Fantastic fiction author David Drake created several short stories around the concept of a Nation Without Walls, where technology overwhelmed a battered Bill of Rights and resulted in an America with cameras everywhere and privacy a commodity.
How do you get Americans to accept such a notion in real life? You teach them as youngsters in school that eroding rights are a good thing. In the wake of a series of sensationalized school shootings, that is just what is being done, for better or worse.
Jeff
http://inq.philly.com/content/inquirer/2000/12/17/lifestyle/PRIVACY17.htm
Sunday, December 17, 2000
Funny, they don't feel invaded
Today's students happily undergo backpack checks, locker checks, video surveillance, even breath tests. They, and their parents, see these measures not as assaults on privacy, but as protection.
By Lini S. Kadaba
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
Imagine having to take a sobriety test before being admitted to the company Christmas party.
Or having to bring your lunch and paperwork to the office in a mesh briefcase.
Or submitting to having your desk searched.
Outrageous, right?
But not far from the experience of today's teens.
On Monday evening, every single Downingtown High School student attending a "Mr. DHS" pageant in the auditorium had to first pass a test - one that checks for alcohol on the breath.
It was the same for the Homecoming Dance, a high-profile soccer game, and other extracurricular activities over the last 18 months. Before gaining entry, students at the Exton public school are tested with a handheld device that lights up if alcohol is on the breath. If alcohol consumption is discovered, the police are called.
But even though privacy experts rail against the policy, one of the toughest in Southeastern Pennsylvania and perhaps the country, the very people subjected to the mandatory checks shrug off the whole issue.
"It isn't a big deal," said Nick Winkler, 17, the senior class president, echoing the opinion of most students at the school. "This whole policy is about protection, not to invade our privacy."
For those who came of age during the '60s and '70s, didn't trust anyone over 30 and questioned authority with a vengeance, the lack of protest seems to smack of complacency.
But for the students, and the adults who have responsibility for them, the whole issue comes down to one word: safety. It is a concern so paramount that it trumps almost anything else, and that includes the right to privacy.
At more and more schools, students march through metal detectors or carry regulation see-through bookbags or face locker searches. Courts have backed school administrators who use such tactics.
"There for a while, almost every dance we had, we were taking kids out in an ambulance because of alcohol poisoning. Some were quite serious," said Downingtown principal Walt Kottmeyer, who bought three of the devices, which easily detect minute traces of alcohol. "Since we've used it [the alcohol testing device], we haven't . . . had to take anybody out. We've proven that it works."
As executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, Larry Frankel makes the case for the other side, one seemingly out of favor.
The Downingtown policy, he contends, is an affront to the Fourth Amendment guarantee against unreasonable searches.
"We should not be stopping people and in a sense searching them - their breath - unless there is probable cause they committed a crime," Frankel said. "It's not treating people with respect and dignity."
He says no one would treat adults that way. He says such tests, however innocuous they may seem, erode privacy rights. "There's always public safety issues to justify violation of the Constitution," Frankel said. "Schools should not be the place to diminish rights."
But the ACLU point of view hasn't resonated among the Downingtown set.
"It dumbfounds me that you want to protect this ideal of privacy," said Josh Rucci, 17, Downingtown's student council president. "[The testing] is more of a protection. It's protecting you inside the dance and afterward. Nobody's going to be driving around drunk. Drunk driving is the problem."
The $395 PAS-VR device, a black box about the size of a cigarette pack, does not require blowing like the Breathalyzer test used by police. Students simply answer an innocuous question (How are you?) while a school administrator holds the device nearby.
It also does not measure the percentage of alcohol in the blood. Its sensors merely illuminate a series of green lights that indicate any presence of alcohol on the breath.
The ease of the test has helped to make students comfortable with the school's policy. "It's not that invasive," said Ramana Rameswaran, 17, the student representative to the Downingtown Area school board. "It's not like you're peeing in a cup."
Students have shown their support for the testing, or at least indifference toward it, by turning out in strong numbers for school activities where testing has occurred, according to students and school officials.
"I did an informal poll," Rameswaran said. Only three of 78 students voiced concern over the policy. Though the three thought the test was an infringement on their privacy rights, "they still attend the function," he said.
Maybe this is a generation with a lower expectation of privacy. After all, most of them were born in front of video cameras. As a society, we travel the Internet with little thought to "cookies" tracking our moves, we go about our day under the watchful eye of security cameras, we reveal our innermost thoughts via e-mail and cell phone, more concerned with convenience than with eavesdroppers. Big Brother is entertainment.
Maybe this is a generation savvy enough to make a cost-benefit analysis. However rare a Columbine may be, students do take guns to school, children do hurt classmates, and teens do drink and drive and die.
"I feel safer going to the dance when I know other people are going to be checked going in as well as I," said Lauren Snyder, 17, who is the president of Students Against Drunk Driving at Downingtown.
She said drinking had been a big problem at school functions - and that should be reason enough to test everybody.
An outrage, says Peter Crabb. Crabb, a psychology professor at Pennsylvania State University who studies the impact of technology on privacy, said he came of age in the early '70s - a factor, he thinks, that explains his reaction.
"I find that for the most part, students don't give a second thought to their privacy being invaded," he said. "It seems like nothing, but it's not nothing."
Take one example: A security camera was recently installed in his Abington campus classroom. "To me it's appalling that a video camera watches me while I'm teaching," Crabb said. "The students don't care. These kids come into the world and cameras are everywhere, drug testing is everywhere. They adjust."
Still, Crabb said, searches, surveillance, testing all increase stress, even among those who say they accept the monitoring.
"If I were a parent or student . . . I would raise hell," he said.
Downingtown parents have expressed only support for the testing, according to the principal.
Parent Pauline Ninneman of Woodleigh, whose daughter, Alyssa, 17, attends Downingtown, had a typical reaction: "It's better than having kids dying from alcohol poisoning."
Students who test positive would be turned over to police, Kottmeyer said. They would also face a 10-day suspension under the school's disciplinary code.
Stuart Eimer, an assistant professor of sociology at Widener University, attributes the willingness to trade privacy for security to a deterioration of community.
"I'm wondering if parents are feeling increasingly that they don't have the ability to monitor their kids' behavior as they did in the golden era of the 1950s," he said. "Therefore, they look at government and the school system to help them."
Richard C. Turkington, a privacy expert and law professor at Villanova University, voiced his discomfort with a policy as broad as Downingtown's, preferring testing based on suspicion.
He maintained that most adults are concerned about threats to privacy. But, said Turkington, in the final analysis, the issue often boils down to the degree of the invasion.
"Lack of criticism and indignity about the alcohol screening may reflect the attitude that parents and students view the intrusion to be minimal and that the screening produces some good," Turkington said. "No responsible person wants underage drinking at school events."
And students agreed. When asked about other types of searches - frisks or urinalysis, for example - they protested.
"That," said Winkler, the senior class president, "would be totally different."
Lini S. Kadaba's e-mail address is lkadaba@phillynews.com
How do you get Americans to accept such a notion in real life? You teach them as youngsters in school that eroding rights are a good thing. In the wake of a series of sensationalized school shootings, that is just what is being done, for better or worse.
Jeff
http://inq.philly.com/content/inquirer/2000/12/17/lifestyle/PRIVACY17.htm
Sunday, December 17, 2000
Funny, they don't feel invaded
Today's students happily undergo backpack checks, locker checks, video surveillance, even breath tests. They, and their parents, see these measures not as assaults on privacy, but as protection.
By Lini S. Kadaba
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
Imagine having to take a sobriety test before being admitted to the company Christmas party.
Or having to bring your lunch and paperwork to the office in a mesh briefcase.
Or submitting to having your desk searched.
Outrageous, right?
But not far from the experience of today's teens.
On Monday evening, every single Downingtown High School student attending a "Mr. DHS" pageant in the auditorium had to first pass a test - one that checks for alcohol on the breath.
It was the same for the Homecoming Dance, a high-profile soccer game, and other extracurricular activities over the last 18 months. Before gaining entry, students at the Exton public school are tested with a handheld device that lights up if alcohol is on the breath. If alcohol consumption is discovered, the police are called.
But even though privacy experts rail against the policy, one of the toughest in Southeastern Pennsylvania and perhaps the country, the very people subjected to the mandatory checks shrug off the whole issue.
"It isn't a big deal," said Nick Winkler, 17, the senior class president, echoing the opinion of most students at the school. "This whole policy is about protection, not to invade our privacy."
For those who came of age during the '60s and '70s, didn't trust anyone over 30 and questioned authority with a vengeance, the lack of protest seems to smack of complacency.
But for the students, and the adults who have responsibility for them, the whole issue comes down to one word: safety. It is a concern so paramount that it trumps almost anything else, and that includes the right to privacy.
At more and more schools, students march through metal detectors or carry regulation see-through bookbags or face locker searches. Courts have backed school administrators who use such tactics.
"There for a while, almost every dance we had, we were taking kids out in an ambulance because of alcohol poisoning. Some were quite serious," said Downingtown principal Walt Kottmeyer, who bought three of the devices, which easily detect minute traces of alcohol. "Since we've used it [the alcohol testing device], we haven't . . . had to take anybody out. We've proven that it works."
As executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, Larry Frankel makes the case for the other side, one seemingly out of favor.
The Downingtown policy, he contends, is an affront to the Fourth Amendment guarantee against unreasonable searches.
"We should not be stopping people and in a sense searching them - their breath - unless there is probable cause they committed a crime," Frankel said. "It's not treating people with respect and dignity."
He says no one would treat adults that way. He says such tests, however innocuous they may seem, erode privacy rights. "There's always public safety issues to justify violation of the Constitution," Frankel said. "Schools should not be the place to diminish rights."
But the ACLU point of view hasn't resonated among the Downingtown set.
"It dumbfounds me that you want to protect this ideal of privacy," said Josh Rucci, 17, Downingtown's student council president. "[The testing] is more of a protection. It's protecting you inside the dance and afterward. Nobody's going to be driving around drunk. Drunk driving is the problem."
The $395 PAS-VR device, a black box about the size of a cigarette pack, does not require blowing like the Breathalyzer test used by police. Students simply answer an innocuous question (How are you?) while a school administrator holds the device nearby.
It also does not measure the percentage of alcohol in the blood. Its sensors merely illuminate a series of green lights that indicate any presence of alcohol on the breath.
The ease of the test has helped to make students comfortable with the school's policy. "It's not that invasive," said Ramana Rameswaran, 17, the student representative to the Downingtown Area school board. "It's not like you're peeing in a cup."
Students have shown their support for the testing, or at least indifference toward it, by turning out in strong numbers for school activities where testing has occurred, according to students and school officials.
"I did an informal poll," Rameswaran said. Only three of 78 students voiced concern over the policy. Though the three thought the test was an infringement on their privacy rights, "they still attend the function," he said.
Maybe this is a generation with a lower expectation of privacy. After all, most of them were born in front of video cameras. As a society, we travel the Internet with little thought to "cookies" tracking our moves, we go about our day under the watchful eye of security cameras, we reveal our innermost thoughts via e-mail and cell phone, more concerned with convenience than with eavesdroppers. Big Brother is entertainment.
Maybe this is a generation savvy enough to make a cost-benefit analysis. However rare a Columbine may be, students do take guns to school, children do hurt classmates, and teens do drink and drive and die.
"I feel safer going to the dance when I know other people are going to be checked going in as well as I," said Lauren Snyder, 17, who is the president of Students Against Drunk Driving at Downingtown.
She said drinking had been a big problem at school functions - and that should be reason enough to test everybody.
An outrage, says Peter Crabb. Crabb, a psychology professor at Pennsylvania State University who studies the impact of technology on privacy, said he came of age in the early '70s - a factor, he thinks, that explains his reaction.
"I find that for the most part, students don't give a second thought to their privacy being invaded," he said. "It seems like nothing, but it's not nothing."
Take one example: A security camera was recently installed in his Abington campus classroom. "To me it's appalling that a video camera watches me while I'm teaching," Crabb said. "The students don't care. These kids come into the world and cameras are everywhere, drug testing is everywhere. They adjust."
Still, Crabb said, searches, surveillance, testing all increase stress, even among those who say they accept the monitoring.
"If I were a parent or student . . . I would raise hell," he said.
Downingtown parents have expressed only support for the testing, according to the principal.
Parent Pauline Ninneman of Woodleigh, whose daughter, Alyssa, 17, attends Downingtown, had a typical reaction: "It's better than having kids dying from alcohol poisoning."
Students who test positive would be turned over to police, Kottmeyer said. They would also face a 10-day suspension under the school's disciplinary code.
Stuart Eimer, an assistant professor of sociology at Widener University, attributes the willingness to trade privacy for security to a deterioration of community.
"I'm wondering if parents are feeling increasingly that they don't have the ability to monitor their kids' behavior as they did in the golden era of the 1950s," he said. "Therefore, they look at government and the school system to help them."
Richard C. Turkington, a privacy expert and law professor at Villanova University, voiced his discomfort with a policy as broad as Downingtown's, preferring testing based on suspicion.
He maintained that most adults are concerned about threats to privacy. But, said Turkington, in the final analysis, the issue often boils down to the degree of the invasion.
"Lack of criticism and indignity about the alcohol screening may reflect the attitude that parents and students view the intrusion to be minimal and that the screening produces some good," Turkington said. "No responsible person wants underage drinking at school events."
And students agreed. When asked about other types of searches - frisks or urinalysis, for example - they protested.
"That," said Winkler, the senior class president, "would be totally different."
Lini S. Kadaba's e-mail address is lkadaba@phillynews.com