LOCKPORT, N.Y. — I have a 16-year-old daughter, and like every parent in the United States today, I worry about her safety when she’s in school. But here in Western New York’s Lockport City School District, those fears have led to a wasteful and dangerous experiment.
This week the district’s eight public schools began testing a system called Aegis, which includes facial recognition technology, that could eventually be used to track and map student movements in our schools. How that happened is a cautionary tale for other schools across the country.
In 2015, in the wake of Sandy Hook and other high-profile school shootings, our district was approached by Tony Olivo, a security consultant, who offered to do a free threat assessment of our schools. Later, he encouraged the school district to purchase and install a high-tech facial-recognition camera system developed by SN Technologies, a Canadian company whose sole surveillance experience was in the casino industry. But the software cost a fortune — $1.4 million for a district of a little over 4,400 students and an annual budget of just over $100 million.
Mr. Olivo identified a funding source the district could use to make the purchase — using money Lockport was set to receive for technology education under a 2014 Smart Schools Bond Act. Far from being an independent expert, however, he also stood to benefit financially from the deal. A proposed licensing agreement the school district was forced to disclose showed that Mr. Olivo’s company, CSI Risk Management, was negotiating a payment of $95,450 annually for five years. Neither he nor the school district would disclose what he was eventually paid...
"Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards." -Aldous Huxley
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