School Districts Should Not Be in the Business of Intelligence Collection

Why in the world would a school board need to collect intelligence on parents, students, and the public to evaluate if we are a threat, including to a school district’s “brand”? Such data collection is reminiscent of intelligence-community abuses exposed in the 1970s during hearings of the Senate’s Church Committee.  

In the name of “safety,” Fairfax County Public Schools, located in the spy capital of the world, is seeking to acquire a covert intelligence capability without oversight. Last November 11, Fairfax County Public Schools published “Informal RFP3100000481” for “software to expand the FCPS social media research program, to allegedly detect or deter any negative actions or consequences from social media which may be directed to racial groups or any other student or teacher within FCPS.”   

The request for proposal, or RFP, hits the five steps of the intelligence cycle: planning and direction, including the identification of “assets;” collection; processing and exploitation; analysis; and dissemination. As a retired U.S. Naval intelligence officer—and the father of a student in the FCPS system—I am alarmed by this proposal and recommend that the school board pull this contract. It is government overreach, with disturbing surveillance of protected speech.   

According to the RFP’s technical requirements, the vendor must show the “ability to define assets such as persons, brands, facilities, and products.” The school district explained that “brand” could mean anything, from “groups, facilities, and students,” to the school district’s “reputation and name.” Protecting the FCPS “brand” could include initiatives, agendas, and information that might embarrass FCPS or school board members.  

The school district said that vendors would build “indicators” and “warnings” in intelligence work and must be able to “save search queries and set alerts for active listening.”  

For phase-two collection, the school district demands that vendors have the “ability to scan deep and dark web sources not visible through traditional search engines.” This is what the intelligence community calls part of “OSINT,” or “Open Source Intelligence.”  

As it engages in phase-three work – processing and exploiting data – the school district requires “false positive reduction with embedded violence language classifier and metadata optimization technology.” Translation: establishing true names, rather than cyber personas.  

In phase four – analysis – the school district is seeking to engage in social network nodal analysis, in which it can “visually identify relationships and connections between persons.”  

In phases four and five, analyzing the information collected and disseminating it, the school district tells vendors that they must have the “ability to produce a customizable report based on a disparate dataset with multiple origin points to produce a high-level summary.”  

The FCPS solicitation calls for the ability to collect data beyond what is voluntarily provided, through overt collection, and it includes “dark web” searches, crawling of social media platforms to include email addresses, the association of information with aliases to identify individuals, social-nodal network analysis to identify associations and affiliations, and integration with the FCPS Student Information System.  

The vendor is also free to use any data source anonymously, thus fitting the definition of “covert intelligence collection.”  

The RFP, if implemented, could be subject to gross abuse. In Loudoun County, Virginia, school district officials were in a secret Facebook group that targeted parents. Later, a gym teacher who spoke out against that school’s “brand” on transgender policies was placed on administrative leave before the courts reinstated him. Last September 29, the National School Boards Association asked President Biden to invoke the Patriot Act against people it accused of “domestic terrorism and hate crimes.” Days later, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland dispatched the FBI to investigate parents.  

Then, in November, after national school board officials failed to exploit the national intelligence apparatus, Fairfax County officials published their request for proposals that would essentially create their own intelligence operation. This amounts to cyberstalking.   

Armed with this capability, anyone, or anything, deemed a threat to the “brand” – including political agendas – can be subject to an intelligence apparatus supported by a school board with a $3 billion war chest. That’s ripe for abuse. The school district should immediately withdraw its request for proposal.