Student Expelled From Indiana High School For Tweeting Profanity

First time accepted submitter OopsIDied writes with the story that high-school senior Austin Carroll of Garrett, Indiana was recently expelled after tweeting profanity from his own home, writing "Supposedly the school has a system which tracks students' social networks after they have logged in at school. Although the tweet was done at home at 2 AM, the school decided that such behavior was unacceptable and that the most fitting punishment was expulsion. He did use a school computer, but it was set up to use the school network even when used outside the school because the school claimed the tweet was associated with the school's IP address." As usual, TechDirt has some biting commentary about the expulsion. But Hey, at least they didn't throw him in jail.

Comments

Re:precedents have been established

[oracleguy01]

Actually this is interesting, the school has clearly established the punishment for doing this. So the easy way to protest this would be get a sizable percentage of the student body to swear on their twitter accounts. What is the school going to do? Expel 30+% of their student body? If they did, it would make national headlines and the people that run that school would become a laughing stock. It would also energize the debate enough where we could finally sort this out. And if they don't expel them, they can't expel this student.

The school was SPYING on his PRIVATE ACCOUNT

[TheSpoom]

Remember kids, wiretap laws and the Bill of Rights don't apply to you when you're enrolled in school.

Anyone agreeing with the school here really needs to read TFA (specifically the TechDirt article). Apparently he Tweeted while at home, and the school had a system set up that tracked all Twitter logins, recording all Tweets on those accounts. The kid must have logged in subsequently to posting the Tweet, and their spy system picked it up.

I mean, what the fuck. The school is literally spying on its students' private accounts. I bet their system picked up Direct Messages too, all in the name of anti-bullying. I really hope this kid calls the ACLU and gets this shut the hell down. This is a huge violation of his and the other students' rights. If he had posted the Tweet from the school it may have been slightly different but still an overreaction. This is outright wiretapping, unauthorized use of an account, a declaration that students' private lives are subject to the school's rules... what the hell is going on here?