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More Bad News From The Hellmouth
Within minutes of Sunday's announcement that the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms is working with a threat-evaluation company to develop a computer program that helps school administrators spot dangerous students near the brink of violence, the e-mail began.
Although the new program was widely described in the mainstream media as a valuable tool for defusing violence, plenty of geeks and nerds -- especially younger ones -- knew better, and saw it in a different, perhaps wiser, context.
"It worries me a great deal, wrote The Hollow Man. "Can you make us heard about this? Voice our concerns? This tool will be making diversity a wrong, [and will be used] for alienating and ostracizing those who are different." Hollow Man described himself as a "very, very worried geek."
But he's also a smart one, and history is on the side of his well-founded fears.
Geek Profiling, the Post-Columbine nationwide American war on the culture and lifestyles of the different, the alienated, and the non-Normal, has climbed to another Orwellian level, thanks to a federal law enforcement agency and a threat-evaluation computer program.
After the Columbine High massacre, American educators, politicians and journalists concluded that guns, values or a twisted educational system weren't the problem. It was, especially, those geeks who were online a lot, who gamed, listened to the wrong music, wore the wrong clothes, rejected sports and other reigning social conventions, engaged in rebellious, defiant or "inappropriate" speech or dress.
Even though violence -- and fear of violence -- among the young has been declining sharply for years, media and political ignorance of kids, technology and culture has only deepened. The only demonstrable links in the recent spate of horrific school shootings - still a very rare occurrence - suggest that trouble arises when emotionally-disturbed adolescent white males gain access to guns. In the months after Columbine, however, there is no federal or nationwide program to help emotionally disturbed kids or to keep them away from lethal weapons.
The answer, most schools seem to have concluded, isn't examining their own structures, values or curriculum, but in enforcing widespread conformity. Stop dressing strangely, behaving individualistically, engaging in non-traditional recreation, or speaking honestly.
Now there is Mosaic-2000, with its promised ability to confidentially (read secretly) vet and rate potentially violent students on a scale of 1 to 10. It is not yet clear where this information will be stored or who, precisely, will have access to it or for how long. But it seems plausible that anonymous complaints, aberrant behavior or teacher hostility could be stored digitally in a student file for the rest of their lives.
Some administrators can't wait to test Mosaic-2000. One Ohio principal whose school is getting Mosaic-2000 told a newspaper that Mosaic's "immediate virtue would be in producing detailed documentation of its evaluation of a troubled student so that doubting parents could no longer challenge an administrator's judgement as too subjective." Now parents defending their dangerous kids will have the ATF and Mosaic to contend with as well as school bureaucrats.
Mosaic's programs, according to The New York Times, rely on carefully - worded questions about student behavior based on case histories of people who have turned violent. They're designed by Gavin de Becker Inc., a private security and software company in California (de Becker came to prominence garnering tons of publicity protecting Hollywood celebrities), and are intended to help officials discern a real threat amid varied outbursts, threats and warning signs. For the past 10 years, the company has tailored risk-assessment programs for special law-enforcement programs dealing with problems from domestic violence to terrorism.
This is an astounding elevation of the unthinking deployment of computer technology as a social -- and profit-making tool to make intuitive judgements in educational environments that often confound experts with years of training.
The Mosaic school program promises questions carefully crafted from case histories by 200 experts in law enforcement, psychiatry and other areas. It will include a variety of concerns beyond alarming talk, ranging from the availability of guns to reported abuse of domestic pets.
"I think it's a wonderful tool that has a great deal of potential, and I hope it's properly used by the schools," said Andrew Vita, associate director of field operations for the ATF, which has used the Mosaic approach to investigate abortion-clinic bombings.
Mosaic is also used by Yale University and federal courthouses to evaluate the potential for violence of individuals who make threats. None of the many media stories about Mosaic in the past few days even raised the question of why such a Draconian security program -- do we really want schools to be run like federal courthouses? -- would be deployed against schoolchildren at a time when violence among the young has dropped to its lowest levels in nearly half a century.
Don't hold your breath about that. Since it's simpler and more expedient to blame the Net and harmless subcultures like the Goths or computer games like "Doom" or TV shows like "South Park" for violence, schools have been granted what amounts to hunting licenses with few restrictions. Kids like Hollow Man have every right to be worried that they'll be punished for what they think, wear, say or do on weekends.
In any other context, a government-sponsored computer program offered by a law enforcement agency and a private security firm to enter school systems and track down certain types of students in schools would trigger howls of protest. As long as we're deploying Mosaic-2000, why stop at "potentially violent" oddballs? Why not get to the really dangerous people loose in schools, maybe programming Mosaic to hunt down and identify religious fanatics such as those who believe in the literal truth of the Bible and reject Darwin and evolution? Aren't they a threat to school science programs?
Will Mosaic be used to identify bullies who exclude, ridicule, beat up and harass kids who choose to be different, driving them into the fringes of school life?
Might it prove helpful in identifying oppressive and unimaginative educators who cling to antiquated curriculums and passive teaching environments, even though many of their brightest students have vastly more creative and stimulating lives online than they do in school?
What about social cliques that believe the most important part of their school year centers around parties where they drink themselves into oblivion and, afterwards, are prone to elevated rates of sexual assault and automobile accidents?
Or school administrators and guidance counselors who know so little about some of their students or the nature of their own schools that they are shocked and uncomprehending when some kids become severely disturbed or enraged, even sometimes to the point of stockpiling and using guns and bombs?
Hollow Man and most geeks and other know better. Mosaic 2000 is out to vet them, and others who dares to define themselves differently from the normal as defined by unknown people working for private firms and government agencies.
Federal law enforcement agencies and private, for profit security companies have no legal mandate or business in schools, deploying computer programs to compile information on kids.
Federal agencies like the ATF and DEA haven't been able to put much of a dent in gun or drug traffic. Why would anybody cede them the duty of sifting through the complex sociocultural world of high school?
Programs like Mosaic-2000 are another nightmare from the Hellmouth that school is for so many kids. They are an abdication of responsibility and a lame excuse for schools to seek out the often creative, individualistic, idiosyncratic and rebellious students with whom they have battled for eons, and who cause them so many problems.
Violence is almost never one of them.
I've been trying to bounce Mosaic-2000 around in my head for a while. After all, we're all screaming that Doom Does Not A Serial Killer Make, and neither does a penchant for trenchcoats. What if Katz is overreacting--what if this software program is really a way for knee-jerk bureaucrats to get their suspicions laughed at by an impartial analyzer? We know that expert systems used to diagnose heart attack systems can, in some circumstances, be even more effective than trained physicians at cross-referencing indications, contraindications, and other tasks necessary to come up--quickly--with an accurate solution.
So, if heart attacks can be diagnosed accurately, why not violent behavior?
After all, I may not be normal, but what do I have to hide? I'm not going to kill anyone.
Us good people don't have anything to fear.
Oh. I've heard that before, haven't I.
Framing Mosiac 2000 as anti-geek is myopic. A psychographic dragnet such as this is quite possibly the most disturbing concept I've heard in quite some time, and should be on the top ten lists of every privacy advocate in the country. Suppose the data compiled was absolutely accurate--a fallacy I will address later--suddenly, a complete profile of your identity has been compiled automatically. Your character type, your likely reactions to various forms of coercion, your fears, your dreams, an invaluable pantheon of knowledge about how to control you and how to react to you--all sitting in a file, based upon answers you were compelled to supply.
And that's if the data's accurate!
It's tough to not see Orwell when people keep using 1984 as a study guide.
Of course, the chances that such information might actually be accurate isn't exactly high. Yes, it's true that expert systems do wonderfully for heart attack victims. Heart Attack Victims don't usually intentionally lie about their symptoms--students do. What's so beautiful about it all is how natural it is:
A close friend of mine grew up ill, and because of the pain she saw her parents experience from her illness, she learned to mask that pain from them and the people around her. Children learn very quickly--there are expectations of you, you are to meet them not in terms of reality but in terms of perception.
Testers like Mosiac 2000, which cannot be written without an implicit bias towards a given desired social identity(non-violent passive, Mr. Orwell?), will quickly be seen as another overbearing set of expectations to fulfill. And children, masters of the art from birth, will learn to adapt to the tests, and "pass them" like any other standardized centrifuge of a test.
Not that this is easy, or without consequence. Shoving your self into a corner has a way of making you even more isolated, even more wrong. Or, of course, it's just another way to fuck the system that's trying to do the same to you. Either way, useless data.
But what of this semi-mythical test? How do we know that it doesn't really know what to ask?
The fact that it was apparently designed using Grade A Felon Material probably isn't a good thing. Reminds me alot of the controversy when some serious yahoos took feminism way too far and posted fliers across their university containing the photo of one guy with the words underneath: POTENTIAL RAPIST.
They picked the poor schmuck at random.
In a world where every student is a potential assassin, where the mob demands the right to psychoanalyze on penalty of exclusion, where everyone and everything must be open and analyzed and identical and conformant and not too much and not too little and nothing in between...is there any room for childhood?
For finding oneself?
How can you find yourself when the test already knows who you are?
What do you say to the kid who the test claims will kill his family?
Technology is a wonderful thing. Kids don't even need to grow up anymore; computers will do it for them.
Of course, it won't work, at first. There will be problems. There would be gnashing of teeth. But with time, the psychographic profiles of the kindergartners will be compared with their profiles when they finally grow up to their violent and sexual destinies, and the next generation of kindergartners will be more correctly controlled.
Who needs privacy. The babies are dying. You don't have privacy anyway, Mcnealy told me so, the babies are dying. You don't want the babies to die, do you? Are you a baby killer too?
No. I guess I grew up in time.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Is it me, or is this an overreaction to the Mosiac article we've already seen?
We don't know how it works yet. We don't know what factors it considers important, and which it doesn't. It's a bit hasty to assume that it's going to single out the people who are different, the "geeks" as Katz likes to call anyone who's not a conformist.
Perhaps they've actually done something GOOD with this program. Perhaps they've found more of the real issues that can influence violent and troubled kids. How do we know this tool isn't a good thing, finding people in danger before something happens?
If it turns into just another geek profiling tool, then I'll gladly join in the chorus about how bad it is. But I'm not going to do that until I know that's how it's working.
---
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
OK, I have to do this to clear up some obvious misconceptions concerning Mosaic 2000. Most of this IS redundant, but it has been scattered through the thread and ignored. Hopefully when it is put into one post together more people will read it and realize it.
1. Students DO NOT ANSWER ANY QUESTIONS regarding Mosaic. The Administrators answer questions regarding known behavior and then program gives suggestions for how best to approach the person in questions.
2. Mosaic CAN NOT do anything on its own. All of the input and output will be determined by the same old biased administrators as far as Who to do things to. Mosaic just legitmizes that and tells them How to do what they would be doing anyways.
3. There is NO WAY to refuse to participate in this except by removing yourself from a school where it is present.
4. You CAN NOT fool this program without massively altering your exterior personality because you have no direct contact with the program.
5. This WILL be abused by the school system to stop parents from protesting their blatant formation of a militaristic regime.
6. The best way to stop this is to have your parents get in touch with some lawyers as soon as it gets implemented in the school system and GET A COPY of the program. Then make sure you ask the administrators what answers they gave to the questions asked, do it yourself and see what it comes up with. Also, check their answers since we know they don't know jack.
Hopefully this will stop a lot of people from screaming 'LIE TO THE TEST!' and whatnot.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
It was pointed out before that this is not "geek profiling".
Christ, this makes it sound like the questions being asked are similar to:
Do you like computers for more than the occasional game or internet and e-mail?
Do you play any role playing games?
Do you have acne?
Are you skinny or over-weight?
Do you play sports?
It is not that simple! If you have ever taken an abnormal psych, or even a college level psych class you would know this.
They are not looking for "geeks", they are looking for violently inclined kids. Most people realize that has little to do with geeks! There is something mentally wrong with violent students, and this profiling has, and does work in identifying them. It is not as simple as, "You are different or weird... therefore you must be violent and a danger to society". Gimem a break.
That a universal method for testing kids may be implemented is not what I am concerned with. The real concern should be what do they do with these kids if they have been profiled as violent?
When considering that, I believe we come to the real problem and potential for harm and abuse.
But I don't agree with Jon's assumption that this is tantamount to open season on Goths. I think this, instead, is something even more sinister.
This is profiling.
If you're an American you've seen the TV show. Breathless blonde babe bumbles across crime scenes developing "profiles" of serial killers. She's pretty, TV cops are always heros, isn't profiling a wonderful tool that the police can use to protect us from bad guys?
The profiling technique used by technologies like Mosaic depends upon the premise that answers to certain questions can be good (or even absolute) predictors of specific tendencies or behaviors. For example, consider the question I just asked: "Isn't profiling a wonderful tool that the police can use to protect us from the bad guys?" Your answer to the question is almost an absolute predictor of whether you are white or not.
Police departments across the U.S. have begun to use computers and statistics packages to study patterns of crime. In some instances it has been a tremendous boon to fighting crime. In other instances it has been a particularly heinous tool of racial oppression. Here's how:
Several years ago the Pennsylvania State Police noted a big increase in drug shipments through northeastern Pennsylvania. They examined their arrest records to identify common patterns--and from those common patterns they identified a "criminal profile" of a likely drug smuggler. Based on that profile, state troopers started stopping cars on I-80 that met the profile--and obtaining search warrants to search vehicles based on no other evidence than that the vehicle and the driver met the profile.
What was the profile?
That, argued the police, was sufficient probable cause to stop any and every single black man with an air freshener on I-80.
In recent months the New Jersey State Police have also admitted to specifically targeting black men on the New Jersey Turnpike. The crime of "DWB"--Driving While Black--has been a joke in the black community for many years. Based on discovery from a civil rights suit, the New Jersey State Police, and Gov. Christie Whitman, admitted that the cops were specifically targeting blacks.
In theory profiling can help identify potential suspects. In practice, profiling has become a synonym for leaping to conclusions based on scant evidence. And the ability of many police departments today to filter database lists makes the potential for baseless profiling positively scary.
For example, let's do a little profiling. Let's identify common characteristics of dangerous personalities, and see who fits. Here are some common characteristics of mass murderers:
Now--who might fit that profile? How about a white, male, 41-year-old man with a wife and no kids. He's a graduate of an Ivy League university, where he majored in Philosophy. He has not found work in his field, but instead has dabbled in several businesses. He runs a very small ISP (mostly as a labor of love) but depends upon his wife's income. He spends an inordinate amount of time online, playing games and emailing friends on the Internet. He is widely known on the Internet, and is viewed as a leading figure in an underground Internet community. He is regarded as a "hacker" and in his online writings he is proud of the term. He has recently become interested in guns, and right-to-bear-arms politics, and cheerfully characterizes himself as a "gun nut."
We're talking, of course, about that dangerous criminal monster, Eric S. Raymond.
In Pennsylvania you register with the county sheriff to get a license to carry a concealed weapon. (I do not own guns, but I am told by a gun-owning friend/employee that a "carry" permit and a handgun permit are the same price--so everybody gets the carry permit.) In Pennsylvania you also pay an income tax to your local municipality and/or your local school district. And, in Pennsylvania, utilities have to provide all sorts of information to the government about who they serve, in what counties, and so forth.
I don't think it would be much of a stretch for the Chester County District Attorney to get a list of gun owners, and cross-ref that list with a list of people with multiple phone lines. And it wouldn't take much effort after that to establish which of those multiple-phone line gun owners had web sites. And you can't spend much time on ESR's web site without noticing "Eric's Gun Nut Page". Given the profile, the DA would be justified (or so he might think) in telling the township police where ESR lives that a potential maniac is living nearby.
And since we're putting up posters about sex offenders (even one-timers convicted forty years ago) on every telephone pole, why not notify the community of gun-totin', Web-usin', multiple-phone-line-ringin' threats to society?
Or maybe--just maybe--we should conclude that computer profiling is not just bad, not just unconstitutional, but evil. And stop it, before we lose what "inalienable" rights we have left.
John Murdoch