After reading about Jennifer’s ambition to “touch every U.S. citizen,” I was randomly poking around the Department of Homeland Security website when I stumbled on this horrifying headline:
Secretary Napolitano Announces Stop.Think.Connect. Campaign Partnership with D.A.R.E. America
Oh God. The DHS and D.A.R.E. That’s a partnership forged in the pit of hell. I can smell the fail from here.
Actually, the Stop.Think.Connect program doesn’t seem like an awful idea. It’s supposedly an educational effort to help children and adults learn about the importance of staying secure online. I say “supposedly” because as far as I know, no peer-reviewed study has ever shown that the D.A.R.E. program accomplishes any of its goals.
(And if someone from D.A.R.E. wants to respond, let me head off the usual distraction: You’re going to tell me that those studies are out-of-date because they were of the old D.A.R.E. program. The new one really works. At least until the next study comes out, and you change the program again.)
Of course, the program is more about “awareness” than about actually teaching people specific and helpful skills. If you’re a government agency like the DHS or public interest group like D.A.R.E., awareness is always a cool thing to promote, because you can easily survey people’s awareness, launch an educational program, and do another survey to show that people are more “aware.” They won’t actually be any better off, because you haven’t taught them anything useful, but you’ll have numbers to prove that people are more “aware,” which will make it easier to get more money next time.
Then there’s the key issues page. In addition to warning people about identity theft and fraud, it also has a section on this decade’s version of the Satanic Ritual Abuse panic: Cyber Bullying and Cyber Predators. The warning about predators is especially amusing coming from the people who brought you TSA patdowns for children.
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