Protect Public School Students from Surveillance of Off-Campus Speech
11 comments
·November 27, 2025vjvjvjvjghv
I am thinking more and more that a total surveillance state is basically inevitable as technology progresses. Governments will have the data and companies will have it too. Right now we are building up the infrastructure for a future totalitarian regime.
p_ing
EFF goes on about how speech has been protected off campus in various cases, but what about Bong Hits 4 Jesus where the Supreme Court ruled that the school did not violate First Amendment rights with suspension?
In that case, the student was off school grounds across from the high school.
Was Morse v. Frederick case law overturned in later cases?
And I could just be completely reading this incorrectly, too.
gruez
>but what about Bong Hits 4 Jesus where the Supreme Court ruled that the school did not violate First Amendment rights with suspension?
>In that case, the student was off school grounds across from the high school.
The wikipedia summary is actually:
>the Court held, 5–4, that the First Amendment does not prevent educators from prohibiting or punishing student speech that is reasonably viewed as promoting illegal drug use at a school-sanctioned event.[1][2]
So the parts you're failing to mention is that it's a school sanctioned event, and that it's promoting illegal drug use. Based on the examples in the EFF blog post, it's clear that those are not the cases that EFF is objecting to, for instance:
>Surveillance Software Exposed a Bad Joke Made in the Privacy of a Student’s Home
I agree that using school devices can be vaguely construed as being similar to "school-sanctioned event", but it's not the same, for the reasons outlined in EFF's blog post.
hn_acker
The original title is:
> EFF to Arizona Federal Court: Protect Public School Students from Surveillance and Punishment for Off-Campus Speech
bell-cot
At what point could one argue that school-supplied Big Brother tech in students' homes constitutes a violation of both the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Amendment_to_the_United_... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Amendment_to_the_United... ?
Spooky23
What a bizarre case. I’m a technology person and late Gen-X. The only tech in my school were lab computers and Ti-81/82 calculators, and I’ve been increasingly leery of the technology in schools since about 4th grade. Before that, they occasionally used iPads for a few things.
Now that my son is in 8th grade, the whole Chromebook phenomenon is something I find gross. Kids don’t read books. The various assessment products are gross and stress inducing, and the tools used for math, especially graphing, make trivial assignments incredibly difficult.
I hate to sound like an old man. But between worse educational products, corporate surveillance tools applied to children and cheap, hard to use devices, I miss books.
tclancy
You are an old man: kids didn’t read books back when we were kids either. I did and you probably did, but that’s doesn’t mean most people did. And it doesn’t mean that kids aren’t curious or learning.
mystraline
I guess learning "someone elses' computer isn't yours" is a lesson best taught early on?
I know fellow millenials that use their work computers for personal reasons. And thats some of the stupidest things you can do. Dont use work or school hardware for personal reasons.
I'd also say, if you're running Windows you're also surveilled to hell and back as well. Linux is basically the only platform thats not.
And as to larger surveillance, its pervading everywhere. Work. School. Driving (Flock). Commercial web. "Free" services.
I'm glad I grew up in one of the last generations that wasn't habitually online. I did loads of "troublesome behavior", that never followed me. Now, some thing will be captured with a smartphone and memorialized forever. And that... Alas. (Old man yelling at cloud, I guess?)
zrail
Yep. I treat work computers as hostile entities. They are always on an isolated guest SSID and VLAN and I never use them for personal tasks.
When my kids start bringing school-owned hardware home that's getting the same treatment.
NoMoreNicksLeft
There are so many lessons going unlearned here. People who surrender their children to the government are upset that they aren't de-surrendered later in the evening once the child arrives physically at home. Even if they win the court battle, they've lost the philosophical one a long time ago.
I wonder, if the device is equipped with a microphone and/or a webcam, does it mean that the school has the right to remotely activate them for "monitoring" purposes? It not too far from what they did when the monitoring software sent the screenshots of an email that never existed.
And what if he joked about stabbing his girlfriend/boyfriend? Would the school report him to the police? What the police would do in this case?