We’ve Replaced School Security With the Creepiest Possible System |
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A sophomore in Arizona typed an email he never sent. Home with his mother before school, he was drafting a note to a teacher about a bad grade, and in between, he tapped out a few jokes and deleted each one. Thinking out loud and swallowing it back, basically. Gaggle’s monitoring software caught the keystrokes anyway. He never hit send. He was suspended before the day was out. By the time the district agreed to shorten the punishment, he’d already served 11 days.
Those keystrokes are the whole thing. Not the joke, which was dumb the way 15-year-olds are dumb. The fact that a few characters typed and deleted in his mother’s kitchen became a document the school could act on. He walked into that disciplinary process already legible. Already scored. Whatever he said next was a rebuttal to a case somebody else had opened without telling him, using words he’d tried to erase.
This is the school year starting now, in August, in Beverly Hills, California, and in whatever town you grew up in. Students are going back to the most surveilled campuses in American history. Facial recognition at the doors. A.I. weapons detection in the halls. Bathroom sensors shaped like smoke detectors, listening for aggression. Drones. Plate readers logging the cars in the pickup line. Beverly Hills High spent $4.8........