Arrested and strip-searched for a first offense? That’s fucking ridiculous. I hope the lawsuit succeeds. It’s the only peaceful tool we have to curb over-zealous law enforcement.
Before the morning was even over, the Tennessee eighth grader was under arrest. She was interrogated, strip-searched and spent the night in a jail cell, her mother says.
Earlier in the day, her friends had teased the teen about her tanned complexion and called her “Mexican,” even though she’s not. When a friend asked what she was planning for Thursday, she wrote: “on Thursday we kill all the Mexico’s.”
This is an ass-covering response to school shootings, because some of the shooters have expressed their intent before.
A strip search obviously isn’t necessary even if it’s a credible threat; a metal detector wand and basic pat down is more than enough to ensure someone doesn’t have a gun. This wasn’t a credible threat though, and a chat with the school counselor would have been the right way to handle this.
Yeah, that was my first thought too. I can see the need to take anything that resembles an actionable threat seriously, but that poor kid did not deserve to be abused by law enforcement like that.
no paywall https://archive.md/1lSRA
I got a captcha on the archive, but was able to read the original just fine. I guess archives are not necessarily lower barrier.
What is sad is that an environment like this ruins someone’s mental health and ironically increasing the overall risk of violence.
Don’t remember whose quote it was, maybe Hannah Arendt, that the real tragedy of tyranny is not when people self-censor what they say out loud, but when this leads them to filter out those thoughts from arising at all
That’s the surveillance panopticon, they know they are being watched, but not when.
The whole trend of teens rejecting phones for dumbphones is making sense now. If you can’t fight big mainstream technology, then fuck big mainstream technology!
As soon as my pixel 8 shits the bed I’m going back to a dumbphone
I’m gonna snag another used Oneplus phone that has decent community love and keep rolling custom roms until Google stops me.
…and once they stop me(in ten years or so), a dumphone with tethering and a secondary device. And if they implant a chip into my brain, I’ll go luddite, live in the woods, read poetry and eat mushrooms.
and then it’s even worse, you go through sms which is even less confidential
…In a way yes, in a way no. A phone that’s SMS and Calls only has a few advantages. One is that other apps can’t spy on SMS because there aren’t other apps to spy on the SMS. The SMS vulnerabilities en-route still exist, sure, but you’re no longer being monitored by Apple, Google or anyone else by default.
Sure, the ideal situation is for all of them to get on Signal, XMPP, Briar, SimpleX… fucking roll a D20. They’re also more about it due to screen-on time than privacy. I don’t think they’re of any belief that privacy is even attainable.
Encrypted messengers for the win
I hope a future where Google is kicked out of Android but that won’t happen
Another school shooting avoided! Just kidding, we just tortured a child for fun.
Which kinda seems like a villain origin story to me.
My sense of humor is dry, dark, and absurdist. I’d go to jail every week for the sorts of things I joke about if I was a kid today. This is complete lunacy.
Example of an average joke on my part: speed up and run over that old lady crossing the street!
It makes my partner laugh. I laugh. We both know I don’t mean it. But a crappy AI tool wouldn’t understand that.
Something tells me that our type of jokes are on the way out bro. As you said, there’s no room for nuance in this story, so I’m afraid we’ll eventually all be listened in on 100% of the time until someone says something ‘actionable’. If you’re not already on a multitude of lists by now, you’re doing something wrong.
My understanding is those types of jokes are now en vogue, at least with Republicans. Wait, maybe it’s only wrong when they’re jokes, but it’s OK when the Republicans are serious about these things.
Depends on the complexion of the old lady crossing the street.
Nah, dark humor is like a child with cancer, it never gets old.
Just don’t allow an ai on the jury. If you are on a jury tell tpe judge you want the prosecuting lawyers disbarred for wasting your time.
Yeah especially around middle school, the “darker” the “joke” the more funny it was
Snapchat’s automated detection software picked up the comment, the company alerted the FBI, and the girl was arrested on school grounds within hours.
Someone should tell the kids about Signal.
As for monitoring on school computers, that seems OK to me if it’s disclosed to the students and parents in advance. What’s problematic is the responses, which seem much more focused on ass-covering than student welfare. I imagine most 13 year olds have made jokes about killing people once or twice and any adult with common sense would be able to tell they’re jokes.
In a country weary of school shootings, several states have taken a harder line on threats to schools. Among them is Tennessee, which passed a 2023 zero-tolerance law requiring any threat of mass violence against a school to be reported immediately to law enforcement.
The 13-year-old girl arrested in August 2023 had been texting with friends on a chat function tied to her school email at Fairview Middle School, which uses Gaggle to monitor students’ accounts.
- how to teach kids to be a good corpo zombie. On corporate/school chat you don’t chat otherwise you are sent to camp/prison /fired
- all of that monitoring for school shooting! What about banning gun that will be cheaper but yeah no ai software monitoring
Murica
I just want to point out a lot of you actively support this if it helps curb “hate speech” or fascists or nazis or whatever. But what can be used against the guilty may be used against the innocent so it is best that we do not allow it at all. Either all speech is free or none of it is, there’s no other way.
i do not think you would find many people who actively support the use of artificial intelligence in the monitoring and moderating of hate speech or fascism. those things must be moderated and resisted by people who can be held accountable for mistakes or oversteps, not machines that can not be held accountable for anything.
Or we could have a legislation that would punish the companies that run these bullshit systems AND the authorities that allow and use them when they flop, like in this case.
Hey, dreaming is still free (don’t know how much longer though).
The problem is a societal one. lets see:
- The kids for bullying her for her tan
- The school boards implementing the surveillance
- The parents who allowed such surveillance in the first place
- The person screening what was flagged for not sending the school counselor to talk with the kid
- The person calling the cops
- The cops for arresting an 8th-grader and DOING A STRIP SEARCH AND KEEPING HER OVERNIGHT WTF instead of handing her over to her parents
This has gone through too many hands to even start blaming the companies. anyone in this chain had the opportunity to do the right thing (ok, maybe the teens didn’t, they don’t know any better). Noone did.
Surveillance shouldn’t be so pervasive, but i have no issue with e.g. surveillance in a prison, maybe in a hospital (not in the patient rooms, but to make sure noone steals the good stuff or to make sure no patients are lost in a service tunnel), at a border, inside of police stations to make sure that prisoner rights are upheld, military bases for obvious reasons and so on.
Your society is the issue, and therefor surveillance is everywhere except where it would be useful.
You’re evidently an apologist for these crappy companies.
2 or 3 parents can’t do jack shit to avoid this, short of removing the kids from school and having them homeschooled.
There are 3 main factors that allow this shit to happen:
- Companies with absolutely no values and only focusing on revenue, which ends up creating these bullshit AI “systems” that are broken as hell (Chatgpt 5 anyone?)
- Lack of legislations to serve the people that voted for these legislators to live in a better society, but they choose to self-serve and allow the same shitty companies to do whatever they want AND sell their shit to institutions, like schools, law enforcement and such, so that they can get money from them
- Authorities that use these same broken “systems”, don’t even test them correctly, and take for granted that they will work because they are too fucking lazy to even care, such as schools (that have authority over our kids because we have allowed it) and law enforcement (if they can even still be called that).
There is no way to justify any of the 3 factors as they exist today. These need to change if anything is to get better.
That there are parents that could be doing more to avoid this kind of shit? Absolutely. Will parents pushing for change do anything towards fixing it? Not if the other 3 factors don’t play their part as well.
And the reason fucking kids are so fragile today is because of us allowing everything to be called “bullying”. So, they joked about the tan, big fucking deal. Learn to take a fucking joke or go live in a cave.
Get fucking real.
nah, i don’t like the companies myself, i run my models locally to be independent from them. Venture capital is trying to cram it everywhere, i agree on that point. But the issue in this case is that not one person in the long chain of people did care at all, not that a chatbot flagged the word “kill”; that would have happened with a simple word filter as well.
I also agree that your system is crap and you deserve a better government that cares for people, but since not enough people vote for people and parties like that, we must assume that the majority of voters in the US either dont care or WANT a strong leader to decide for them, they want surveillance to feel save (even tho it doesn’t help with safety at all!), and that this majority is racist as well, or else the skin color of the girl wouldn’t even be a conversation point. It was in the open for what Trump and Project 2025 stood - and they didn’t even stop with the presidency, they gave him the senate too to make sure their agenda gets their way. The rest is simply a consequence of that - this society consists of indifferent, partly hateful, partly racist people.
Kids are brutal and often cruel, especially to their classmates. They brought a girl to the point where she hated the color of her skin so much that she made a “joke” to kill the ethnic group so she wouldn’t be associated with that anymore. Here we are again: hateful, racist people have hateful, racist kids that bully others over skin color.
The solution? I’m not sure. It will take a lot of time and multiple generations; and it probably will only happen if the US loses a lot of it’s power or breaks up into multiple states.
I kind of agree with you. Things in the US (and most of the rest of the world) have taken a turn for the worst. I’ve been digging into all that’s been going on since January, and comparing it with how the nazi party came to be in power in Germany, and the similarities are scary, to say the least. Sure, it’s towards other races more than anything, as well as religions, sexual preferences and other key differentiator, but the core is exactly the same. How the Nazi party got most Germans to believe that being German meant hating jews, blacks and who knows what else, and that’s what made the holocaust so effective. Propaganda pushing hate and dividing the same country. If we go back in history, we can see all the same bullshit propaganda from those days today.
And, full disclosure, I am not opposed to countries controlling illegal immigration, as not doing so is extremely detrimental to any country, however, there is no need to completely destroy people (mentally, spiritually and sometimes even physically) to achieve these goals.
It is as you say. Americans are focused on the lie that surveillance will make them safer, and this government has exacerbated that exponentially in just half a year, using fear as the tool, and fear of immigrants, LGBT people, any skin color difference, and many more.
Now, let’s look at the other side of this. By promoting all this crap, the US has managed to make previous allies look at the possibility of moving to the other side. China, Russia, India and a few more countries have all but created their own “UN”, and contrary to what the media is showing us, they are actually flourishing, which points to a dramatic shift in global politics.
The UK, EU and Australia are leading the surveillance regimes, even for the US (visa, mastercard and steam are US companies, and all 3 were bullied into submission by a fucking Australian NGO, fucking up millions of US gamers in the process, and the authorities of the US haven’t even blinked, WTF?), which is building rapidly into a distrust climate among all allies (assuming they still are).
This is way more complex than war, surveillance, racism, xenophobia and finances, this is the decline of the Roman Empire all over again, bringing with it all the disasters to civilization that comes with this fall.
Money as we knew it doesn’t exist anymore (it hasn’t been based in gold for decades now, and now there is no physical base for it either), values have been stripped from morals in every single community (religious or not), existing weapons could destroy every living being on the planet within a couple of hours, and everyone seems to be blindly following so-called “leaders” that are only looking after their own benefits (and I’m talking about every facet of our civilization: business, work, families, governments, nobody gives a fuck about the common wellbeing anymore).
From my perspective, it falls on each of us to take the best care possible of our families, if and when we achieve this, do the same for our immediate communities, and if that pans out, then each of our countries. But I’m not counting on any “leader” to do what is needed to reverse the downward spiel the whole world is in right now. At this rate, we’re all just going to crash and burn.
Sorry for the horrible and long rant, I am extremely frustrated watching the world my kids will have to try to survive in, and the feeling of helplessness is overwhelming.
How can I say this, if you only dream while sitting on the couch, then alas, everything will end sadly. Although if you implant a neurochip into your brain, then you won’t be able to even dream lol. :3
Nope. It should be reviewed by a human, and the response should be proportionate.
Not just any human. It should be a board certified child psychologist. They would be one of the few who could recognize a legitimate threat/concern or bullying from a poor joke or a stressed-out kid just venting with an empty threat. And on a positive ‘hit’, should just be a visit from the counselor to see what’s going on. IMO, psychologists should also be the only ones allowed to look at any of the info as they should know how to keep private conversations private if intervention is unnecessary.
The idea of the software does show some merits, but it is way, way too underdeveloped and grossly misused to be of any use.
This is frustrating. Obviously it’s not okay to make jokes like that and I even think some sort of punishment might be okay, but strip searching and jailing her overnight? You aren’t creating someone who will think before they speak, you’re making someone who will be paranoid of all legal processes and never trust any government official ever again for anything because they got fucking STRIP SEARCHED AND DETAINED OVERNIGHT over a really shitty joke.
It’s ok to make jokes.
To me this is equivalent to dropping bombs on the Middle East and expecting not to create a lot more terrorists. If she didn’t want to go shooting before maybe she wants to now.
The US will do anything and everything except try proper gun control
Proper gun control? Nah let’s spy on kids
No, rather, to monitor future slaves so that they are obedient.
It’s for the children!!
/s
For them they are not children but rather wolves that can snap, so they try to make them obedient dogs.
You know what really grinds my gears? This shitty dystopia completely eschews any potentially cool aspect of invasive exploitative authoritarianism. The (not so) secret police is patching together their own “uniforms” by browsing the bargain bins at the local tacti-cool mall-ninja outfitters. Where’s the black leather trench coats, stylish sunglasses worn after dark and slicked back hair? If they’re going to ask me for ‘ze papers’ all the time, the least they can do is look cool doing it, godamnit. At least get Hugo Boss to design your attire; that’s just about the only thing that worked out well for the last bunch of pricks.
I mean, where’s the towering brutalist architecture? Where’s my mandatory daily dose of SOMA? Or my idiotically wirelessly hackable cyberware? Hell, they can’t even do bread and circuses right anymore. The bread is CO2-pumped flour glue and the circuses is an endless stream of more Marvel projects and Disney violations of Star Wars.
And don’t get me started on the quality of our dictators these days. They sure don’t make them like they used to.
Can’t they at least smoke cigarettes in a cool and threatening manner?!
I think that’s illegal now too. Can’t have anything interfering with the glorious vision of a relentlessly productive citizenry that ideally slave away for the benefits of their owners until they die in the office chair at age 74 - right before qualifying for pension.
Well, except for the health “care” system. That’s an exception, but only because the only thing better than ruthless exploitation is diversified ruthless exploitation. Gotta keep the peons on their toes, lest they get uppity.
I think one rich man in the past said - I don’t need a nation of thinkers, I need a nation of slaves. Unless I’m mistaken of course. It’s like saying predators have learned not to chase their prey but to raise it, giving it the illusion of freedom, although in fact they are leading it to slaughter like cattle. I like this idea with cattle I couldn’t resist lol. :3
Hey, some of the newer Star Wars stuff is alright! Sometimes!
Mom, can we have Equilibrium at home?
“ICE reached out to both Mr. Bale and Mr. Bean in an attempt to address the current gun-fu deficit of the agency, but regrettably neither had any interest in the job.”
“It made me feel like, is this the America we live in?”
Some people are really fucking ignorant.
Unsurprising to me this is happening in schools, they’ve got to be ready for the low wage retail jobs many will have after graduation. A lot of places have been upgrading their phones to Zoom-enabled devices, which have the ability to record and summarize all employee conversations held near them for management or HR. I’ve worked in a couple places recently where it got rolled out and there were hints they were using it that way.
Anyone willing to call me paranoid, or supportive of the idea this tech is used this way or will be, please respond, retail isn’t really full of many tech savvy people and I’m curious if I’m imagining the capability/use of this, or if others have had similar experiences.
What a shithole country.
