[Lorric]

Please tell me HOW on earth am I supposed to bring up evidence of a kind of practice that is only NOW beggining to take hold?

This kind of "empiricism takes all" approach is getting tiresome and old real fast. It's like trying to debate Chomsky... Look you don't need evidence to observe the obvious, and the obvious is that society is going in a direction where the term "privacy" is getting shorter and shorter in practice and in theory. Where all the shades of gray between "absolute privacy" and "absolute public" are getting crushed and thrown into the public sphere by default, and the excuses are always the same, "it's about your safety and the safety of your children", etc. Watchmen will never go wrong in any of this, so you can be ASSuRED no abuse will be commited.

Excuse me? Really? Are we now ignoring centuries of actual data on how human beings behave and abuse every single system they inhabit in exchange of a mindless empirical naiveté of  "but you have no EVIDENCE that people will misbehave". Yeah, of course I have no evidence of something that will happen in the future, NOR DO I NEED TO. I just have to know how humans behave within their systems and with respect to the allowances they are given, and this kind of direction we are headed is a nightmare in the making. And what bothers me even more is that people don't even take any of this **** seriously! It's as if all the scandals have never happened and we just pretend people are angels!

Bloody hell.

Should we stop trying to do good things, because people might twist them and do bad things?

[Luis Dias]

I haven't yet read any single positive notion about this "thing" other than "it's for your own good we monitor these things, trust us!"

[Lorric]

I haven't yet read any single positive notion about this "thing" other than "it's for your own good we monitor these things, trust us!"

If it stops some kids cutting and killing themselves, I call that a big result.

Oh, has anyone ever watched the movie Odd Girl Out? Personally I think it's really good. It deals with all kinds of bullying including cyber bullying.

I particularly liked the way they cast the victim, instead of going for the stereotypes, you know, fat/disabled/loner, etc, which are increasingly becoming more and more out of date, they took a pretty girl, and cast her as one of the popular kids at the school. Then she is turned against, and you watch as she spirals down and down...

Here it is if anyone is interested, it's the cyber bullying part of it which makes me think of it:

[Nuke]

i miss solving issues with bullies with an unpredictable and spontaneous surge of violence. keep this up and the next generation of american adults is going to loose the country to the french.

[MP-Ryan]

Please tell me HOW on earth am I supposed to bring up evidence of a kind of practice that is only NOW beggining to take hold?

If your slippery-slope argument holds any validity, you should be able to come up with at least one related example.

Instead, you (and FUBAR) are asking us to infer an effect from an indistinct cause.  You keep saying this will continue a trend of erosion of privacy, when in fact the material subject to the policy has no attached privacy consideration whatsoever.  Consider the following variation on a popular meme:

1.  Student publicly posts on Facebook.
2.  School sees and makes record of public student post on Facebook.
3. ???
4.  Student is embarassed by something school collects and commits suicide (FUBAR) AND/OR government collects all of student's private-not-just-public information because it wants it for some nefarious reason (Luis).

There is a gigantic logical/evidentiary failure in and around point 3.

[FUBAR-BDHR]

Without it having already happened you can't give an example, by the time it gets to the point examples are available it's too late. 

Let's take a hypothetical.  A student gets pregnant and decides to have an abortion.  She has been missing quite a bit of school in the past 2 weeks due to dealing with the emotional problems caused by such a situation.  The school decides to do a thorough monitoring of her activity and links her main identity to a secondary handle she is using to keep her identity secret while looking up information and asking questions on forums.  Is it possible someone else might find this information yes but not as likely as someone that is getting paid to look for it.  Now in the process of the company reporting this information to the administration another student or even a teacher overhears the conversation or sees the report lying on a desk.  That person then discusses it with others.  The rumor mill starts and eventually this student is found out.  The embarrassment is enought to push her over the edge and she can't live with it and takes her own life. 

Now without that digging the issue could have been handled privately by her family and no one in the school would have known.   

Also as far as slippery slopes go I'd rather drive slow and watch out for the ice then wait until there is a 50 car pileup before I hit the breaks.

[TwentyPercentCooler]

On one hand, searching PUBLIC information is not an invasion of privacy.

On the other hand, the public school system has absolutely no business monitoring or interfering with students' lives outside of school. It's only a matter of time for the schools start handing out punishments for things that happened in the outside world; I'm hoping someone slaps the system with a lawsuit right out of the gate and the power-mad school administrators get a punch in the wallet. On the list of people who REALLY shouldn't have any more power than they already do, school administrators rank right up there with HOA presidents.

[swashmebuckle]

Thank goodness we can finally pay a real professional to peep in on our kids' inevitable indiscretions! There is absolutely no reason to doubt anyone who would want that job, no sir.

[MP-Ryan]

Without it having already happened you can't give an example, by the time it gets to the point examples are available it's too late.

See above.

The school decides to do a thorough monitoring of her activity and links her main identity to a secondary handle she is using to keep her identity secret while looking up information and asking questions on forums.  Is it possible someone else might find this information yes but not as likely as someone that is getting paid to look for it.  Now in the process of the company reporting this information to the administration another student or even a teacher overhears the conversation or sees the report lying on a desk.  That person then discusses it with others.  The rumor mill starts and eventually this student is found out.  The embarrassment is enought to push her over the edge and she can't live with it and takes her own life.

First, this assumes the school is doing widespread monitoring and somehow perusing secondary sites and pursuing quasi-forensic connections between them and social media.  In fact, it isn't:

Public content is collected and provided to school districts from the following websites:

·         Twitter;
·         Facebook;
·         Instagram;
·         Picasa;
·         Vine;
·         Flickr;
·         Ask.fm;
·         YouTube; and
·         Google+.

Second, it assumes that the school will not only receive private information, but will maintain copies of it unsecured in contravention of applicable privacy law (if a school collects public information from a student and condenses it into a private file on student activities, that is covered by privacy legislation and require confidentiality).  Best case scenario there is a lawsuit against the school, worst case is criminal charges.

Third, public posts by anyone do not have an inherent privacy interest.  If your hypothetical girl has posted information publicly, then it is fair game for anyone to see.  Conversely, if someone uses that information to perpetrate bullying, criminal harassment, etc then we have both civil and criminal law that deals with those matters.

AGAIN-

It's not that I agree with the policy.  It's that the arguments being presented are quite weak.  There are many perfectly valid reasons to oppose such a policy, but slippery-slope / moral panic nonsense undermine the legitimate reasons for opposition and are easily dismissed.  Arguments based on conjecture and possibility are never convincing.

[MP-Ryan]

I'm hoping someone slaps the system with a lawsuit right out of the gate and the power-mad school administrators get a punch in the wallet.

On what grounds, exactly?  As I've already noted, the policy does not violate any applicable laws.

Really, the best way for the parents and students to tackle this issue is to raise public awareness, oppose the policy on defensible grounds (e.g. this is not the schools' mandate / this is not what schools receive funding for / I am not comfortable with my child's school performing this monitoring because I believe it to be morally wrong), and vote out the school board that brought it in in favour of one that will throw it out.

[TwentyPercentCooler]

I'm hoping someone slaps the system with a lawsuit right out of the gate and the power-mad school administrators get a punch in the wallet.

On what grounds, exactly?  As I've already noted, the policy does not violate any applicable laws.

Really, the best way for the parents and students to tackle this issue is to raise public awareness, oppose the policy on defensible grounds (e.g. this is not the schools' mandate / this is not what schools receive funding for / I am not comfortable with my child's school performing this monitoring because I believe it to be morally wrong), and vote out the school board that brought it in in favour of one that will throw it out.

No, they aren't breaking any laws. But, I'm hoping for the inevitable lawsuit(s) and attention from the judicial system because that needs to change. The authority of the schools is spreading far too thinly as it stands; they're losing ground in their ability to punish students for things that happen at school thanks to overzealous (and terrible) parenting and it seems to me that they're trying to consolidate power elsewhere. The problem is that we already have a system for punishing criminal acts outside of the schools.

They're probably overstepping their boundaries; the main problem is that those boundaries aren't very well-defined. Where do we draw the line between the school system and police? At the very least, getting attention from the courts will hopefully result in having those boundaries more clearly defined.

I completely agree with you, though. I just don't think that there's going to be a resolution outside of the courts. If we vote down one school board mandate, they'll just make another sneakier one, like this endless parade of BS SOPA/PIPA clone legislation.

[Lorric]

Thank goodness we can finally pay a real professional to peep in on our kids' inevitable indiscretions! There is absolutely no reason to doubt anyone who would want that job, no sir.

So, maybe someone or someone who knew someone (and there are many) who got bullied as a kid would like to take that job to stop it happening to others? Or perhaps one of those teachers that got driven out of the class because it was too stressful could take up this job instead. Or simply some normal person who needs a job. There's plenty of those around too you know.

Or we could just assume that somehow out of however many normal people apply for that job, the school will somehow end up picking some lowlife.

[MP-Ryan]

No, they aren't breaking any laws. But, I'm hoping for the inevitable lawsuit(s) and attention from the judicial system because that needs to change. The authority of the schools is spreading far too thinly as it stands; they're losing ground in their ability to punish students for things that happen at school thanks to overzealous (and terrible) parenting and it seems to me that they're trying to consolidate power elsewhere. The problem is that we already have a system for punishing criminal acts outside of the schools.

They're probably overstepping their boundaries; the main problem is that those boundaries aren't very well-defined. Where do we draw the line between the school system and police? At the very least, getting attention from the courts will hopefully result in having those boundaries more clearly defined.

I completely agree with you, though. I just don't think that there's going to be a resolution outside of the courts. If we vote down one school board mandate, they'll just make another sneakier one, like this endless parade of BS SOPA/PIPA clone legislation.

The point is that there are no legitimate grounds for a lawsuit.  Anyone trying to file one would likely find themselves forking over not only their own legal expenses, but those of the school board as well.  While a lawsuit would raise the matter in the public consciousness, it either wouldn't be accepted as there are no grounds, or it would be accepted then dismissed, likely with costs awarded.  Either way, it means people trying to fight the policy being out a considerable sum of money for no gain other than publicity, which can be easily achieved through other means.

While litigation is firmly embedded in the public consciousness of the United States as a remedy for things people don't like, you actually have to have a claim with some kind of merit in law for it to do anything.  So my earlier question to you holds - on what grounds do you think they can sue?

[Dragon]

Exactly. You're essentially proposing suing the school for viewing public information. Where's logic in here?

[Luis Dias]

FWIW, I agree with MP that this is not a legal issue, it's a political / moral / ethical issue.

[MP-Ryan]

FWIW, I agree with MP that this is not a legal issue, it's a political / moral / ethical issue.

Indeed.  And there are many, many relevant, reasonable ways of making that issue known without resorting to dubious claims about legality, slipper slopes, or moral panics.

For example, the Glendale Unified School District appears to have their budget online.  I wonder how much public money is being spent on this monitoring program that could be better spent on actual education?

[Luis Dias]

... AND/OR government collects all of student's private-not-just-public information because it wants it for some nefarious reason (Luis).

There is a gigantic logical/evidentiary failure in and around point 3.

This is a strawman. Nowhere did I say that the intent is nefarious. Nor do I even understand what is this "government intention". People are people and they'll use and abuse any kind of system, specially one of control and surveillance.

Now I do not see how practically making sure to every student that they are on record about everything they say or write and that someone is hired specifically to watch any missted they make while they are on their own lives and so on as a "positive thing". We are basically creating the scaffold of a society that is taught that their internet lives are 100% controlled by the institution they happen to be studying in or working in.

How is this even supposed to avoid any kind of internet bullying is also pretty much beyond me. The students have too much spare time, too much ingenuity when they are really psyched into things, too much jackassery on their spirits. How will they ever control every account that any cretin will remember to create just to make a photoshop "attack" or to start rumours or to post pictures or whatever? Will they also log every IP and try to track down any kind of anonymous harrassment to their actual real life attacker?

[Lorric]

You could extend the panic to every position in the school or any position which sees someone have children placed in their care.

The humiliation example that was talked about before, I've seen plenty of teachers publicly humiliate students in front of the class.

[Luis Dias]

That is ridiculous. A teacher publicly humilliating a student is not comparable to a student being at home at night talking to his friends in facebook knowing there's a group of monitors of his school reading their ****.

[Luis Dias]

This is the ****ing society we are building up:


http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.pt/2013/09/in-future-everyone-will-be-fired-after.html

Earlier this week Pax Dickinson, the Chief Technology Officer at Business Insider, was fired after a number of his tweets regarding women and minorities drew public outrage. Pax (if that is his real name) is only the latest of a growing series of individuals who lost their jobs after expressing unpopular or offensive views. In July Jack Hunter resigned from a position on Senator Rand Paul's staff after past statements in defense of the Confederacy came to light. In May, Jason Richwine resigned his position with Heritage after the details of his Ph.d dissertation (which speculated on issues involving race and IQ) were reported in the Washington Post. Psychology professor Geoffrey Miller managed to keep his job after one of his "fat shaming" tweets went viral, but was censured by his employer, was forced to undergo sensitivity training, and is subject to a number of other administrative penalties.

And that's just in the last few months. Going back further one can find the same story playing out over and over where an unpopular comment draws popular outrage, leading the offender's employer to (quite rationally) seek to disassociate itself as quickly as possible.

edit:

On the other hand, J.S. Mill's On Liberty (one of the classic defenses of freedom of opinion) was written against both legal *and* social sanctions for unpopular opinions. Given Mill's consequentialist attitudes, this is not really a surprise. If conformity of thought has negative consequences, then those negatives will probably exist regardless of whether the conformity is due to government dictate or to social pressure. Frankly, I've never been sure if the idea of there being no social sanctions for holding any opinion is even possible. It's certainly never been tried. But it is the case where people constantly self-censor their opinions (more than they do now) would probably be a much blander and boring world than the one we have today.   

Welcome to the Politically Correct New World Order. The world where no dissent and no abnormal thought can ever see the light of the internet.