09.15.13
California Snitching — or NSAs for high schools
Private-sectored, and off-shored to foreign workers, the advancing innovation of global networked services, case GEO Listening, hired by Glendale School District to snoop on students on social media.
Most relevant, from the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
“This is the government essentially hiring a contractor to stalk the social media of the kids,” said Lee Tien, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that defends privacy, free speech and consumer rights.
“When the government — and public schools are part of the government — engages in any kind of line-crossing and to actually go and gather information about people away from school, that crosses a line,” Tien said …
“People say that’s not private: It’s public on Facebook. I say that’s just semantics. The question is what is the school doing? It’s not stumbling into students — like a teacher running across a student on the street. This is the school sending someone to watch them,” Tien said.
Sending someone to watch them, also in their off time.
“To do the work, [GEO Listening] employs no more than 10 full-time staffers — as well as ‘a larger portion’ of contract workers across the globe who labor a maximum of four hours a day because ‘the content they read is so dark and heavy,'” the company’s CEO told CNN.
One is sure that in the sharing economy, the larger portion of contract workers is due to the fact they’re so much cheaper to use than full-time Americans. Digital snitching, like everything else you can do via remote, cheaper with offshore labor and no payroll taxes, benefits, minimum wage, or anything.
The high end American spying companies choose to fill National Security Agency contracts, you see. National secrets need protecting. Kid’s stuff, well, not so much, apparently.