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U.S. Schools Are Buying Phone-Hacking Tech That the FBI Uses to Investigate Terrorists
U.S. Schools Are Buying Phone-Hacking Tech That the FBI Uses to Investigate Terrorists [gizmodo.com]:
In May 2016, a student enrolled in a high-school in Shelbyville, Texas, consented to having his phone searched by one of the district’s school resource officers. Looking for evidence of a romantic relationship between the student and a teacher, the officer plugged the phone into a Cellebrite UFED to recover deleted messages from the phone. According to the arrest affidavit, investigators discovered the student and teacher frequently messaged each other, “I love you.” Two days later, the teacher was booked into the county jail for sexual assault of a child.
The Cellebrite used to gather evidence in that case was owned and operated by the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office. But these invasive phone-cracking tools are not only being purchased by police departments. Public documents reviewed by Gizmodo indicate that school districts have been quietly purchasing these surveillance tools of their own for years.
In March 2020, the North East Independent School District, a largely Hispanic district north of San Antonio, wrote a check to Cellebrite for $6,695 for “General Supplies.” In May, Cypress-Fairbanks ISD near Houston, Texas, paid Oxygen Forensics Inc., another mobile device forensics firm, $2,899. Not far away, majority-white Conroe ISD wrote a check to Susteen Inc., the manufacturer of the similar Secure View system, for $995 in September 2016.
Gizmodo has reviewed similar accounting documents from eight school districts, seven of which are in Texas, showing that administrators paid as much $11,582 for the controversial surveillance technology. Known as mobile device forensic tools (MDFTs), this type of tech is able to siphon text messages, photos, and application data from student’s devices. Together, the districts encompass hundreds of schools, potentially exposing hundreds of thousands of students to invasive cell phone searches.
[...] The Fourth Amendment protects people in the United States from unreasonable government searches and seizures, including their cell phones. While a search without a warrant is generally considered unreasonable, the situation in schools is a little different.
In the case New Jersey v. T.L.O , the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that schools do not necessarily need a warrant to search students so long as officials have a reasonable belief a student has broken the law or school policy, and the search is not unnecessarily intrusive and reasonably related in scope to the circumstances under which the search was originally justified. The “reasonableness” standard is extremely broad, largely deferential to the whims of school officials, and can serve as the basis for fishing expeditions ; courts have only rarely ruled that school searches violate the Fourth Amendment.
[...] Gizmodo reviewed student handbooks from four school districts with access to mobile extraction devices, and we found that none of the student handbooks prohibit administrators or resource officers from carrying out warrantless searches of personal electronic devices.
[...] Ultimately, Gizmodo’s investigation turned up more questions than answers about why school districts have sought these devices and how they use them. Who is subject to these searches, and who is carrying them out? How many students have had their devices searched and what were the circumstances? Were students or their parents ever asked to give any kind of meaningful consent, or even notified of the phone searches in the first place? What is done with the data afterward? Can officials retain it for use in future investigations?
[...] While it is common and widely accepted that schools have the right to search students’ lockers or even their cars, phones contain far more about their lives than any physical space ever could.
“Your phone contains things pertinent to your entire life off-campus as well as on. It really contains the most intimate map of who you are as a person, what your thoughts are and what you’re doing, what your daily life is like,” Quentin said. “And that is a much more invasive search, of things not pertaining to school, than a search of a locker or of a backpack.”
