The ideas seem sound. Adults can’t possibly see and hear everything that happens on a school campus, so startups are marketing automated surveillance solutions to cover the gaps. One company says their facial recognition systems could have prevented the Parkland massacre. Another startup specializing in gunshot detection says its ‘aggression detectors’ can alert staff to violence before it even happens. But politicians, public school administrators, and teachers might not be in the best position to determine the efficacy of these programs. A recent report from Pro Publica and Wired showed that aggression detectors are basically useless. After extensive testing and experimentation they determined that these systems were inexplicably prone to both false-positives and missing auditory signs of aggression all together. According to their findings: And those facial recognition systems? They’re a logistical nightmare that rely on aggressors to follow a very specific protocol. Kevin Freiburger, director of identity solutions at Valid told TNW: We found that higher-pitched, rough and strained vocalizations tended to trigger the algorithm. For example, it frequently triggered for sounds like laughing, coughing, cheering and loud discussions. While female high school students tended to trigger false positives when singing, laughing and speaking, their high-pitched shrieking often failed to do so. The problem here is that, for this to work, schools have to become like prisons. Locking down a campus is only effective if the entire compound is secure enough to prevent ingress. Worse, in order to deny a potential shooter entry, they need to be on a banned list and the AI has to recognize their face. While this sort of system may have prevented Cruz from entering because he was no longer a student, it wouldn’t have prevented Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold from entering Columbine High School had this technology been available and in use 20 years ago. In the case of Nikolas Cruz, who was charged with killing 17 people at a Florida high school, he had already trespassed at the school previously and was escorted off the property and banned with standing orders to not allow him entrance to the building(s). Could a facial recognition-based access control system have produced a different outcome? In other words: audio monitoring and facial recognition may alert authorities once a shooting begins – and thus potentially save lives by reducing response time – but they probably won’t be able to stop or prevent catastrophic violence in schools. TNW spoke to Sean McGrath, a digital privacy expert at ProPrivacy, who told us: The bigger problem here is that AI-powered audio and video surveillance is becoming accepted as a way of life for US citizens — much like it is in China — and the government’s claiming it’s for our own good, but experts say it won’t solve the problems it’s being deployed for. If our privacy is being eroded, we should get something tangible in return. The reality is that these technologies pose a much greater threat to society than the threat faced by mass violence. It’s perfectly understandable that academic institutions and other organizations would want to utilize any and all tools in order to safeguard the public, but listening technologies are nothing more than a form of function creep. This isn’t to say AI shouldn’t be used to mitigate the violence problem in the US. AI, as a general technology, can certainly intervene in situations where violence has occurred. For example, Freiburger also told us: But these systems are reactive and targeted. They don’t record everything your children say and do in schools, and they don’t claim to actually stop or prevent mass violence. Audio and video surveillance, even when powered by AI, can’t intervene before a shooting occurs. Social media crawlers – targeted surveillance AI that searches student social media accounts for threats – on the other hand, use publicly available data to do just that. McGrath thinks we should focus on fighting the root causes of violence in society rather than adopting “just-in-time” mass-surveillance technologies. He continues: But it might be too late for the US to extricate mass-surveillance systems from the public or start regulating these so-called solutions to mass violence. They’re already in our public schools, libraries, and mass-transit systems. As David Carroll, the US professor who took on Cambridge Analytica, puts it: the US and China are both surveillance states, China just embraces it.
