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Geek Profiling: The Next W.A.V.E.
According to David Bresnahan, reporting on the WorldNet Daily site, the new "W.A.V.E" program, developed by Pinkerton Services Group,a division of the international security firm Pinkerton, Inc. is starting up in North Carolina, and is soon to go nationwide.
W.A.V.E. offers anonymous toll-free lines for students, who will be trained to watch for and report "dangerous" behavior like depression, or kids with weapons. Every North Carolina school will have free access to this program, which will include a Web site, classes, school assemblies and special sessions for parents and teachers. W.A.V.E America was created by a North Carolina task force on school violence working together with Pinkerton. A contact list of law-enforcement agencies is also being developed for each school in the state to notify when a tip has been received by Pinkerton on its nationwide toll-free line.
W.A.V.E joins new sofware "security" programs like Mosaic 2000, which is being tested in public schools in America to compile and computerize information on students believed to be dangerous or potentially violent. This new rat-on-kids industry is an offshoot of the Geek Profiling anti-Net hysteria that broke out all across the United States after the Columbine High School killings, whose first anniversary is fast approaching. Despite the fact that horrific incidents like Columbine are extremely rare, and that the FBI and Justice Department have both reported that youth violence has dropped to its lowest levels in more than half a century, the belief persists in much of America that technologies like the Internet (and activities like computer gaming) are turning otherwise healthy school children into mass murderers.
In a newsmagazine survey taken earlier this year, 81 percent of Americans said they believed the Net was responsible for the Columbine massacre.
In the lunatic world of American education, and the surreal aftermath of Columbine, it now seems perfectly reasonable, even sensible, to suspend and force into counseling children who who are angry, depressed, who wear white, game obsessively, or who say intemperate and stupid things. The W.A.V.E program is not only institutionalizing but rewarding a culture in which kids are being taught to turn in classmates whose behavior they consider abnormal or dangerous. It also reinforces the notion that school students have no Constitutional rights of due process such as privacy, confronting accusers, behaving in non-conformist ways, or even knowing that accusations against them exist.
Although school-age children are presumed to have few rights, it's obvious that this kind of anonymous and intrusive law enforcement would blatantly unconstitutional for adults. Just yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Florida law that permits police to search people for firearms solely on the basis of anonymous tips. Citing the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable search and seizure, the court ruled that such a law would enable "any person to harass another to set in motion an intrusive, embarrassing police search..." Authorities, the court ruled, needed some corraborating evidence before they could invade the privacy of any citizen. It's frightening to imagine how school authorities can possibly teach citizenship when they have so wantonly violate the very idea of constitutional rights.
This Orwellian phobia (who do we turn in next?: "dangerous" parents, neighbors and sibs?) has been a staple of the most venal political systems in the 20th Century, from Nazism to fascism to Communism. It is presumptuous and arrogant on so many levels it's astonishing to see public officials like North Carolina Gov. Jim Hunt adopt the idea so unthinkingly and enthusiastically. But he's not alone -- plenty of parents and educators are along for the ride.
It isn't clear where information goes once it's collected by kid-profiling software, or toll-free hot-lines. Presumably, it remains in a computerized dangerous-kids database for life. This is just one more reason that it's insane to ask young children to evaluate their classmates for emotional disorders and other signs of potentially "dangerous" behavior. Not only are kids patently unqualified to make judgments like that, the temptation to turn in kids that are socially competitive, "geeky," different, disliked, abrasive or unhappy seems almost irresistible, especially when doing so brings tangible rewards like cash, and is cloaked under anonymity. Monitoring and evaluating behavior is a science that's supposed to be done by trained professionals -- teachers, psychologists, guidance counselors, and therapists. Even then, kids ought to have the right to be openly confronted with the accusation that they're a menace to society, and to respond, rather than wonder if some angry classmate has branded them for life on an anonymous toll free line run by a profit-making private company with a vested interest in promoting the notion that schools -- and kids -- are dangerous.
"A safe school environment is fundamental to helping North Carolina's students succeed in school," announced Governor Hunt. "Every school ought to be a safe one and W.A.V.E. American will help get every kid involved. This program is more than just a tip line, it teaches students and parents to look for the early signs of violent behavior and to resolve conflicts constructively."
This is the worst kind of political exploitation of kids. It takes schools off the hook and turns the complex process of school administration over to adolescents. Kids will ultimately have to live in fear that the deskmate they jostled with will turn them in for money, or that bragging about exploits on Doom will get them turned into W.A.V.E. as "unbalanced."
If a kid or a parent becomes aware that a classmate has a gun and plans to use it, there are plenty of cops and law enforcement officials they can call. There is no statistical evidence to support the notion that schools are so dangerous that children need to be manipulated into turning one another in. Nor is there much doubt about who will be targeted -- geeks, nerds, Goths, oddballs, along with anyone else who is discontented, alienated and individualistic.
That kids are being rewarded for doing this is revolting enough. That they are being asked to do by a profit-making private corporation for money suggests a culture a lot sicker and more dangerous than most schoolkids. that?
here's the TV movie..
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0083316
Apparently based on a true story...
On the one hand, you've got anonymous measurement tools beyond count: Slashdot's AC's, Employer info sites, that Teacher site that's getting sued for Libel...
And it's our god given right to use those, right?
Then on the other, you have W.A.V.E. . Similar anonymous measurement, *EXACT* same potentials for abuse(unpopular people get slammed unfairly for fair actions, etc.) The technology itself--anonymous evaluations--remains consistent. So what's different?
Lets see. The former consists of individuals commenting on members of a larger institution. The latter consists of larger institutions retrieving commentary from their individual members <i>regarding</i> their individual members.
Still, this doesn't establish that there's anything wrong with W.A.V.E. I generally want the institutions I'm a member of to protect me from other members--particularly schools. There's an irrational "tattle tales are bad" chant that ignores the fact that Geeks Like Me would be toast without the ability to go to a counselor or a dean of students and say, "That kid over there is beating me senseless on a daily basis. That sucks!"
Yes! Tattle! If someone's making your life miserable, <i>you can do something about it</i>! Schools have and need infrastructure to deal with this.
And that's when things start to fall apart for the W.A.V.E. program. There's something truly perverse about what it has people report...it's not those students who <i>cause</i> the most misery who get busted; it's those students who everyone looks at and says, "Man, that kid is such a loser and everyone hates him. Shit, he's gonna take a gun and shoot up this place!"
In other words, W.A.V.E. has implicit in its design a scheme that doesn't prevent harassment, rather it provides a means of tagging and identifying the harassed. This wouldn't be an awful thing, if it wasn't so presumptuous and backwards--we need to do something about this poor kids who get kicked around every day...not to deal with the violence of them getting kicked around, mind you! "That's normal, you see. Kids establish a pecking order, you can't fight that." No, this isn't about stopping the kicking, it's about essentially providing a means of recognizing when a kid's been kicked so low that they might start fighting back. It's to recognize when kids are brought to the point where they have nowhere to go but up.
How scary, that after months of enduring torment, your institution itself gets into the act, worrying that something must be wrong with you if the popular kids don't like you.
And thus, where the <i>real</i> fear of this system is coming from: It's not the anonymous reporting--we like anonymity, look at all the people who make a career out of bashing Katz on a regular basis. (Incidentally, I was impressed by this story--this is probably some of Katz's beter writing.) It's not even the knowledge of the institution that there are kids who are getting kicked around.
It's that the institution isn't the school.
It's the idea that, someday, some accountant will send your dean of students a "scientific report" saying you're just too likely to react dangerously to all the abuse he's been allowing under his nose. There's a tendancy to use science to absolve personal responsibility in institutional management, and if The Numbers Say You'll Kill Someone, it just doesn't hurt administrators all that much to "send the child to a special school" "just to be on the safe side."
Nobody wants to be held responsible when some kid shoots up the school, and *THEY KNEW* something was going to happen--after all, that kid had a 83.2 on the Gonna Shoot Up The School scale--why wasn't he kicked out, they'll ask?
Don't laugh. If 82% of America can blame a f*cking network of computers for a schooltime massacre, *phear* what they could do to the actual administrators.
This is essentially outsourced psychological risk assessment. Instead of people within a school dealing with the problem and actually handling things from the inside--where things are visible--schools become a sort of "black box", with little candy treats being waved around to elicit data about its inner operations from unknown members inside.
When the data comes in from an outside agency, with a scientific chart o' student issues, held within a database protected by not a relevant data protection code in the country(ooh! Wanna sell Prozac? W.A.V.E. licensing divisions, how many depressed kids would you like to sell to today?)...it stops being an issue of whether tattling is right or wrong, and starts becoming a question of just how much cynicism are we willing to accept in our school infrastructure.
Calling this program WAVE, after that after school special, is so amazingly unfortunate for this program that it defies description.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
I just had a thought on a little "harmless" prank that could make things interesting for WAVE. Of course I'm not actually advocating that anybody do this, oh no--just pointing out a possible vulnerability.
Congress has 100 senators and 435 representatives. At least a few of them have teenaged kids. I'm sure they'd appreciate the early warning from anonymous sources that have fingered junior as a depressed violent druggie anarchist.
Anyone else remember the creepy CBS after school special about the wave? It was about a hitleresque movement too. At least that had a happy ending where the kids realized their behavior was wrong. . .
This is not the first rat-on-your-peers program I have heard about. In my college, they recruited students who lived in dorms for one. It was a special group called peer counselors. They were basically behavior/mental illness narcs. They were supposed to gain the confidence of other students if they saw any signs of depression etc. Any hint of depression and they would turn over their fellow students. They were trained in how to do this.
You see, depression can lead to suicide so they treated any even mildly depressed students as "A danger to themselves or others." This is a cause for summary suspension in most schools and cause enough to lock anyone up against their will indefinitely in most states. You lose all civil rights. You may be tortured. You have no right to communicate with others if doctors feel that is not in your best interest. You lose your right to vote and marry. And you never get a real trial. Sadly, a student just homesick and a bit blue could find themselves forced into counseling and maybe out of school. Oddball or unpopular behavior might lead to the diagnosis of schizophrenia with similar results.
My school had plenty of volunteers for their corps of depression narcs; after all they were helping those poor kids. There are always plenty of people willing to mind their peers business. Let people feel good about this and you have a loyal following. Some churches seem to function on this theme as well. It is very compelling. At least the charge of sin doesn't get you locked up.
In the United States at least, the charge of mental illness is very like the cry of Witch! in Salem once was. And once accused, you lose credibility no matter the truth of the charge. The only way to prove your sanity is to take tests that may very well help them lock you up. It does not matter if you have done anything wrong. Admitting to a single thought that you wish you could die even though you would not harm yourself can be enough to condemn you. Imagine telling someone you thought of as a friend about an embarrassment and saying "I just wanted to die" and then being kicked out of school. It has happened.
Peer behavior narcs in high schools is a very scary thought to me, but then I am not pleased with the paranoia that D.A.R.E. teaches kids. Did you know they outed the Snuffelupagus because they felt teaching children that sometimes they are right when the whole world doubts them was dangerous?
Scary stuff.
--- If you don't want to know the answer, don't ask the question.
"It's a carbon copy of the Hitler Youth program used so successfully in World War II Germany to root out dissidents and oddballs."
Actually, this sounds even worse to me. The Hitler Youth was "just" a youth organisation, at least at the beginning. And even later on, the motivation was mostly political and even paramilitary "education" of the members, not using them as a extension of the Gestapo (the Nazi internal intelligence service). The Hitler Youth has to be seen in this context. They were the pre-school of the fascist government, preparing young people to be "good citizens" (in the perverted sense the Nazi government thought of this). Spying on others was not explicitly asked for, at least not as far as I know. (And Nazi history takes up quite a big part in german history education).
It was a bit different with the "Freie Deutsche Jugend", the national youth organisation of the former GDR. Members were explicitly asked to inform their leaders of any planned attempt of "Republikflucht" (unauthorized leave of country, usually to the FRG) they got to know of, and some even turned in their parents.
But what you are talking about _is_ asking for spying on peers, and what's more, it is happening in a democratic nation. Appropriate action should be taken (and I do consider your article as such) before this starts to take off.
Successful fascism starts in culture, not in politics.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
*sigh* What ever happened to the days of simply getting harrassed, teased and occassionally roughed up simply because you were different? Now you have to worry about secret profiling, your own peers spying on you, and potentially much worse. It's not as if I'm remembering a time all that long ago either. I graduated high school in 1995, and I must say I had the good fortune of graduating from a high school that, while not the most accepting of places, at least allowed kids to be different. Now I find when I went back last week to visit a former teacher of mine, there are security cameras everywhere, students must wear id badges, and those who are not the classic, good little J. Crew model kids are afraid to even talk to each other.
So here's my idea. After speaking with a few former teachers of mine (who also can't stand where things have gone, but they have to follow administration, or else they lose their jobs), none of whom are happy about where things are heading, this is what they'd like to do. They'd like to be allowed to actually play a role in their students lives. They'd like to be allowed to be friends again, and instead of further marginalizing those who are different (many of whom read this) and actively pushing them towards violence (that's what things like this do, it's very easy to adopt a cornered animal mentality in this type of setting), why not allow faculty to get to know students again. Maybe if teachers can be mentors again, instead of secret police there wouldn't be such a serious problem facing schools.
But then again, what do I know, I've only been then, graduated, and moved on to a successful life, thanks in large part to teachers who not only were mentors, but were also friends.
-J
If I could only live my life with my threshold at 4...
The United States of America may tout it's capitalist infranstructure as the Glorious Saviour of Mankind, but they are closer to communists and fascists than many of their citizens are willing to admint to themselves.
I'm not an American but I grew up there. The truth is that the American political system, no matter how much everyone bitches and whines, is one of the most liberal and open systems in the world! You vote for INDIVIDUALS. You cast your vote and get a person that is 'responsible/accountable' to you because you voted for HIM/HER, not the party. You don't get this anywhere in Europe where you vote for these huge religous-ideological blocks. Bleh.
The US also has very good separation of church and state. Do laws that support a certain church's preaching get passed? Of course they do, but only because the people who voted wanted it this way. Each election has propositions, or laws directly voted on by the people. In any European country you'd need a referendum to get an issue passed, and even then the exact wording of the bill would be left up to the politicans.
The truth is this. Every election, Americans make choices concerning their freedoms and restrictions. They have the power to directly influence both, including allowing themselves to exchange some freedom for a feeling of safety. You don't get this in a lot of European and Asian nations. And you certainly don't get it in Africa.
I'm not saying that the US political system is perfect in any way, I'm just saying that you need to remember that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.
Remember to VOTE!
Jay
-- polish ccs mirror
Not really. I think that "JonKatz" contributes a lot to Slashdot with his commentary. I just wish when he wrote his opinion pieces that need you to have a background on the subject, he would give the background first, then give his take on the matter. Alternatively, he could link to a news story on the situation so that we could read the facts and then he gets the ball rolling with his opinion piece.
/. readers are more diverse and intelligent than he thinks, and we are capable of discussing a social situation that may affect people like us AND other types of people without it being tailored to only discuss the video game members.
Instead, we get the facts and opinion jumbled with no citation or clear distinction. We have VERY little information on the actual program being run, just on his "fears" of geek persecution, which I question if it is real or he is catering to his audience. While I have no doubt that he considers this a real threat, I find it disappointing that he is ignoring the greater issues and just tailoring it to the slashdot audience. I think that the
No where in the article is there a discussion about the methods of therapy being used and wht they are trying to accomplish. I truly doubt that N.C. is trying to root out video game playing, they no doubt have real goals, and that side of the story is hidden in this piece.
Alex
The actual press release from Governer Jim Hunt of North Carolina is at:
http://www.governor.state.nc.us/news/releases/WA VErollout.htm
This really saddens me, expecially since I am a Western North Carolina resident. First we have to deal with little broadband bandwidth in the backwoods here, and now with Hitler youth!
"The tighter you squeeze, Lord Vader, the more star systems will slip through your fingers." All this police-state stuff just makes kids more alienated and afraid to talk, which in turn makes them more dangerous. Of course, if you could trust school administrators not to be vicious idiots, a program like this might make sense. But in an age of expulsion for gun-shaped charms on charm bracelets, that sort of trust is hard to come by.
InstaPundit! Ahead of the Curve Since 30 Minutes Ago
But don't just register yourself with W.A.V.E., register yourself on The Psycho-Killer Registry as well. In fact, don't stop there, register all your friends and family too.
- Have you ever listened to Marilyn Manson, or other "dark" music, and not disliked it?
- Have you ever gone to hollywood movies, and enjoyed them?
- Have you ever played computer games?
- Have you ever felt lonely?
If any of the above are true of you, then you may be a threat to society, ready to snap at any moment!Go on, do the right thing - register.
I seem to remember a TV movie years ago about a California high school teacher who tried to explain to his students how the Nazis and Hitler Youth were accepted. He created a "pride" organization in the school that became very scary pretty quickly -- all to demonstrate how it happened. The name of the organization -- and the movie -- The Wave.
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