| High school Student Expelled For Dropping F-bomb In Tweet From The Register:
An Indiana student has been expelled from school after sending a profane – if rather witty – tweet from his personal account.
Austin Carroll, formerly of Garrett High School, claims he sent the offending tweet out of school hours using his home computer, but an automatic monitoring system for pupil's tweets set up by the school recorded it as coming from one of the computers on campus. Carroll was summarily expelled from the school, and local police were called after fellow students protested the incident.
"If my account is on my own personal account, I don't think the school or anybody should be looking at it. Because it's my own personal stuff and it's none of their business," Carroll told Indiana News Center. |
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 AVDRespice, Adspice, ProspicePremium
join:2003-02-06
Onion, NJ
kudos:1 | Holy Shit! This is public school? |
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 Noah VailSon made my AvatarPremium
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Lorton, VA
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 ·Bright House
| reply to FF4me
As it stands now, this story doesn't make the first bit of sense.
First:
Since when does a non-charter public school take a position on crap-talk?
Second:
He says he sent the tweet while he was home. The school says he sent it while in school.
The first news outlet that asks about the time-stamp on the tweet gets a "Good Job!" sticker from me.
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| reply to AVD
More discussion @ TechDirt:
»High" >www.techdirt.com/articles/201203···ml">High School Student Expelled For Tweeting Profanity;
Principal Admits School Tracks All Tweets:
from the hello-free-speech-rights dept |
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 KilroyPremium,MVM
join:2002-11-21
Ann Arbor, MI | reply to FF4me
From a quick Google search of the school it looks to be a public school. The tweat looks to be from 2:30 a.m., one would expect outside of school hours and not on school equipment.
I'm seeing all kinds of first amendment issues with this.
Bottom line, are we honestly so tight that a word or idea is sufficient to expel a student?
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 BlackbirdBuilt for SpeedPremium
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Fort Wayne, IN
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2 edits | reply to FF4me
From the original article: quote:
The principal at Garrett High School claims their system tracks all the tweets on Twitter when a student logs in, meaning even if he did tweet it from home their system could have recognized it when he logged in again at school.
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Indiana's NewCenter (sic) reached out to the school's administration. The principal refused to comment on camera at the request of the school's attorney.
This cries out for somebody with some Twitter technical understanding... and that's not me. The school would have some legitimate responsibility for things sent out over their own network/system. The technical question, IMO, is how does the Garrett system track "all" Twitter tweets when a student logs in, and what does that mean exactly in this situation?
That is, did the student actually send the tweet while at home, or did it stay in some kind of outbox "to-be-sent" limbo and finally get sent at school when he logged in there? Is the school's tracking system automatically able to pull down all prior tweets from a student's Twitter account once he logs in at school... and, if so, what responsibility (if any) might it have to look at those in order to gauge context of a school-sent tweet over which it does have some responsibility?
At this point, the lawyers are in it, and the school's clammed up.
edited to add: Note: "Indiana's NewsCenter" is a regional TV-station news service that shares its material with partnered radio and newspaper outlets.
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| said by Blackbird:At this point, the lawyers are in it, and the school's clammed up.
The lawyers need to be in it - and not just in defense of the school.
For the kid, the punishment doesn't fit the "crime." But the punishment has revealed a much larger issue as far as what the school's been up to.
Somebody needs to get to the bottom of this whole policy plus exactly how the school is monitoring all tweets. If this was sent from the kid's home, I smell liability. |
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BlackbirdBuilt for SpeedPremium
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| reply to FF4me
And this just released a couple of hours ago: Garrett High School senior suspended for "f-word" tweet
quote:
... Garrett-Keyser-Butler Schools superintendent Dennis Stockdale wouldn't confirm whether Austin Carroll, 17, was suspended or expelled for posting an inappropriate tweet on a personal Twitter account last week.
Stockdale said he cannot talk specifically about the case, but did give a statement. “Garrett-Keyser-Butler Schools has not suspended or expelled any student for using their personal electronic device inappropriately on their own network, including this situation,” he said.
Stockdale said the school district has disciplined students who inappropriately use the school’s network or its electronic devices, including iPads or Macbooks.
Carroll’s mother, Pam Smith, told KPC News that her son will not be able to finish his senior year with classmates, can't attend the senior prom nor attend commencement practices. He will be allowed to participate in graduation, but will receive a blank diploma that night. Stockdale will give him the signed document following the ceremony.
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Smith and her son contend his obscene Twitter feeds were sent from his home computer through their personal Internet provider. But when his IP account was uploaded at school, the tweets reportedly showed on his school account, Smith said.
Smith and her son were called to the school principal’s office March 12 regarding the incident, and administrators showed her printouts of the tweets. Smith said she has not seen complete documentation regarding IP reports and times.
Stockdale said federal law allows the school to filter content used by students.
...
There still remains the technical-realm question of just what is meant by "...when his IP account was uploaded at school..." But the drift of this article seems to indicate this episode is now moving toward the category of "degree-of-punishment" in the minds of the players involved, rather than freedom-of-speech issues... so we may never figure out exactly what occurred technically and how. Time (and further news releases) will tell...
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Noah VailSon made my AvatarPremium
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I don't have a problem with the school tracking what the students post in a public arena.
If school officials were forbidden from tracking;
would they also be forbidden from looking at information that's already tracked/stored by social media sites?
If not, then what's the point? If so, how do you enforce that?
I'll add one caveat.
Any information collected is verifiably destroyed, as soon as the student is no longer active in the school system.
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 MikePremium,Mod
join:2000-09-17
Pittsburgh, PA
kudos:1 | reply to FF4me
What school system can afford books... let alone a twitter tracking system? |
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BlackbirdBuilt for SpeedPremium
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| said by Mike:What school system can afford books... let alone a twitter tracking system?
I suspect that the system is a generic, industrial-grade, content-filtering system... and the tweets simply get scooped up and filtered, just like anything else. In this region (and Garrett is only a handful of miles from here), some schools are even providing iPads to students, while a great many school systems have adopted various kinds of content filtering for their school networks.
Since there are so few "hard" details on this, it is tempting to focus on the ones that have been provided. Is it possible that the student was using an iPad or Macbook to access his Twitter account, both from home and at school - and in technical terms, might that mean that all the tweets (or at least recent ones) in that account would be somehow downloaded each time he logged in? If so, then those tweets would also pass through the school's network/system when he logged in there... and that would supply a potential mechanism for the school's filtering system to trap the offending tweet and flag it.
If this is anywhere close in describing what may have occurred, it raises some thorny complications for public institutions and applying filtering systems on their networks. The superintendent stated that the school had a legal ability to filter content used by students... so would that also include "content" contained in their own created messages while off-campus, particularly if that was done automatically in the context of how a particular device and account worked? If so, how far do those in charge go in "filtering" in terms of time and nature of content? With technology evolving so rapidly, there will likely be a lot more of these kinds of flare-ups ahead
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 XiodenPremium
join:2008-06-10
Monticello, NY
kudos:1 | reply to Mike
The money they save not buying books was used for the twitter tracking system, duh! |
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MikePremium,Mod
join:2000-09-17
Pittsburgh, PA
kudos:1 | reply to Blackbird
I said "shit" in 6th grade and a teacher told me to watch my god damn mouth.
Times have changed I guess... |
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BlackbirdBuilt for SpeedPremium
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| said by Mike:I said "shit" in 6th grade and a teacher told me to watch my god damn mouth.
Times have changed I guess...
But apparently, not for you... 
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 rcdaileyDragoonflyPremium
join:2005-03-29
Rialto, CA | reply to Mike
Life was so much simpler then. |
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 MaxoYour tax dollars at work.Premium,VIP
join:2002-11-04
Tallahassee, FL | reply to FF4me
Monitoring tweets isn't really that hard, and if you are sending them out publicly there is no expectation of privacy.
Given that »twitter.com redirects to »twitter.com/, routers at the school wouldn't be able to monitor who is sending what. The school would be able to know when a tweet is sent out, and then have a timestamp match from a public search.
This does seem like a lot to go through for a public school just to make sure those who send out tweets with bad language don't get an education.
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| The only function of a public school is to teach authority and demand everyone to submit to state power.
It's certainly not education.... apparently.
How did they get student's twitter accounts?
If they're whining about just using twitter at school, pretty sure that's not worth expulsion.
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 BlitzenZeusBurnt Out CynicPremium
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| They took zero tolerance to new levels of idiocy. Hell the only time I got in trouble in school was when somebody else tried to beat me up, and they lost, hell I didn't even know who they were, yet I was still suspended for defending myself as I wasn't going to lay down like a pussy. Even if I didn't fight back with their polices just being involved in a fight would get the student suspended out of zero tolerance bullshit.
Now they want to monitor students, and punish them for what they do outside of school. Then they run to their lawyers, and the police when they are challenged for going beyond their legal reach.
I'd like them to prove that they did the tweet on the school network at 2:30 am, and not somebody/something just reading their feed over the network. Pure idiocy, however they will never admit fault without a lawsuit, and even when they know they will not win try for a settlement to absolve them of the guilt without having to admit it.
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MaxoYour tax dollars at work.Premium,VIP
join:2002-11-04
Tallahassee, FL | reply to Mike
said by Mike:The only function of a public school is to teach authority and demand everyone to submit to state power. As the husband of a teacher, and since I know many who work in various levels of education, I can say this absolutely not true.
Some schools may do this, and I don't doubt that they do, but to say that it is the only function of public schools is hyperbole.
Conformity is absolutely taught in schools, and many educators are pretty open about this.
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OZOPremium
join:2003-01-17
kudos:2 | reply to FF4me
Logs show school's IP address? My be it's because student used VPN to the school at the time, when he tweeted? And if VPN was setup with "remote gateway" (sending all packets via VPN and not vial local router), all IP packets could be filtered in school's router. Even more, he may talk via school's proxy, instead of connecting directly to the tweet.com. It's all possible with an "adjusted" DNS support, they provide. But I agree - they better spend money on books, than assemble and maintain sophisticated tracking system, teaching students totalitarian lessons...
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