Agreed. I think there are methods for teaching that at scale. Like, let's design an idle game that shows other possibilities.
kolektiv · 1d ago
> training them to accept the surveillance state
From the perspective of those pushing this kind of technology and political movement, is that a bug or a feature?
doctorwho42 · 1d ago
Yeah, it's a feature. If anything, its a basement bargain feature. For any large system, indoctrination early and often is the best way for systemic change.
We already see it with the modern surveillance state, post 9-11 the US citizenry has lost so many freedoms and if you ask random people on the street about it they would be perplexed. Hell, even my friends give me a bit of the "ahh so this is your conspiracy theory" look when I mention them. Growing up through 9-11 and the forever war was pretty dystopian, or at least a March into the dystopia's that I only read about in books.
koakuma-chan · 1d ago
> We say some stupid things as kids, because they're just words and we're missing greater context at that age.
I think the problem is that people send kids to public schools and just hope for the best. Imagine you have a brand new child, and you send it to school, and the child ends up saying something offensive, is this the child's fault? I think not. The child was trained on harmful data, it's not surprised the child exhibited undesirable behaviours.
jacquesm · 1d ago
My kid went to public school in Canada. He learned English pretty quickly and one day got suspended from school for a week. When I asked what had happened he said the other kids asked him to pronounce f.u.c.k. and then, after he complied ran to the teacher to say that he'd used a 'bad word'.
So, the principal, one Roman Peredun calls me up and says that my son used a bad word. I asked him what word. He wouldn't say it. So I asked how am I supposed to know how 'bad' my son is if you can't even repeat the word. He then spelled the word. I said, oh, 'fuck'. Yes, that's not in dutch however so he must have picked it up in your school. Peredun hung up and I sent my kid back to school the next day.
giantg2 · 1d ago
I can confirm this. Sent a 5yo to public school and they came home with the new saying "I don't give a fuck!". Not what I want a 5yo to learn. We have massive overreactions by the schools for comments like in the article, but they're culpable in this sort of behavior by creating a largely undisciplined environment for basic in-person behavior. Uncontrolled classrooms and busses lead to all sorts of problems because nobody gets punished on the low end. My kid got in trouble for something and the punishment was to play alone at recess. Really? I told the school I think they should have been in detention at recess, possibly for a couple days. Of course they got punished at home too, which I suppose doesn't happen in some households.
Hizonner · 1d ago
> Sent a 5yo to public school and they came home with the new saying "I don't give a fuck!". Not what I want a 5yo to learn.
Ya know what? No sane person gives a fuck.
NoGravitas · 1d ago
Most of us are all out of fucks to give. With how things are going, I'm not totally surprised that even 5 year olds are running out of fucks already.
koakuma-chan · 1d ago
Lol this
giantg2 · 1d ago
This is not the vocabulary nor the mindset that someone with 5 year old control and unrealized potential should be exposed to. It's fine for us old, ground down folks with self control.
mr90210 · 1d ago
> The child was trained on harmful data, it's not surprised the child exhibited undesirable behaviours.
Your comment reduces children to entities that will behave as expected provided they get fed “good” data.
Humans are not LLMs.
giantg2 · 1d ago
You're taking the inverse of the commentor said. Being fed good data and being good is a different thing than being fed bad data and expecting them to be good.
There are plenty of studies on formative environments, especially on how negative environments can lead to negative behaviors.
koakuma-chan · 1d ago
I think children will behave properly given proper values and education.
giantg2 · 1d ago
I don't think that's universally true, but I do generally agree. It at least raises the probability substantially.
koakuma-chan · 1d ago
Correct. According to Socrates, corruption of majority is unavoidable.
evaXhill · 1d ago
Not that surprising that things have gotten to this point, just a few days ago schools in Florida were testing a new drone defense system against shootings. Between see-through backpacks, armed teachers, metal detectors, and other things you’d think it would be more easier to severely restrict firearm access to under 21 year olds and make the parents criminally liable if they are found to have facilitated access in any way in the wake of a shooting. But yeah i guess dipping into online conversations and immediately notifying both school officials and law enforcement is a good solution (/j)
puppycodes · 21h ago
God this horrifying, i'm really glad i did not grow up in this type of environment. Why people involve police in this is beyond me. Also how is that even a legal arrest? What crazy judge would write an arrest warrant for that? IANAL but sounds like an illegal warrantless arrest.
giantg2 · 1d ago
The problem are the lazy idiots using the software. This is the reason we need capable humans in the loop for anything important.
Here we have a bad joke. The system flags it. The school sends it to the police. The police detain and interrogate the kid. Everyone is treating the determination of a complex automated system as their own determination. We also have every actor treating this as a credible threat. For this to be credible, you have to have the means to accomplish it. They gave a timeline. You know you have time to investigate before making an arrest. Problem is, nobody cares.
yard2010 · 1d ago
If we have to rely on competent humans, we are doomed.
giantg2 · 1d ago
Any system will have failures. The goal is to eliminate some of those failures through multiple checks. The automated system can help by bringing up possible issues that couldn't be monitored by humans. But then it should be humans reviewing these alerts for false positives. It should be much like using a security scanning tool. Findings will come up and you need someone to disposition them. Some will need no actions false positives or issues under your risk tolerance, but then others need appropriate responses. It seemes in the cases like the example, you have a intern running the scan tool and turning every finding into a high vulnerability because they don't know any better than to blindly trust the tool.
1718627440 · 1d ago
We always rely on humans being competent. If we forget that and treat everything as being correct then we are doomed.
seagnson · 1d ago
This article really makes you think about how far is too far with school surveillance. It's scary to imagine kids getting in trouble just for being kids. The balance between safety and freedom is tricky, but arresting students seems extreme. Thanks for shedding light on this important issue.
scotty79 · 1d ago
> 13-year-old girl
> When a friend asked what she was planning for Thursday, she wrote: “on Thursday we kill all the Mexico’s.”
> Taken to jail, the teen was interrogated and strip-searched, and her parents weren’t allowed to talk to her until the next day,
> She didn’t know why her parents weren’t there.
> A court ordered eight weeks of house arrest, a psychological evaluation and 20 days at an alternative school for the girl.
Wow, 2025 is wild. Police and court should have psychological evaluation instead and maybe some time off without pay to cool off. Protecting children, no matter how many of them they have to traumatize and incarcerate.
DonHopkins · 1d ago
If only it weren't so easy for a 13-year-old to get their hands on an automatic weapon, then maybe we could take jokes like "on Thursday we kill all the Mexico’s" more casually.
As well as worrying about how to prevent kids from getting their privacy and freedom of speech violated, maybe we could put some more effort into preventing them from getting shot up in schools so often. Or at LEAST as much effort as we used to with assault weapon bans, which worked.
Until then, thoughts and prayers for their lost privacy and freedom of speech, too.
cramcgrab · 1d ago
And with the recent cell phone ban you have no proof, no video or pictures.
soulofmischief · 1d ago
When I was in high school, the police illegally body searched my entire school as a racist flex after tackling, beating and tasing a student over a pack of cigarettes one foot outside the door of my math class. A student responded by filming them and handing it over to a local news station, who ran the story and footage.
To retaliate, the next day administrators had metal detector wands waiting for us right off the busses, took every single cellphone they found and locked them up at the school board office for the rest of the year.
That school was absolute hell, a battleground between students and teachers. I am not exaggerating at all when I say that being spotted outside your classroom was an immediate expulsion, with not even enough time between classes to pee or use your locker (two minutes, we had to run). As part of the escalation, the fire alarm began being pulled at least twice a day. Any student who had even a moment alone with one would pull it immediately. Absolute chaos and a direct result of power collapse due to a racist, authoritarian school board that only knew how to wield institutional violence.
For this reason, my kid will always have a phone in order to protect themselves from administrative abuse. I will fight for that tooth and nail. I had over 40 write-ups in just elementary school for refusing entertain abuse from authoritarian staff, and I'll be a failure if my kid doesn't walk the same path.
1718627440 · 1d ago
Wow, US schools sound like prisons.
soulofmischief · 1d ago
This was probably in the top ten worst high schools in the country. It was the worst high school in my state, which I attended a semester after attending the best public high school in my state, so I really got to see the wide gamut of education available in my state. And my state floats between the 1st-3rd worst ranked in the US for education, so it was truly a bottom-of-the-barrel experience.
Each time you'd walk into class, it was a dice roll if another piece of equipment had been stolen. We stopped buying and using projectors because any new ones got stolen within days. Sometimes I'd walk into class and every single piece of furniture had been completely turned upside down. Students would play on their phones, yell, throw things at the teachers, and the teachers would just ignore them.
It was also an extremely racially charged situation which had a big impact. I think there were less than ten white people in the school, the rest of the school was black, and a handful of hispanic folk.
The white people were almost all racist, and so apart from my neighbor, I only hung around black people. As the only white person there who hung out with non-white people, my nickname across the entire high school somehow became Tarzan, in part due to my long hair. When I'd walk down the halls each day, people would beat their chests and make ape noises and give me dap.
I'll never forget being at an award ceremony and walking up for a few awards, each time the entire student body would start stomping in the bleachers and making jungle noises and shouting my nickname. The visibly perplexed administration had no idea what was going on.
Because my credits would not cleanly transfer to their curriculum, I had two free periods each day and used this time to help out the administration and teaching staff, running errands, organizing, doing paperwork, etc. This allowed me to interface often with the school board, who was... entirely comprised of white, racist, old men. Men who fundamentally refused to understand the predicament facing the student body, and who were too eager to escalate instead of finding a way to bridge communication between the student body and faculty. Instead of empowering students, they saw them all as future bodies for the prison and service industry, and it was obvious. Students learned nothing, but would get straight A's. They would of course absolutely fail state and national standardized tests. They were shoved through the meat grinder with nothing to show for it.
1718627440 · 22h ago
Wow, I realized all the horrific stories came from a single person. You had a truly sad childhood. I am sorry, hopefully things are better now. However maybe you can be the change you want to see. Maybe you want to become a police man?
tyleo · 1d ago
Did you even read the article? For the example at the top, all the stuff these kids did was well documented. I don’t understand how having a phone helps here except to add even more distraction in school and another avenue for surveillance.
The kids used a school communication program to say something racist. Schools should monitor school communication platforms.
The only thing I disagree with is the level of punishment (sending a kid to jail for a night).
7thaccount · 1d ago
Yes. I think some are pointing out that this crazy level of surveillance is at Orwellian levels. Why are kids even messaging each other on these platforms? I know books and paper is old school, but it does the job well. If they have to use some kind of internal system, then a racist joke could've led to a detention and parent/teacher talk. It didn't need to auto-flag law enforcement and traumatize the kid for life. Involuntary commitment at school sounds as unAmerican as it gets.
7thaccount · 23h ago
Edit: the threat of violence is obviously not acceptable in an age of horrifying events like school shootings. I think that goes without saying, but wanted to add to my above comment. As I unfortunately didn't make it super clear.
However, there should be a way to address the risk and prevent acts of terrorism without turning into a police state. A more reasonable response might have been to have the parents come by for a long meeting with the principal, school counselor, and school resource officer to talk about the severity of making such statements - even if she did make it sarcastically as tone/intent is difficult to judge. Then suspend the student for a day or so and have the school resource officer periodically check to ensure she didn't bring any weapons.
To play devil's advocate though, I can't imagine the stress from parents who have children of Mexican descent in such a situation.
internalfx · 1d ago
AND strip searching them, AND not allowing communication with their parents...
tyleo · 1d ago
I don’t understand your point. It seems like you are saying, “this punishment is so severe we shouldn’t be correcting the behavior at all.”
ludicrousdispla · 1d ago
Hopefully none of the students type German into the chat.
In that sense, it isn’t “normal”, it’s just “something that’s happening in theory but eh maybe it only affects scary people or whatever idk”. I feel like this tolerance we’re developing for outside forces invading “private” spaces, nominally for these loose justifications of harm reduction, will be what _actually does_ make it normal.
Once it’s truly normal, and people think it’s what keeps them safe from mass shootings or whatever, it will be too late to get rid of it. I think fear and normalcy will motivate its spread to places beyond school chat platforms and Snapchat.
No comments yet
Yeah, she'd probably get fired but law enforcement wouldn't get called because there was no specific or credible threat and the company doesn't have the mandatory reporting requirements that the school does.
> ...
> Gaggle’s CEO, Jeff Patterson, said in an interview that the school system did not use Gaggle the way it is intended. The purpose is to find early warning signs and intervene before problems escalate to law enforcement, he said.
> “I wish that was treated as a teachable moment, not a law enforcement moment,” said Patterson.
Of course they didn't do things as the Gaggle CEO describes. They were legally compelled not to.
I love a good complaint about corporate meddling as much as anyone, but sometimes it really is the government to blame.
The purpose of a system is what it does.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpo...
More discussion:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comment...
Here is a counterpoint:
https://rivalvoices.substack.com/p/the-purpose-of-posiwid-is...
If you take this view, then a fair assessment recognizes that "the system" in this case consists of more than just the Gaggle software.
Look at public schools as just another municipal enforcement department tasked with making sure the kids all meet state standards and it makes sense (or at least to the same extent that all the other indefensible shit done in the name of government makes sense).
Anyway they took us to look at the inmates in the halfway house who were behind bars and then they could come out to the bars and as their part of the whole scared straight exercise they would of course yell stuff at us, which was mainly about how they wanted to have sex with the approximately 16 year old girls on the trip.
Gosh, Utah sure is a morally upstanding place.
> on Thursday we kill all the Mexico’s
Especially considering the frequency of violence in American schools, can't really blame the school for jumping to conclusions.
Of course you can blame the school. They were too lazy to look at context and determine if the threat was real and credible. They took the determination of a complex tool as an unquestionable fact. The system supplies the fact that the user's account made the comment. All other facts need to be made by investigation. This statement provides a reasonable suspicion to investigate, but should not exhibit probable cause for an arrest as it requires a threat be credible, incite panick, etc per the specific terrorist threat law. This requires investigation and thought.
Like if you're gonna do "make the news" shit you oughta at least have someone check your goddamn work first.
Do you think whoever is doing this at the school is a qualified professional, e.g. a child/teen psychiatrist that knows the kid in question well enough, to be able to determine if the threat was real and credible?
If you want to solve this problem solve it at the root, not by overreacting to teenagers.
It's terroristic threats. That's the law most of the school shooting threats would get charged under. The real problem is that most states have automatic reporting laws, which means you have to report anything that sounds like a threat even if it isn't. This is the main difference between regular cases and school cases - you end up with a lot of junk being reported and potentially causing more harm than it was intended to prevent.
There is an easy way to stop 99.9% of all school shootings, and it isn't 'automatic reporting laws'.
Don't worry, the people who want these Orwellian things will find a more "marketable" way of describing it.
https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/arming-teach...
https://www.ue.org/risk-management/premises-safety/increased...
Not the sharpest bullets in the barrel...
Back when I was in school the web filtering got so draconian those of us in the know started keeping Tor browser on a thumb drive, and carrying it to whatever computer we were using. Some went as far as to reboot from a Linux image on said thumb drive. That was nearly 20 years ago, can't imagine it's any better now
1. Schools running and monitoring their own communication platforms. This seems fine.
2. The US government monitoring private communication platforms like Snapchat and arresting kids on school grounds. This seems bad.
The way it’s written though mixes these together and makes it look like schools are monitoring the private communication of students. I think it’s fine for schools to monitor there own platforms but weird for the government to monitor all platforms haphazardly.
I'm not saying this doesn't happen, but I am saying that this has never happened to me or anyone I know.
How long before they use AI to do that?
AI hype is at play here as well, not only in the breathless press releases from AI companies.
2. The US government monitoring private communication platforms like Snapchat and arresting kids on school grounds. This seems bad."
Public schools are government.
A student said, “on Thursday we kill all the Mexico’s,” on a schools private communication platform. The school should correct that behavior.
Unfortunately they involved law enforcement. Thats where I see the problem. A better solution would be detention and informing the parents.
Sounds like they could've reasoned that they face the least chance for liability if they pushed the responsibility to law enforcement.
When you were a kid gun laws were stricter.
Some states have fewer laws, others have more. At the federal level, there are more laws and rules than there were in the 60s or 70s (overall more than at any prior time).
And of course enforcement varies. I remember many people coming to school with guns in their cars during hunting season even though it's not legal.
One can impute it from the content assuming it’s relevant, i.e. in America.
As for the feature bans those are clearly municipalities attempts to get around either constitutional or political impediments to the bans people actually want. Magazines fed semi automatic rifles are what people want to ban, banning rifles with muzzle shrouds is how they get there.
Studies on this topic are fraught because the gun industry has long prevented the normal research funding issues on this topic and have fought tooth and nail any data collection efforts.
Yes there's more legal access federally than in the 90s but the difference is pretty much wholly on a state by state basis with some states having no or slight change and some states having large change.
> If we are only looking at the federal level, then there has been no substantial reduction.
There _was_ a significant reduction at the federal level. They acknowledged that and then changed the goalpost.
I then claimed
> Studies on this topic are fraught because the gun industry has long prevented the normal research funding issues on this topic and have fought tooth and nail any data collection efforts.
This is true. The Dickey Amendment prevented first the CDC and then the NIH from collecting gun violence statistics from 1996 until today. Though in 2018 they were able to add a rider to it to make it a little easier.
FOPA makes it impossible to collect registration information for federal use, including in data exchange for studies around gun ownership.
I'm not sure what more you want me to backup. Would you like the actual legal citations on those?
Screeching about whatever fed law changes or lack thereof the Brady Campaign told you to screech about is pointless. Fed law directly affects only a tiny minority of buyers because people buy what's available and no recent federal law changes have increased/decreased the legal buyer pool and sales volume.
You don't need the CDC or the NIH or whatever other "authoritative" source who's boot you prefer the flavor of in order to make assessments of how things have changed over time. State law changes and sales data are very easy to come by. Those are where the real meat of the change is. Many states over the past 20yr went from it being a hassle to "just toss a pink Ruger in your purse" to a simple retail transaction.
This forced reporting necessarily creates false reports. Under the law, things like terrorist threats are required to be credible or incite panic. Reporting things that aren't credible is arguably a violation of law under any other context, yet they choose to ignore that with these mandatory reporting laws. Basically it creates a situation where nobody is allowed to use their brain - automated conveyer to the criminal system.
Brain users get jaded and a) stop b) seek alternate employment.
Schools don't just crush kids.
Eh, terminal violence was potentially threatened. Calling the cops seems fine if no teacher or administrator can vouch for the kid. (Particularly if, as is true in this case, the law requires “any threat of mass violence against a school to be reported immediately to law enforcement.”)
To the extent someone fucked up, it’s the cops who allegedly caused the 13-year old to be “interrogated, strip-searched and spent the night in a jail cell.”
> Police are a volatile, uncontrollable solution
No they don't and shouldn't be.
> If you introduce police into a situation
I think informing the police about a dangerous attitude in some child isn't the wrong solution. The police not showing up at the parent's place and sending a therapist, but instead treating a child like a criminal adult is criminally neglect.
Also right here in the comments we have somebody mentioning that people behave how you treat them. That doesn't apply soly to children. If you treat the police like a militia and don't show respect they will behave like that to you.
> I think informing the police about a dangerous attitude in some child isn't the wrong solution
I was regularly beaten at home by religious zealots, before finally being kicked out onto the street and becoming homeless at 16. The police were over at my house every three weeks or less, constantly threatening me with foster care and juvie if I didn't respect my grandfather's right to beat me.
The man would routinely make me choose a weapon, often but not always a belt. He would then beat me savagely with the metal buckle like a whip, all over my body, until I would stop crying, because "men do not cry, I'll teach you how to be a man", and "I'll give you something to cry about".
Every ounce of state intervention made it worse, because of police and administrative corruption. Don't even get me started on how they surveilled me through my school.
Yeah, we do have ideals. And regulations, which... don't always match those ideals. And then we have reality, which... doesn't always match regulations. To ignore reality and say that the regulations are the true reality is honestly a very ignorant and dangerous thing to do, especially when you try to instill this perspective into others.
You are one citizen. The police represent the other million citizens. They have the monopoly on violence, so that all the other citizens can't do that. I think this is way better than every citizen caring weapons and doing self-justice. Even when the police is going crazy, that is still better than civil war. They do have checks and regulation even if they don't always work, the other citizens haven't.
That being said, I can absolutely see, how you distrust the police. I can't imagine what justification the police gave to their superiors in your case. I would expect public outrage if this became public, but maybe your country truly doesn't care.
Of course you shouldn't report such issues to a corrupt militia, which your police seams to be posing as. However that is not what I would call a police and it should be reported to the police if you had such a thing in your region.
When you ignore children with violent intentions this will lead to a stabbing or shooting later on. The police will treat a single claim very differently than recurring threats for violence. Informing the authorities early one makes them able to send therapists the first time. When they only ever hear about problems once things went violent or even only at the time of the amok, they need to send the violent force on the first occurrence, because they can now only try to shield the victims not help the delinquent child.
Police exist to enforce the laws within specific parameters. They are basically a modern formalized take on midlevel men at arms. They mostly only de-escalate conflicts and prevent harm incidentally.
A concept of a written law is very different from a rule by decrees and the will of the ruler. The difference is that deciding whether something is lawful is outside of the ruler or the enforcer. (i.e. separation of powers) This is what differentiates a liberal democracy from a dictatorship, but also 19th century and modern monarchies from absolutism. So no police is not modern men-at-arms.
Somebody should tell them that.
> If they don't you should file a disciplinary complaint.
... which will be ignored. They may or may not laugh in your face.
I wish I lived in your dream world.
I was personally given a maximum sentence of 6 months in jail as an underage, first-time offender because a police officer who had been stalking my friend group planted weed on me at the scene of an accident. I was denied the right to a trial by jury, they refused to let me out of jail until I'd signed a paper giving up that right. I was homeless and needed to graduate high school, so I had no choice. My defense attorney was then forced off my case so that I could be given another attorney under the thumb of the prosecutor and judge's racket, and so this was never addressed.
Seven cops came up one after another and gave wildly different testimonies of what happened, then the judge gave me my sentence because "I think you're lying". When I moved to appeal, my compromised attorney refused to let me, saying, and I quote, "The judge is my boss. If I let you appeal his decision, he'll make my life miserable."
See, the prosecution was pissed off that I tried to fight my charges, and so they worked with the judge to give me maximum possible jail time, despite being a homeless kid who had never been arrested before.
And the officer who stalked me, planted weed on me and arrested me is a known methamphetamine producer and distributor. I have personally witnessed her roll up in her cop car with a toothless old woman in the passenger seat, and watched that old woman grab as many boxes of pseudoephedrine as she legally could and bring them back to the cop car. This is called smurfing.
Presumably it was on a day when her regular chemical supplier was unavailable, and presumably they hit several such stores that day in order to amass a large supply. Some people I know literally murdered her brother over a meth dispute, and the police found a giant meth lab on his property.
Oh, and the mayor was the prosecutor's dad. So, can't tell the DA, can't tell the mayor... Maybe the state police? No, they work with them. FBI? No, I have left anonymous tips several times and nothing ever came of it. The only investigation I ever caught wind of mysteriously dissipated.
I even went to journalists, but no one took it seriously and those who did left it alone.
Everyone in that town knows the racket. Everyone. The mayor retired a few years ago, the prosecutor is good friends with my extremely abusive grandfather, and no one will ever answer for my mistreatment.
The article specifies this is a Tennessee law. The school is in Kansas.
Agreed that the cops screwed up, but the school is also responsible.
Welcome to global privacy trends in 2025.
But also, is the school creating a blindspot for itself where it has _less_ information than if these systems were not in place? From one of the court documents linked in the article:
> The District and Gaggle—acting at the District’s behest—do not merely infringe students’ Fourth and First Amendment rights—they do so in a way that actively undermines the very safety concerns the District claims to address. Acting with the District’s knowledge, Gaggle automatically and unilaterally seizes student materials containing an undisclosed list of “trigger words” or phrases, without regard to context. This sweeping censorship extends to all student documents and content within the Google Workspace/Suite on District platforms. As a result, when students use their school-issued accounts to seek help or report concerns—particularly about mental health—Gaggle frequently intercepts and seizes those communications before they can reach their intended recipients, including teachers, counselors, and even parents. Such censorship denies some students the help they may need, contrary to Defendants’ articulated purpose for using Gaggle.
... i.e. the school is inadvertently quashing students attempts to ask for help or report problems
> When The Budget’s editor-in-chief investigated via requests under the Kansas Open Records Act why Gaggle continued to operate in violation of the purported exemption for student journalism, the findings responsive to her requests were, ironically, suppressed—apparently unbeknownst to the District officials tasked with responding to the requests—by Gaggle. Like the fox guarding the henhouse, Gaggle prevents parties from learning about how and when it operates.The District was made aware of Gaggle’s actions with respect to student journalists, but took no action to eliminate the problem.
... i.e. the school is generally unaware when it is itself silenced by its "safety management" software, even when this brings it out of compliance with legal requirements.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/26040279-lawrence-bo...
I think most of us can agree that if kids are using Chromebooks or something provided by the school district they should be held accountable (similar to how if I say something awful in a work chat or email I'll be held accountable.
It is the overreach like you said that is the problem. People thinking that we "must protect the children" at all costs is the problem.
The specific district here has a "no bullying" agenda which, as a father formerly with kids in the district, is not a thing. But they promote it and they are the top performing schools in the state so whatever they can do to pander to parents is what they will do.
There's also a large Protestant population here with mega maga churches, and moms against liberty (real name: Moms for Liberty, but I like to call a spade a spade) is heavily enmeshed in the school system. Whatever the parents say goes, and this is just another example.
I always told my kids: I don't care who is asking - a teacher or the police. The answer to "show us your phone" is always "you need to call my parents". I am so glad my kids are no longer in the school system here.
Many of my friends are teachers, lots in this district, and I have to say the state of education has really gone backwards in general and specifically here
>>> A court ordered eight weeks of house arrest, a psychological evaluation and 20 days at an alternative school for the girl.
If one assumes that the court did take into consideration context and age, it appears to largely validate the follow up decision once flagged. (I don't agree with lack of parental contact, to be clear.)
If the police were willing to make an example out of someone, the judge they work with is likely to do that as well.
Oh, really? Do they have data that shows a significant reduction in violence since surveillance started, or is this just reframing false positives (that can result in arrest, eight weeks of house arrest, a psychological evaluation and 20 days at an alternative school) as a net benefit. My money is on the latter.
The victims will still be victims, they’ll just be punished by the system even harder for being a victim.
Immediately and automatically engaging law enforcement, and even the FBI, is horrific. Kids have always had greatly restricted freedoms in schools, but transcending the classroom and monitoring their digital lives is just training them to accept the surveillance state.
Sure, these people exist. They are dangerous.
Same thing with unfettered capitalism, the systems only work if we continue to support said systems. When the rules break down, so do the desires of the collective to maintain said systems.
If we can somehow win back trust in our collective ability to democratically solve problems... that should solve the problem.
I think that involves some creative solutions to collective decision making.
> teaching enough people that economics aren't the only metric for running a society, community, and life.
I agree that this is the major problem with society today, but I don't see a solution when this is exactly the desired state of affairs by anyone with any amount of money.
It's funny how only in economics is a secondary effect (efficiency/production/profit) optimized for, and we just hope or assume that it will result in wide-scale health/happiness/wellbeing. In any other situation, we would just design the system around the desired outcome.
From the perspective of those pushing this kind of technology and political movement, is that a bug or a feature?
We already see it with the modern surveillance state, post 9-11 the US citizenry has lost so many freedoms and if you ask random people on the street about it they would be perplexed. Hell, even my friends give me a bit of the "ahh so this is your conspiracy theory" look when I mention them. Growing up through 9-11 and the forever war was pretty dystopian, or at least a March into the dystopia's that I only read about in books.
I think the problem is that people send kids to public schools and just hope for the best. Imagine you have a brand new child, and you send it to school, and the child ends up saying something offensive, is this the child's fault? I think not. The child was trained on harmful data, it's not surprised the child exhibited undesirable behaviours.
So, the principal, one Roman Peredun calls me up and says that my son used a bad word. I asked him what word. He wouldn't say it. So I asked how am I supposed to know how 'bad' my son is if you can't even repeat the word. He then spelled the word. I said, oh, 'fuck'. Yes, that's not in dutch however so he must have picked it up in your school. Peredun hung up and I sent my kid back to school the next day.
Ya know what? No sane person gives a fuck.
Your comment reduces children to entities that will behave as expected provided they get fed “good” data.
Humans are not LLMs.
There are plenty of studies on formative environments, especially on how negative environments can lead to negative behaviors.
Here we have a bad joke. The system flags it. The school sends it to the police. The police detain and interrogate the kid. Everyone is treating the determination of a complex automated system as their own determination. We also have every actor treating this as a credible threat. For this to be credible, you have to have the means to accomplish it. They gave a timeline. You know you have time to investigate before making an arrest. Problem is, nobody cares.
> When a friend asked what she was planning for Thursday, she wrote: “on Thursday we kill all the Mexico’s.”
> Taken to jail, the teen was interrogated and strip-searched, and her parents weren’t allowed to talk to her until the next day,
> She didn’t know why her parents weren’t there.
> A court ordered eight weeks of house arrest, a psychological evaluation and 20 days at an alternative school for the girl.
Wow, 2025 is wild. Police and court should have psychological evaluation instead and maybe some time off without pay to cool off. Protecting children, no matter how many of them they have to traumatize and incarcerate.
As well as worrying about how to prevent kids from getting their privacy and freedom of speech violated, maybe we could put some more effort into preventing them from getting shot up in schools so often. Or at LEAST as much effort as we used to with assault weapon bans, which worked.
Until then, thoughts and prayers for their lost privacy and freedom of speech, too.
To retaliate, the next day administrators had metal detector wands waiting for us right off the busses, took every single cellphone they found and locked them up at the school board office for the rest of the year.
That school was absolute hell, a battleground between students and teachers. I am not exaggerating at all when I say that being spotted outside your classroom was an immediate expulsion, with not even enough time between classes to pee or use your locker (two minutes, we had to run). As part of the escalation, the fire alarm began being pulled at least twice a day. Any student who had even a moment alone with one would pull it immediately. Absolute chaos and a direct result of power collapse due to a racist, authoritarian school board that only knew how to wield institutional violence.
For this reason, my kid will always have a phone in order to protect themselves from administrative abuse. I will fight for that tooth and nail. I had over 40 write-ups in just elementary school for refusing entertain abuse from authoritarian staff, and I'll be a failure if my kid doesn't walk the same path.
Each time you'd walk into class, it was a dice roll if another piece of equipment had been stolen. We stopped buying and using projectors because any new ones got stolen within days. Sometimes I'd walk into class and every single piece of furniture had been completely turned upside down. Students would play on their phones, yell, throw things at the teachers, and the teachers would just ignore them.
It was also an extremely racially charged situation which had a big impact. I think there were less than ten white people in the school, the rest of the school was black, and a handful of hispanic folk.
The white people were almost all racist, and so apart from my neighbor, I only hung around black people. As the only white person there who hung out with non-white people, my nickname across the entire high school somehow became Tarzan, in part due to my long hair. When I'd walk down the halls each day, people would beat their chests and make ape noises and give me dap.
I'll never forget being at an award ceremony and walking up for a few awards, each time the entire student body would start stomping in the bleachers and making jungle noises and shouting my nickname. The visibly perplexed administration had no idea what was going on.
Because my credits would not cleanly transfer to their curriculum, I had two free periods each day and used this time to help out the administration and teaching staff, running errands, organizing, doing paperwork, etc. This allowed me to interface often with the school board, who was... entirely comprised of white, racist, old men. Men who fundamentally refused to understand the predicament facing the student body, and who were too eager to escalate instead of finding a way to bridge communication between the student body and faculty. Instead of empowering students, they saw them all as future bodies for the prison and service industry, and it was obvious. Students learned nothing, but would get straight A's. They would of course absolutely fail state and national standardized tests. They were shoved through the meat grinder with nothing to show for it.
The kids used a school communication program to say something racist. Schools should monitor school communication platforms.
The only thing I disagree with is the level of punishment (sending a kid to jail for a night).
However, there should be a way to address the risk and prevent acts of terrorism without turning into a police state. A more reasonable response might have been to have the parents come by for a long meeting with the principal, school counselor, and school resource officer to talk about the severity of making such statements - even if she did make it sarcastically as tone/intent is difficult to judge. Then suspend the student for a day or so and have the school resource officer periodically check to ensure she didn't bring any weapons.
To play devil's advocate though, I can't imagine the stress from parents who have children of Mexican descent in such a situation.