My Experience As A School Network Monitor

"If you have nothing to fear, you have nothing to hide."

Joseph Goebbels

I've already written about this, but for two months last year I worked in a secondary school as an IT technician. It was just a work experience role, so my responsibilities were limited. Sometimes I was able to fix a problem, most of the time I would just gather as much info as I could before passing it onto a colleague. Often I was given the menial jobs, or 'side-quests' as I liked to call them. I would patrol after-school, change print toners, fill in data entry. Easy stuff for a luddite such as myself.

In the middle of my placement, the government introduced new anti-extremism measures for schools. Like all the anti-extremism measures, this one did absolutely nothing to stop extremism and only restricted everyone's freedom whilst spreading panic. In fact, the governments response to ISIS can be summarised as thus: "PANIC! EVERYONE PANIC! YOU COULD BE LIVING NEXT DOOR TO A TERRORIST! THEY COULD BE IN YOUR OWN HOME!!"

Making people panic never works, because you have to keep the panic up. It's the same with shocking people, or using any kind of emotional manipulation. If all those Oxfam/Save The Children adverts showing emaciated infants dying of cholera actually did anything then Ethiopia would be the wealthiest nation on Earth. But all they do is shock us, then we calm ourselves down and get on with things. You want to inspire people? Dully depress them. Anything too strong and people will just block it out. They might throw some money at you, but after that then you're not getting anything else.

In accordance to the new anti-extremism measures for schools, the IT department was asked to step-up it's surveillance. The school network was already completely monitored, but now it had to be checked daily and a report had to be issued at the end of each week. As the work experience guy with nothing else much to do, this fell down to me. So I became a member of the thought police for the next month.

Yeah. I spied on children. Every day I would log into the security network and browse through screenshots of anything deemed suspicious.

It sounds both really seedy and kind of fascinating, but actually: spying is dull. I had to sift through about 500 screenshots a day, and the school security filter barely worked right. The majority of the images were just blank desktops. Any image with fingers, round shaped fruit, or anything pink was flagged for pornography. A GCSE class was studying Of Mice And Men, meaning that almost everyday I would get about fifty screenshots that contained the 'n' word (in perfectly fine context). I was actually tempted to go to the headteacher or ring up the company in charge of the security network to ask why 'muslim' and 'gay' were considered threatening.

Encouragingly, I found no incidents of bullying, adult content, or extremism. There was one time when I found an LGBT student who had suicidal thoughts, but I double checked the room she was in and actually she was writing a statement for pupil support - who were there with her and were already drawing up a plan of action. In total, I only printed off and reported four screenshots. The first was someone on a website that sold BB-guns. The second was a website that sold knives. The third was a sneaky Year 9 accessing YouTube via a proxy server. The fourth was some kind of social media website. None of the pupils were punished, and I'm pretty certain none of them were extremists. I merely suggested these websites be blocked because they weren't relevant to anything and I doubt the headteacher wanted his pupils browsing these sites.

Remember: it's ultimately Big Brother that creates Winston.

This whole business doesn't seem that bad, then. Almost all the students are innocent, and I was hardly spying on these kids in the locker rooms. I was just watching them do their Geography homework. So why did I feel so dirty? Aside from that quote at the start of this post...

It could be that I was already assuming that every student was a troublemaker. Whilst it was almost always the contrary, I had to treat every security alert on the system (all 500 of them) as a serious incident that needed investigation....even though my 'investigation' was just: "Are there guns, genitalia, drugs, or anything that might be bullying? No? OK delete it." By the end I could blast through all 500 images in twenty mins. I did it one-handed during my lunch break once.

It took me back to when my teachers would keep the entire class back because one little shithead decided that flicking pens was infinitely more fulfilling than the Annexation of the Sudentenland. The entire class was made to feel guilty for something only a single idiot did, and in turn that just made us all angry. We would hate teachers who did this, and in the process more students would begin to misbehave.

Occasionally I would get an alert for documents with something like the words: "i like willy" typed into them. These were either pranks or, as I liked to muse, the students deliberately trying to defy the system. They knew this would create a security alert, but they also knew they couldn't possibly get into trouble for it. It's the most pathetic form of rebellion imaginable, but a rebellion nonetheless.

It'll probably come as no surprise to you that 'Brazil' is one
of my favourite films. 

But at the same time I was paranoid, because the watchmen were being watched. My computer was also linked to the security network and thus there was another person spying on staff activity also. Obviously, I hadn't looked at anything suspicious during my time. I had absolutely no reason to worry about the fact I too was being watched. The most I did when bored with nothing else to do at work was check the BBC News website and that one time I looked on Wikipedia about 18th century Australian pirates. Other than that: I occasionally wrote in my notebook. Like a security guard, I would often take long patrol routes around the school after the pupils had gone home; checking that the PC suites were all functioning. Aside from that one time I found a cracked monitor, these walks were just a way of keeping myself occupied so I didn't fall asleep on my desk.

Yet...I was being spied on! Everything I did I did in the knowledge that someone else was watching. It really messes with your head. Whenever I googled something job-related, I wondered if they could see me right now. When I walked down the corridor under the watchful glare of the CCTV camera, I worried that someone might think I was up to something. The very act of aimless walking made me feel like I was being suspicious.

This is something right out of dystopian fiction. Not only was I one of Orwell's 'beetle-like' creatures, overseeing everything, but I was also Winston Smith. I felt forced to adopt an air of blank satisfaction whilst feeling like a criminal just for thinking. Because it's assumed that I'm doing something wrong then I became convinced that anything other than total orthodoxy was wrong.

Disappointingly, Nineteen Eighty Four wasn't on the Literature curriculum. I wish it was. I might go and do a teacher-training post-graduate course just so I can come back to this school as an English teacher to secretly turn everyone socialist. And I wonder why I didn't get that school librarian job....