U.S. Schools are Buying Phone-Hacking Tech That the FBI Uses to Investigate Terrorists

Pig Hogger (Slashdot reader #10,379) writes: Everywhere, every day, thousands of phones are plugged-into forensic tools that will pull out everything a phone has to offer an investigator. The thing is, investigators are not always working for police departments, but for school districts, who have been increasinly buying various phone hacking tools. Gizmodo writes: Public documents reviewed by Gizmodo indicate that school districts have been quietly purchasing these surveillance tools of their own for years... 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. While companies like Cellebrite have partnered with federal and local police for years, that the controversial equipment is also available for school district employees to search students' personal devices has gone relatively unnoticed — and serves as a frightening reminder of how technology originally developed for use by the military or intelligence services, ranging from blast-armored trucks designed for use in war zones to invasive surveillance tools, keeps trickling down to domestic police and even the institutions where our kids go to learn. "Cellebrites and Stingrays started out in the provenance of the U.S. military or federal law enforcement, and then made their way into state and local law enforcement, and also eventually make their way into the hands of criminals or petty tyrants like school administrators," Cooper Quentin, senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said in a video interview. "This is the inevitable trajectory of any sort of surveillance technology or any sort of weapon...." Gizmodo analyzed a random sample of 5,000 public school or school district websites across the United States and found that eight district websites mention Cellebrite or another MDFT technology. Because our sample is a relatively small portion of the total number of high schools in the United States — and the ones that stood out did so because they published the purchases as line items in public budget reports — many other school districts may have access to this technology. The Los Angeles Unified School District, the second-largest school district in the country with over 630,000 students enrolled in over 1,000 institutions in the 2018-2019 school year, has a Cellebrite device it says is used by a team that investigates complaints of employee misconduct against students... 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? Most of the school districts did not respond to our inquiries.

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