Texas Teens Can't Graduate High School Until They've Been Told How To Behave Around Cops

from the HOW-NOT-TO-GET-SHOT dept

To graduate from high school in Texas, you must first be able to show you won't provoke police officers into shooting/tasing/beating you during a traffic stop. That's according to a new state law that ran through the legislature under the guise of solving police/community relationship problems. (via Popehat)

In the aftermath of several fatal police shootings of unarmed citizens, Texas lawmakers sought to pacify tensions between law enforcement and civilians. The state legislature brought civil rights groups and law enforcement organizations together to develop a solution: the Community Safety Education Act, which was signed into law last year.

The bill requires any student entering ninth grade in the 2018-2019 academic year and thereafter to participate in a class and watch a video instruction on how to interact properly with officers during traffic stops. Without a notation of attendance on their transcripts, seniors cannot receive diplomas.

To "pacify tensions" brought about by cops killing unarmed people, we're instructing teens to become docile subhumans who should only respond to the presence of law enforcement in the manner law enforcement prefers. That's the gist of the Community Safety Education Act Instructor's Guide [PDF], which not only tells people to remain suitably cowed during traffic stops, but also gets the law wrong.

The problems with the instruction manual (and the law... and required course itself...) begin at the beginning, in the "Tips for Educators." The guide says instructors should remind students of their rights, as well as warn them that exercising them could get them killed.

Students may ask about citizens videotaping traffic stops. It is a citizen's right to videotape. Drivers and passengers should be aware that unknown items in a citizen's hand may cause safety concerns for officers.

In short, it's best not to record a stop for your own personal safety because there's no telling what a professional highly-trained in law enforcement and force deployment might do if they see something in someone's hand -- even if that something is 1,000,000x more likely to be something everyone carries with them (a cellphone) than a weapon. Most people aren't going to escalate a traffic stop into a murder one charge. But that's hardly reassuring to highly-trained law enforcement officers, who are led to believe every interaction with the public carries the potential of death and destruction and respond to every movement like bunnies scattering at the sound of a stepped-on twig.

Since highly-trained law enforcement officers are completely unpredictable, it's up to Texas' education system to crank out harmless teen drivers. Hence the stupid law and the stupid course, which comes with graduation strings attached.

The "notes for drivers" says it's "recommended" officers treat drivers courteously, but there's certainly no law requiring courteous behavior, much less one that withholds a police academy diploma until would-be officers of the law complete their "Don't Be An Asshole" course.

The advice given is basically this: do everything a cop tells you unless they tell you to stop doing it or to do something else. The course says students have the right to refuse vehicle searches, but kind of portrays assertions of rights as a way to get arrested.

And the guide gets the law wrong: specifically, Texas' "failure to identify" statute. Here's what the guide says:

Although it is lawful for you to remain silent during a traffic stop, you are required by law to truthfully identify yourself when asked to do so by an officer. A driver or passenger can be arrested for giving false identifying information to an officer.

The second part is true. The first part isn't. That's OK. Texas law enforcement officers can't manage to wrap their minds around this law, so it's unsurprising a teacher's guide put together by politicians is inaccurate. The law actually says [emphasis added]:

A person commits an offense if he intentionally refuses to give his name, residence address, or date of birth to a peace officer who has lawfully arrested the person and requested the information.

A traffic stop is a detention, not an arrest. It likely makes little difference in the context of a traffic stop, where documents asked for by officers will likely identify the driver with or without their verbal input. But placing this misinformation inside a required course will likely cause students to think this applies everywhere, not just during traffic stops. It doesn't. An officer needs to arrest a person before they can legally demand identification. And officers can't use a refusal to provide identification as the basis for an arrest.

Passengers aren't required to ID themselves. They're only forbidden from providing false information -- the same as the driver. But the teacher's guide makes the same mistake again in its "Notes for passengers."

Although it is lawful for you to remain silent during a traffic stop, you are required by law to truthfully identify yourself when asked to do so by an officer.

The law does not require this. It does not require it of drivers, even though proving you can legally operate a vehicle tends to undermine any "remaining silent" about your identity. Passengers, however, have nothing to prove, so this course is telling high school students something that simply isn't true and will only contribute to Texas law enforcement's continued abuse of the statute.

It would be bad enough if the mandatory course was limited to "pacifying tensions" by implying unpredictable civilians are what really needs to be fixed. But the course goes even further by getting the law wrong. So, high school students will be forced to attend a pointless course containing misinformation to be considered educated enough to secure a diploma.

Filed Under: behavior, high school, police, students, texas

ISU Student Groups Changing Names En Masse To Protest School's Ridiculous New Trademark Policy

from the no-pride-allowed dept

You will recall that over the past few years, we have been discussing how Iowa State University essentially did everything wrong concerning an alumni group running a pro-marijuana organization that made use of school symbols and iconography. After initially approving the group's use of school trademarks, several members of the state's conservative legislature got involved, leading to the school rescinding that authorization. NORML, the name of the group, sued the school, claiming all of this was a violation of their free speech rights. The courts agreed, eventually to the tune of a $600k judgement, meaning that school wasted over half a million dollars of taxpayer money to fail at trademark bullying.

You might have expected that this would serve as a delightful education for the school as to the reasons why they don't want to be a trademark bully. You would be wrong, of course. Instead, the school's next step was to immediately rewrite its trademark use policy, making it laughably restrictive and essentially attempting to give the school broad oversight over all uses of its iconography by student groups. This, predictably, has led to a full on revolt both by many of the school's student organizations and its student government.

To start with the student organizations, they are largely dropping ISU connections from their name and branding like a hot stone.

A year ago, Iowa State University's student chess club was easily tied to the university through its name. Now, it’s the Ames Collegiate Chess Club. The student aviation group had been the Flying Cyclones. Now, they’re the Ames Flyers. And the student space club, which had had “Iowa State” in its name, is Ames Space Teaching and Recognition Association.

Why the changes? University administrators over the summer tightened Iowa State’s trademark policy by limiting most student organizations' access to trademarked references to the institution.

As noted elsewhere in the post, ISU has a habit of puffing its chest out over its large roster of student-led organizations and clubs. Yet, because of its heavy-handed new policy, those ties to the university are being severed, taking those bragging rights away. Where ISU once could be seen as having a rich tradition of clubs and organizations reveling in student participation, a separation line has now been drawn. All because the school wants to choose control over culture.

And the students are pissed.

The policy so riled student government members that they unanimously approved a resolution this week requesting the administration, at least temporarily, backpedal from the guidelines that were posted Aug. 1 on ISU’s Trademark Licensing Office website.

"The administration went about this poorly," Michael Tupper, an ISU student government member, said at this week’s meeting. "They implemented the change in the middle of the summer, when there were no students on campus."

In addition, Tupper said during the meeting, “We’ve been told multiple times that the change was not in direct result to the lawsuit. … That is not true.”

A school spokesperson states that the school will review the resolution and then meet with the student government, but it's painfully obvious that it would rather have avoided student interaction altogether through sheer timing. Making such a policy change where the primary effect will be felt by student groups when students weren't even on campus isn't particularly subtle. Meeting with the student government now is CYA, not some kind of olive branch. And that's likely why the student government is not screwing around here.

Some at this week’s student government meeting suggested that if university officials don’t follow through on any requests in the resolution, other actions could be taken, including votes of no confidence or censure.

It's a problem entirely of ISU's own making. And, given the culture that is supposed to be fostered on college campuses, this is about as wholly unnecessary as it gets. As entertaining as it is watching an institution like ISU learn absolutely all the wrong lessons from a well-publicized trademark dispute, it has to be just as frustrating for the students on campus.

Filed Under: student groups, students, trademark, trademark bully
Companies: iowa state university

Fifth Circuit Says No, You Fucking May Not Strip Search A Classful Of Female Students To Find $50

from the because-of-course-you-can't-the-hell-were-you-thinking dept

The Fifth Circuit Appeals Court convened to write an opinion [PDF] the judges shouldn't have had to write. But then, of course, they had to because the lower court screwed everything up. The first paragraph sums up the issue -- and the appeals court's decision -- succinctly and devastatingly. (h/t Raffi Melkonian)

During a sixth-grade choir class, an assistant principal allegedly ordered a mass, suspicionless strip search of the underwear of twenty-two preteen girls. All agree the search violated the girls’ constitutional rights under Texas and federal law. Even so, the district court dismissed the girls’ lawsuit against the school district for failure to state a claim. We reverse.

The school admitted it violated the students' rights. It admitted it performed a search without justification or guiding policies. It all but started cutting settlement checks and yet the lower court said no viable claim was made by the plaintiffs.

The background: in an attempt to locate $50 that went missing during a choir class, the entire class was searched. Given the nature of the search, this quickly changed the definition of "class" from a "a number of students studying the same course" to "a number of students suing the school." This maybe wouldn't have gone as far as it did, but for the invaluable assistance of the school's police officer.

When no money turned up, the school police officer “suggested that girls like to hide things in their bras and panties.”

I sincerely hope this person is now chronically underemployed. Why escalate things needlessly? No one was looking for weapons or even illegal drugs. It was cash -- something easy to lose. That $50 has gone missing does not necessarily mean it was stolen. That it may have been stolen does not necessarily mean the female class members would have stashed it in their undergarments.

Without seeking permission from the students or informing their parents, the vice principal had the school nurse perform a strip search of all the students.

Higgins took all twenty-two girls in the choir class to the female school nurse, who strip searched them, taking them one at a time into a bathroom, where she “check[ed] around the waistband of [their] panties,” loosened their bras, and checked “under their shirts.” The girls “were made to lift their shirts so they were exposed from the shoulder to the waist.”

Do the ends justify the means?

No money was found.

The district's policy for searches is a mess. An unconstitutional mess. As the court points out, it gives no guidance to administrators on how to reach its self-generated standard of "reasonable cause" before performing a search. However, it does tell administrators searches by school personnel should be as non-intrusive as possible and only when there's a "reasonable" belief contraband might be found.

The only discipline handed out for this mass violation of rights was a memo chastising the Vice Principal for performing a search to find something not actually considered to be "contraband." But the court points out that this memo misses the whole point of Constitutional protections and the school's obligation to leave those (and their students) unmolested.

Regardless, the supposed lack of “contraband” appears to have been the principal’s only concern; the memo never criticized the search for invading the underwear of twenty-two preteen girls, or for doing so without particularized suspicion.

In fact, the principal's memo seemed to suggest strip searching students was acceptable as long as the principal was given a heads up.

The memo further made clear that, at least in the principal’s mind, such strip searches of students are not per se improper under school district policy. Rather than forbidding all strip searches going forward, the memo requested: “In the future, if you feel a student must have a search requiring a strip search, please notify me before proceeding.”

Addressing the lower court's fuck ups, the Appeals Court first points out the question of Constitutionality has been answered firmly, with some of that coming from the defendant school's own admissions.

[T]his clearly established law means that Higgins violated the constitutional rights of the twenty-two girls unless Higgins reasonably suspected that the missing $50 cash (1) would be found on that particular girl’s person and either (2) would be found specifically in that girl’s underwear or (3) would pose a dangerous threat to students. For what are perhaps obvious reasons, the parties do not dispute that the alleged search failed all three conditions. It was clearly unconstitutional.

The school tried to claim the plaintiffs had nothing to support their claims. It tried to portray this as allegations about an unconstitutional policy. But the Appeals Court notes the plaintiffs are actually alleging the school had done nothing at all to provide search guidance to its administrators. This changes the judicial math a bit. [Emphasis in the original.]

To be clear, the argument is not that the school district’s written search policies are facially unconstitutional or that they caused the alleged constitutional violation by themselves. Rather, the “official municipal policy” on which Plaintiffs attempt to hang Monell liability is the school district’s alleged policy of providing no training whatsoever regarding its employees’ legal duties not to conduct unreasonable searches. In other words, as currently presented, this is a “failure to train” case.

This allows the plaintiffs to move forward with their allegations, overturning the lower court's dismissal. The Appeals Court notes this reversal isn't meant to suggest the plaintiffs have enough evidence to prevail on this claim -- only that they should not have seen their case dismissed during the first round of pleadings by the lower court.

But what seems obvious to everyone was somehow unclear to the vice principal who ordered the searches. The court notes there really can only be one entity to blame in this matter: the school itself for failing to give officials proper training on students' constitutional rights. Just having a policy several steps removed from the actual limitations demanded by the Fourth Amendment isn't enough. The courts don't expect police officers to know the nuances of every Fourth Amendment decision governing the searches of full-grown adults so it sure as hell isn't going to expect a school administrator will have this all nailed down without outside instruction.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, 5th circuit, 6th grade, strip search, students

Google Hating Mississippi Attorney General Sues Company... With Ammo From EFF

from the well,-this-could-get-interesting dept

We've written a fair amount about Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood over the years, with a major focus on his factually-challenged hatred of Google, that may or may not be influenced by Hood's heavy funding from Hollywood. What is known, however, is that the MPAA, quite clearly, decided to use Hood as a pawn in its campaign to attack Google. The Sony Pictures hack from a few years back revealed a detailed plan, put together by the MPAA, to funnel money and resources to Hood solely for the purpose of attacking Google with questionable legal claims. Hood's first attempt to do so (with letters that were literally written by the MPAA's lawyers) effectively failed, following a legal challenge from Google.

Hood, of course, is not one to give up, so he's back again with a lawsuit filed against Google, arguing that the company has violated student privacy with its Google Apps for Education. If this sounds vaguely familiar, here's the twist: this is the same basic complaint that the EFF complained about in a filing to the FTC a year and a half ago. The EFF, of course, actively fought Jim Hood in his initial attack on Google, so it's a neat trick by Hood (and, perhaps, the MPAA?) to now use the EFF's own legal arguments against Google.

As I stated back when the EFF filed its complaint, even though we frequently agree with the EFF on things (and even though we wish Google was better on privacy), I'm still struggling to see what the privacy violation is here. The key issue is that Google signed a pledge -- the Student Privacy Pledge -- which says that when offering its apps to schools, it will safeguard student's privacy in some very clear ways. Multiple third parties, including the Future of Privacy Forum -- who helped create the very pledge Google is accused of violating -- has looked at Google's G Suite for Education and concluded that it complies with the pledge. There are no ads in the G Suite for Education, which is the main privacy issue. But the EFF's complaint was that by sync'ing student accounts, it's storing information about the students in violation of the pledge. But the sync feature is just to allow students to be able to log in from multiple devices and have the same experience -- and Google insists that none of that information is ever used for advertising or other datamining. If it turns out that's not true, then there are issues. But if Google is being accurate here, I'm just don't see where the problem is.

As far as I can tell, the FTC has done nothing with the EFF's complaint. But now it appears that (without naming EFF), Jim Hood has decided to jump in to the legal waters and claim that Google is violating its pledge on student data privacy.

It feels like someone in Hood's office (again, perhaps with some nudging from friends at the MPAA) decided that it would be a neat trick to use the EFF's own complaint against Google to go after Google yet again. It most likely will mean that EFF won't oppose Jim Hood as it did last time around. However, taking a step back and looking at the actual complaint, it's difficult to see how it will stick. As stated above, the organizations that created the very pledge in the first place have claimed that EFF is wrong (and are now saying that Hood is wrong), and that Google complies with the pledge itself. This also seems like a weird issue for Hood to focus on for any other reason than because he wants to attack Google. In fact, it's questionable how this is anything but an Attorney General using his position for something of a personal vendetta against a company he dislikes.

It will be interesting to see how Google responds to this lawsuit... and how far it can actually go.

Filed Under: apps for education, jim hood, mississippi, privacy, privacy pledge, students
Companies: eff, google

School District Routinely Abused Access To Law Enforcement Database; Suspended Whistleblower Who Exposed It

from the like-any-other-criminal-enterprise,-the-government-hates-snitches dept

Give enough people access to sensitive information and abuse is inevitable. We've covered multiple incidents of law enforcement database misuse by police officers. Some have used their access to track former spouses. Others use it to harvest info on potential partners, supplementing the minimal personal data supplied by internet dating sites.

But it's not just law enforcement officers abusing this access. It's also abused by public employees who have been granted access to these databases. Jose Gaspar of Bakersfield.com details the apparent routine misuse of database access by school administrators.

Kern High School District administrators and other employees misused a criminal database to investigate students, and while sheriff’s officials recommended criminal charges against two, no one was prosecuted, according to documents obtained this past week.

The chief of police for the school district (Joe Lopeteguy) suspected unauthorized use of access of the CLETS (California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System) database so he asked the Kern County Sheriff's Office to investigate. The office confirmed Chief Lopeteguy's suspicions.

The report says KHSD police accessed CLETS to get information about a special education student for unknown reasons; an employee who’d filed a workers’ compensation claim with the district; and about 30 student athletes.

What tipped Chief Lopeteguy off was a request sent to him by the athletics director asking him to run a student's plates. Lopeteguy told the requester he wouldn't because such a search would be illegal. Apparently, this was the first time the athletics director had been told "no."

Shortly after, the chief reportedly said, he received an email from his boss, KHSD Director of Pupil Personnel Otis Jennings, wondering what was going on.

The message from Jennings read, “This is something we've done in the past through the chief for purposes of the district.”

The former school police chief (Mike Collier) admitted to approving these (apparently illegal) search requests in the past. Both the athletic director and personnel director had submitted multiple database search requests, often without informing Collier of their plans. The district's police dispatcher -- who ultimately controlled database access -- confirmed this.

[The dispatcher] told investigators that [athletics director] Greene would come in with a list of licenses to run, but she would only run requests under Collier's order and with him providing his CLETS identification number. According to the report, Stonecipher also said Jennings would make CLETS requests and she would direct him to Collier.

Collier apparently approved the 246 database searches performed using his credentials during the 2014-15 school year, even though a majority of them were for information school staff wasn't allowed to obtain via the law enforcement database.

Investigators tried to speak to Collier about his search history but he lawyered up and refused to cooperate. The other administrators named in the investigation also refused to speak to the Sheriff's Office.

Not that their refusal to cooperate ultimately matters. The Sheriff's Office recommended bringing charges against Collier and Jennings for their access violations, but the District Attorney decided not to prosecute. The only person being punished for this abuse is the man who reported it: Chief Lopeteguy.

During the investigation, on May 13, KHSD placed Lopeteguy on administrative leave. Lopeteguy told investigators the district was accusing him of misusing CLETS and of incompetence.

Lopeteguy was reinstated two months later but claims -- via a $2.3 million lawsuit against the district -- that he's still being harassed by district staff, who have gone so far as to attempt to have the Sheriff's Office investigate him for abuse of the CLETS database.

Here we see the government acting in two of its standard roles: the routine abuser of access to information citizens are required to provide it with, and as the punisher of whistleblowers who expose this abuse. Neither of these actions serve the public in any way, shape or form, making a mockery of the term "public servant."

Filed Under: bakersfield, database, law enforcement, students
Companies: kern high school

University Tracks Students' Movements Using WiFi, But Says It's OK Because It's Not Tracking Students

from the slippery-slope dept

One of the many revelations from the Snowden files was that Canada's spy agency has been tracking people as they connect to WiFi in different public locations. And if Canada is doing it, you can be pretty sure the NSA and GCHQ are doing the same, since neither is known for being backward in using whatever means it can to snoop on huge numbers of people. Of course, you'd expect spy agencies to be up to these kinds of tricks, and you might also be unsurprised to learn that shops are also tracking you using your WiFi connection. But we might have hoped that universities would have been a little more sensitive to privacy issues than the following news on the Australian ABC News site suggests is the case:

The University of Melbourne has moved to allay privacy concerns amid revelations it is tracking students through their wi-fi usage.

The university said the practice, which looked at where people were moving around campus, helped institutions improve retention rates and the experience of students.

According to the article, the university is using the data for the following reason:

The university is trying to work out where people move across the campus to help with planning the new Metro Rail project, which will run through the middle of the campus.

That's certainly a reasonable goal, but the university seems blissfully unaware of the privacy dangers of its data gathering. In particular, the fact that it is interested in which campus room students are in at any given time means that it could probably work out the identities of those using a particular WiFi system by correlating the rooms visited with the different courses taken by each student. The university would then have a record of where all its students went during the day, who they met, and for how long. Apparently meaningless location information is actually incredibly revealing.

There's no suggestion that the university is doing anything like this, or even thinking about doing it. But once advances in technology mean that something is theoretically possible, the pressure to put it into practice can become irresistible, as other students have discovered.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: australia, privacy, students, tracking, wifi
Companies: university of melbourne

Appeals Court Tells Government It Must Extend Educational Institution FOIA Fee Price Break To Students

from the you-can-always-make-it-up-with-student-loan-interest dept

The perennial FOIA Reform Masquerade Ball is again under way, with legislators attempting to dodge blustery requests to "cut in" by administration officials and similarly-motivated federal agencies. The dance usually ends with Congressional committee chairmen yanking needles from records and booting everyone out of the dancehall.

Meanwhile, limited headway is being made in another branch of the government, far from the muffled protests of overwhelming majorities who have been shouted down by parties of one. The DC Appeals Court has just ruled that the government must extend its FOIA fee discounts to students at educational institutions, rather than just to instructors and administration.

The Department of Defense has fought this the whole way. It wanted a clear-cut delineation between students and staff for reasons only it comprehends, as that would mean saddling those with fewer financial resources (students) with higher fees.

The decision starts out by noting that FOIA fees -- if high enough -- are an effective deterrent to requesters. It then goes on to examine the government's assertion that the category of "educational institution" does not include these institutions' student bodies.

We thus must decide whether the statutory term “educational institution” is properly read, as the Government reads it, to include teachers but exclude students from the category of preferred requesters who are eligible for reduced fees. We conclude that the Government’s reading is inconsistent with the statute. Indeed, we think the Government’s reading makes little sense at all.

[...]

It would be a strange reading of this broad and general statutory language – which draws no distinction between teachers and students – to exempt teachers from paying full FOIA fees but to force students with presumably fewer financial means to pay full freight.

The government -- in making its nonsensical argument that students are not part of educational institutions -- relies on two different pull quotes. One is from a statement Sen. Charles Leahy made way back in 1986 during his legislative push to amend the FOIA to reduce fees for schools.

“A request made by a professor or other member of the professional staff of an educational or noncommercial scientific institution should be presumed to have been made by the institution.”

The government has chosen to believe this excludes students. The court, however, points out that Leahy was actually expanding the definition from what was originally assumed: that only top-level representatives of education institutions (presidents, chairpersons, etc.) could benefit from the lowered fees. The amendment, as written, makes no delineation between staff and students, no matter what the government feels Leahy must have meant when he made that statement.

The second pull quote is from an OMB (Office of Management and Budget) FOIA guideline.

“A student who makes a request in furtherance of the completion of a course of instruction is carrying out an individual research goal and the request would not qualify” as a request made by an educational institution.

With this, you'd figure the DoD has a point. But it doesn't, as the court explains. There are questions that need to be answered and one of them is, "How does the OMB arrive at this conclusion without a single statutory leg to stand on?"

In our view, OMB’s rule for student requests is inconsistent with the statute. FOIA refers broadly to an “educational institution.” As we have explained, we see no good basis in the text or context of FOIA to draw a line here between the teachers and students within the educational institution. The Guideline’s ipse dixit distinction of students from teachers is entirely unexplained and unpersuasive. The Guideline says that a geology teacher seeking information about soil erosion to support her research is entitled to reduced fees. But why not the geology student seeking the same information for the same reason? Crickets. We discern no meaningful distinction for purposes of this statute between the geology teacher and the geology student.

As the court sees it, the OMB's diversion from the statutory mean may be more motivated by its position (the "Budget" part of OMB) to seek higher fees from more requesters -- allowing it to make more money while deterring a certain percentage of FOIA requesters. If so, that's its own problem and one it fixes immediately. The FOIA isn't supposed to be a profit-making enterprise, much less a reliable revenue stream.

But this statute, as we read it, does not empower the Government to pursue fiscal balance or provide relief for the FOIA bureaucracy on the backs of students. The statutory text and context lead us to this simple conclusion: If teachers can qualify for reduced fees, so can students.

The court cautions that its take on the "educational institution" price break is not meant to be read as FOIA: Student Edition and used by attendees to obtain cheap documents for personal or commercial use. It says the government can take steps to prevent abuse by requiring things like copies of student IDs, letters from instructors, etc. That being said, the court is similarly not granting agencies the power to follow the letter of ruling while doing everything they can to break its spirit.

We caution agencies against requiring hard-to-obtain verifications that will have the practical effect of deterring or turning away otherwise valid student FOIA requests.

This is a win for student Kathryn Sack and for all others similarly situated. It returns a fee exemption to a more logical place, rather than leaving it in the shape it was, where it could be used to deter requesters with limited means.

Filed Under: education, fees, foia, information, prices, students

Subtle: Iraq Flips The Internet Switch For 3 Hours To Combat Cheating Students And Corrupted Teachers

from the well-okay-then dept

We've talked about cheating in academia in the past, usually revolving around whether or not what used to be called cheating might be better thought of as collaboration. Beyond that, we've also talked about some of the strategies used to combat the modernity of "cheating", which has included the monitoring of students online activities to make sure they weren't engaged in cheating behavior.

Well, the nation of Iraq doesn't have time for all of this monitoring and sleuthing. When its students have their standardized tests, they simply shut the damned internet off completely.

For a few hours each morning, the Iraqi government keeps cutting off internet access—to keep students from cheating on their end-of-year exams. As reported by DYN research, which tracks internet blackouts around the world, the country’s access went almost entirely dead between 5 a.m. and 8 a.m. in the morning on Saturday, Sunday and again on Monday.

And this isn't the first time the Iraqi government has gone about things in this way. Last year, they pulled the same lever to shut down internet access to the country, with the same explanation that it was combatting a scourge of question and answer sharing occuring online. What's interesting about this is that the real problem appears to be the teachers, not the students. Teachers in Iraq are apparently regularly bribed by students to share the questions and answers to tests and that those leaks are then spread across the internet for other Iraqi students to see.

“What happens usually is that some teachers would be giving the exams questions to students who pay money, then [those] students would sell online questions all over country,” one Iraqi, who requested his name not be used in a story, told Vocativ. “Between 5 a.m. to 8 a.m. [is when teachers finalize questions] so this is the time when teachers [who have been paid off would] give questions to students by Facebook or Viber or Whatsapp and so on.”

Now, perhaps this move is effective in its aims. I don't know, since students looking to cheat haven't exactly always required the internet to do so. Still, even if it were, there must be another more subtle yet effective way to combat this cheating scourge. Perhaps one that doesn't interrupt internet access for, oh I don't know, everyone else in the entire country. Because the effects of this blackout aren't exactly limited to students.

Human rights groups were outraged at the outage. “We see this, especially in such a destabilized country as Iraq, as really terrible. It’s a lot of people under a media and communications blackout,” Deji Olukotun, Senior Global Advocacy Manager at the internet freedom nonprofit, told Vocativ.

Come on guys, figure this out.

Filed Under: cheating, exams, internet, iraq, students

School District That Said NSA Told It To Monitor Students' Social Media Posts Is Back With Non-NSA Approved Monitoring

from the forum-lurking-as-service dept

The same Alabama school district that claimed God the NSA told it to monitor its students' social media activities is back in the news again. The tune has changed but the lyrics remain the same. This new social media monitoring program proceeds without the NSA's blessing or the use of a snappy acronym, but it's pretty much the same thing -- only expanded to cover all students (potentially), rather than the former's programs 600 or so "targets." (via the Free Thought Project)

Over the weekend, Huntsville City Schools Superintendent Casey Wardynski released a video detailing new system-wide procedures designed to improve discipline and safety in schools.

Cell phone videos of fights at Huntsville High and Grissom High have been circulating online in recent weeks, stirring up debate about the effectiveness of discipline policies at the schools.

"We're going to implement a procedure that directly addresses an area that's become a real concern again," said Wardynski in the video, published here, "which is how violence in our schools – how threats to our schools – interact with social media, and how social media can play a role, if we pay attention to it, in heading off problems."

The new procedure will allow the superintendent and administrators to review the public social media posts of students who have a history of violence or whose behavior demonstrates a risk to student and employee safety.

There's nothing stopping schools from reviewing public posts made to students' social media accounts. Disciplining them for First Amendment-protected activity performed outside of the schools' confines is a bit more problematic.

The one-page document laying out the specifics of the monitoring program (which really isn't all that specific) states the school will take action against students if it feels posts made off-campus "threaten" the "safety" of the student body or its employees. Nowhere in the document is it indicated that this will be limited to true threats or other exceptions to First Amendment protections. Instead, the school makes it clear its monitoring efforts will be subject only to its own discretion, with punishments to follow for students who run afoul of its vague stipulations.

If the superintendent determines that a student’s social media posts reasonably constitute a serious threat of physical violence to students or employees, the superintendent may initiate such disciplinary action as he deems necessary to alleviate such threat.

If the superintendent determines that a student has made posts to social media indicating either that student or another student’s propensity towards violence or gang affiliation, the superintendent may also refer such student to any applicable school-based or district-level student supports.

The school-based or district-level student supports may, in appropriate circumstances, include recommendations for non-mandatory counseling and support for such student with the informed consent of the student’s parent or legal guardian.

The thing is that any actual criminal activity occurring off-campus should be handled by law enforcement, not school administration. Serious threats made by students when not on school grounds may be noted as reasons to forbid the students' re-entry into the school, but this determination should be made after law enforcement has investigated.

The other stuff is vague nonsense. This puts the school in the position of monitoring posts for ethereal matter like a "propensity towards violence." Then it wants school officials to act on it, even if the posts occurred off-campus, might have been taken out of context and/or do not actually represent the sentiments of the person expressing them (retweets, re-posts, "likes," etc.).

Making this worse is the apparent impetus for the policy: apparently, video recordings of fights between students that were posted on social media and went somewhat viral. Superintendent Wardynski claims the fight was planned on social media platforms. His assertion is couched in DHS-speak.

"In each of those cases we've gone and done a forensic analysis of those cases and looked at social media surrounding those, and found there were a lot of precursor indicators in Facebook and other locations in social media that indicated a fight was headed to our school," he said.

So, this isn't a well-thought out policy. This is a kneejerk policy. Much like its previous, NSA-approved social media monitoring effort, isolated incidents are presented as trends in order to justify the district's actions. In 2014, the program was justified because someone said something possibly threatening in a chat room while a Yemeni native was present and a "gang" composed of "six or seven students related to each other" was dismantled by the school's "SAFe" team. In this case, it's a fight or two that, like everything else these days, was captured for posterity by observers will cellphones and uploaded to social media platforms.

And, in the cases cited, the activity that was filmed occurred on school grounds, where it fell firmly under the district's control. The superintendent is taking something fully-justifiable and expanding it beyond its logical and legal confines.

The district may find itself in trouble if it insists on punishing students for off-campus behavior. Despite being on the receiving end of backlash for the district's last social media monitoring efforts, Superintendent Wardynski appears to have learned nothing.

Filed Under: alabama, casey wardynski, huntsville, nsa, social media, students, surveillance