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Clear backpacks, monitored emails: U.S. students under constant surveillance

theguardian.com

311–320 of 560 posts

Re: Clear backpacks, monitored emails: U.S. students under constant surveillance

#311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People's views of the world have been drastically skewed by the news industry. Consider how much news coverage was given to the Las Vegas mass shooting. That resulted in 58 dead and 413 wounded. Compare that to how much national coverage is spent on car accidents. About 40,000 Americans per year are killed by cars. That's about two Las Vegas massacres worth of dead each and every day of the year. The news industry th…

Hypothesis on the specific topic of cars vs. guns: The US has already done about all it can to regulate cars to maximize safety. There is, perhaps, more to be done, but since the Constitution doesn't include a right to keep and bear cars, regulation and law in the space of publicly-operated vehicles is already large and mature. The same is not true for firearms, which is why it's such a contentious topic in the US.

>The US has already done about all it can to regulate cars to maximize safety.

Halving speed limits on highways and interstates would save many lives. But we'd prefer to "move fast and break things"

Re: Clear backpacks, monitored emails: U.S. students under constant surveillance

#312

Poor, emotion driven risk management as usual. School shootings kill very few people per year and are rare events (especially in places that can afford this tech) despite what the New York Times would have you believe. Why not focus efforts on things that actually do kill young people, namely: * Car crashes (teach people to drive more defensively) * Suicides (provide better mental health services) * Violence that occ…

There's always money for punitive controlling "solutions". There needs to be a politically active obnoxious block always bellowing about it as unnecessary and a waste of money relentlessly for something to happen because apparently that's the only way things happen

Re: Clear backpacks, monitored emails: U.S. students under constant surveillance

#313

THIS IS NOT OKAY. We can't have children being used to constant surveillance and accepting this as a part of life. It sets them up for so many problems in the future, where they won't understand the serious implications of constant tracking and surveillance. And sure, nothing too bad comes out of this stuff right now in most of the world, but have you seen China? The minute a government decides to do so, all that dat…

I think part of the problem of polarization is distrust in the respective other political isle. Constant surveillance and constant crises are probably key drivers here. Some say it benefits security, but I think the calculation is flawed. You will never get engaged citizens in a open-air prison. People implementing these policies should be deeply ashamed of themselves.

I'd say that part of the problem is that surveillance data is monetizable, which increases every vendor's incentive to make that capability a fundamental part of the value proposition for the product or service.

Re: Clear backpacks, monitored emails: U.S. students under constant surveillance

#314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny this article coming from the Guardian which I believe is a British publication. And London being the only city in the top 10 for surveillance outside of China. https://www.comparitech.com/vpn-privacy/the-worlds-most-surv...

My local corner shop has about 16 CCTV cameras in it, covering as many angles in the shop as they can. This is common. Very common. I'm totally OK with that kind of apparently 'pervasive' CCTV coverage - we're not talking government-owned networked cameras linked up to face/gait/whatever recognition systems or deep cold storage banks, we're talking small store-owners keeping an eye on junkies and thieves. The oft-reg…

Imagine each one of those cameras were being held by a person. How would you react then? This is the true nature of the situation.

Surveillance Camera Man made it explicit, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mP5ZVPwP7bg : people hate being watched. Doing it with machines is an exploit for the human psyche.

Re: Clear backpacks, monitored emails: U.S. students under constant surveillance

#315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My local corner shop has about 16 CCTV cameras in it, covering as many angles in the shop as they can. This is common. Very common. I'm totally OK with that kind of apparently 'pervasive' CCTV coverage - we're not talking government-owned networked cameras linked up to face/gait/whatever recognition systems or deep cold storage banks, we're talking small store-owners keeping an eye on junkies and thieves. The oft-reg…

Mind showing me a camera that you can definitively say the government (or other actors) don't have the potential for backdoor access to? I certainly can't.

Any CCTV system that's air-gapped from the internet (records to local storage only) reasonably meets this definition.

Yes, there are possible exfil paths, but not ones that can reasonably be executed on a large scale. Realistically, the danger from break-in and hard drive theft (or warrant/subpoena) is greater for the average user.

Re: Clear backpacks, monitored emails: U.S. students under constant surveillance

#316
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that the law in most (all?) states now in USA, that you need a license to possess a gun legally (ie need to be an authorised person)? This sounds more like, in common with most polls, it shows how the manner of asking a question alters the answers given? I'd be really interested in how the poll would go without "the police and other", and with using a construction based on "allow ..." instead of "ban ...".

You don't need a license to posses a gun in many (most?) states. You do need a federal background check to purchase a gun from a vendor. And a license to carry a concealed gun. But as far as owning a gun, no license needed in any state I've lived in.

So anyone can have a gun, you just have to get someone else to purchase it?

I was under the apparent misapprehension that the license you needed to purchase a gun was an ownership license - ie you got the right to own, then could purchase.

Re: Clear backpacks, monitored emails: U.S. students under constant surveillance

#317

Unpopular opinion: make private gun ownership illegal instead of forcing kids to be monitored to make sure they're not carrying

yeah it'll be like when we made heroin illegal and then there was no more heroin.

Re: Clear backpacks, monitored emails: U.S. students under constant surveillance

#318

THIS IS NOT OKAY. We can't have children being used to constant surveillance and accepting this as a part of life. It sets them up for so many problems in the future, where they won't understand the serious implications of constant tracking and surveillance. And sure, nothing too bad comes out of this stuff right now in most of the world, but have you seen China? The minute a government decides to do so, all that dat…

The flip side of the coin is that kids learn from a very early age what it takes to slip past the surveillance net. The smart ones watch everyone around them get caught for infractions. Taking note. Quietly gathering data. Towing the line, purposely being caught for the occasional minor infraction so as not to appear too good to be true. Until one day, they disappear from prison in the middle of a storm and take the…

My daughters teacher was monitoring her and her friend instant-messaging each other on school issued laptops.

The got around it by using a Google doc to chat in real-time.

Re: Clear backpacks, monitored emails: U.S. students under constant surveillance

#319
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument is very, very weak whataboutism. Just because people die of other things more frequently does not mean that you are not supposed to prevent deaths. Your argument suggests that we should not be bothering with a justice system at all, because far more people die of cancer and heart disease than are murdered or crippled, therefore it would be dumb to put any money down for preventing and prosecuting murder…

Do you have any evidence that clear backpacks have a meaningful impact of deaths in schools from guns? Is that impact sufficient to warrant the culture of fear that is being incolcated into these poor kids? It's not whataboutism, it's cost benefit analysis.

> It's not whataboutism, it's cost benefit analysis.

GP didn't make that analysis; they merely implied that nothing should be done about school shootings because more kids get run over. That's whataboutism in its purest form: "We should doo something about school shootings!" - "But what about all the kids getting run over???"

Re: Clear backpacks, monitored emails: U.S. students under constant surveillance

#320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"gun restrictions only benefit criminals" All the data from other countries that god rid of guns supports the opposite of this. Show some statistics or stop saying this. "are you gonna make cars illegal too?" Ones that can be easily used to kill people? Hopefully, eventually, yes. We already heavily restrict them, license them carefully, track them meticulously, require them to be registered, and constantly improve t…

Go ahead and compare rural US where all the guns are to rural Europe. Similar rates of crime and violence. Take out the major US metropolitan areas that have gun control and see what happens to your comparisons. When you compare an island the size of Mississippi with 29 citizens of 250k population and a much larger homogenous population, historically weak self-defense and higher reliance on government, etc etc to the…

>major US metropolitan areas that have gun control

They don't have gun control in the sense that the UK and most other European countries have gun control. You can even get a permit to carry a concealed weapon in NYC, for example.

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