A disturbing piece of reporting from Gizmodo (via /.) on the adoption by many US school districts of digital forensic tools to retrieve content from their students’ mobile devices. Of course, such technology was originally developed as a counter-terrorism tool, and then trickled down to regular domestic law enforcement. As we have remarked previously, schools have recently been on the bleeding edge of the social application of intrusive technology, with all the risks and conflicts it engenders; in this instance, however, we see a particularly egregious confluence of technological blowback (from war in the periphery to everyday life in the metropole) and criminal-justice takeover of mass education (of school-to-prison-pipeline fame).