CIA-Backed Surveillance Tool 'Geofeedia' Was Marketed To Public Schools (dailydot.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Daily Dot: An online surveillance tool that enabled hundreds of U.S. law enforcement agencies to track and collect information on social media users was also marketed for use in American public schools, the Daily Dot has learned. Geofeedia sold surveillance software typically bought by police to a high school in a northern Chicago suburb, less than 50 miles from where the company was founded in 2011. An Illinois school official confirmed the purchase of the software by phone on Monday. In the fall of 2014, the Lincolnshire-Prairie School District paid Geofeedia $10,000 to monitor the social media posts of children at Adlai E. Stevenson High School. "We did have for one year a contract with Geofeedia," said Jim Conrey, a spokesperson for Lincolnshire-Prairie School District. "We were mostly interested in the possibility of trying to prevent any kind of harm, either that students would do to themselves or to other students." Conrey said the district simply wanted to keep its students safe. "It was really just about student safety; if we could try to head off any potential dangerous situations, we thought it might be worth it," he said. Ultimately, the school found little use for the platform, which was operated by police liaison stationed on school grounds, and chose not to renew its subscription after the first year, citing cost and a lack of actionable information. "A lot of kids that were posting stuff that we most wanted, they weren't doing the geo-tagging or making it public," Conrey said. "We weren't really seeing a lot there." The school's experience, added Conrey, was that more often than not students would approach school administrators with sensitive issues, as opposed to the school unearthing problems affecting students using Geofeedia. "Quite frankly, we found that it wasn't worth the money," Conrey said.

Comments

Obvious takeaway here?

[wierd_w]

And there is no broad picture to take away from this?

Such as, if prepubescent school kids (not the mist shining example of intellectual prowess) are not a good target for this tool, how would it be effective against domestic terror agents, or even foreign terror agents?

They imply it only collects the public data available-- not the private data. It is therefore only useful as a tool to make associations with, and make inferences, using otherwise beniegn data points.

Unless the school has an interest in being the thought police, or trying to make Joe McCarthy's ghost blush, it is no wonder they did not find it useful.

Given thus finding, what does this say about the CIA's goals?

whats wrong with this picture.

[z0idberg]

A covert surveillance tool monitoring your nations children operated by police liaison stationed on school grounds.
For their own safety of course. (Well "mostly" for their safety. No mention of what the other motivations might be).

This isn't a slippery slope. This is halfway down the mountain heading for a cliff sliding at full speed.