Face Recognition Is Now Being Used In Schools (theintercept.com)

Presto Vivace shares a report from The Intercept: Officials at the Lockport, New York, school district have purchased face recognition technology as part of a purported effort to prevent school shootings. Starting in September, all 10 of Lockport District's school buildings, just north of Buffalo, will be outfitted with a surveillance system that can identify faces and objects. The software, known as Aegis, was developed by SN Technologies Corp., a Canadian biometrics firm that specifically advertises to schools. It can be used to alert officials to whenever sex offenders, suspended students, fired employees, suspected gang members, or anyone else placed on a school's "blacklist" enters the premises. Aegis also sends alerts any time one of the "top 10" most popular guns used in school shootings appears in view of a camera. The district is spending most of its recent $4 million state "Smart School" grant on these and other enhancements to its security systems, including bullet-proof greeter windows and a mass notification system, according to the Niagra Gazette. Slashdot reader Presto Vivace adds: "This is why municipal elections are so important. Just because this stuff is on the market, does not mean your local school system has to buy it."

The report notes that "all the major school shootings in the last five years in the U.S. have been carried out by current students or alumnae of the school in question." These students wouldn't have their face entered into the face recognition system's blacklist. Furthermore, "Most shooters don't brandish their guns before opening fire; and by the time they do, an object-detection algorithm that could specify the exact type of weapon they're firing would not be of much use," reports The Intercept. "... the technology would give a school, at best, only a few extra seconds in response time to a shooting."

Comments

Band-Aid solution...

[b0s0z0ku]

If someone is inside the school with a gun, it's too damn late. Want to fix school shootings? Put a waiting period on all gun purchases to allow the mentally ill to "cool off." Stop publicizing the names and activities of school shooters. Publicity encourages copycats -- this is a well-known phenomenon with suicides as well. And God forbid people have access to free mental health care, and we enact policies like limits on working hours and vacation time that actually keep family support networks together vs driving them apart. But nooooo ... we have our FREEDOM in America.

Re:Race to the bottom

[Anonymous Coward]

Or we could actually do something when these people are identified beforehand. The Florida shooter from a few weeks ago was known to make comments about killing other students and their parents and was reported to the police and/or FBI over 20 times before it actually happened, and yet he still had easy access to a gun. If we actually enforced the laws we currently have then maybe it wouldn't have happened.

Side note: curiously, the student spokesperson of the latest anti-gun movement, Hogg, is the son of a former FBI agent and a CNN reporter, which makes me suspicious as to why he was chosen given that the FBI failed to prevent the perpetrator from shooting up the school, and CNN has a strong anti-gun agenda.

Re:*facepalms*

[6Yankee]

We could do something about school shootings, or we could sell guns AND surveillance systems AND clear backpacks.

We could do something about obesity, or we could sell Twinkies AND mobility scooters AND healthcare.

For every problem, a profit. Solving the problems means removing the profit, and that's Communist. You're not a Communist, are you, son?

Re: this is another example of why we don't have

[mjwx]

You forgot
8) A society awash with guns and too many people who value them above others' lives.

Funny how it's only the US which specializes in gun massacres. Must be more of that American exceptionalism.

This. The problem is the love affair and lack of responsibility with the gun. Someone doesn't even need to buy or own their own gun to go on a rampage, they could just borrow someones, even without their permission as a lot of gun owners leave them loaded and lying around in the open (or at best, in an unlocked drawer). Until that attitude changes, dead kids are inevitable.

Canada and France have many more guns than the UK. France has 31 (per 100 people), Canada has 30 and the UK has 7, however Canada and France do not have significantly more mass shootings than the UK.

Here's how you prevent many school shootings:

[Rick Schumann]

Stop publicizing school shootings!

You don't agree with me? Here's my reasoning: First take a look at this article and see what the shooter had to say in his videos before the shooting took place. He's clearly looking forward to the attention and notoriety he's going to get from it. This is the way the minds of these sick fucks work: they think they've been wronged, they think the world owes them, they think that they're going to be 'heroes' when they commit their act of mass murder, and even though they're likely going to either be shot to death by police or die in prison, they're basking in the attention and the idea that they'll be the stars of the press for weeks and months. Each school shooter that is publicized is enabling the next shooter, and so on, and so on, as they all want their shot at fame and glory; WE NEED TO DENY THEM THAT.

There needs to be a gag order in place on these. The press needs to be denied access to information. The arrests, the trials, they all need to be closed-door with gag orders in place so the proceedings are entirely secret. When they put them in prison, it needs to be done silently, they need to be put in solitary permanently, not allowed to talk to ANYONE so there's no leaks. If there is no payoff to the shooters then my theory is most of the shootings won't happen because there won't be any reward for doing it.