The Hidden Costs of Wi-Fi Gun Detection: When ‘Safety’ Tech Becomes Preemptive Policing

School safety is non-negotiable, but the rush to embrace unproven surveillance technologies risks turning campuses into constitutional sacrifice zones. The latest entrant is Wi-AI from CurvePoint.ai, a Carnegie Mellon-funded group that claims to detect concealed firearms using ordinary Wi-Fi signals and artificial intelligence. By analyzing how radio waves bounce off or penetrate clothing, bags, and bodies, Wi-AI supposedly identifies metallic threats without cameras or physical searches.

 In late 2024, Chartiers Valley School District near Pittsburgh became the first to install it district-widewith eight devices across four schools under a five-year contract.  On paper, it sounds less intrusive than metal detectors. In practice, it represents a dangerous escalation of the “EdTech surveillance” boom the ACLU warned about in its October 2023 report Digital Dystopia. 

That report exposed a multi-billion-dollar industry that preys on fear, peddles unsubstantiated efficacy claims, and disproportionately harms marginalized students. Wi-AI fits the pattern perfectly. CurvePoint insists the system is privacy-preserving because it captures no images or personal identifiers. Yet every student walking through a monitored doorway becomes a 3D radio-wave silhouette in an algorithmic dragnet. The AI decides, in milliseconds, whether a reflection pattern matches a gun. No warrant. No reasonable suspicion. No human in the loop until after the alert fires. That is the very definition of preemptive policing, and it collides head-on with the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of due process.

 Due process is not a technicality; it is notice and an opportunity to be heard before the state deprives someone of liberty. Schools already operate under a lowered Fourth Amendment standard (New Jersey v. T.L.O., 1985), but Wi-AI automates suspicion itself. A false positive; triggered by a laptop, belt buckle, umbrella ribs, or a bag of Doritos (which happened twice in Baltimore County Maryland with rival company Omnilert’s camera-based system), can escalate instantly. Then comes the school lockdown, armed officers, pat-downs, interrogations, suspensions, juvenile records, even a police response that ends in tragedy. The ACLU’s Chad Marlow put it bluntly: these systems “put students at risk of someone being told they have a weapon… eliciting a response from the police that could put not only that kid, but other kids in the school in danger.”

CurvePoint boasts a 95% detection rate and under 4% false positives in controlled tests. Real hallways are not labs. Rain-soaked coats, crowded jostling, medical implants, foil-wrapped lunches, any of these can skew results. When the inevitable mistakes happen, who bears the cost? Disproportionately, the same groups the ACLU found are already over-policed by existing surveillance tools.

Meanwhile, the evidence that any of this preventsviolence remains thin to nonexistent. An audit of the deadliest school shootings over two decades found surveillance cameras present in eight of the ten worst incidents; yet they stopped nothing. A 2021 University of Louisville study of 850 districts found no difference in crime outcomes between schools with cameras and those without. The U.S. Secret Service has repeatedly stated that social-media monitoring plays almost no role in thwarting attacks. Wi-Fi gun detection is simply the newest expensive placebo sold to terrified administrators.

Critics on the pro-rights side are not impressed. AmmoLand’s David Codrea calls it “another liberty-eroding boondoggle,” pointing out that Wi-Fi signals can be jammed, entrances can be bypassed, and no technology yet invented can stop a determined killer faster than an armed defender already on scene. Programs like Colorado’s FASTER or Texas school districts that quietly arm select staff have stopped attacks in seconds—without turning every child into a suspect every day.

Chartiers Valley’s superintendent, Dr. Daniel Castagna, is understandably desperate to do something after watching national tragedies unfold since 2011. But doing something is not the same as doing the right thing. Single-point entry, locked exterior doors after the bell, vetted and trained armed staff, better mental-health resources, and a campus culture that encourages reporting—these measures harden schools without treating students like pre-criminals.

 Until Wi-AI and its cousins are subjected to truly independent, transparent, longitudinal testing—and until clear protocols guarantee human review, appeal rights, and strict data-deletion rules—they remain a reckless experiment on other people’s children. Safety purchased at the price of routine, suspicion–less, algorithmic searches is not safety at all; it is the slow normalization of a surveillance state. When groups like the ACLU, who are notoriously borderline “anti-2A” are critical of a measure lauded by the usual “gun grabbers,” it should make you wonder just how bad it really is. We can, and must, protect students without sacrificing their constitutional rights. Wi-Fi gun detection is not the answer. It is the newest symptom of a system that would rather monitor everyone than confront the hard social and policy failures that produce school shooters in the first place. 

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