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School Pays To Get an Algorithm To Scan Students' Social Media For Threats and Suicide Risks Posts (wbur.org)
When someone visits the buildings of Shawsheen Valley Technical High School in Billerica, as they walk through the secure foyer, they have to get their driver's license or another state-issued ID scanned. But the secure foyer does kind of a high-level national background check, too, explains Superintendent Tim Broadrick. From a report: The "LobbyGuard" scanner is the size of a computer tablet. It scans a driver's license, takes a picture of the school visitor and if all is OK with the person's background check, almost instantly clears the person to enter the school. An employee behind a window then pushes a button and unlocks the door to the school hallway. Amid nationwide concern about school shootings, there's talk at Shawsheen Tech of covering the wall of glass in the lobby with a special film to make it harder for a bullet to pierce. There's also a police officer -- known as a school resource officer -- stationed at the school. He has an office in the lobby. And the school has adopted another security measure to try to protect students from attacks -- one you can't see. It's a computer program designed to detect threats against the school in social media posts. And it runs 24/7.
"It's receiving and filtering and then gives us alerts when certain kinds of public communication are detected," Broadrick explains. Shawsheen Tech buys the social media scanning service from a Vermont-based company called Social Sentinel. It's one of many technology firms doing some form of social media scanning or monitoring. Social Sentinel claims it's the only one with expertise in protecting schools. Shawsheen Tech has about 1,300 students. It pays Social Sentinel approximately $10,000 per year, according to Broadrick.
"It's receiving and filtering and then gives us alerts when certain kinds of public communication are detected," Broadrick explains. Shawsheen Tech buys the social media scanning service from a Vermont-based company called Social Sentinel. It's one of many technology firms doing some form of social media scanning or monitoring. Social Sentinel claims it's the only one with expertise in protecting schools. Shawsheen Tech has about 1,300 students. It pays Social Sentinel approximately $10,000 per year, according to Broadrick.
I would not have presented any ID entering my schools. If they want to keep me out it's a violation of their mandate.
This is what you get when you value guns more than freedom
It's not time to stop being social but tis long past time to stop using "social media". You can be social without Facebook harvesting everfuckingthing you say and do and giving it away to companies like this. You can chat directly with your friends via encrypted IM. You can exchange pictures, same.
Stop putting mega data harvesters in the middle of everything. Eschew Google, esp Docs. Eschew Facebook and Instagram. Bring the internet back to its peer to peer distributed concept.
Social media is antisocial The way you be social is with your friends and family not with Facebook
so we can avoid a few common sense gun regulations like background checks with enforcement to own guns, waiting periods and the like. But of course if we did that it would add delays to gun purchasing and cut down on impulse buys. A friend of a friend just the other day walked in to buy a pistol and managed to walk out with an AR-15 because he got caught up in how cool it looked. Make him wait 3 days and he'd have come to his senses and just bought the pistol he came in for.
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This is what you get when you value SAFETY more than FREEDOM. 40 years of liberal logic & indoctrination, lack of morals, lack of ethics, lack of manners, lack of respect, no family, and on and on... When I was in high school in the 70's, pretty much every pickup had a gun rack with a .22 rifle and or
shotgun. Some had pistols in the glovebox. Not one was locked. Kids carried pocket knives, or buck
knives in a sheath on their belt. NOT ONCE was there ever a shooting, stabbing or anything else.
The gun hasn't changed...the KIDS have changed. And NOT for the better. Liberal logic & indoctrination
hasn't worked!
Then again, I'm not likely to shoot up anybody with my Mini 30, 92f, 10/22, nor Mark 2 pistol. Point being, I'm a damned good shot with all of them, but if you ain't made of paper nor trying to break into my house you have nothing to fear from me.
How much better would those students' lives be if the school spend all that money (software, hardware, employees) they're spending on maintaining 'security' on helping the students instead? Schools don't teach life skills nor social skills and parents have stopped teaching those things as well.
This is a high school with kids who know how to think. My high school had many doors. We often opened them to sneak out and sneak back in during break periods. Some had security cameras. So what? They are passively and randomly watched, can't ID you if you cover yourself correctly, and are only looked at after someone already gets caught. All of their security is focused on the main point of entry. It does nothing for side doors, windows, and I'd bet money there isn't a backup database to use during power outages (well maybe it uses a cell connection, how about the door buzzer's power or saturated airways?).
There's also no metal detector or x-ray machine, so this will do nothing to stop a shooting except make it more difficult for people to escape. The shooter isn't going to have a profile until she starts shooting, or if she does, it'll be ignored like all the other shooters. Even when you are prepare for something, almost everybody thinks it'll never happen to them. You only see what you want to see, so almost everyone will overlook the signs.
No social media accounts will be the next round of privacy victims. You don't have one? You must be hiding something!
Sounds more like a prison than a rural high school. Is this what we've come to as a country? Easy availability of powerful guns, but not mental health therapy. Easy prescription of drugs that numb the mind, but strict penalties for drugs that expand the mind. Bullying and violence being legitimized and/or ignores. Long working hours, broken families, absentee parents. Media looking for more, more, and more ad revenue, even if it means glorifying heinous criminals, discussing their crimes non-stop for weeks, and encouraging copycats. Multiple studies have shown that things like suicide increase when other peoples' acts are publicized.
My kids' school has a locked front door and a fence around the school yard. They claim it's to prevent a kid being abducted but they will eventually open the door to everyone. So the extra security worthless, is a total pain and worse it means I have to walk my kids the long way round the parking lot. I'm in Canada. We average less than one abduction by a complete stranger every 3 years of a child not on a native reserve. It is so rare most Canadians know who Paul_Bernardo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... is. Contrast that risk with the risk of my kids being hit in the parking lot. It's thousands a year with about 20 fatalities of small children.
This is a school where they should be good at math. The risks to small children are childhood leukemia and traffic accidents. As they get older its meningitis, traffic accidents and suicide. How about we spend 1/10 of the money we spend on Hollywood threats on real threats to my kids?
My feelings exactly.
... I was thinking of a line from "Chinatown".
And yet, though most of us are fairly reasonable, well behaved, and start off with good intentions, it's hard to predict the future
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
A shooter is no match for my army of robots.
I could be reading the title of this incorrectly, but it seems a bit jacked up...
... Cambridge Analytica.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Considering that America is a 242-and-counting year long experiment in liberal government, I have to ask: Why do you hate America?
Because America's history seems a lot more filled with hubris, genocide, and treating its citizens like trash than anything else.
Burtosis,
So many random services and products now demand an email, cell phone other contact data.
How long before they demand "social media" to stay in contact?
The lack of social media now starting an investigation to find a hidden social media account?
Trying to discover if a US student has another way of communication? An account lacking most account details but a classical music CD collection?
The only way to detect that would be gov backed contractor malware pushed out to all home computers. Just to be sure.
--
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I want to focus on the small percent of shooting victims who were shot in a "mass shooting" event vs a "low victims" shooting of a person or persons.
Depending on how you define a mass shooting, 4 or more killed or 8 or more, 90-99%* of shooting victims were killed in a "low victim" shooting.
Mass shootings garner more attention, and are more newsworthy.
If the goal is to reduce the number of shooting deaths** focusing of mass shooters has the opportunity of greater effect. Stopping one mass shooter saves more lives than stopping 3 or 7 non-mass shooters.
But focusing on mass shooters too much to the exclusion of non-mass shooters is something I merely wanted to shine a light on.
*I crunched some numbers found in an internet search. Mass shootings may account for more than 10% of shooting deaths, but that becomes less likely the higher the percent.
Almost by definition victims of mass shootings are homicides and not justifiable, and many include random "uninvolved" bystanders, which increases the tragic aspect.
** if I read the comments right on various internet sites, I sadly conclude that a fair number of people don't care, or find stranger deaths entertaining, and some want to increase the deaths of some others.
Where do school shootings rank? There have been about 250 deaths in school shootings over 18 years, or about 14 per year.(and K-12, not just ages 15-19). Since there are approximately 51 million K-12 students in the U.S., a student's chances of being killed in a non-gang, non-suicide school shooting in any given year are about 1 in 3.6 million. You are roughly 3x more likely to be struck by lightning (1 in 1.08 million).
Like airliner crashes, school shootings are one of these extremely rare, statistically insignificant events whose emotional impact creates a large amount of social interest. This causes a disproportionate amount of press coverage, leading people to wildly overestimate the actual danger. If you really want to save high schoolers' lives, teach them to: drive safely and buckle their seat belts, not to abuse drugs, seek counseling for depression, stay out of gangs, use sunscreen, eat healthy and exercise, get the flu shot, don't smoke, don't eat too many sweets, and avoid teen pregnancy. Each of these will save many more lives than all the hand-wringing over school shootings, some (like suicide-prevention) around a hundred times more.
I'm 30 but still, all my posts are marked as non-public, friends-only. Any teenager who's too dumb to do the same to their account deserves to get "scanned" or whatever and basically have their privacy massively invaded. By the way, a lot of teenagers are smart enough to also not use their real names.
So, we are now going to require ID for this, but not to vote, right? Got it.
Just another day in Paradise
It's comforting your post is still up.
Have to wonder what software a gov at a state and city level are getting for the price. That they can map out most online usage.
Facial recognition back over years of accounts to find patterns still in use?
4 hops of most accounts would map a community. Finding many of the unexpected and random accounts in use?
Creating new random accounts often and never going back for reuse them would not be protected from malware getting into the same home computer network.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
WTF? IF this is the future I want to die now.
Snowden showed us how the NSA has equipment installed on the internet backbone all over the world, you wouldn't need to install malware on each device. But I seriously doubt they would stop there, beyond the obvious hacking tools (for example the ones the NSA lost incompetently like a toddlers gloves on a bus that caused the wanna cry epidemic), there is a new push to put the malware in dedicated hardware enclaves right on the chip. If you want an example of how social media and seemingly innocuous data can be used I suggest this clip because creating a psy-ops weapon to sway an election aka Facebook/Cambridge Analytica is about a 3/10. We are about 7-10 years out on the onboard computational power using moores law and the battery energy density only needs to increase about 10 fold to make those micro swarm bots a reality.
So the NSA/GCHQ backbone crypto keys got offered to the DEA, then the FBI. Now its down to state and city police. Then contractors got a support role.
The network collects it all.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Late, however it's almost here. Complete with a ministry of truth that people believe and is the lying news media.
Far cry from when I was growing up. There was no police presence at the school. No panic button. Other than an occasional theft or assault they weren't needed. As a kid I also had guns in my bedroom. One of the was a high powered rifle. We learned marksmanship as kids. All of us did. We also learned respect. We had adults that for the most part told us the truth.
Now we have political correctness - a leftist divisive idea. They're trying to put us all back into slavery. Most likely a Feudal system.
And in case that wasn't enough, now we have this little gem too. I get the distinct impression the easiest way to implement a dystopian future is through the boiled frog approach and the water is pretty nice and toasty about now.