Still can’t find a diaper wearing wannabe Rambo in the Pennsylvania woods.
Via AL Com
A secret program to monitor students’ online activities began quietly in Huntsville schools, following a phone call from the NSA, school officials say.
Huntsville schools Superintendent Casey Wardynski says the system began monitoring social media sites 18 months ago, after the National Security Agency tipped the school district to a student making violent threats on Facebook.
The NSA, a U.S. agency responsible for foreign intelligence, this week said it has no record of a call to Huntsville and does not make calls to school systems.
Regardless of how the program started, Huntsville City Schools began scanning Facebook and other sites for signs of gang activity, watching for photos of guns, photos of gang signs and threats of violence.
The Huntsville monitoring program is called SAFe, or Students Against Fear. School board members said they did not know about the program when contacted last week.[…]
Al Lankford, the city’s longtime school security officer, told AL.com that he took the NSA phone call. He said security officers went to the high school and eventually searched the boy’s car.
“We found a very good size knife and the student was expelled,” said Wardynski, a former U.S. Army colonel appointed as superintendent in Huntsville in 2011.
NSA did not acknowledge placing such a call. “The National Security Agency has no record that it passed any information to the Huntsville school district, and the description of what supposedly occurred is inconsistent with NSA’s practices,” said Vanee Vines, public affairs specialist with the NSA, on Monday.
The NSA is focused on foreign intelligence. Vines said any information about a domestic safety issue would be sent to another federal agency, like the FBI. “Moreover, NSA does not make recommendations regarding school safety programs,” said Vines via email.[…]
Huntsville is not alone in the practice. A company called Geo Listening watches social media for school districts including Glendale, Calif. Their web site reads: “Geo Listening’s unique monitoring service will process, analyze and report the adverse social media from publicly available student posts… We align our reporting criteria with existing school district procedures and board policy as they relate to student conduct & safety.”