Wisconsin Court Dumps Conviction Of Middle School Kid Who Drew A Picture Of A Bomb

from the whispering-fire-in-a-home-theater dept

The intersection of school administration and law enforcement leads directly to insanity. All logic goes out the window when school administrators come across something that makes them feel slightly uncomfortable. Adding cops to the mix doesn't help anything. It only serves to turn every mildly misbehaving student into a criminal.

We're here to talk about bombs. I'm sorry. Let me clarify. Not actual bombs. Drawings of bombs. Drawings created by students who are likely to draw bombs, guns, and general violent mayhem without actually wishing any of that on their fellow students.

It took a couple of rounds in court to actually set this right. We've covered similar insanity over drawings of bombs here at Techdirt before, like the (temporarily) indefinite suspension of an autistic student who drew a bomb that looked like something straight out of a Looney Tunes short.

This bomb drawing was a little more intricate but no more threatening than the round black bomb with a fuse we've all seen in any number of cartoons no one saw fit to prosecute. (h/t Ari Cohn)

The Wisconsin Court of Appeals has finally ended the madness that began with terroristic threat and disorderly conduct charges being leveled against a middle school student.

The decision [PDF] recounts the unfortunate chain of events that ultimately needed to be addressed by the penultimate level of the state's criminal justice system.

The court found the following facts. In 2018, A.N.G. and T.B. were classmates in a middle school summer school program. During class one day, T.B. created a drawing on a page in his science workbook. T.B. did all the drawing and writing, but A.N.G. contributed ideas.

The drawing contained T.B. and A.N.G.’s names, images of what appears to be a cartoon-style bomb, a building labeled “school,” and a body lying on the ground. Around these images are written the following words: “pigs,” “preplay,” “bomb,” and “gun.” The court determined that the content of the drawing “conveys a threat of bodily harm.”

The Appeals Court points out something the lower court mentioned, but erroneously failed to give appropriate weight during its handling of the case.

However, as will be significant in analysis below, the court also specifically found that T.B. and A.N.G. did not intend for the drawing to be “for public consumption.” Instead, the court found, T.B. and A.N.G. intended to keep it “private.”

If it's private, no one's attempting to threaten others. That undercuts the charges brought against the student, which rely on communication of a threat. Instead, the court assumed even a private sharing of violent ideas between two students was enough to satisfy the charges because anything containing bombs and whatever would be viewed as "threatening" by interlopers the creators never intended to share their drawing with.

Returning to the circuit court’s decision, the court stated that it considered it “impossible,” “in the atmosphere in which we live,” that “a student would create a document like this and not assume a reasonable person would interpret” it as a “threat” that was “a serious expression of an intent to do harm.”

Wrong, says the Appeals Court. The surrounding circumstances matter. A person entertaining themselves by drawing depictions of violent dismemberment in their own home cannot be considered "threatening" to others in the legal sense because there's no communication of these subjective "threats" to others. Just because a teacher saw it and decided to get involved doesn't change the legal math.

However, as discussed below, this observation assumes an intended recipient of, or (using the term from First Amendment doctrine) “listener” to, the document, and in this case there was no intended recipient-listener.

The state's arguments are nonsensical and the court gives them no sympathy.

The State argues that the drawing was a true threat because it was not created as part of a classroom assignment or a creative school-related expression. The State also contends that it was not mere hyperbole or an innocuous joke. Further, the State argues that the drawing was not reasonably intended to be kept private because it was reasonably foreseeable to A.N.G. that it would be seen in the school setting by school staff or other students who would interpret it as a serious expression of a purpose to inflict harm, and that, when it was discovered, school officials did reasonably interpret it this way.

The court says the state's argument inverts First Amendment protections to strip them from anyone whose communications are inadvertently witnessed by others. An inadvertent discovery is not the same thing as a distributed communication originating from the now-unintended "sender."

I see no reasonable way to construe the findings of the circuit court and the uncontested testimony at the hearing to reflect that A.N.G. meant to cause the drawing to come to the teacher’s attention, or to the attention of any other school staff or students other than T.B., its co-creator. Based on the circuit court’s findings and the uncontested evidence, the teacher’s awareness of the drawing and decision to demand it were just accidental from A.N.G.’s point of view.

There's a criminal prosecution involved and yet the school's actions -- once the disturbing artwork had been inadvertently discovered -- do not reflect the state's assertions that administrators felt justifiably threatened by their discovery. If the school felt violence was imminent, it certainly didn't act like it did.

[E]ven if I were to assume that school personnel could reasonably be classified as “listeners,” how these “listeners reacted to the” drawing (as Perkins refers to the first factor) does not weigh heavily towards classifying the drawing as a true threat. Based on the testimony of the teacher and administrators involved, the circuit court found that the drawing was “obviously concerning [to the school] and obviously the school took steps within the school setting to address these issues.” Yet, they did not take it so seriously that there was an evacuation or a search of the school. Further, instead of seeking to have A.N.G. removed from the school, administrators placed A.N.G. in an in-school suspension and did not impose more significant discipline. The assistant principal testified that she takes seriously all expressions that she construes to be threats, suggesting a low threshold for school reaction to any and all conduct that might represent a danger.

Constitutional rights for students may be limited but they're not nonexistent.

Weighing all of the above considerations under the Perkins factors, I conclude that A.N.G.’s private drawing was not a true threat in the constitutional sense. Based on all of the circumstances, a reasonable “speaker” in A.N.G.’s position would not foresee that a reasonable “listener”—someone he never in fact envisioned—would interpret the drawing as a serious expression of a purpose to inflict harm. Case law interpreting the First Amendment protects from prosecution the expressions under the particular facts here.

Away goes the delinquency petition tied to two trumped-up charges that never fit the crime the student never committed. When you put kids, cops, school administrators, and a post-9/11 "everything is a threat" mentality in the same room, idiotic decisions get made and lawsuits get filed. A little bit of rational thinking would go a long way. Unfortunately for this student, it took two years for cooler heads to prevail.

Filed Under: bombs, drawings, kids, law enforcement, schools, wisconsin

Disney's Licensing Dogs Charge Underserved School District A Third Of Fundraiser Money For Playing 'Lion King' DVD

from the robbing-them-twice dept

When it comes to posts about copyright issues, I cannot say for certain that Disney is the most frequent commonality in those posts, but it just... feels like it's probably true. After all, Disney has played such a heavy role in making copyright the over-extended, profit-driven, legal-cudgel bastardization of what copyright law was originally meant to be. Mickey Mouse himself is cited as the reason for copyright extensions in the past, and the company has been notorious in its zealous jealousy in protecting its copyrights.

But allowing your licensing partners to charge a school district for a third of the funds from a school fundraiser just because a parent brought a Lion King DVD to keep the kids happy during the event? That's a bit much, even for Disney.

When an elementary school in Berkeley, California, hosted a "parent's night out" fundraiser, they didn't think playing the 2019 remake of "The Lion King" would do anything besides keep the kids happy. That was until Emerson Elementary School received an email from a licensing company Thursday -- more than two months after the event -- saying they had to pay $250 for illegally screening the movie.

"One of the dads bought the movie at Best Buy," PTA president David Rose told CNN. "He owned it. We literally had no idea we were breaking any rules."

It's something we talk about all the time. Because of the twisted pretzel that copyright laws have become, it is quite possible for well-meaning folks to infringe upon copyright without having any idea that they're doing so. That cannot possibly be what the framers of copyright law had in mind when they created it. Movie Licensing USA, Disney's partner for managing licensing agreements, extracted $250 from the school's $800 fundraiser for showing the movie to kids, and informed the school that they would have to pay the same amount for any future showings.

The parents and district paid, but weren't happy about it. Because the universe is not without a sense of irony, part of the need for the fundraiser is, according to the district, the sweetheart real estate deal Disney got from California for the property it owns.

Berkeley City Council member Lori Droste, who is also a parent at Emerson Elementary, believes Disney is being unfair.

"There was an initiative passed in 1979 called Proposition 13 which casts the property tax on all land, and so Disney's property tax rates are at 1978 values which translates into millions upon millions of dollars a year that Disney is not paying," Droste told CNN.

"Because of that, our schools are now extremely underfunded," she added. "We went from the '70s being among the top education systems in the US to one of the lowest."

So, to summarize, Disney benefits from a government deal and avoids paying taxes, which fund school districts, and then sent the licensing police to the doors of a fundraiser for one of those school districts to take $250 out of the coffers. At this point, it's almost like they're trying to be one of their movie villains.

Filed Under: california, copyright, fair use, fundraiser, licensing, lion king, schools
Companies: disney

Schools Are Using 'Aggression Detecting' Mics That Are Set Off By Coughing, Slamming Locker Doors To Head Off The Next School Shooting

from the pour-more-money-into-the-stuff-that-isn't-working dept

Schools are spending more and more money on safety. Or, at least, that's what they're saying they're spending the money on. But simply adding more layers of surveillance -- on campus and off -- isn't really doing much to make schools safer.

Preventing violence at schools is a noble goal, but many of the solutions are just repackaged law enforcement products that treat campuses as high-crime areas. The latest developments being pitched to schools aren't innovative. They're just another way to help administrators view students as persons of interest in crimes yet to be determined.

This might not be as problematic if the tools worked well. But they simply don't. ProPublica took some repurposed ShotSpotter-esque tech for a spin, only to find out it doesn't work as advertised. The idea is the microphones will pick up aggressive… um… noises and head off the next school shooter. Great in theory. In practice?

Ariella Russcol specializes in drama at the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts in Queens, New York, and the senior’s performance on this April afternoon didn’t disappoint. While the library is normally the quietest room in the school, her ear-piercing screams sounded more like a horror movie than study hall. But they weren’t enough to set off a small microphone in the ceiling that was supposed to detect aggression.

A few days later, at the Staples Pathways Academy in Westport, Connecticut, junior Sami D’Anna inadvertently triggered the same device with a less spooky sound — a coughing fit from a lingering chest cold. As she hacked and rasped, a message popped up on its web interface: “StressedVoice detected.”

“There we go,” D’Anna said with amusement, looking at the screen. “There’s my coughs.”

Good to know a student's coughing fit may find them staring down the business end of whatever weapon the school resource officer chooses to "reasonably" deploy in the face of certain danger. AggressionSpotter doesn't seem to be up to the task of providing school staff with a heads up. The company behind the tech -- Louroe Electronics -- pitches this to law enforcement and school administrators as being the tool they need to head off "antagonistic individuals" before it escalates into something that injures or kills students.

The problem is every product tested by ProPublica can't actually do what it says on the tin. When lives are on the line, aggression detectors are being set off by famous people with grating voices.

Our research found that [Sound Intelligence's aggression detector] tends to equate aggression with rough, strained noises in a relatively high pitch, like D’Anna’s coughing. A 1994 YouTube clip of abrasive-sounding comedian Gilbert Gottfried (“Is it hot in here or am I crazy?”) set off the detector, which analyzes sound but doesn’t take words or meaning into account.

So much for the future. This is the AI used by Louroe, which can be set off by Gilbert Gottfried bits while ignoring students screaming.

Louroe's attempt to win back some points by touting its privacy protections falls flat as well. The company claims the software only captures aggressive "sound patterns." What the company calls "sound patterns" is actually students speaking. And those recordings can be stored indefinitely by administrators, allowing them to replay conversations overhead by Louroe's mics.

The company behind the software at least seems a bit more pragmatic. Sound Intelligence CEO Derek van der Vorst acknowledged the fact that the tech will generate lots of false positives and probably won't prevent a "crazy loony" from shooting up a school. Still, he insists better safe than sorry, even when it seems "sorry" is the more likely outcome.

As is to be expected, this growth industry began as cop tech. Sound Intelligence's first deployments were by European law enforcement agencies.

It tested an early model in a Dutch “pub district,” according to a 2007 study co-authored by a company researcher. Microphones were placed in 11 locations in inner-city Groningen, and the detector’s findings were compared with police reports of aggressive behavior. The results were “so impressive,” the study reported, that the device was considered “indispensable” by several Dutch police departments, the Dutch railway company and two prisons.

If you're looking for analogies, Sound Intelligence has provided one for you. The difference between schools and prisons is the bell at the end of the day. Schools are loading up with surveillance tech to keep an eye on troublesome inmates, using toys battle-tested on literal prisoners.

Settings can be tweaked and a lot of early adopters are finding the presets to be useless. ProPublica reports schools have had the gunshot detector triggered by slammed locker doors and loud birthday wishes.

Deployment in other venues has been just as error-prone, making one wonder how low Dutch law enforcement sets the bar for "indispensable."

The software has been less effective at The Valley Hospital in Ridgewood, New Jersey. Daniel Coss, security chief for the hospital’s health system, said he’s phasing out the detector after a three-year, $22,000 pilot program. The devices — placed in public, “high risk” areas — had been set off by patients’ loud voices and cafeteria workers slamming cash registers closed. Once the detector was tweaked to be less sensitive, it ignored an agitated man who was screaming and pounding on a desk. The situation escalated until six security officers responded.

This is what educators are relying on to keep kids safe and, hopefully, head off the next mass shooting. The tech simply isn't up to it. While schools continue to beta test software and hardware using tax dollars, students are being inured to round-the-clock surveillance. The excuse is "safety," as it always is when surveillance programs ramp up. But there's no trade off to be made here, not when the tech can't pinpoint aggression and fails to recognize clear signals like screaming as signs of imminent danger.

I understand no school administrator wants to feel like they didn't try everything they could when the worst case scenario occurs, but using students as guinea pigs for unproven tech originally developed for prisons isn't the answer.

Filed Under: aggression detection, privacy, schools, surveillance
Companies: sound intelligence

Schools Are Safer Than Ever, But That's Not Stopping Schools From Buying Social Media Monitoring Software

from the this-rock-repels-bears dept

Students socialize via the internet more often than not... you know, just like the rest of us do. More and more frequently, they're being surveilled by their schools. This first came to light a half-decade ago, when documents surfaced showing a California school district had purchased social media monitoring software to keep tabs on its students. Similar stories followed, including one incident where a test publisher admitted to monitoring social media posts of students taking its tests.

In about half the country, this is now standard operating procedure for schools. The Brennan Center for Justice reports schools are purchasing social media monitoring tools with increasing frequency, allowing them to track and surveil students far past the borders of the school grounds.

In an attempt to quantify expenditures on social media monitoring software by school districts, the Brennan Center examined contracts for such software using SmartProcure, a database of government purchase orders. Our review is based on self-reported procurement orders in the database, and thus likely depicts only a portion of school spending on these tools. According to these data, school spending on social media monitoring software has surged in recent years. As the graph below indicates, the database shows 63 school districts across the country purchasing social media monitoring software in 2018, up from just six in 2013 — more than a tenfold increase.

The logic behind the increase in monitoring is flawed. Fears of school shootings and other on-campus violence have increased, even if the amount of actual violence hasn't. Students aren't more violent than ever, as stats compiled by the DOJ show. Juvenile arrest rates reached their peak in 1996 and have declined 72% since that point.

Despite evidence otherwise, schools are claiming "safety" is the propellant driving these purchases. But there's no evidence these tools make students safer. But it's easy for districts to point to historically low levels of student criminal activity as evidence they're doing something right, even if it has nothing to do with monitoring students as they engage in their off-campus lives.

Anyone who's failed to mind the generation gap will be unsurprised to learn these tools aren't the greatest at determining which students may pose a threat to others. As the Brennan Center points out, social media communication is rarely straightforward and the tools aren't smart enough to sort the harmless from harmful.

Aside from anecdotes promoted by the companies that sell this software, there is no proof that these surveillance tools work. But there are plenty of risks. In any context, social media is ripe for misinterpretation and misuse. But the possibility of misinterpretation is particularly high for middle school and high school students, who are more likely to use slang and quotes from pop culture, and who may be especially motivated to evade adults’ prying eyes. Difficulties in interpretation mean that social media monitoring of students is likely to lead to false positives. Moreover, monitoring programs are particularly bad at correctly understanding languages other than English and even non-standard English, which may be used by minority students.

Obviously, these drawbacks are never highlighted by companies selling surveillance tech to schools. And schools are spending other people's money, so due diligence is rarely anything more than an afterthought. The more they buy these tools, the more competitors enter the field, offering varying degrees of expertise that all look like they're top-of-the-line when being pitched to school administrators.

While most of these tools do nothing more than scrap public posts from social media platforms, there are too many downsides to consider this a positive development for students. False positives are a huge concern, especially when schools are relying more and more on law enforcement to handle routine discipline problems. There's also very little justification for schools to continue tracking students as they engage in their lives away from the campus. While the tools may occasionally surface something of concern, the tradeoff being made completely excludes students from the equation, treating their private lives as little more than a source of mostly-useless data.

There's no expectation of privacy in public posts, but there is the expectation that school administration won't be adding itself to conversations taking place off school grounds. These tools subvert that expectation and will likely push more students to take their accounts private, making it that much more difficult for truly concerning social media posts to be seen and reported.

Filed Under: school safety, schools, social media, social media monitoring

Missouri Law Enforcement Is Dodging State Forfeiture Laws To Screw Schools And Keep Drugs Flowing Into The State

from the to-serve-and-protect-their-own-interests dept

The journalists at St. Louis Public Radio are the latest to dig into their state's asset forfeiture programs. Despite the state receiving a decent grade from the Institute of Justice for the controls it places on state-level forfeitures, the station found plenty of abuse thanks to the federal loophole, which allows law enforcement to bypass all the built-in protections legislators have enacted.

Missouri law around asset forfeiture contains some fairly strong protections. Civil asset forfeiture can only take place after a conviction or a guilty plea in a criminal case. In addition, the money is set aside for schools. The Institute for Justice, a libertarian-leaning legal advocacy group, gave Missouri a grade of B+, among the best in the country. In the federal system, however, no criminal conviction is required, and police departments can keep up to 80 percent of the money they seize.

Prosecutors like Tim Lohmar in St. Charles County make the decision whether to handle potential asset-forfeiture cases with state charges, or at the federal level. The vast majority of the time, Lohmar chooses the federal process.

This has resulted in a windfall of over $1 million for local law enforcement agencies. Thanks to federal adoption, the money train never stops, no matter what state laws require. If the forfeiture is tied to criminal charges, the money goes to local schools. Cops aren't fond of sharing, so only three of the 36 forfeiture cases processed by Lohmar last year included criminal charges for the person the cash was taken from.

The preference to grab cash, rather than drugs, has led to some completely nonsensical defenses of civil asset forfeiture.

“When you seize a thousand pounds of marijuana in the St. Louis area, you’re really not hurting the operations of a drug cartel in Mexico, because the cost to produce that thousand pounds is negligible in the grand scheme of things,” [State Rep. Justin] Hill said.

We're expected to believe cultivating and processing drugs is a zero cost effort but lost cash can never be replaced. It stands to reason that the production and sales of drugs aren't going to stop, so the seizure of a few thousand dollars from a random driver is also pretty "negligible in the grand scheme of things."

And we know cops don't actually care about stopping the drug flow. They allow the drugs to make their way into St. Louis and camp out on the roads leading away from the city to seize cash they believe resulted from the drug sales they can't be bothered to stop.

[Sgt. Carmello] Crivello, like most highway interdictors, focuses on the westbound lanes of the interstate, targeting cash, rather than drugs, that comes through Missouri in the eastbound lanes.

“The westbound, generally speaking, are the profits from the drug sales,” said Crivello in an interview, “... so stopping westbound (is) more likely to hurt drugs … (You) hurt the cartels more than you hit the pocketbooks.”

Repeating the same fallacy doesn't make it true. Law enforcement agencies like cash and the federal loophole that allows them to keep 80% of what they seize. What they don't like is the work that comes with actually dismantling drug cartels which, at some point, has to involve drug seizures and arrests, rather than pocketing cash and sending drivers on their way.

The state's law enforcement agencies have a chance to do some truly great things with forfeiture money. As was noted earlier, adding arrests to seizures routes funds to the state's public school system. Rather than be an active contributor to their communities -- both by funding schools and actually taking drug runners off the street -- cops are seizing cash and asking the feds to launder the proceeds so they can bypass local schools and any pretense of stopping the flow of drugs into the state.

Of the $19 million collected in asset forfeitures over the past three years, $340,000 has gone to schools. That’s less than 2 cents on the dollar. Most of the rest of the money went to law-enforcement agencies for new equipment, squad cars, weapons, ammunition and jail cells.

Legislators enacted reforms almost two decades ago. Law enforcement immediately found a way to circumvent these restrictions. For a brief moment a few years ago, the federal government closed the escape hatch. That has been reopened and it certainly won't be closing again while Trump is in office. Fortunately, state legislators are aware of what's happening and are attempting to close this loophole.

Missouri State Rep. Shamed Dogan, R-Ballwin, has tried unsuccessfully during recent legislative sessions to pass a reform measure that would reduce the number of forfeitures that go the federal Equitable Sharing route and thus circumvent state law. Opposition from law-enforcement groups has kept the proposal bottled up in committee.

Dogan is considering two forms of the bill. One would bar officers from sending forfeitures of less than $100,000 to the federal program. An alternative, more palatable to law enforcement, would set the cap at $50,000. In other words, the small seizures would have to comply with state law, while the big seizures could go the federal route.

Doing this would force state cops to play by the rules set up in 1991 -- the ones that gave the state residents some of the best protections in the country. It would make them focus on actually stopping the drug trade, rather than directly profiting from it.

Filed Under: asset forfeiture, forfeiture, missouri, schools

On Heels Of Favorable FCC Ruling, Verizon Imposes 'Spam' Fees On Text Message Service For Schools, Nonprofits

from the do-not-pass-go,-do-not-collect-$200 dept

Just about a month ago the FCC quietly handed the telecom industry another favor by voting to reclassify text messages as an "information service" instead of a "telecommunications service" under the Telecom Act, effectively freeing text messaging practices from government oversight. While the FCC stated the move was essential in order to fight text spam, consumer groups were quick to note the lack of oversight provided cellular carriers a nifty way to hamper third-party SMS services that might just compete with, or cause problems for, their own offerings.

Fast forward to this month, and lo and behold, Verizon's already ruffling some feathers on this front. Remind, a free school texting, chat and messaging service used by teachers, students, school coaches, and parents, this week sent a notice to its customers stating that it may no longer be able to offer the service on the Verizon network thanks to a new "spam" fee Verizon is imposing on a service that's not really spam. From the notice to customers:

"To offer our text messaging service free of charge, Remind has always paid for each text that users receive or send. Now, Verizon is charging Remind an additional fee intended for companies that send spam over its network.

Your Remind messages aren’t spam, but that hasn’t helped resolve the issue with Verizon. The fee will increase our cost of supporting text messaging to at least 11 times our current cost—forcing us to end free Remind text messaging for the more than 7 million students, parents, and educators who have Verizon Wireless as their carrier.

While several Canadian companies charge similar fees, Remind said on Twitter that Verizon was the only US company (for now) to begin charging this fee, which the company estimates could cost it up to several million dollars annually. And because the FCC gutted all regulatory oversight, the agency eroded any meaningful authority over Verizon or any additional company looking to impose such spurious surcharges. When pressed by Ars Technica, Verizon stuck to its claim that the new surcharge is essential to help combat spam:

"Verizon, which touts its commitment to education, defended the new fee. Such fees are "intended to share costs incurred to help protect students, parents, and teachers from spam and dangerous text messages over the Verizon network, while reducing fraud," Verizon said in a statement to Ars.

Verizon said the "very small fee will be charged only to major text-messaging aggregation companies such as Remind and Twilio–and not schools, parents, or students." The fees "pay for the work required to contain spam and fraud associated with this service," Verizon said.

But Remind and the company they use to send the messages and alerts (Twilio) already pay Verizon money to carry the texts, and this new fee will only compound those costs dramatically to Verizon's direct financial benefit. In the midst of the bickering between the two companies, Verizon issued a news release saying it would back away from its original plan, slightly. This being Verizon, it was unable to do so without attempting to shift the blame entirely to Remind:

"As discussed this week with Remind, Verizon will not charge Remind fees as long as they don’t begin charging K-12 schools, educators, parents and students using its free text message service. Despite this offer, made Tuesday, Remind has not changed its position that it will stop sending free texts to Verizon customers who use the service regarding school closures, classroom activities and other critical information."

In short, Verizon's "compromise" is that it will reverse the fee for K-12 users of the free Remind service, but that still means numerous other users of the service (like coaches, preschools, and day care centers) will still face the arbitrary fee. Remind tells Ars Technica they've yet to get that proposal in writing, and there's questions as to how K-12 users would even verify their exemption with Verizon in the first place. A better option remains to simply not engage in the cash grab at all.

This particular fight over text messaging oversight began a little more than a decade ago, when Verizon decided to ban a pro-choice group named NARAL Pro-Choice America from sending text messages to Verizon Wireless customers who had opted in to receiving them. Verizon justified the ban by declaring the text messages "controversial or unsavory." A curious move for an industry that has historically cuddled up to marketing spammers and crammers when it's profitable.

Ever since then consumer groups, worried that cellular carriers would abuse their gatekeeper power on the text messaging front, have been urging the FCC to declare text messages a “telecommunications service," making it illegal for carriers to ban, hinder, or impose arbitrary fees on such select SMS services. Of course the Ajit Pai FCC did the exact opposite, and here we are, with non-profits and schools lighting up Twitter with complaints under the #reversethefee hashtag.

Filed Under: fcc, fees, nonprofits, schools, spam, text messaging
Companies: remind, twilio, verizon

Another State Lawmaker Thinks Teachers Should Be Banned From Discussing 'Controversial' Issues

from the 'party-of-free-speech'-strikes-again dept

Having gotten it into his head that teachers are "indoctrinating" the mushy minds of school students, an Arizona lawmaker has introduced a bill almost certainly headed for a Constitutional challenge.

State Rep. Mark Finchem wants to ban public and charter school teachers from spreading “controversial” political, racial and religious messages in their classrooms.

The Oro Valley Republican introduced House Bill 2002 in the Legislature last week. If it passes, teachers could face consequences as severe as losing their jobs for engaging in any “political, ideological or religious” advocacy or discussion with their students.

The bill [PDF] introduces, among other things, a requirement for teachers to attend three hours of annual "ethics training" and adopt a strict "ethics code" that prevents them from talking about a long list of things Rep. Finchem finds "controversial." The list begins with blocking teachers from advocating for political parties, candidates, and legislation, which already makes part of the bill redundant.

State law already bars public and charter school employees from using school resources, including personnel, to influence the outcome of an election.

But that's only part of the list of forbidden subjects. The bill also forbids teachers from:

Discussing any litigation making its way through the nation's courts.

Introducing "controversial issues" not related to the course being taught

Endorsing any activity that "hampers or impedes lawful access of military recruiters to the campus"

Endorsing or engaging in any activity that "hampers or impedes the actions" of law enforcement

"Singling out" one racial group as "being responsible" for the suffering of another race

It also introduces some weird form of "Fairness Doctrine" by demanding teachers provide resources supporting both sides of any controversial subject that somehow makes it way past Rep. Finchem's speech barrier. These multiple incursions on the First Amendment are followed by dubious "findings" Finchem wants to have codified as legislative facts.

A. The legislature finds and declares that:

1. The purpose of public education in Arizona is to produce knowledgeable and competent adults who are able to participate as informed citizens in the democratic process of selecting representation in our constitutional republic.

2. Education in a democracy is best served by teaching students how to think, not telling them what to think. Our country is divided over many issues affecting its citizens. It has been established through surveys that a majority of K-12 teachers discuss controversial issues in their classrooms.

3. It has been established that some teacher training institutions, teacher licensing agencies, state education departments and professional teacher organizations have condoned and even encouraged this behavior under the guise of "teaching for social justice" and other sectarian doctrines. Time spent on political or ideological indoctrination takes time away from instruction in the academic subjects taught by public educational institutions, including the foundational subjects of mathematics, science, English, history and civics, and prevents students from receiving the best possible public education as funded by the taxpayers of this state.

4. Parents and taxpayers have a right to expect that taxpayer resources will be spent on education, not political or ideological indoctrination.

Perhaps Mark Finchem will allow these many surveys supporting his indoctrination theory to be read into the state record along with the rest of his bullshit bill. Finchem claims a "stunning number" of calls from concerned parents has prompted this action, rather than the organized #RedForEd educator walkout that accompanied educators' demands for increased funding.

There's no chance this bill survives a Constitutional challenge if it somehow becomes law. Restrictions on speech -- even that of government employees -- demands a narrow crafting. Targeting speech with legislation requires a sniper's mentality. Finchem is carrying a shotgun loaded with birdshot and hoping it's enough to prevent speech he doesn't like from being spoken in the state's classrooms.

Filed Under: arizona, controversial topics, free speech, mark finchem, oro valley, schools, teaching

School Security Software Decides Innocent Parent Is Actually A Registered Sex Offender

from the you-can't-argue-with-(search)-results dept

An automated system is only as good as its human backstop. If the humans making the final judgment call are incapable of using good judgment, the system is useless.

School personnel allowed a machine to do all of their critical thinking, resulting in this unfortunate turn of events.

Staff in an Aurora school office mistakenly flagged a man as a registered sex offender when he and his family went to his son's middle school for a recent event.

Larry Mitchell said he was humiliated Oct. 27 when Aurora Hills Middle School office staff scanned his driver license into a software system used to screen visitors to Aurora Public Schools district schools.

The system, provided by a private company, flagged Mitchell as a potential match with a registered sex offender in a nation-wide database. Staff compared Mitchell’s information with the potential match and determined that match was correct, even though there are no offenders in the national sex offender registry with his exact name and date of birth.

Not only did these stats not match, but the photos of registered sex offenders with the same name looked nothing like Larry Mitchell. The journalists covering the story ran Mitchell's info through the same databases -- including Mitchell's birth name (he was adopted) -- and found zero matches. What it did find was a 62-year-old white sex offender who also sported the alias "Jesus Christ," and a black man roughly the same age as the Mitchell, who is white.

School administration has little to say about this botched security effort, other than policies and protocols were followed. But if so, school personnel need better training… or maybe at least an eye check. Raptor, which provides the security system used to misidentify Mitchell, says photo-matching is a key step in the vetting process [PDF].

In order to determine a False Positive Match the system operator will:

i. Compare the picture from the identification to the picture from the database.

ii.If the picture is unclear, we will check the date of birth, middle name, and other identifying information such as height and eye color.

iii. The Raptor System has a screen for the operator to view and compare photos.

iv. If the person or identifying characteristics are clearly not from the same person, the person will then be issued a badge and established procedures will be followed.

Even if you move past the glaring mismatch in photos (the photos returned in the Sentinel's search of Raptor's system are embedded in the article), neither the school nor Raptor can explain how Raptor's system returned results that can't be duplicated by journalists.

Mitchell said he was adopted, and his birth name is Lawrence Michael Evans. The Sentinel did not find a match with that or his legal name and date of birth in the national sex offender registry.

Raptor says its system is reliable, stating it only returned one false positive in that county last year. (And now the number has doubled!) That's heartening, but that number will only increase as system deployment expands. Raptor's self-assessment may be accurate, but statements about the certainty of its search results are hardly useful.

The company's sales pitch likely includes its low false positive rate, which, in turn, leads school personnel to believe the system rather than the person standing in front of them -- one who bears no resemblance (physical or otherwise) to the registry search results. Mitchell still isn't allowed into the building without a security escort and is hoping that presenting school admins with his spotless criminal background check will finally jostle their apparently unshakeable belief in Raptor's search results.

This failure is also an indictment of the security-over-sanity thinking. The Sentinel asked government officials if there were any incidents in which sex offenders had gained access to schools, thus necessitating this $100,000+ investment in Raptor's security system. No results were returned.

Neither local school or state public safety or education officials could point to data showing how many registered offenders try to seek access to schools, or if a registered offender visiting a school has ever harmed a student in Aurora or Colorado.

Given this history, Raptor's system is always going to be better known -- at least at this school -- for locking out non-criminals than catching sex offenders trying to be somewhere they shouldn't. If the schools haven't seen activity that necessitates the use of this system, it will always produce more false positives than actual hits. When there's no one to catch, you're only going to end up stigmatizing innocent parents. It's a lot of money to pay for solving a problem that doesn't exist. The school has purchased a tiger-proof rock and somehow managed to hurt someone with it.

Filed Under: ai, aurora hills middle school, fasle positive, larry mitchell, schools, sex offenders
Companies: raptor