The Huntsville, Alabama school district is under media scrutiny for a secret program it started last year to monitor students' social media activity. Two of the five Huntsville school board members have said that they were never told about the program. The surveillance program, called SAFe (Students Against Fear), paid a consulting firm over half of a million dollars last year to monitor students' social media postings. SAFe is also being targeted by the Alabama ACLU for being used to discipline African-American students at a disproportionate rate. Al.com reports that of the 14 expulsions for infractions related to SAFe, 86% impacted African-American students; African-American students comprise about 40% of the school system. Huntsville City Schools Superintendent Casey Wardynski has said that since January, about 600 social media accounts of the district's 24,000 city students have been investigated for images of guns or gang signs on social media sites such as Facebook and Instagram. The SAFe program reportedly started when a high school student posted a series of jokes on Twitter at the end of his junior year that allegedly caught the attention of the National Security Agency. The NSA then called Huntsville to tell officials about a student making violent threats on social media, although the federal agency denies making the contact. The student's posts raised no national or international threat, but the NSA connection is suspected because one of the student's family members from Yemen was part of the group chatting with the student during the tweets. School security searched the student's car shortly after the school system was contacted and found a jeweled dagger from a Renaissance fair in the glove box. The student was expelled for the first semester of his senior year for threats and for a weapons violation. Taking a picture with a gun in Alabama may get you expelled, but in Nebraska, you may pose with one in your senior yearbook portrait, as long as it is done "tastefully."
