MinnPost photo by Tony Nelson

Minnetonka Public Schools Superintendent Dennis Peterson signed a three-year contract, at $23,500 annually, with a company that pledged to alert the district to threats shared publicly.

A few months ago, MinnPost reported on a concerning contract between Social Sentinel (a surveillance company) and Minnetonka Public Schools that largely went under the radar. A growing number of surveillance and data-sharing efforts have emerged in the Twin Cities in recent years using a mix of tactics to spy on youth. Tapping into public fears related to school shootings, bullying, and unfounded fears regarding the threat of terrorism, surveillance efforts have become rationalized as an acceptable prevention practice at the expense of young peoples civil rights and free expression. The idea that patterns of behavior can be tracked and used to identify the warning signs of potential violence continues to have a firm footing within our school system.

Tracking of behavior classification, intervention, and academic performance are now becoming the basis for surveillance of youth with unaddressed needs. Measures like these further distance us from addressing the root causes that fuel crime and incarceration. It is an investment in the permanence of rigid inequities and continued reliance on punitive measures. In lieu of an investment in qualitative approaches to community and relationship, there is now an incentive to militarize the relationship between young people and those whove promised to protect them. What this does is serve the interest of corporate analytics companies and law enforcement bodies by well-meaning school administrators who are in search of low-cost ways to promote safety at the expense of students greater well-being. The missing piece is the aim to address the needs of children/youth and their families. In these quiet, seemingly innocuous ways, the unobjectionable language of surveillance has crept into our schools.

Here are some examples of how surveillance has materialized in our schools in addition to Minnetonka Public Schools agreement with social media surveillance firm Social Sentinel:

We believe these aforementioned programs are indicative of surveillance systems due to a number of characteristics, including:

The stated purpose behind many of these efforts is to streamline the availability of services for communities experiencing disparities or inequities. The optimistic take on this would have us believe that the algorithms on which these programs are built are objective and evidence-based. Experience tells us otherwise.

Instead, algorithmic decisions are the product of inputs which themselves are premised on biased information, and often lead to silly interpretations. Consider this fact from the Brennan Center for Justice: Algorithmic tone and sentiment analysis, which senior DHS officials have suggested is being used to analyze social media, is even less accurate. One tool flagged posts in English by black and Hispanic users like Bored af den my phone finna die!!!! (which can be loosely translated as Im bored as f*** and then my phone is going to die) as Danish with 99.9 percent confidence.

Writer and philosopher Emma Goldman once said, A society gets all the criminals it deserves. What she meant, of course, is that criminality is defined by the powers-that-be, and in some societies, that they mirror the values, biases, and priorities of those in power. Put simply, what we invest in says a lot about what and who we value, as well as the ways in which conversations around public safety are framed to tee up policies/practices around security. The fact that our schools continue to invest heavily in surveillance efforts says more about our distrust of children/youth and our commitment to cultivating the cradle-to-prison algorithm. Because it is easier to fix broken people than to do the work of transforming a broken system, those in power are exploiting the struggles of some students mostly poor youth of color to justify disproportionate scrutiny.

Ramla Bile

Dominique Diaddigo-Cash

In fact, the Brennan Center reports that social media monitoring has been used to target racial and religious minorities, and to police speech that is seen as dissent. From the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to the current Black Lives Matter movement (labeled Black identity extremists), activists have been targeted by law enforcement bodies through surveillance tactics at the expense of the civil, political, and human rights. In the early adoption of programs such as the one in Minnetonka, little consideration has been given to the impact of such programs on the civil rights of children, youth, and their families, particularly since:

Kids do better when they are connected to caring adults, and when we can create a community of belonging that embraces the whole child. We cant replace the need for human-to-human connection with analytics systems. And while private corporations rush in with prescribed solutions to the behavior problem with no lens for equity or racial analysis on how surveillance works, were exposing our children to law enforcement. In addition to grossly violating the privacy of children/youth, we need to acknowledge that surveillance is a form of systemic racism. Institutional surveillance is a leading contributor to mass incarceration. Normalizing such practices minimizes the harmful impact of surveillance.

Ramla Bile is a Twin Cities-based writer and activist who challenges the surveillance apparatus and the ways systems criminalize BIPOC communities. Dominique Diaddigo-Cash is a writer and community organizer whose life and work explores the impacts of state violence on marginalized peoples and identities.

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The surveillance-industrial complex is targeting our kids - MinnPost