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AI Is Supercharging Child Surveillance and the School-to-Prison Pipeline
Controversial, data-driven technologies are showing up in public schools nationwide at alarming rates. AI-enabled systems such as facial recognition, predictive policing, geolocation tracking, student device monitoring and even aerial drones are commonplace in public schools.
For example, a recent national survey of educators found that over 88% of schools use student device monitoring, 33% use facial recognition and 38% share student data with law enforcement. Many of these tools are designed for military use and routinely used by authoritarian regimes to repress ethnic minorities — making their use in schools all the more frightening.
The harms of these technologies are not evenly shared. Research shows that these tools disproportionately affect Black youth, youth with disabilities, immigrant youth, LGBTQ youth and youth in low-income communities. For example, researchers at Johns Hopkins University found that schools with large surveillance infrastructure suspend students at higher rates, leading to worse academic outcomes for Black students.
Despite the prolific use of these technologies, there are still solutions to undo digital authoritarianism in America’s public schools.
The clearest solution is a ban on using federal funds for schools to purchase these technologies in the first place. Federal funding is a driving force behind the widespread adoption of these technologies. Eliminating federal funds as a revenue source for school districts to procure these systems will go a long way in addressing this challenge.
U.S. Senator Calls for the Public Release of AT&T ‘Hemisphere’ Surveillance Records
U.S. Senator Ron Wyden wants the public to know about the details surrounding the long-running Hemisphere phone surveillance program. Wyden has written U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland a letter (PDF), asking him to release additional information about the project that apparently gives law enforcement agencies access to trillions of domestic phone records.
In addition, he said that federal, state, local and Tribal law enforcement agencies have the ability to request “often-warrantless searches” from the project’s phone records that AT&T has been collecting since 1987.
The Hemisphere project first came to light in 2013 when The New York Times reported that the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) was paying AT&T to mine and keep records of its customers’ phone calls. Four billion new records are getting added to its database every day, and a federal or state law enforcement agency can request a query with a subpoena that they can issue themselves.
The project has been defunded and refunded by the government several times over the past decade and was even, at one point, receiving federal funding under the name “Data Analytical Services (DAS).” Usually, projects funded by federal agencies would be subject to a mandatory Privacy Impact Assessment conducted by the Department of Justice, which means their records would be made public.
“I have serious concerns about the legality of this surveillance program, and the materials provided by the DOJ contain troubling information that would justifiably outrage many Americans and other members of Congress,” Wyden wrote in his letter.
Healthcare Workers Opt Out of COVID Shots: CDC
Becker’s Hospital Review reported:
Many healthcare workers at hospitals and nursing homes are choosing not to stay up to date with their COVID-19 vaccinations now that mandates are no longer in effect, especially in certain parts of the country, according to a CDC study published Nov 10.
The finding is from a CDC analysis of approximately 7.7 million healthcare personnel working in 4,057 acute care hospitals and approximately 1.6 million healthcare personnel working at 13,794 nursing homes during the 2022–23 influenza season (October 1, 2022, to March 31, 2023).
The analysis findings show that up-to-date COVID-19 vaccination coverage was 17.2% overall among the hospital workers. Coverage was highest in the Pacific region (28.9%) and lowest in the Mountain region (9.1%). There were no substantial differences by staff member type.
People Who Stuck by U.K. COVID Rules Have Worst Mental Health, Says Survey
People who stuck by COVID lockdown rules the most strictly have the worst mental health today, research has found. Those who followed the restrictions most closely when the pandemic hit are the most likely to be suffering from stress, anxiety and depression, academics at Bangor University have found.
They identified that people with “communal” personalities — who are more caring, sensitive and aware of others’ needs — adhered the most rigorously to the lockdown protocols that Boris Johnson and senior medics and scientists recommended.
“The more individuals complied with health advice during lockdown, the worse their wellbeing post-lockdown,” concluded Dr Marley Willegers and colleagues.
The researchers based their findings on a study of how compliant with the rules 1,729 people in Wales were during the first U.K.-wide lockdown in March to September 2020 and measures of stress, anxiety and depression found among them from February to May this year.
If OpenAI’s Board Was Trying to Save Humanity From Sam Altman, It Failed. So It’s Time to Come Clean.
The bizarre soap opera that is OpenAI has entered its fifth day. As yet, there is no formal resolution, but as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said on TV, the practical outcome is known: OpenAI employees will continue to build OpenAI’s products, and Sam Altman will continue to lead them.
It’s still not clear why the OpenAI board fired Altman. The stated reason — that he lied to them — has not held up under scrutiny. As Business Insider’s Kali Hays reported, when asked for specifics about Altman’s alleged dishonesty, one of the board members who ousted him gave two vague and flimsy examples, neither of which — even if fairly represented — seems like a firing offense.
But, as Business Insider’s Alistair Barr has argued, if the goal of the three remaining OpenAI Board members is to save humans from OpenAI’s product, it’s time for those board members to say so.
Personally, I don’t think the three remaining OpenAI board members have as much control over the future of AI and the fate of the universe as they may think. If it’s so easy to build a Cylon empire, then one of the dozens of other companies that are racing to advance AI will probably do it, even if OpenAI doesn’t.
