[baclc] Surveillance state extends to children

Discussion
1

Margarita,

  This is indeed chilling -- creepy and Orwellian. Reading between the lines, you can sort of see what they have in mind. These police officers, dubbed SROs presumably as a euphemism so they don't have to openly call them police officers in this context (SRO = Student Resource Officers, if I recall correctly) would monitor individual students online starting in their elementary school years, using this harvested social media data and physical access to the students at school to worm their way into their lives and become their trusted "friends" (of course the "trust" is really only expected to extend in one direction though -- the officers won't be trusting students with sensitive information) as they build databases on these students. The "at-risk' students (those deemed prone to violence) might even be groomed as future cops (channel those violent/anti-social tendencies in a direction useful to the State) or future criminals (criminals are also essential to the continued funding of the police and criminal justice system, although as a character in "Atlas Shrugged" said, if there are not enough criminals one can always make more by passing more laws and criminalizing more behavior).

  Some questions... How did this hidden language come to light? What was the context of this paragraph? Are SLPD officers already embedded in San Leandro schools? Already "monitoring youth activities" and building databases on students, I wonder?

   "COPS grant" = #CaptureOurPublicSchools? #Co-optOurPublicSchools?

Love & Liberty,
                                  ((( starchild )))

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Thanks for this post, Starchild. Very interesting! My immediate reaction was to think of "federalization" of police and schools. After some research, I am not so sure. Apparently, there are private companies that offer social media surveillance services (several articles on the Glendale School District use of one such company). Instead of hiring private companies, it seems that local school districts have the option of applying for a grant for SRO service, and then the SRO's do the surveillance work. A couple of articles talked about cost --- it seems Glendale paid around $40,000 to the private company, while SRO's mentioned in another article received $133,000 a year each. I did not find any specific mention of social media surveillance in San Francisco public schools. I did find mention that SRO's do patrol schools in S.F. The SFUSD website just has some general platitudes about their role. In other words, they are hired, taxpayers pay for them, but nobody knows what they do, if anything. Like other form of government intrusion, social media surveillance recalls the tale of the frog in boiling water. Regular folks act OK with all kinds of stuff until it is too late to jump out. Here are some interesting articles should anyone be interested.

http://www.cops.usdoj.gov/default.asp?Item=54

http://www.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/sf-police-schools-ironing-out-details-of-newly-defined-relationship/Content?oid=2849203

http://venturebeat.com/2013/08/29/school-district-hires-company-to-monitor-social-media-activity-of-students/

Marcy