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IL School District to Monitor Student Blogs
tinkertim writes "According to a Yahoo article, a school district in Libertyville, IL will be holding students accountable for illegal actions discussed in their MySpace blogs even if such actions in no way involved the school or another student. A spokesperson for the school district was quoted as saying: 'The concept that searching a blog site is an invasion of privacy is almost an oxymoron,' he said. 'It is called the World Wide Web.' Supposedly, no direct monitoring or snooping will be done unless the school receives a report from a concerned parent, community member or other student."
The ambiguity of the criteria doesn't help either: 'Illegal' is one thing, but 'inappropriate' is another one they use (though not mentioned in the summary) and more or less gives them a license to discipline (oh, but only after some undisclosable anonymous source expresses 'concern', of course). I'm willing to bet that illegal means mostly slander against school employees, and inappropriate is 'anything else we don't like and can use as dirt against a kid we want to get rid of'.
Given that most of the time, it's parental apathy being compensated for by the authorities, it's very telling that in this case parents are demanding to be given back their control.Libertyville? Yeah- right.
...of law enforcement. Shall we have our police officers teaching and managing our schools now? I can't even fathom why a school would want to take on this responsibility. I bet that if this keeps up, a few years down the road parents are going to be yelling at the schools for not catching Jonny's 'illegal' blog. What a mess. Now only if the parents would make the same committment!
"The board of Community High School District 128 voted unanimously on Monday to require that all students participating in extracurricular activities sign a pledge agreeing that evidence of "illegal or inappropriate" behavior posted on the Internet could be grounds for disciplinary action."
Clearly this school is just preparing its students for the America of tomorrow.
... and the people who can't spell, too. Their always the first up against the whall ;-)
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No, I think they will just start posting under each others' names.
It is now apparent what the step before "Profit!!" is: snitch.
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the thing that i found weird was the school considered semi-nudity (guys wearing nothing but tube socks) worse than drugs and alcohol.
Yes, of course they did. Because when you're a kid (under 18) and post naked pictures of yourself online, that "self expression" is called child porn, and predators feed off of that stuff.
That's not to say that it is the school's job (IMO, it's not) to be monitoring the activities of students after hours, but if that is their intention, then kids posting naked pictures of themselves should certainly fall under unacceptable behavior.
That said, were I a parent and my kids were expelled for something they did after hours, after making sure my kids were punished so that they don't begin to think I am on their side for what they did, I would sue the school over a denial of free, public education. I don't pay tax money to have the schools pick and choose who can go to school and who can't based on after school activities. And certainly not because the teachers don't like what they see on MySpace. If you have a personal problem with it, bring it to me. Don't deny my kid an education and hurt their future college prospects just because the idiots decided to talk or brag about stuff (that was probably much more mild in real life, or didn't even happen) on MySpace.
Yeah but none of those things are conclusive, or couldn't be forged.
.... that's all the evidence they need. Page, photos, email: what more could you want? They toss Joe in front of a kangaroo court (if they even have to do that), where all Joe can do is blubber that it's not his page. But of course the photos are of him, and it's his name on the email ... so he just looks like a liar. Nobody will believe him.
Let's say there was some kid I really didn't like, named Joe Smith. So first, I go onto GMail, and make an account for Joe.Smith@gmail.com. Then, I go register to MySpace with that email address. While I'm standing around at school, with my cellphone or other small camera, I grab a few photos of Joe. I post those up to "his" MySpace page.
I develop this page for a few weeks, because I have nothing better to do, and this lends it more credibility. Nobody notices, because of course I haven't actually told anyone who knows the real Joe Smith about it. I start posting some racy stuff. Nothing that would get the Feds / Police / DEA involved, but some stuff that the school admin people wouldn't like. Maybe how I think they're real assholes, and how I wish they would do biologically impossible and reproductively unproductive things with themselves. Or maybe I mention some low-level criminal activity: shoplifting, marijuana, drinking, etc. Allude to underage sex -- there's nothing to get puritanical hearts racing like the thoughts of 17-year-olds getting it on. (Or, for even more effective hell-raising, dig up some good dirt on Joe that's actually true -- everybody has some skeletons in the closet, even at 17 -- and post that to the web page. That makes it harder for him to deny later and increases the potential damage inflicted on his friends.)
Then, after I've established this for a little while, I drop a dime on "Joe's" online presence, or maybe I just mention it to somebody else's parent (one of those everything-is-my-business, moralistic asshole types). They check out the webpage, and do the predictable kneejerk thing and immediately go to the school principal/headmaster asking for Joe Smith's head on a plate. The administrator looks up the MySpace page in question, finds incriminating text, finds GMail account in Joe's name that's connected
End result: Joe gets suspended, suspension goes on his permanent record, messes up his chance to go to Princeton, he ends up going to community college and hanging himself while coming off of some bad LSD in his parents basement five years later. Or maybe just going to some other college. Whatever. The point is I was able to fuck with his life without really having to do anything -- I just created some stuff online, revealing nothing about myself besides an IP address (which the school probably wouldn't be able to trace back to me, especially if I was smart enough to use a proxy), and fucked up someone else's life hardcore.
That's the problem with policies like this: they don't take into account the fact that people will try to manipulate them to harm others, either for their own gain or just for the sheer hell of hurting other people. They're designed shortsightedly, and that's why they're almost always a very, very bad idea.
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