Monitoring People via Technology Started Before Prism

Using technology to monitor people has been going on way longer than the NSA’s prism. Whether it’s been tracking location, screening emails, turning on web cams, or another form of monitoring using technology traces back before Prism was created. Over the last decade or so I have heard plenty of stories about how schools have provided laptops to students and months later the school is being sued for illegally monitoring the students. Some schools were just constantly tracking where the laptop was backing it the reasoning that if a laptop was stolen they could use the GPS to track it down. I find this appropriate but there is no need to constantly be tracking and recording the information.

                Some schools were even turning the webcams on without alerting the students. They were able to see what was on the students screen and everything going on in the room the laptop was in. I have an absolute huge problem with this and I know so does just about everyone else. Under no circumstance does a school need to turn on a webcam to see and hear what is going on in a room. To me this is even worse than the NSA’s Prism.

                Prism became a huge debate over the summer and still is heavily being argued today. It did not surprise me at all to hear that the NSA was recording information about users on the internet. What did and still does surprise me is hearing year after year another school or town being sued for illegally using technology to monitor their students. I do not see any reason a school needs to monitor their students. If they want to catch students doing drugs, cheating, or engaging in illegal activities, there is much better, legal, and moral ways to achieve this. To an extent I can understand why the NSA is tracking information and recording it. They have a much bigger and tougher problem, tracking and preventing terrorism.

I’m not sure if all, of even if any of the schools getting sued are victims of individuals misusing power or as an entire institution misusing their powers. I feel that in most cases it is probably an individual or small group of individuals acting on their own and taking the power they have to spy on students. At least, I hope this is the case. If institutions as a whole are making steps to track and monitor their students I see a huge problem slowly developing in this country. I feel like one day this will just become so normal that it won’t even be argued.

It scares me to think that one day it will be so normal that those with more power and authority will just be tracking my every move. As technology advances the monitoring will increase. It will become easier to track locations of people and what they are doing. Issues like Prism could have been resolved well before it was even created. All it would have taken was people that were not affected by schools monitoring students to speak out. If there was enough of a push for monitoring people as being immoral and intolerable, Prism would have panned out completely differently. Maybe it would be the same, except no one would have spoken out to release the information, but I think it is more likely that Prism would have been discussed and designed differently.