Attack Drones Coming to an Elementary School Near You!

Civics of Technology Announcements

Annual Conference: We are holding our 5th Annual Conference on August 6th-7th, 2026! Our keynotes this year are Dr. Meredith Broussard (data journalist & author of More than a Glitch among other books) and Natasha Singer (NYT edtech reporter & author of the forthcoming book, "Coding Kids: Big Tech's Battle to Remake Public Schools”). Learn more here and register here.

The full program will be posted soon!

News from our Partner Organizations

Library of Babel: On October 6-7, 2026, The Privacy Center at Georgetown Law will host Life After Data: the Conference on De-datafication. The event will bring together researchers, activists, writers, artists, students, and technologists for a conversation around the following prompt: Imagine a future in which digital data is no longer the currency mediating all of our social, economic and political systems, structures and practices. How might we get there from here?  The program will consist of a combination of shorter lightning talks and longer papers by invited speakers, interspersed with workshop sessions during which all participants will discuss the conference presentations. Travel and accommodation costs for invited speakers will be covered by the Privacy Center. Details available on the website. Submit your proposal by June 30! See flyer here.

By Erin Anderson

Back in 2024, I warned our COT community about school safety technologies that were scaling unchecked across Georgia, like CENTEGIX, a panic button teachers wear around their necks in the case of a school shooter, but are primarily used for behavior management (e.g., teacher pushes button to call admin to remove kid from class) or health emergencies, and also caused numerous accidental school lockdowns, with scared children huddled in their classrooms texting mothers things like, “We are going to die. I love you.”  I connected these technologies to school-safety legislation like Alyssa’s Law, which mandates them and often leads schools to spend millions to align with the mandated school-safety tech, which conveniently comes in neatly packaged enterprise bundles. For example, my school district spent millions on Centegix while also getting the Halo smart sensor, an AI-integrated bathroom sensor that can detect “vaping and bullying.” Centegix is also integrated with Axon Enterprises, a predictive policing network that is also served by my local law enforcement. Back in 2024, I argued that the academic community needs to keep a closer eye on such technologies, rather than ceding them to fields like law enforcement. This post is an update on the original post… and frankly, the landscape has only gotten more dystopian.

First, a quick update on CENTEGIX’s meteoric rise. A couple of months after that blog post, an actual school shooting in a school using CENTEGIX occurred at Apalachee High School in Georgia. A 14-year-old student fatally shot two teachers and two students, while wounding seven others before police arrived on the scene and arrested the shooter. Just one week before the shooting, all teachers in the school started wearing CENTEGIX. The local sheriff credited the rapid response to the panic buttons, calling them a “God’s intervention.” Following this crisis, the Georgia legislators almost unanimously passed Alyssa’s Law, a bipartisan victory in these divided times. But its fame has since spread across states, along with Alyssa’s Law, now known as Alyssa’s Act, as it’s being debated at the federal level.

However, a deeper look into the details helps us better understand this technology’s storybook rise, details which should serve as a cautionary tale. CENTEGIX was created by Daniel Dooley, son of the University of Georgia’s legendary football coach Vince Dooley,  and brother to Derek Dooley, who recently ran to replace Georgia’s Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff. Had Derek won the GOP primary — he didn’t — he would have had the opportunity to vote on legislation like Alyssa’s Act. It would have been a huge conflict of interest, as the Dooley family stood to make billions. Daniel, the CENTEGIX founder, was also a roommate of Georgia’s current governor, Brian Kemp, back when they attended the University of Georgia. During his brother’s Senate bid, allegations surfaced that the state had awarded over $27 million in state funding to Daniel’s CENTEGIX company, thereby jet-fueling CENTEGIX’s rise, prompting 35 lawmakers to demand an investigation into ties between the governor and the Dooleys. While some might read this as just a Georgia story, this is an example of a larger pattern that keeps repeating with these technology companies. A crisis is followed by an urgent mandate and near-unanimous passage of legislation, then a school safety technology enters, uncritically, to exploit/capture the market, which only gets revealed not through rigorous academic vetting, but through political entanglement. The most critical vetting of the technology came from Dr. David Riedman, an AI/Machine Learning/gun control expert, via his Substack, the Riedman Report: Risk, AI, Education, & Security (highly worth reading/following…keynote speaker worthy …). Riedman dug into the details of the Apalachee school shooting response and argued that the 911 calls made by the buttons could actually inhibit police response, because they flood police response systems while being deprioritized to actual human calls. Riedman needs the educational academic community’s help to take a more critical stance on such technologies and to help school leaders know how to ask the critical questions to vet them before spending millions on them. 

While watching the downfall of not-Senator Derek Dooley play out, I came across an article that tied this funding debacle to another pilot happening in Georgia, with the school safety company  Campus Guardian Angels, which is rolling out hybrid human/AI attack drones in schools that can “first make noise, then deploy pepper spray, and can ultimately slam into attackers at speed if necessary.” According to the makers of the technology, these drones can travel 30-50 mph in schools and up to 100 mph outside, capable of smacking down school shooters. This technology and the piloting of the program were approved by Georgia legislators.

And again, this is not a Georgia problem. Your Congressional representatives will see some version of Alyssa’s Act and similar technologies. We need to help our educational leaders and representatives have the language to vet not only educational technology, but school safety technology. They should question who researched the technology, how children’s data is collected, stored, and shared, and how it’s being bundled with other technologies. Who's behind the technology? What qualifications in education specifically do they have, and who in the community (e.g. law enforcement, school board members, politicians) might have personal ties with the technology?

This isn’t just a Georgia problem. If this story plays out as CENTEGIX did, dystopian attack drones could soon be coming to a school near you.