how Columbine created schools of surveillance.

Content Warning: I will be talking about school shootings incredibly in depth, but will not include names of the school shooters. Typically, I would insert memes or more levity into the conversation — but I don’t feel this is the time.

School shootings are not just reported from the news: they’re live streamed on Snapchat or Twitter. Our feeds see the last messages teens send to their parents, or the tools of activism that survivors utilize.

This is a marked difference from 1999, when Columbine happened. At the time, it was the deadliest school shooting in US history. It was the first one truly intangled with technology and the news cycle, and a harbinger of what we experience 25+ years later.

More importantly, it helps explain how technology went from a hallmark of the first major school shooting, to being implemented in failure while trying to stop them.

Social media has been evolving into another form of weaponry for school shooters. Schools now simply shut down when an anonymous account posts vaguely threatening messages, or pre-existing shooters are turned into figureheads within online communities.

For every large group of people that see the shooters as beyond human, there’s a small number of people who see themselves.

In its wake, we now are catching up to guidelines about how to report in the media responsibility, and to not infame shooters into what they want. But, the process is slow and the hidden internet communities where people lurk are numerous.

We have to confront the fact that the cycle of violence is enabled more easily with technology. But, the solution might not lie there.

Within psychology, the escalation of violence is a pattern that perpetrators of violent crimes commit before actually enacting the crime. This is how they get from point A to B, and it’s supposed to act as a roadmap to identify and intervene.

The escalation starts with perceived ‘injustice’ or thought that violence is justified in some sense, and then an active step of researching and planning.

This is where surveillance is supposed to step in.

In an effort to better understand US history, I’ve started with learning about Columbine. I read “A Mother’s Reckoning” — written by the mother — Sue Klebold, of one of the Columbine shooters, and “Columbine” by Dave Cullen, both landmark works about what happened.

In both books was the prominence of what would become the early roots of surveillance culture that Columbine, 9/11, and numerous other events at the turn of the 2000’s would entice.

I can’t paraphrase Sue’s book — and I don’t wish to. I think it’s a work that needs you to read it for yourself in able to contextualize it properly. But, ultimately: the takeaway she left was the desire to have better survellied her son. The belief that if someway, somehow, she just KNEW that he was experiencing these things, she would have been able to intervene.

In that strain, “Columbine” the book echos the implications that the media had. The fact that misinformation spread by traumatized students would turn into a media frenzy that lived beyond the facts, and a remarkable inability of the sherriff’s office to act on death threats on the other shooters’ website.

The outrage was towards the parents and their lack of survelliance, made-up “Trench Coat Mafia” / goth kid affiliations (a silly school thing that the shooters were not linked to), and less to the law enforcement agencies who’ve interacted with the boys. People saw a tragedy and made up a way to stop it within their cloak of fear.

That impulse, coupled with 9/11 2 years later, created a perfect storm of desire and willingness to implement surveillance culture en masse onto the US population.

Now it’s late 2024 — Everyone knows they’re being watched, but our world doesn’t “feel” much safer — especially in the dimensions of school shootings.

I attended American high schools, had school shooting drills, worked with National Die In and the March for our lives movement for a bit in 2018, and grew up in a pro gun household. I’ve also known people who have been in school shootings, and known others who have lost a loved one to them through MFOL.

On the other side, I’ve been working in technology — whose solution to school shootings is surveillance.

How did we get to a world in which technology is given the job of fixing structural issues embedded in our world? Columbine has some of the answers for us.

The use of technology was a prominent part of Columbine, and one of its’ defining characteristics. One of the shooters had a website that included abhorrent content and death threats to other students, enough so that it was reported to the sheriff’s office.

The boys took videos of their planning, weapons, and apologies to family, often referred to as the basement tapes. Images from surveillance footage of the boys in the school have become infamous fodder for online groups of fans, who’ve created an affection towards the boys more similar to a k-pop idol than kids who killed 13 other kids (and themselves).

In later shootings, incel culture and making manifestos available on social media has become a cornerstone of these events. Oftentimes, the press goes through every detail imaginable post-event to come up with a picture of the perpetrator, including their online history and ideological beliefs.

Shooters use their online identity as a sort of ‘jumping’ off point to enforce their ideas and order. They know a trail will be searched, and they’re more than willing to leave one. Mass shootings have evolved into a political act that gains attention through its brutality, similarly to self-immolation.

Surveillance is brought up as a solution because it’s a ‘safe’ answer to a terrifying question. How do we find the kids who are going to kill other kids? Easy — watch them more.

There has to be answers that we can easily fasten, but surveillance remains a false promise. We implement it because it helps us sleep at night. But, the data doesn’t lie to us in a way we can lie to ourselves.

The state of surveillance in schools is very patchwork: in true American tradition, the amount of money that schools have to spend varies wildly and is mostly paid out of property taxes. One school in Orange County may have metal detectors and SROs (school resource officers), and another in the midwest may not even have the funding for a guidance counselor.

There is good and bad surveillance. People who attempt or are thinking about suicide are often put in a state of surveillance for their own well being.

Surveillance, historically for the human race, probably was evolutionarily incredibly beneficial — it’s cited as a reason why serial killers have become less prolific. But it loses its’ potency at scale, and through pieces of technology with high false positive rates and cultural blindspots.

Just because surveillance occurs doesn’t mean that we are safe: it sometimes just means we have more data about what we missed. It doesn’t improve systems that are already broken, it just provides more fuel to them.

Surveillance may help in the post-event process for bringing someone to justice, but oftentimes school shooters are looking for fame, death, and to be known for their violence.

It’s in the very fabric of school shootings: something entirely shocking and contrary to what you think should happen at a school is happening.

So, survellience would only be benefical prior to an event, by finding and monitoring threats. But, we know in the case of Columbine that the shooter’s website WAS reported to the police, who wrote a warrant that was never given to a judge.

Surveillance fails against broken human systems, which are rife in schools. Schools are often underfunded, overburdened, and required to face in totality every major social issue: the mental health crisis, child poverty, political tensions, and more.

These institutions face a lot of pressure, and now we’re asking them to manage and pay for solutions to stop shootings from happening within them.

Surveillance can be undertaken by parents, who go through their kids’ phones or install keyloggers on their laptops or request location.

It can be from the school, who may utilize software within the district to see what happens in a student’s accounts or in the browser activity. They may have social media posts available for reference of events, or may interact and have a social media account themselves.

Surveillance can be IRL, with SRO’s who are police officers for a specific school. It can be metal detectors, the enforcement of clear backpacks, security cameras within classrooms, or the implementation of guidance counselors who report back problems that the school can then escalate.

It is no secret to my generation (gen-z), that surveillance is now enmeshed into our world. We know that what we post is seen, and linked to us. In that sense, being online in school creates a panopticon effect: we know someone is seeing us — we just don’t know when.

If surveillance was working, school shootings would be going down. But, they haven’t.

Security.org provides this visualization. Although 2019–2023 only had 48 fatalities and 82 injuries, it’s worth remembering 2020 and parts of 2021, depending on the school, were completely online. And, even as active shooter events go down, the amount of general gun incidents are spiking more than ever.

The US Secret Service has released a paper that provides more information into the lives of shooters. I would recommend reading it all here, but the conclusions are:

• There’s not a ‘profile’ of a specific school or person who causes violence across age, gender, race, academic performance, or social characteristics. Although, most attackers statistically were white males.
• Attackers had multiple motives
• Most attackers used firearms they had access to at home, and had previous symptoms of mental health problems, were victims of bullying, and had a history of school disciplinary action or contact with law enforcement
• Half of the attackers had interests in violent topics
• All attackers had problems with friends or romantic relationships
• Nearly all attackers had negative home life factors
• All attackers had concerning behaviors, and most of them concerned other people and communicated their intent.

Notice how most of these traits are things that can be determined without mass surveillance across a student body, and they are things that would not be resolved by surveillance. The issues are not the lack of data, it’s the lack of a comprehensive working systems within our community. We often know the warning signs and can see them, but fail to piece them together before a shooting.

Surveillance may surface more warning signs (while creating false positives), but it’s not a replacement for human decision making about who is dangerous, why, and how we can work to mitigate the risk factors before it becomes too late.

The report also shows that people who were focused on major events were more likely to undertake intense planning and research, and that 1/3rd researched weapons, while only 17% documented their plans. 12% did prior research on other events. In these instances, surveillance wouldn’t ‘catch’ the shooters, because they don’t always act in watchable ways.

But, it’s also worth pointing out a statistic that can undermine the idea of implementing surveillance measures at all: 22% engaged in unique behaviors that allowed them to evade surveillance — like deleting emails, using cash to pay for things, or utilizing privacy tools.

These attackers are not dumb, and surveillance is not invisible to the people within it. It creates more impetus to evade being seen.

Not that the fact it doesn’t work is stopping anyone from trying to sell it. The ACLU did a report about a growing domain within EdTech — aka, people making money off of surveilling kids. The report was aptly named, “The Danger in Buying with the EdTech Surveillance Industry Is Selling”.

In 2021 alone, schools and universities in the US spent $3.1 billion on security products and services, and $300 million of these funds are federal. Most of the claims that these companies make about being able to stop school shootings are patently unverifiable. Independent research establishes over and over again surveillance does not reduce incidents of violence in schools.

Social media survelliance tools were widely marketed to schools as a way to identify at-risk students for shooting threats and self-harm, but these tools create false positives and fail in the face of changing lexicon and slang.

This is money divested from educational institutions, who could instead be hiring more teachers, investing in mental health programs, and expanding the resources available to their kids.

Kids know they’re being surveilled, and it freaks them out.

Within the ACLU survey, the majority of kids (87%) claimed that their school was surveilling them, and 24% were concerned about how school limits resources they feel they want to access. A quarter of students were concerned about how it could be used to discipline them or their friends, or shared with law enforcement.

And for what? Surveillance cameras were present in 8 of the 10 deadliest school shootings. The US Secret Service found that social media monitoring did little to thwart planned school shootings. The money poured into school security has done little to move the needle in a tidal wave of violence sweeping American schools.

$3.1 billion dollars went to unresearched survelliance systems in 2021, a year that had a record high number of gun-related incidents on K-12 school grounds.

A reliance on surveillance creates further secrecy for the people who are working to hide things, and enables the erosion of privacy for everyone else.

In fact, poorly implemented surveillance measures turn into markers of infamy for the shooters, and failures for the systems that didn’t catch them. The Uvalde Police are probably famous for being shown bumbling around on surveillance footage that was released to the public.

We see a similar trend outside of schools: gunshot detecting devices deployed in cities are claimed to rarely detect actual gunshots. TSA scans every plane-entering person, yet was largely shown in a study to be ineffective at snuggling in weapons.

Surveillance is a tool, but it’s just that. When it’s contextualized in imperfect systems that can be abused (like most human systems are), we dampen its’ ability to perform and put it at risk of becoming a weapon towards the people it was meant to protect.

In America, autonomy and freedom is our greatest value in the constitution. Yet, we turn to surveillance, which undermines our core values.

We turn to surveillance to avoid deeply painful issues: namely, the fact that people at risk will increasingly turn to gang violence, school violence, or get caught into the mass incarceration system that we’ve turned the justice system into.

Surveilling kids and putting that data into a system that overworked school teachers or administrators don’t have time to use will not stop school shootings.

We talk about putting more pressure on underfunded US schools instead of tackling the fact that health insurance is a financial torture, that can still result in the cost of therapy being $100–200 a session. Our schools spent and spend billions on surveillance instead of mental health programs and other supports that would have potentially improved the risk factors leading to shootings.

We monitor social media instead of removing people’s access to guns. Our suicide prevention mechanisms encourage people to “hold on for a better tomorrow” or imprisons them without tangible support to structurally change their environment, only to release them again.

And we will do those things continuously at our detriment. I used to remember the school shootings by name, and I cannot even tell you the last one that happened in 2024.

Surveillance by tech is bringing a band-aid to someone who lost an arm, at the cost of incriminating other kids and creating a culture of fear. It started with Columbine, but it will continue with every successive attack until we learn that survelliance tech will not always save us.