School Paid Ex-FBI Agent $157,000 to Spy on Kids’ Facebook Pages

Remember that bizarre news item about a school
district deciding to monitor its students’ Facebook accounts

on advice from the NSA? Alabama.com pursued the story and

discovered that the district paid $500,000 over the last two
years to several employees at a consulting firm tasked with
handling cyber surveillance. That figure includes $157,000 for
Chris McCrae, a former FBI agent and security expert.

When administrators monitor students’ private, non-school,
online activities, who is harmed? Mostly black kids, as it turns
out:

On Oct. 30, Huntsville City Schools provided records showing the
system expelled 305 students last year. Of those, 238 were
black.

That means 78 percent of all expulsions involved black children
in a system where 40 percent of students are black. Expulsions
related to social media investigations through the SAFe program
were a small part of that total. Of those 14 expulsions related to
SAFe, 86 percent involved black students.

Some people think those numbers are evidence of deliberate
racial profiling on the part of the watchers. (For what it’s worth,
the only black member of the school board, Laurie McCaulley,
suggested that perhaps more black students were up to no good than
white students.)

The system relies on a network of snooping: Teachers,
administrators, parents, and students are supposed to watch out for
online postings about guns, drugs, and gang activity, and then
inform the security team. It’s easy to see why that kind of thing
could be abused. And in fact, a local civics association activist
believes McCrae’s gang is monitoring her as well:

Jeannee Gannuch, co-founder of the South Huntsville Civic
Association, said after the online program came to light, she
noticed T&W was following her civic group on Facebook. Gannuch,
who has at times been critical of city officials, said she blocked
the consulting firm.

“My tax dollars are paying for a hired hand to watch a political
organization? That doesn’t seem right,” said Gannuch.

School security forces should at least restrict their Orwellian
spying networks to activities that happen during school hours,
within school walls.