^ You're devious... I love it! 
But this is a classic use of FUD to sow the ground for other uses. You know... it's for the children. Do I even need to post a link to that Carlin skit again?
-wraith808
Heheeh! That is a great skit!
Might as well though! I'll let you do the honours!
And +1 for FUD. This is nothing more than conditioning children to accept surveillance as a normal part of life. It's just a building block of the Panopticon. Whether or not they actually are purposeful in their intentions isn't particularly relevant. You don't get to say that the invention of iron wasn't an important building block for forging swords - it was, even if the first people to smelt iron didn't intend to create katanas.
Today we have a lot more information and can better predict the consequences of some actions. One of the problems there is that you have this massive denialist group that seems to always refuse to recognize the obvious. Sure, it's possible to use some of these tools responsibly, but given how things seem to work out today, I really have to wonder at just how deluded one must be to think that they aren't going to be abused. Heck, kids get thrown in handcuffs and arrested for eating their food into the shape of a gun now. Kids 5 and 6 years old are being arrested. Do we really want to traumatize children that badly that we put the kind of power that this thing is capable of into the hands of the sickos that think tasering a 13-year old girl is going to help?
"It's for the children" - automatic shut down for me. At that point I assume that whatever you're doing is going to be used to hurt kids, because reality seems to show that.
Just about anything you see now can be flipped backwards in your mind and you'll have a more accurate picture of what's really going on. e.g. The "Department of Defense" wages wars of aggression, and never defends.
Continuing a quote from the company's web site:
Our Mission
Provide more timely and relevant information to school administrators so that they can better intervene in the lives of children, and ultimately provide these kids with a more optimal chance to become productive citizens with positive peer connections.
Our Vision
By providing information as early as possible, intervention methodologies will be far more effective when bullying or other isolating events occur.
This is a classic problem-reaction-solution in action.
Problem: People don't raise their kids to have any respect for others.
Reaction: Oh, somebody must do something.
Solution: Panopticon.
Wouldn't a better solution be to address the underlying issues that prevent people from raising their kids with respect for others? Perhaps a society where both parents work 2 jobs and the kids are left alone isn't really such a great idea? Maybe it's better to have a society where the economy is designed to allow the general public to create wealth so that a single income is enough to support a family? Perhaps having a parent at home to raise children isn't such a horrible idea?
But nope.
This is just another example of how our sick and decaying society seeks to solve symptoms rather than address underlying root causes. You can see this same scenario played out on a thousand different stages with different actors and different props. But underlying story is always the same.
When you start to look at some of these "plays" and examine the "solutions", you can often see how the solutions only make things worse. I'd rant a bit about some specific examples, but they're off-topic, and I've already abstracted what I see as a core problem with this in 2 ways - the specifics to this case, and the general abstraction of the Hegelian dialectic in action.
