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Reading, Writing, RFID
supabeast! writes "Wired has a story about a public charter school in Buffalo that now tracks student attendence with mandatory RFID tags. The school's director said 'All this relates to safety and keeping track of kids...Eventually it will become a monitoring tool for us..' In the future the system will expand to '...track library loans, disciplinary records, cafeteria purchases and visits to the nurse's office...punctuality...and to verify the time [students] get on and off school buses.' I think that we can all stop calling the privacy advocates paranoid now."
Kids in schools are already treated to an all-day tracking with security cameras virtually everywhere but the toilets...and maybe there too...
1984?
"Old man yells at systemd"
Tell me why keeping track of children in a school is such bad thing?
Chip implants are soon to come!
What kind of penalty would be imposed for destroying or disabling these tags? They can't be that difficult to find.
I think the Beast is on speed dial now.
Not noteable, IMO a rubbish article.
My High School had a no hat policy, so I guess tinfoil wouldn't even be an option!
Workaround: "Hey Sandy, if you carry my tag to English today, I'll carry yours on Thursday."
:)
Thus: false sense of security.
-l
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I think that we can all stop calling the privacy advocates paranoid now.
I'm going to continue doing so until they can find an effective way to keep tabs on me...
Well now the poor kid that gets told to do the homework or get a beating for the bullies will have 50- 100 of these RFID tags so it looks like everyone is in class.
I'm told you are what you eat, does that mean I can be you by tomorrow with some A1?
This is total insanity ...
There's gotta be a law somewhere against this... honestly, such a blatant violation of one's privacy. Think of all the hoops people in the medical professions must go through, and these people just go ahead and turn people into numbers...
where's my perfect attendence award?
Minority Report was wrong... they don't track you by scanning your eyes!
I can't wait to walk into the GAP, so they can read my RFID tag and announce to everybody around that I recently purchased an unusually large amount of womens' underwear.
These are not the same tags they are proposing for inventory control in retail outlets dispite what both the Wired article and the slashdot submitter imply. These are designed to be read from a longer distance and used specifically to track people. You can still call anti inventory control RFID privacy nuts 'paranoid'.
You just know in a few months, some corporation is going to announce RFID tags for their employees. Heck, some companies already monitor email, webuse, they have cameras all over, they check when you come in if you have a door ID card. So they'll stick RFID tags in your badge and tell you to wear it at all times. And since people are so afraid of getting laid off, now's a perfect time to impliment such orwellian schemes.
Isn't it amazing that schools always seem to have money for this crap and yet cannot seem to educate literate graduates or provide pencils, books and paper for their students?
They've got endless budgets for in-classroom cameras, RFID name badges and seminars about file-sharing but never enough for field trips, athletic equipment or buses.
It just never seems to improve.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
For example, we could remotely help them with their homework, automatically remove them from dangerous situations, make them do funny dances and speak with foreign accents, as well as invade neighboring countries, all with the push of a button.
Here's to the future.
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
Here:
It's whitespace. You can borrow some.
How exactly does this take away from the child's freedom again?
They are still free to choose attendance or ditching. They are still free to choose to return library books on time or keep them past the due date.
Their choices have consequences, and this technology will make sure those consequences are dealt as impersonally as a photo-radar speed trap, but I can't really see where anyone's civil rights are being violated.
I'm pretty far left-of-center, and I think this illustrates a much bigger problem of breakdown in trusting relationships between parents, teachers and kids, but could someone explain this one to me please?
--
Now if this were to find it's way into the workplace, that would suck. But not all monitoring technology is a bad thing.
No radio frequencies in the classroom - Teacher, leave those RFID tags alone All in all, it's just another kick in privacy's balls... - If you don't have your tag, you can't get any pudding!
hey jon i dont feel like going to school today can u please take my id so I dont need to get a fake physicians certificate
Architect:
This must be a glitch in the matrix and should be fixed immediately. The humans are becoming aware of our control on them. At least they think it's only for observation.
I'll see if I can pay a visit to Ellison at Oracle in case he's the one leaking this information.
P.S. -- that Anderson kid's getting on my nerves.
-- Smith
Sweet Zombie Jesus, this is terrifying. Kids growing up in a world where their every move is in effect monitored, as are all objects around them. If you're old enough to know better, you can at least fight the concept. But to grow up in the middle of it as if it were natural... disgusting. We're going to be raising children who are either soulless or, in the case of those who can't deal with it, psychotic. What a truly hateful development. Somewhere Huxley and Orwell are weeping. And yes, I'm aware Orwell wasn't trying to predict the future but was in fact commenting on totalitarian regimes in his lifetime. He's still weeping.
and our kids are totally fucked. I predict an entire generation of useless paranoid humans who can't bear any responsibility, because of their paralyzing fear of irrational and inequitable punishment.
Even without these tags, I remember the animosity generated among kids when someone gets away with something (beats the system) while other kids get caught red-handed (brought a Swiss army knife to school, because, well, it's useful for stuff).
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
RFID = compliant IEEE standard = MAC Address?
Even if there isn't a MAC Address, it must use some kind of base station that receives packets...DoS anyone? (Probably have to build a radio, tho)
No child of mine will be tagged or branded. Is this school or a concentration camp??
Okay, but will the principal & the teachers have RFID tags to track their attendance, too? And perhaps GPS systems tracking their cars to make sure they're not speeding to work in the morning? And Internet filters on their computers? And let's check the length of the male teacher's hair to make sure it's not too long, and the length of the female teacher's skirts, to make sure they're not too short, and oh yeah, let's have them blow into a breathalyzer each morning before they're allowed to enter the school, and by the way, the "Civil Liberties" class has been cancelled due to obsolescence. We've put the "Don't Be a Pirate" class in its place.
</rant>
they should put RFID tags on those chatty secrataries, I mean, administrative assistants instead, after all they're the one's demanding outragous salaries!
Children NEED to be watched, like you should have been when you were younger, you fucking nerds.
Its only a matter of time until some parent decides to sue the school over the 'health risks' of RF radiation. ?Deja Vu?
Pedophile's dream. Now a pedophile can just: get a job in a school that has these things, plus cameras, working in the central monitoring office.
Then he watches. He chooses a student he likes, and then the RFID tags tell him which cameras to monitor, when. After all, disk space is limited, and he needs to know how to set up his scripts to capture the right stuff. He can now make a nice archive of shots of his favorites, and squirrel them away for whatever.
Oh, you say you have nothing to hide? Please post your mother's maiden name, and the names, photos, social security numbers, phone numbers, birth dates, school records, and addresses of each of your family members.
kids really can't object. if this tracking is up to the consent of the kid's parents, kids may not have much choice in the matter.
smd4985
I don't see anything terribly wrong with helping the teachers keep track of kids. Imagine a few hundred kids on a field trip to a museum. It'd be a lot easier and safer if the kids were all tagged so if they went out of a certain perimeter the chaperones could go find them right away. There also wouldn't be the problem of continuous head counts or leaving someone behind. Tagging kids is a bit weird, but the world's gotten more than a bit weird. Parents are lojacking their children now, after all. RFID tagging older kids seems a bit pointless though.
slashdot, news for crazed liberal socialist zealots
Simply implant the tags into student's bodies. Surround the tag with an air-sensitive, explosive capsule so counteract removal attempts.
Often in Error, Never in Doubt.
So if Walgreens grinds to a halt because none of their products responds to the RFID scanners any more, does this classify as terrorism ?
I would recommend that we put the unit back in operation, and let it fail.
I don't think there is any privacy issue in a school context. A student should expect to be under constant surveillance while at school, and careful monitoring of students, their activities, and school resources will result in safer schools and better education.
However, please note that this policy doesn't invade the personal privacy of students: they aren't being required to submit to searches, give up personal expression, etc. This is merely a measure to monitor compliance with existing school policies.
My only concern would be if the tags were abused, or subverted by the students.
does this prevent someone from just carrying someone else's ID in their pocket? I mean, if my high school did this waaaaay back when I went there, I could have made some serious coin just carrying around some IDs.
This doesn't help if the teachers aren't making sure the students are actually there. And it sure as hell doesn't help them learn.
Atomic batteries to power! Turbines to speed!
The right to be a human, not a computer peripheral.
The kids are wearing these on a name badge around their neck, so it's not getting implanted into their skin. That's the bood part.
It's still not good. Its potential for abuse, from BOTH sides, is tremendous. There's bound to be lots of problems with implementation, and people can discreetly carry around other's badges for them.
Technology is schools is way over-hyped.
This message brought to you by Extreme Outcome Predictors of America...
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Wake up, public school is all about treating children like cattle. Thats why I hate it so much. Dropping out of high school was the best choice I ever made, it was MY choice to exercise MY rights and to proclaim MY freedom from a tyranical overloard, my fat bull-dyke principal (that's not an exageration, she really is a fat bull-dyke). If you disagree, you can bring it up with my bachelors degree and my honors.
Homeschool your kids. Or group homeschool them. Or something. Don't send them to McSchool.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
The privacy advocate (implying most people aren't concerned with privacy) is exactly right. This move's effect (and probably its purpose) is to prepare children to accept ubiquitous monitoring and tracking, so they don't resist it when the cameras are installed on every city block in a few years.
My age group will be ridiculed as paranoid when I complain about the corporations/government start keeping detailed logs on everything I do, everyone I see, everywhere I go, etc. etc. After all, GovernCorp is only doing this for our protection, to keep the TERRORISTS away!!!
Watch as your children are taught to love Big Brother...
They are supposed to inject the RFID's into prison inmates first. THEN apply the same system to our schools.
Presumably if they're going to the trouble of determining all those other parameters, they'll also determine if the average distance between any two tags remains two low (ie, within two inches of each other because they're both around the same student's neck) or if the correlation between the positions of any two tags is too high (ie, because one's around a student's neck and the other is in his pocket for two straight hours).
Maybe the school is too obtuse, but if I were the principal and I was an RFID-phile, that's what I'd do.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
I hear that microwaving does not kill RFID tags. Anyone knows of an efficient way to clean something of its RFID tags ? Do EMPs work ? Or would I have to physically mangle them ?
Maybe we deserve this world ?
What triggered this memory was two words near the start of page two: where it said "picture tags", I misread it as "prison tags". I think my subconscious was trying to tell me something.
It was interesting watching my own prejudices while reading the article as well; I started out with a "this is terrible!" preconception, but then that conception wavered quite a bit when the article carefully emphasized "inner-city school". I went to one of those for awhile; I don't know about all of them, but the one I was in was pretty awful, and that was almost thirty years ago.
Regardless of how bad the school is, I don't think there is any excuse for surveillance technology on everyone, whether or not they've been convicted of anything. Perhaps putting that kind of dog collar on kids with discipline problems would be ok, but on EVERYONE? Isn't school already enough like prison?
"Each morning at 7:30 AM, check your free will at the door. We'll return it to you, only slightly tarnished, in the afternoon. "
If you insist on putting a dog collar on children, you've got no gripe if you end up with dogs.
Its going to be easier to cut class if attendace of the nametag is what you are checking for. No need to go to class, just make sure your friends swap it around so it makes it to all the classes you are supposed to be in.
This will be great when they start doing this in the adult world. Hookie is lots more fun when ya get payed for it.
"Doctor, it's not the voices I hear in MY head, but the voices I hear in YOUR head that really frighten me."
So uhm... not at all? Great. Got it. BAD FSCKING IDEA!!!!
IAALS.
If my tax dollars are being spent to maintain a school, these little buggers better damned well be attending. I don't have kids and I don't have a problem that my tax dollars pay for public schools....I do have a problem if they're playing hookey.
It trains our kids to be used to the idea of having their every move monitored. When they become adults they will so trained to it that they won't put up a fight when the government decides everyone needs a tracking device.
If my daughter's public school ever decided to do this, I will be the first parent to refuse to allow my daughter to carry the device.
An important reminder: the Consitution is not suspended just because you are in school. It still applies, despite what some control freaks would have you believe.
-- Will program for bandwidth
That makes it blatantly obvious who didn't RTFA. All these people saying that they can just leave the card in their desk or use someone else's are showing their true colors. The cards are worn around the neck, with the kid's picture on it. When they enter the school, their picture comes up on the screen and they touch it. There's someone watching to make sure there aren't any problems. And since when did kids get the same right to privacy as adults? Haven't we all heard local stories about kids getting left on the bus, or accidentally counted as being somewhere when they weren't? Happens all the time. I'd be willing to bet the majority of people complaining about this don't have kids, and certainly don't have kids that go to school in a "tough" neighborhood. And I'd certainly rather have my kid carrying an ID card with just their picture and a RFID tag with only their student number on it, rather than an ID card that has their name and vital stats. Sure, all that info's in a database, but that info's going to be in that database no matter what- this doesn't make it any less secure.
666-607: 6th floor apartment of the beast
Good for them, but not for me.
Companies and other schools will start to track with RF tags.
Then stores and other locations will start to keep tracking information (it is a number, they don't care who you are).
They will probaly share this, since you are broadcasting, there is no privacy issue.
It isn't you yet, but it will come.
It's about who is responsible. A huge aspect of control is responsibility. If the state removes the responsibility of their kids' attendance from parents, the state has effectively taken control of those kids outside of school, albeit for a limited time period. As the state slowly whittles away parent's responsibility over their kids, by consequence, the state gains more authority over them. After a generation or two of this control, a (presumably) benevolent Orwellian-style society won't be viewed as anything out of the ordinary.
I have an access badge at my work, lets me in rooms, lets me into the building, tracks my movement. We where going to enable it for Sun Rays, so we could walk up to any desk and have access to our x-session.
Not exactly the same as RF, have to manually scan every where you go, but if you want access you have to scan.
I use a system called Powerbroker, that logs all my keystrokes when I log into systems, it can be used to replay sessions incase something went wrong. Also tracks everyone, incase someone did unathorized work.
My Net connection is logged in the corporate proxy, and if I hit an authorized site, it informs me that the site is blocked.
My wireless data and phonecalls are tracked, with detailed records. All the way down to my location using trianglation (we call it location-based services to the customers.) Not exactly E911 and GPS, but thats in the works.
About the only security I have is my own computer and system. Since IT doesnt control my Unix box or Laptop, I can have encrypted FileSystems, and encrypted containers to keep people out. Also I use encrypted tunnels to my own systems (ssh/ssl/vpn) so I can have un-monitored access. With Wireless data being around, you can have access to the net even if your IT department blocks you. Private IRC/IM/email and such.
I guess I noticed security and privacy issues, same goes with kids. The RFID's just monitor movement and services, not the actual data the kids use. If we started recording the converstations in the hall, and sniffers to read sms messages between kids, then its a REAL invasion of privacy.
In other news, anyone see that the Senate passed the Genetic Privacy Bill? Hopefully this gets signed into law, this is the real type of privacy we need. Thou, Flip side, criminals get put into a nation wide DNA database, go figure.
-
None of us is as dumb as all of us
kids...
This isn't a way of tracking the teachers, or tracking what the students say, or watching visitors to the school. It's a means of the school doing what we want them to do already--keep track of the children while they're in school.
And, considering that this is a charter school, any parent who doesn't want their children tracked is welcome to simply not send their children there.
Honestly, I would like it if this sort of thing was MORE prevalant. How much class-time is wasted taking attendance?
Hmm... I always thought that the comparisions between highschool and prison were a bit weak, seems that society is working to make them more accurate.
They don't have to carry these things around when they're not in school. And when they ARE in school, they're supposed to get on/off the bus at a specific time, they're supposed to be in specific classes at specific times. They're not supposed to leave campus during classes (with obvious legitimate exceptions, of course). Each class always takes roll, and if the student hasn't shown up for class that day, and the office hasn't been notified why, the parents are contacted. This happens already, why would adding RFID tags make any difference? It might be helpful to know that the student got off the bus, but hasn't shown up to class. Or walked out of the building after 3rd period not to return. The advantage of using RFID is that this information can be made available immediately if needed, and if there is a real problem, you don't have to spend a couple hours tracking down attendance records from the teachers or watching hours of video looking for the important 3 seconds.
I suppose it's sad that anyone thinks that this is necessary, but the same can be said for metal detectors and locks on the doors. The only problem I can see with this is if someone relies on on the RFID and ONLY the RFID for tracking purposes. Manual attendance counts should still be taken and verified to avoid any attempts to abuse the system. But lets not get too excited about a perceived loss of privacy where there really has never been a whole lot of it anyway.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
What scares me is that some school officials probably already discussed that approach.
the government does not have the right to track and monitor a citizen's every move. it goes against the notion of privacy. IANAL, but it seems it would be an illegal search of a citizens life. on that same note, no business has the right to put full tabs on its employees because that is a violation of their rights. if it is wrongful to disregard the privacy an adult citizen of this country then we must also frown apon any attempt to ignore the privacy rights of minors. they are citizens as well but do not get the luxury of having their voices heard. they cannot vote. it is, therefore, the duty of all the adult citizens of this nation to protect the rights of minors because they cannot do it themselves.
-----
Constitutionally Institutionalized
by daniel mcdonald
I am the unpatriot,
for not standing behind
the man blind.
You are the patriot;
for idling in line
no questions in mind.
Anyone can track these kids anywhere with a radio receiver. This dosn't have to stay in the schools
When your workplace switches to RF ID cards you can be tracked too.
This is broadcast information, why can't I share this. Stores and groups could track people silently anywhere.
Add a Credit card transaction, and you can put a name to the person wandering through all these places.
Instead of the English classes reading '1984', maybe the f*cking administration should.
Lately I have a hard time believing the slippery slope "fallacy" is actually a fallacy. It's pretty clear where this path is going to take us.
Until you can actually state why all this tracking is objectively bad, you really need to keep calling them paranoid.
The world's not going to end because some kids are tracked.
n/t
"Is our children learning?"
10 Bits= $.25
100 Bits= $.50
110 Bits= $.75
1000 Bits= 1 byte
Gardening will be viewed as tax evansion, since gardeners will not have government approved rfid tags in thier unprocessed food.
The rfid tags will also be vitamin-fortified and will be accompanied by nano heart worm robots that will swin in our blood supply eating cholesterol.
Think global, act loco
"It's as private as anything else can be when your information is stored on a server,"
Given the state of IT security in many places, not very secure.
" "It's as private as anything else can be when your information is stored on a server," he said. "
Doesn't mean they aren't out to get you. .It only means you are overly sensitive to it.
But its nice ( in a sad sort of way ) that us paranoids are getting credit for being right all along about things such as this..
Too bad it may be too late to do anything about it.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Another application for RFID that would be unpleasant occurred to me recently: quality control and regulatory compliance stickers. Rather than have a bunch of little ugly stickers on the products you buy ("QC#4 passed", or "UL approved") you could write that information into an RFID tag embedded in the product. It would be both prettier and, maybe, a bit harder to forge. Then we would have a legitimate application for consumer RFID tag readers (so you could verify the regulatory compliance of products on store shelves, read the embedded serial number/batch number/date of manufacture, etc.)
Can you at least NOT use italics in your own personal comments? It confuses article text and your own opinion.
Browse at -1, because trolls are often the most creative part of
On Star Trek, finding someone is as simple as asking "Computer, where is Ensign Expendable currently located?"
The school spent $25,000 on the ID system. The $3 ID tags students wear around their necks at all times . . .
...except my school spent nearer to $30,000 for regular plastic ID cards for us to wear around our necks and a couple of cameras to watch the school parking lot. What's scary to me is that they also plan on making the kids in the junior high and elementary schools wear these IDs. Looks like someone else got to them first.
.....
I've also been told by some of the faculty they want to make the cards act somewhere along the lines of how the RFID, for attendence and the like.
"Before, everything was done manually -- each teacher would take attendance and send it down to the office," he said. "Now it's automatic, and it saves us a lot of time."
This I like the least... we also just switched over to having the teachers use the computers for attendance. That was a bad call, especially since the computer writes out cut slips automatically when a student is marked absent, for which in most cases was a mistake on the teacher's part. Taking attendance before was much easier, since the teachers understood the system, and if a student needed to be somewhere else during that class, they could, and the teacher would just have to make a mental note of it and could mark an absence for the day in her book with no cut slip, since the student was where s/he was supposed to be. With the computers the teachers are required to mark the students absent if they are not in the room, even if they had called in (though most teacher fortunatly ignore this rule). Cut slips for everyone; just one big annoyecne.
The $3 ID tags students wear around their necks at all times incorporate the same Texas Instruments smart labels used in the wristbands worn by inmates at the Pima County jail in Texas.
Well, I've joked about my school turning into a prison . . . I guess I deserved to hear that anther school did, and mine just might follow even more closely in its tracks.
I don't see what good ID tags in schools will do. To many people refuse to wear them (though they oft face consequnces for it) for them to do any good for identification purposes. They're not about to stop terrorist attacks on the school, and there more of a hinderance than a help when it comes to getting students to be where the should be, since the students know where they should be more often than the school does. Unless those little peices of plastic can stop bullets, why bother?
What happens when these kids grow up thinking it's okay for Big Brother to track them everywhere they go? Looks like a generation that doesn't realize that they don't have privacy, freedoms, rights, etc. is being bred. No one ever fights if they don't know there's something to fight for. I thought the government couldn't win this under the guise of security . . . looks like they can.
if you'll (totally) recall, they had rfid chips implanted in the movie that told their cast of charecters everything from where and when to which seashell (oh, you don't know about the three sea shells, psst. he doesn't know about the sea shells, hehehehehehe). if hollywood could nail this prediction 10 years ago, who here should be surprised today
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." - Rahm Emanuel
I'm guessing....Nope.
Hey, I'm just your average shit and piss factory.
When his parents would show up at daycare and ask where my friend's clothes were, he had no idea.
At my school, when a kindergartener had to bring an important piece of paper home to his parents, they stapled it to his shirt so that he wouldn't lose it on the bus.
I'm in college now and have lost an embarrasing number of plastic mugs in class.
If schools can get kids to keep track of their RFID devices, I'll be impressed.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
FUCK THIS! My kids are going to be homeschooled!
But the tags need to be surgically implanted, with small explosive charges (just enough to remove the child's head efficiently) to prevent tampering.
Then we won't need truant officers, the school principals can just use remote-control detonators, instead. Think of the cost savings!
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos.
Is the right wing finally losing the battle?
From article...
"That way, we could confirm that Johnny Jones got off at Oak and Hurtle at 3:22," Stillman said. "All this relates to safety and keeping track of kids.... Eventually it will become a monitoring tool for us."
So I guess they will have to tell the school if they are going to go over to a friends house for the day... That way they won't send the helicopters out if he gets off at the "wrong" bus stop!
i'll preface this with a disclaimer that i'm not usually a conspiracy theorist, but these things have some seriously scary potential -- probably more so in other countries than ours, but nonetheless.. i heard an interesting argument against them last night on our local "liberal" radio station (i have the conservative one on the presets too, i'm pretty darn moderate) picture this if you will: you go to a political rally for someone or some cause that is against the current regieme(sp) - an agent of can hang out in the crowd, or just place readers at the entrance/exit to scan for the RFID's that the Gap has been so nice to put in your clothes. the now know who was there, who you were with, what your political views are, etc, etc. all with a simple database correlation query.. like the picture? place one of those outside of blackhat or any hax0r meetings etc and let the fun begin.. -r
Students are expected to be responsible enough to be entrusted with a laptop at taxpayer expense, so expecting them to keep track of their RFID is no big deal.
Why was this modded funny.. this IS the ultimate goal. Implant EVERYONE.. make them practically non removable....
it should be modded as 'scary true'.
Get them as kids.. makes it an easier process to maintain it when adults. and after a generation or two, you get mass coverage.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Camera's in class? Got em
In car monitoring of the kids? Got it.
In store cameras to follow you through the mall? Got it.
Hell...they even give little cameras out for free so we can monitor each other. They just call em "cell phones".
What's next...shock collars to zap the kid when he strays out of bounds?
Oh wait.. That's how they're foisting this on us in the first place..
The truth about Scientology, Xenu, and you: Operation Clambake
Charter schools are different than private schools. For detals, see this description (which is a bit over-optimistic), but basically they're an "alternative" public school. They're funded by local and state taxes, but are not responsible for living up to many guidelines and regulations normal schools have. In my limited experience they don't turn out well; the one near me basically ended up completely occupied by kids who skipped class to do drugs all the time. They were much more open-ended and "free-thinking" than most regular schools I've seen, but to perhaps a dangerous extent since the kids basically didn't have to learn a damn thing if they didn't want to. Then again, maybe I'm just bitter that they had all the fun ;).
Rock over London, Rock on Chicago. Wheaties: Breakfast of Champions.
Face facts: In our litigious society, schools--rightly or wrongly--get sued when parents realize that little Johnny has been skipping class or that little Jannie has been smoking dope and giving BJs behind the gym during lunch. The jurors that render judgment are made up of the same parents that fail to acknowledge their responsibility for their kids behavior. The schools must protect themselves. The cost of one of those lawsuits--imagine if the kid gets himself killed--could well be more than the cost of these RFIDs over a five year period.
"Love is a familiar; Love is a devil: there is no evil angel but Love." --William Shakespeare ('Love's Labors Lost')
Wouldn't little blue numbers tattooed on the wrist be cheaper?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
About 5 years ago I read that someone was working on a device(s) to track a ship's crew. Had some features of a pager (not RFID tags). Was mostly for safety reasons...guess it can be a very hazzardous environment...especially with fires + explosions etc. Also nice to know immediatly if someone falls overboard.
Come to think of it, doesn't everyone on Star Trek have communicator, such that the computer keeps track of where everyone is?
Hmmm...is my cell phone telling the local towers "I am here, in case you need to call me!"
Yeah, I think the school might want to bust them for that when they're supposed to be in class as well.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
and they stop working .... hear that kids?
good news, bad news... I don't think that kids will be unable to bear responsibility, because for the things they actually care about, they will have to. The problem here is that the rules are so controlling that they will are likely to be flagrantly disobeyed. The continued presence of stupid rules only means that the students will have less respect for rules (in general) in the future. When everything is forbidden, everyone becomes a criminal, and then nothing is forbidden because no one cares anymore. If you want to end constructive authority, rules like this are an effective way to do it.
Any measure intrusive to be effective will be intrusive enough that no one will want it. This use of RFIDs can be negated, particularly by those it is designed to work against, such as kidnappers; thus it gives away the privacy of children while providing very little gain in safety or security (the children might get lost - then the tags would be useful). It is however, a wonderful way to spend all that extra money the schools seem to have...oh wait, they don't have much of that...my bad.
I just feel as though America is completely fucked...
and I sure wish that some of the things taken had RFID tags in or on them.
If we had this technology years ago we would really know what happened to elvis!
"You're on my side and the dark side, like Lando Calrissian?" --Gimpy, Undergrads
In reality, the rules that we have set out are not always obeyed, and the rules accomodate for this concept. Speeding is illegal, but most people do it, and only the egregious violators get ticketed. When you change how a rule is encforced, you fundamentally change the nature of the rule.
The only motivation to track students is to enforce rules governing their movement through the school. I'm sure it's not just for the purposes of statistical study. These rules of movement are now enforced in spirit, but ultimately they cannot be enforced strictly to the letter because too much can go untracked. Now, that is no longer true.
I've heard more than one story of a student who was a good student arranging some special priveleges with teachers under the table. Taking an occasional morning off to go have breakfast with friends. Skipping a class to go wait in line for good concert tickets. These did not hurt the student's academic performance, and rewarded their maturity with a degree of freedom. With the ability to track their every movement, these students would be punished instead.
This sort of system encourages students to follow rules strictly, and that is not healthy for society. People need to be able to occasionally bend or break rules, otherwise society stagnates.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
http://www.geocities.com/ussmunchkin5/TNG80.htm
Can you carry my tag for me?
No matter how subtle the wizard, a knife between the shoulder blades will seriously cramp his style.
It's not the RFID tags and the constant surveillance tags that bother me, but I don't like all of the school assemblies where they keep saying bad things about Emanual Goldstein. I swear, that school's having one a week.
Oh, and those creepy posters and TV screens everywhere aren't much either.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
My 7th grade son has to carry his ID card whenever he is on school grounds. If he doesn't have it, we are called and either we deliver the ID or take him home. He sits in the office until then. $20 for a lost ID.
I see posts on here asking what's wrong with the concept of monitoring kids/people/etc. It is really simple. It works TOO well. How can children learn the difference between right and wrong if you remove their ability to do wrong, chance being discovered, and suffering the ramifications?
At what point in a society equipped with oversight such as this do our children "learn" to choose the right path?
There is a very real correlation to abused children becoming irresponsible adults, it is a common psychological side effect of the abuse. The reason? Because every experience the child knows to adulthood is something that was done to/for the child - never was the child exposed to the effect of properly or improperly handled responsibility. Thus later in life they are simply regurgitating the only thing they have ever known.
How can you learn responsibility when the option to choose is removed? Some will say you can simply explain it to them. Talk to them. Sure, and I can explain the color red to blind person too - doesn't mean they will ever really grok it, in fact - I assure you they won't - and even if they could how can you hope that they will ever show the slightest innovation in their decision-making skills if they are simply clones of YOUR thought process.
Dealing with children is like a chess game - to be good at it you have to think more than one move in advance. Sometimes it is better to let the child make a decision and suffer the consequences so they truly see what can/will happen to them due to questionable decision-making practices.
Achieving complete compliance from our kids in this arena is probably what's best for those in charge. For the teachers, the parents, law enforcement, the government, whatever... but it is categorically the worst thing we can do to/for our children.
From the article: The school spent $25,000 on the ID system.
Leaving the 'tracking' issue aside (I'm sure hundreds will do it more justice than I can) this is a prime example of why we spend more and more on education with worse and worse results.
How does this system help students learn? It doesn't. Oh, it'll make sure they show up, but ~$10.00 in paper and pencils will do that, too.
The only benefit that I can seeis that teachers will be relieved of a two minute task. Resist the urge to add up a year's worth of minutes--most lessons are on a day-by-day schedule, and those minutes aren't going to help. Plus, there's now a scan-in monitor who has to make sure that the right student is wearing the right ID.
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
Children should be kept track of by a teacher with no more students in the classroom than a single teacher can engage at once. Using technology to monitor students is penitentiary infrastructure.
Schools are a place where tchnology should not be viewed as a way to shrink the bottom line while maintaining the same results on paper. Technology has its place in schools, and I'm not against it, but there are human factors that we are simply not up to filling with technology. Good teachers with a personality cannot be replaced as a classroom institution. RFID tags... PLEASE!!!??
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
The sad truth is this: If this technology becomes widely available and practical for school use, it will be all but mandatory. If some school (public or private) decides that they do not want to use it because it intrudes on student privacy, etc. and then some child gets abducted from school grounds, it doesn't take a genius to figure out what will happen. The school will be sued for 'failure to provide a safe enviroment by not using a known safety device' or some nonsense like that. Even if they used security measures that were otherwise excellent and the intruder just got lucky. Yet another disadvantage of living in a country run by lawyers.
This is probably part of the whole "Look-how-wonderful-RFID-is" campaign. The RFID folks pay for the system, (and maybe donate some computer stuff to sweeten the deal) in return for the glowing reviews from the school board.
All kids have those anyway. It's called acne!!
liqbase
Thank god I made it out of school before this came along...
I can just imagine the belt-welts I would have felt had this been around in my time.
Or, I would have stayed in public school... either way it would have hurt.
Snooze and you lose your sushi.
Everyone has to become 'body-builders' as lead-lined clothing becomes all the rage......
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
Why would a bully carry the card, and what would it matter? By the article's description, it works only within 20 inches, and what they'd do anyway is steal your card and discard or destroy it so you'll get in trouble for not having it, or not checking in with it.
Virg
It seems that George Orwell's "1984" is slowly but surely coming true. If you think that this infringement on privacy rights is going to stay in the schools, you're sorely mistaken. With all of the people abdicating their rights by having cameras monitor the public streets for better security, its only a matter of time before this rfid program will be expanded to the public streets. In the near future, if you want to go out into the public streets, you will have to carry a national id card that has an embedded rfid chip in it. All your movements can easily be the tracked, logged and spindled!
Quit playing Monopoly with Bill.
Linux - of the people, by the people, and for the people.
if you carry my tag to English today...
The tag will be implanted under the skin, at the base of the spine. With attachment ports for future enhancements.
Evil is the money of root.
What I want to know is, with all the talk of school cutbacks, reductions in education spending, and the decline in U.S. educational standards, where are schools getting the money to build systems like this?
I mean, that's great that they want to know who is in the building and what time they got there, but it strikes me as odd that teachers could not perform the same duties using a pencil and piece of paper.
The focus of education is on academics, not punctuality. Unless every child there is doing Calculus, reading through one of the top 100 literature lists, knows where France is on a map, can dissect a pig, is able to competently complete a line rendering, and knows all that junk they teach you in home economics, the people behind this system are wasting these kid's time and their parent's money.
It would also have to explode after three days if there was more than one surviving student, or if any of them tried to leave the island....err....sorry, been watching Battle Royale too much.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Now that I think about it, I wish this was around when I was a kid to see my parents faces the first time I put the rfid'd id card on a bus bound for mexico...
lol...
Snooze and you lose your sushi.
"School" as we know it was designed to train the children of subsistence farmers to be effective factory workers. Rather than getting up at dawn, working with their families at their own pace, and doing whatever it was subsistence farmers did for fun, the Industrial age required workers trained to wake up at the same time every day, respond to stimuli such as whistles ordering the start and end of the working day, and so on. A few generations of such schooling later, and it's become our cultural norm. At the time of the Industrial Revolution, the notion of schooling was nothing short of, well, revolutionary.
Fast-forward to today. We have Industrial-era schooling in an Security-era economy. Your post ("I don't see why kids should have it any better") is evidence of this - you seem to think that having the Panopticon in the workplace and government is a Bad Thing. And yet, you're learning; you're adapting, as evidenced in your next paragraph:
> When you have kids you'll take whatever steps are necessary to protect them. If that means they have to live without much privacy for 18 or so years of their life then so be it! They have approx. 70 more to have all the privacy they want.
Actually, they won't. But you're correct that the RFID-chipping of kids is a Good Thing. Just as you know no limits when it comes to keeping track track them for their protection, your employer and government has an interest in your well-being. Granted, the interest isn't as overarching as the relationship between parent and child; more like rancher and cattle. But show me a rancher who doesn't take care of his cattle, and I'll show you a rancher who's out of business in a year.
But back to school. We moved from the agricultural age to the industrial age, and we designed schools to raise children who would take us there. We now stand at the transitional generation from the industrial age to the security age. By getting the kids accustomed to the Panopticon at an early age, they'll graduate from school better-prepared to take part in the security society.
300 years ago, old farmers probably hated having to get up at oh-dark-hundred to go to the factory as much as you seem to dislike your zero-privacy expectation at work.
As a result of our transition from an agricultural society to an industrial society, we have a wide range of consumer goods ranging from broadband pr0n to advances in medical treatment that have doubled the human lifespan and nearly tripled the useful part of the human lifespan.
Today, you and I grumble, and your kids might even chafe (initially) at being chipped. Within a generation or so, our presecurity culture will also be abandoned, and 300 years from now, our descendants will look on us and our presecuity culture as just as primitive as we now imagine our preindustrial subsistence-farming ancestors.
So do all the parents agree that this is a good idea? For those that do: fine, let their children be cattle.
For those that disagree with this policy...send your kids to school with a note that says you don't allow them to take their RFID tag to school.
If the school doesn't like that attitude...raise a stink! Make people aware of the slope they're leading their kids down. Or take the easy route and find someplace better. I don't think either is a wrong answer at this point.
Depending on how old your kid is, you could try explaining too why this whole system is a bad idea, too.
Now if I could only remember where I put that RFID finder thingie.
This is simply the logical next step of public education.
The original supporters of public education were largely supporting it for the purpose of subjugating the public. They saw mandatory public education as a means to subvert those of higher intellect, and to "level the playing field" so that people would be more easily managaged. Additionally, it was seen as a tool to sundivide people, and to cause folks to see artificial social barriers (such as age) where they were not, by dividing them up into such age-based groups.
When you consider that people throughout our history have been doing college-level work at around 12 (Benjamin Franklin, anyone?), this isn't in the least bit inconceiveable. Franklin wasn't a savant or anything like that - he had quite a few contemporaries: Washinton, Jefferson, Adams and the like. They also started adulthood at a younger age. (Franklin was a printer's apprentice at 12, and was doing graduate-level work, ot a degree, at that time).
When you contrast this historical treatment of education, vs. modern situations, where there are often intelligent people that do poorly in school, or simply do medicorely because they don't have the desire to invest themselves in something that is incredibly slow paced, and teens in general feel distant and confused, it's no small wonder.
This is just one step closer towards the Governing class being able to truely and completely subvert people: we're well on our way to thoughtcrime. I give he US (and maybe other countries too?) no more than 20 years until there is mandatory RFID-taging of every student, and maybe 30 years for every citizen - all globally locateable. All in the name of "stopping terrorists", and the easier management and control of the populace.
Doesn't make those "crazy" biblical philosophy folks seem that far off with the "mark of the beast". I guess now would probably be the right time to mention that Christianity has a strong centric emphasis on the individual, if I wanted to be flamed and start the trolls a' rolling.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
TI Specs on Card Reader
13.56 mhz, 8"/5" Read Range...no tracking yet (hoping that 802.11x has already sucked these frequencies)
64 bit unique card ID set by TI, 2K storage on card, magnetic strip optional, 847(?) kHz subcarrier signal required for power/transmission
TI RFId Site
Do they have to carry a card with them at all times (which they could easily leave in a desk)... or is it implanted in some hard to reach body cavity?
> My 7th grade son has to carry his ID card whenever he is on school grounds. If he doesn't have it, we are called and either we deliver the ID or take him home.
And they're doing this in the name of security, correct? So, every time he loses his ID card, you have to drop what you're doing to act on it, pony up $20.00 and he misses a day of school? What if the local bully decides to take his card from him every week? Is this really a sensible solution at all? If he loses his ID on the day of a big test, does he get the chance to make it up? Can you think of ways this could be abused?
It sounds like you need to reconsider the school your son attends. When their need to track him trumps his learning, the system needs revision.
Virg
Whether the workplace, school, or street it monitors the wrong thing!
It only monitors WHERE the tag is.
The tag is only the same place as the person WHEN EVERYTHING IS NORMAL.
The purpose of monitoring is to stop ABNORMAL things.
Because those who monitor start to focus on the tags and not the people its easy to show them what they want to see by moving the tags where the tags need to be.
By the time the monitors realise something is wrong, they've lost a lot of time.
If you need to monitor children or employees, then monitor them, pay attention to them as people, get to know them.
Delegate it to a dumb machine and you'll get dumb data.
Sure you can say "Oh, it must have just been Johnny's tag that boarded the school bus, it seems it was pinned to Jimmy's coat pocket, I wonder when Johnny really disappeared".
"Dang you Joe, I know it was you what was in the company store room at 10:15"
"No sir, my home was burgled last night"
Sam
blog.sam.liddicott.com
everytime the little jewel of my loins looses his rfid tag ? We have a record going on jackets now, 3 this year, am considering padlocking his current one to him :) I pay my taxes for school, then buy "uniforms", then special books, and then lunch, because lets face it would you eat what they serve, I went to school one day and I couldn't, so the bottom line is gonna be an increase in my cost rather than expect the teachers to learn to identify the students in their classes ?!?! I take responsibility for my child, his learning and upbringing, actively participate in his schooling, provide rides and assitance to a soccer team and all the children who's parents don't or can't, and I expect the teachers to DO THE SAME. I don't expect them to raise my children but they DO have the RESPONSIBILITY to NOTICE if they aren't in class and notify the parents, I will go from there.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
How exactly is this a problem? Are privacy advocates upset about teachers taking attendance at the begining of class? I'd rather have an RFID-based system take attendance automatically then waste the first ten minutes of every class throughout the day.
Tracking who goes where in the bulding? I've had to work at several places where I had to swipe my badge to unlock the door, how is this different?
Speeding up the lines when checking out at the cafeteria through RFID, more time to eat and relax during lunch.
If the serial numbers of the tags was distributed outside of the school, I could see a privacy concern, but as long as they're only used internally, I don't see the privacy violation. Seriously, how much do you do in high school that you want to do anonymously?
Johnny and Jill are shown as in the janitor's closet. And they've been in there for 15 minutes!
:-P
It must be a kiddie shag-a-thon. Dispatch the troops to break up this scandalous act!
Damn, my "back in the day I had to walk 7 miles in the snow each way to school" stories aren't gonna be nothin' when they come back with "yeah, but you could get away with STUFF"
In our school 1984 was one of the main book used in our English course.
Oh the irony.
Good to see the guys at MiniTrue working hard..
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
Your point about responsibility-enforcing technology destroying true personal responsibility is valid, but much of the modern American pop-cultural concept of the "proper" use of law is blind to this subject-object dichotomy. Example: ever notice how politicians talk about being "tough on drugs" to "send a message?" Who is the subject and who is the object in this discussion? Heroin (example drug) is illegal in the US because of an intellectually specious concept that society is responsible for protecting individuals who are irresponsible. The problem here is that separating responsibility from the individual ultimately deprives people not only of their freedom, but from an environment in which the concept of free will itself has independent validity. I don't believe children have the intellectual capability or life experience necessary to make consistently mature choices, so protecting them into adulthood is necessary and a genuine moral obligation of those who bring them into the world. But stripping kids of responsibility ultimately ruins them as adults later on, because they never truly get exposed to the consequences of the exercise of free will. The use of artificial restraining tools (the application of law, instead of the application of mature mind) is so insidious precisely because it encourages laziness of thought. That laziness of thought then takes on independent psychological force after the original reason creating a legal structure is forgotten. The laziness in thought then corrupts the society it was meant to help. That's why welfare policies in the US failed and were largely rolled back in the 1990s: welfare was found to create psychological dependency on welfare. That's because people (and other natural entities) tend to default to the lowest-energy state possible. With people, low-energy means less thinking, less acting and less ultimate freedom, because thinking, acting and understanding how to maintain one's freedom and independence all consume a lot of energy. That's what it means when they say: the price of freedom is eternal vigilence. Government has one purpose and one purpose alone: to serve as the organ of coercive force. When people lose sight of that fact, they start dreaming of new functions for the government without realizing that if something is truly good, it should come about through the exercise of free will in the first place. It takes effort to enforce laws, and divorcing effort from the application of force will not help the cause of freedom. Indeed, because government always has a monopoly on power, it will only serve to increase the relative empowerment of the government population (because governmental power is ultimately controlled by people who, like other people, take personal responsibility for advancing their own interests if it's easy to do so) versus the relatively unaware general population.
I teach and to me this doesn't sound like such a bad idea. As a homeroom teacher trying to keep track of 25 students or more is a really hard thing to do, let alone a school of 200-300 students. I'm thinking right now about the parents who show up to school and their child isn't around (happens more often that you think) because they got on a bus, or are still in school, or left at a earlier time, or maybe ditched halfway through the day. A system like this would help us to keep track of where students are and possibly alleviate a whole lot of aggravation and panic on the parts of parents and teachers. There is also the paperwork side of this. Teaching is soooooooo much work. I regularly put in 12 - 14 hour days and one thing that would be great is if I didn't have to worry about attendance. There is a lot of attendance paperwork to keep track of, (We SHOULD be doing it on the coputer but the administration seems to have no idea what computers are capable of.) not to mention that in the morning there are a bazillion other things to do along with taking attendance. It would be so nice if they just walked into the school and they were automatically noted. (sigh)
Don't believe me? Read on.
In the article:
"Intuitek President David M. Straitiff said his company built privacy protections into the school's RFID system, including limiting the reading range of the kiosks to less than 20 inches and making students touch the kiosk screen instead of passively being scanned by it. He pooh-poohed the notion that the system would be abused.
"(It's) the same as swiping a mag-strip card for access control, or presenting a photo ID badge to a security guard, both of which are commonplace occurrences," Straitiff said."
(then, later in the article)
""It's as private as anything else can be when your information is stored on a server," he said."
- - -
So okay, it's no worse than mag-strip cards or photo ID cards AT THE POINT OF ENTRY TO THE CLASSROOM.
But suppose, just suppose, your server gets compromised. Happens every day, as we all know, to banks and other supposedly high-security establishments, so it's safe to say that school databases can and will be compromised.
Now, the person who compromises the server gets names, addresses and faces from the database, prints them out in a handy reference*, then sets up a little scanner at a nearby arcade to read the tags of kids as they come in. Certainly conceivable.
The person then hangs out at the arcade during school hours and, when one of these kids shows up while ditching school, the abductor walks up to the child and loudly announces in a voice of authority "Jimmie Johnson, you should be in 3rd period right now! Come with me." The child assumes the person is a school authority (after all, they recognized them and knew their name, right?) and goes with the adult.
The child is taken into a car (people don't stop them; after all, this person recognized the kid, and the kid isn't fighting it, right?) and is driven somewhere secluded where they are molested and killed.
The whole point of this isn't that you get tracked -- it's that you get tracked WITHOUT KNOWLEDGE, and that RFIDs allow anyone who comes within reading range of the tags to read information from it.
At least having a photo ID in a pocket or a mag-strip card in your pocket means nobody can track you without getting it out of your pocket first -- so if some adult starts claiming they know you, but don't know your name, you can start screaming bloody murder in hopes than an adult will intervene and prevent your abduction.
Sigh.
*Arguably, this could be done without the use of RFIDs, since a person could break into the server and print this data out and this would be sufficient. However, without RFIDs the abductor would need to stand near the entryway holding the printout and checking out faces, which would be highly suspicious behavior. With RFIDs, the perp could sit in a car nearby and wait for the scanner to pick up one of the kids. They cross-reference it with their printout, then go into the arcade without holding any reference material -- and march straight towards the child in question. It's a lot more commanding and authoritative, and much more likely to be believed by witnesses in the vicinity.
At least our kids will be used to the idea when the government starts doing it to the populous. Trust me... it starts with the kids, and when they grow up to be politicians, they don't see what the big deal is.
You quitting proves that the karma kap worked. The most annoying of the whores shut up. --CmdrTaco
> This is a charter school--a privately run school that applies capitalism's "someone doing it for a profit will do it better" principle to higher education.
Charter schools are not private schools, and elementary schools are not higher education. A charter school is a public school with a specialized charter. Google it and you'll find a mass of optimistic and not-so-optimistic descriptions of charter schools.
Virg
They tell you it's for the safety of the children.
Don't you want to protect the children against criminals?
What? You are against this idea? Are you a criminal? What have you to hide?
If you are not a bad guy - you don't have to worry, because you have nothing to hide.
Have a nice (untracked) weekend
NoSuchGuy
Grundgesetz * 23. Mai 1949 - 30. November 2007 - http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/
Kurt Russel's Newest movie: Escape from School
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
More control, less freedom. some things just shouldn't be done, even if you can.
Generally, I think this is a good thing. When I was in middle school, through HS, and into college, and now with a job, I had to carry an ID Card. Here at work there is an RFID tag in it that we can swipe infront of a few doors. It is easier then the mag. strips. MS, HS, & college all had barcodes. It worked well. My DL has a mag strip and a large 2d bar code. "Active Census" will be fun. Imagine having realtime data on the population. We will not have privacy. The only thing close to privacy will be what we keep locked in our head. Wait a few years, and they'll be able to read that as well.
Remember the tech. itself isn't good or bad. It is what "we" do with it. Alot of "good" can come of this. I would absolutly love to know where *everything* that I own is at all times. (That would elimate theft or make those that steal RFID goods be caught extremely easily.)
It is easy to miss use this as well. I'm surprised some one other than the US government hasn't sponsered an effort to seemlessly track everything and everyone yet. It is only a matter of time.
I haven't seen anyone mention it, so I'll go ahead. If a whole generation of kids grows up used to the idea of constant surveillance, what are the laws going to be like in the future? Home or private school for my kids...(I've been in both home and private (Christian) schools and gone to public, so my decision was made already. This just clinches it. My $0.02
Franklin Rooseveldt was one of the greatest minds ever to lead this country. Were it not for his efforts, we'd have a class of 'untouchables' much like the third world. Part of what makes us a great country is that we care for ALL the people, regardless of what businessmen want.
All you privacy advocates can flame away. I'm going home and won't be taking the time to read your bitter diatribes anyhow.
As a parent of three children, including a handicapped son who just entered a large over-crowded highschool, I'm all for knowing where my kids are. As long as I'm responsible for my children, I welcome technology to assist me (and those who have proxy responsibility for my children) in tracking them. Once my children are adults, they should have every right to their privacy. Until then, I want to know every detail of my children's day.
I skipped high school on an almost daily basis. When I wasn't in school, I was driving around with my friends drinking beer and smoking rope. I will gladly invade my children's privacy if I can keep them from wasting their youth as I did (even though it was quite a fun youth!).
If this technology can improve the security of schools while at the same time freeing up teachers to actually teach, then that's a good thing. How cool would it be to get an automated email if one of my kids was frequently tardy to class. How critical would it be to get an instant automated notification that an elementary school student didn't arrive at school or a high school student left early.
My children's safety and education are much more critical to me than their privacy.
Make it something they have done as long as they can remember, then there will be no complaints. Nothing like social programming.....mooooo
:-( --- argh. Despair, I owe again.
Our schools stopped "schooling" and became social/government control factories starting over fifty years ago.
This is just another step in that direction.
I hope this is challenged by some of the more intelligent parents and the practice ended. The ACLU should be very very interested in and helping to handle this gross invasion of privacy, no matter the thin candy coating of "safety of the children" excuse.
Ignore that sig behind the curtain.
From the article:
Stillman has gone whole-hog for radio-frequency technology, which his year-old Enterprise Charter School started using last month to record the time of day students arrive in the morning.
In my highschool, teachers took attendance, including noting if the student was late. So, now the teachers don't have to do that, because a device scans all the tags as students enter.
In the next months, he plans to use RFID to track library loans,
You can bet that the library was completely aware of which student had which book at my school. Really, what sort of libraries don't keep track of this info? Otherwise, you could just keep the damned book and no one would ever know. I can see how it would make things easier if the librarian could just scan your tag rather than take down your name.
disciplinary records,
When students in my school were "written up" for misbehavior, this included writing down their names. So now, I guess, the hall monitors can just scan their tags instead.
cafeteria purchases
I suppose these weren't recorded for me when I paid in cash. Many students, though, used prepaid accounts, for which of course you needed identification. Now they can just use the tags.
and visits to the nurse's office.
Yep, I'm pretty my name was recorded when I went to the nurse's office.
Eventually he'd like to expand the system to track students' punctuality (or lack thereof) for every class
See item 1.
and to verify the time they get on and off school buses.
I suppose my bus driver didn't always keep track of when I got on and off the bus, but I don't see the problem here. Many school busses have security cameras on them which have the same effect. Why would you not want your school to know when you get on or off a bus?
So, where is the invasion of privacy? How is any of this any different than it ever was? RFID's don't allow anyone to track your exact position as you move around the world. They are just tags which can be scanned like security cards, but easier.
Really, I wonder about people who look at this and say "OH MY GOD THEY'RE TRACKING PEOPLE!" without thinking about it.
(Please, no slippery slope crap.)
They're doing this to allow pedophiles to track clusters of kid, much like industrial fishing with a large net.
The Machine needs COGS, not CONTROLLERS. The public education system has been getting progressively dumbed down year after year. School Boards are being run by hard-core machine politicians with the long-term view of 'keep em stupid and they'll vote any way we want'. Meanwhile, parents are working two jobs each trying to keep up and then try to find time to help their kids with schoolwork. It's not just the budget, it's the hidden agendas. Until you start getting some working joes on the school boards, it's going to be business (like Enron) as usual.
Would you really like to see us evolve into a society where all laws are enforced at all times by a "no sparrow falls" all-seeing authority? That's where we're headed, and it's disturbing. The idea of living in such an oppressive world seems to suck the very oxygen out of the air. And to complete the role reversal, I'm pretty right of center.
I mean the days where they tatooed a number on you and kept track of you by placing you in a concentration camp^H^H^H^H oops I mean resort.
.. expell them, humiliate them, impose corporal dicipline? Call human services on their parents for neglecting their kid when they are no longer in school. Call the police to take the kids away, and pop a bullet in their heads if they fight back to keep their child?
Also this begs the question, if the RFID requirment is so harmless, then what are you going to do when a kid or parent refuses,
How much you'd want to bet that they'd call the parents extreme!
>>> in a few months, some corporation is going to announce RFID tags for their employees.
According to most papers I had to sign starting for a new business, they could add RFID to building access card without my knowledge "new cards for everyone".
One place I worked for the RFID card had to be used to work the cofee machine. It was strange when they changed the machines, as it was located in a secured area anyway. Until the reviews came in and the boss said "hum 4 coffees a day, better watch out 4 or 5 raises a red flag, we don't want to have a bunch of nerve balls in the meetings".
The report even informed of the regular, decaf or chocolate you had and at what time; grabbing a coffee on your way out after 8PM became a habit for many after the first review! (See I was working late for YOU and for FREE)
This is only tracking students in public places. It's not so much a privacy thing, but convenience.
parents' love is a scary thing.
Very good question...
-Jerry Wathers
There are usually two groups of people who get upset about privacy issues like this.
First there are the people who are breaking the rules, and who vaguely claim "privacy" as the reason to cover up their real reason. Unfortunately, these people just give ammo to the other foolish idea that "if you are doing the right thing, you have nothing to worry about".
The second group thinks it through a little deeper, and realizes the long term dangers of each little encroachment. What are the possible abuses? They will occur. What then?
If every movement of a child is tracked, who might want that data? Parents? Advertisers, even? Suppose the budget just didn't come through this year. Why provide the temptation for abuse? Suppose Johnny's aunt works in the main office, and isn't too keen on him dating that black girl because "it just isn't right". Funny how she's always suddenly walking past whenever they're together. Or suppose the administration decides to take a proactive approach to discipline by keeping an extra close eye on any student with any problematic history... including notifying the parents of the new friends that Johnny makes while trying for what he thought was a "fresh start" in high school. Is that right? How did Johnny's name even get on that list? Was that his aunt's doing? Or did a jealous classmate hack the central computer? Hey, it's like in the War Games movie, but you can do a hell of a lot more than just change your grade!
Now consider the psychological effects of living under a constant watchful eye. Keep in mind that you are not really acting morally until you do the right thing when you are NOT watched... that's really what matters. When do the students get to practice that?
Have you ever been driving alone on a road where you *knew* for certain that there were no cops for miles? Many teenagers (and some adults too..) would drive like maniacs, until the time they hit a deer, or nearly soiled their pants when that cardboard box in the road came out of nowhere... and they realize the reason for the speed limit laws. Learning that there are reasons behind most rules is part of growing up, and if the only reason for obedience is "because I said so, and I'll KNOW if you break the rules", won't it take a very long time for a kid to grow up?
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
When will you start understanding that it is the LEFT that is responsible for this. Anyone who things the liberals don't control eduction needs to get an education. Stop electing these people and stand up for people who support the constitution. This doesn't mean republicans per se, but you'll find more to choose from on that side of the asile.
As a measure used strictly with multiple truancy cases, this may be useful. However, I disagree with forcing it on the whole school population. It assumes everyone is guilty. This is actually quite similar to Pressplay vs. The iTunes Music Store. Apple doesn't assume everyone is guilty of piracy and thus allows a reasonable amount of fair use to take place. Pressplay is like this Buffalo school district and assumes everyone is a pirate, restricting fair use rights.
Which moron can I get to take both mine and Jimmy's RFID tags? Oh, there goes geeky, slashdot-reading Oliver. Hey, Oliver, wait up. Have I got a deal for you!
*** Back at Oliver's home ***
Using my *NIX box, a pair tweezers, my DirecTV smartcard programmer (shhh...don't tell mom & dad), I can screw both Jimmy and Mikey, by reversing their electronic ID's! Just call me MacOliver!
There's a badge on my hip from SmartProx. I've been wearing these things for the last 8 years. They are required to enter the parking deck, enter/leave the building, enter/leave critical areas, enter/leave the smoking area, enter/leave most of the office areas, etc.
:)
There's also cameras everywhere. I've been working under or near camera coverage for about 10 years now.
This is typically said to be for keeping unauthorized people out, but during time spent in management positions, we always used them to see what employees were up to. Say Tom says he worked 80 hours in the office last week while I was on vacation. I could print up a report of his badge SN and see how much time he was in the office, how many smoke breaks he took, how long his lunches were, etc.
Why not just go ahead and use it with these kids? They are kids, in school. Seems more important to keep track of them that corporate professionals, wouldn't ya think?
On the subject of privacy, that seems to have went out the door a long time ago. Most of the privacy issues I've seen debated in the media recently just seem asinine when you drive down the highway to work and it's almost 100% covered by traffic and investigative cameras.
What are the investigative cameras for? Spotting DWI, illegal substances sitting out on passenger seats, excessive speeding, spotting stolen cars, wreckless drivers, road rage, tracking suspects without the need for hi-speed pursuit, etc.
There's not much privacy outside your home. What's private in your home needs to just be kept secret so it'll remain private..
....these people have lost their minds. Secondly, this won't make it past it's first court challenge.
And finally, after watching Bowling for Columbine I can't say I'm surprised. Fear fear fear.
Rich...
The goal here is not to track kids. The goal here is to desensitize them to the loss of privacy.
The process goes: Offence to personal boundaries, cognitive dissonance, anxiety, rationalization, acceptance.
Repeat with an incrementally greater offence to those boundaries, and soon you'll have a society of prisoners who actually think they are free.
There are people who realize what's being done to them and consciously choose not to follow the script. That takes a lot of work, and is very stressful on those individuals. Still, non-compliant individuals are valuable to the process of subjugation. Violent retribution against, or marginalizing of "extremists" serves as an example to the larger group.
Most people won't have the strength or commitment to break with the expectations of society. Even if you're right, you'll still be treated as a lunatic.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
Heh, ya, that *could* happen, if the molester was a hacker, technophile, and has an affinity towards doing things the really hard way. But back in reality, scenarios dreamed up by your overactive imagination would have an extremely low chance of occuring. The benefits gained by automating the roll taking progress far outweight the chance of some criminal hacking the system to have instant tracking a person electronically
The whole point of this isn't that you get tracked -- it's that you get tracked WITHOUT KNOWLEDGE, and that RFIDs allow anyone who comes within reading range of the tags to read information from it.
I'm betting the id's they carry don't broadcast the personal info as plain text. They either use high encryption (which would mean the high tech molestor in your scenario would need access to how they encode the data), or they use a hasing method, where the hashed info on the id has to match up with a hashed info on a server to verify it.
So how secure are the servers? Are they connected to the 'net? Are they local access only? What is their software configuration?
I would hope they get foiled by their own kids using what they learned in computer class.
All in the name of security, we have to watch you 24/7 because well, we don't trust what you have learned or to make the right decisions because we are horrible leaders
Wasn't there a movie recently that explained that choice is an illusion created between those with power and those without? That's the nature of the choice to attend school on time, or not.
"People will tolerate any deprivation of liberties as long as it is protrayed as being good for the children. " - Goering
Pretty well sums it up.
"You can sit where you are, or walk out the door. If you walk out the door, your family will be tortured, your friends killed, and you will be severely beaten. If you remain sitting nothing shall happen."
That's pure coercion. By your logic, residents of a dictatorship are in fact free because they can hold elections; they will be shot afterwads, but they CAN hold them. And you don't see the problem here?
==========
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
It's kids growing up in a world where tracking is commonplace - and thus they will know, better than any of us, tricks to confound the trackers because folling people in order to do what they like is what kids do best.
We are creating a generation of "untracables" if you will.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
There's no need to implant everyone to track them. There are a number of ways that will be technologically feasable in the very near future.
As any dog knows every human has a ubique scent. You could be tracked in public places base on sniffing devices.
Or you could be tracked by scanning lasers posted at every street corner that reads your retina.
Or there could be little vacuums that collect the cells that fall from your body and analyzes them on the fly as you walk.
Some day these and other unimaginable ways to track us will be possible and they will be used.
Remember... ZG9uJ3QgZm9yZ2V0IHRvIGRyaW5rIHlvdXIgb3ZhbHRpbmU=
RFID tags in employee badges.
:
think about it. how many of us who have jobs have badges to get in and out of secure locations? how many of those badges are electronic? i'd say all to both questions.
it's always some good excuse
save the children
cut down on employee theft
stop terrorism
stop crime
keep little susie off drugs
and that's the way your freedoms are eroded. whether they're taking away your guns, your right to privacy, fair trial, monitoring your child, censoring your music, or tracking your movements, those who are afraid of themselves and the world around them keep cutting off our rights more and more.
technology is a great enabler for everything, including that jackboot that will be mashing itself into the human face, forever, to roughly quote george orwell.
PC moderators can suck my White pierced, tattooed dick. If you think pride == hate, s/dick/Aryan meat mallet/g.
+) you now have to be a geek to skip class
+) suddenly your geek status makes you all the rage
+) neigh on godlike computer system verifying your every lie
-) police state taking over
So why is it ok to monitor children but not adults?
Ok, even ignoring all the obvious privacy issues, or about kids being brought up with intrusive technology, I think this is a bad idea?
You might ask "Why"? Because it destroys student-teacher relations.
"How does it do that Mark?" Well, the only reason most of my teachers learned my name was to take attendance. If it's automatic, there won't even be a reason for teachers to learn the kids names.
Maybe kids will be identified by their serial number. "Hey, 4902850386, stop pulling 2958230843's hair, or no ration pill for you!"
The system will automatically see when a kid is outside of a designated zone at a certain time (for example, in the hall instead of in class) and it will shock them until they return to the zone. Of course, an override will be made available to teachers for bathroom breaks. Parents will be able to add rules to the logic system that will target certain behavioural issues. Such behaviours include: Getting a C- or lower, talking out of turn, falling asleep, cussing, talking to boys/and or girls, getting a hard on- a sure sign of inappropriate thoughts, talking to bad kids, or black kids (niggers, as the parents most excited about this feature refer to them).
because I have been enjoined by this Holy Office to abandon the false opinion which maintains that the Sun is the centre
... And that is how the cookie crumbles
and 300 years from now, our descendants will look on us and our presecuity culture as just as primitive as we now imagine our preindustrial subsistence-farming ancestors.
actually, i kind of envy them. I'm guessing you've never set foot on a farm.
filter: +3. Hey, look! all the trolls went away!
The "security age" is crap. It's just a way to further the whole producer-consumer paradigm to it's final destination. Yeah, I'd know where my kids are any given moment, but they'd also be adding rows in someone's DB and sending targeted ad-banners to my web browser..
Oh, and your analogy with cattle & ranchers? You got it backwards. We are the ranchers and the politicians are the cattle. We tell them what to do, they listen to us. Yeah, it may seem like it's getting close to what you described, but once the pendulum swings over enough, it'll swing back and the people will be firmly in the driver's seat.
And with regards to children, how are little kids gonna be able to grow up and realize that not all people are bad people, if they start with the assumption that all people are bad people, even fellow students? Potential relationships will be lost, friends won't be made, etc all because tommy is a yellow threat while jimmy is red.
The worst thing is your comment reads like you are ok with all of this stuff going down. You've just resigned yourself to living in a place where freedom is a memory, and privacy an afterthought.
"Intuitek President David M. Straitiff..." Am I the only one who read this as Initech the first time?
hear hear.
i have set foot on a farm. i miss it. a lot. primitive != less desirable. in fact, primitive is often a better match for reality than "advanced". wonder how that happened...
[|]
Parenting skills got jack to do with it. And at what point did I say the government is bad? Of course the card doesn't "teach" the kids anything. There's no active goal here other than to keep tabs on the kids-- which, if you notice, I said is laudable. The effect in the long run (talking generations here), could be that people stop questioning small intrusions into their lives. Is this a case of intrusion? If so, I'll agree it's a very small one, and one with best interests in mind. BUT, that doesn't prevent unforseen side effects.
Just as you know no limits when it comes to keeping track track them for their protection, your employer and government has an interest in your well-being. Granted, the interest isn't as overarching as the relationship between parent and child; more like rancher and cattle. But show me a rancher who doesn't take care of his cattle, and I'll show you a rancher who's out of business in a year.
Funny, that's exactly what Apologists said about the condition of slaves in the Old South.
By getting the kids accustomed to the Panopticon at an early age, they'll graduate from school better-prepared to take part in the security society.
You seem to be arguing that loss of privacy is enevitable, that we should get over it, and it's really a good thing anyway. That's bullshit. That type of thinking can only lead to more government control over our private lives. The more I hear people spout off such inflamatory nonsense, the more I think about purchasing a gun while I've got the chance. I'll pay in cash, of course. Does that sound threatening? Good, it's supposed to. I'm not threatening you in particular (that is, you'll never be in physical danger from me), but I want to make it very clear how serious the right to basic privacy really is. I, for one, will defend it to the death, and will raise any children I have to do the same.
This boils down to our right to be anonymous in our speech and in our beliefs. Lack of privacy means lack of anonymity. A lack of anonymity means a lack of freedom in speech. A lack of freedom of speech means that we no longer control our own lives.
300 years ago, old farmers probably hated having to get up at oh-dark-hundred to go to the factory as much as you seem to dislike your zero-privacy expectation at work.
What's the point here? 150 years ago (there were no real factories 300 years ago) workers were treated like cattle with little to no respect for their saftey and well-being, least of all their privacy. Disposable and repressed, the factory workers eventually banded together and forced the factory owners to pay attention. Hence labor unions.
I don't know, maybe you'd like to being forced to work 16 hour days, seven days a week, for maybe a tenth of your current pay. Personally, I'm very thankful for the sacrifices those workers made way back then.
Within a generation or so, our presecurity culture will also be abandoned, and 300 years from now, our descendants will look on us and our presecuity culture as just as primitive as we now imagine our preindustrial subsistence-farming ancestors.
Unless we vigorously defend all of our constitutionally guaranteed freedoms, including free speech and the right of anonymous travel (eg: no implanted RFID tags), nobody will know a damn thing about us 300 years from now. Certainly not in any meaningful sense. The revisionist control freaks will make certain of that.
No matter how many of my rights are taken away, somehow I still don't feel safe. -Frigid Monkey
Jimmy gets on the bus and gets scanned.
jimmy walks onto the school campus and gets scanned.
jimmy first class. he gets scanned.
period 1 " you are a dirty pirated and you should rat anyone out who copies CD's . the riaa is your friend trust us to look out for your best interest and most of all let us do the thinking for you so go home and rat out mom and dad for having mp3's : HOSTED by the RIAA"
period 2 " if you dont look like a jock a cheerleader, or everyone else you must be a terrorist, fit in or be punished, all weird different or independent though is wrong, dont think trust us we know what were doing and you are an idiot"
period 3 " if you or your parents have a tivo or dvd-r you are a dirty pirate, you should be thrown in jail, look at the starving hollywood people you are hurting, now run home burn your dvd-r vcr or anything that can copy movies, and make sure you only buy movies, trust us we know what were doing and well do the thinking for you: hosted by the MPAA"
lunch " you get scanned for lunch and a marketing analyses program bombards you with targeted advertising according to some algorithm, suddenly oreos, tweenkies, and Pepsi are healthy"
period 4 " if you question the government or think differently than what we tell you, you are a terrorist, you deserve to go to jail you should not think, dont question authority, we know whats best for you."
the sum of this is, tomorrows adults are going to be docile unthinking cows. doing whatever authority tells them to do.
i am frightened, i will be starting a family soon and i dont want my child to grow up in that environment. our society, does all it can to strip individuality and independent thought from its children. even home schooled children are looked at strangely, and what we would once call patriotic is now called terrorist.
Be afraid Be Very Afraid
It seems like the objections to RFID everywhere are that people can track your purchases, movements, personal possessions, etc etc etc. They can do this because they can read the RFID tag and figure out what it is - the RFID tag in your driver's license card announces it's a driver's license card for John Doe, the RFID tag in the Benneton shirt you just bought says it's a Benneton shirt, etc.
:)
What if RFID tags provided a single GUID, and no more? Kind of like a MAC address, but a bigger name space. So your driver's license says it has tag number 123456789123456789, and your shirt says it's number 147258369147258369. And that's all.
Each entity that puts RFID tags in things maintains its own list of what tag number goes into what item. This list would be shared (not openly) with other entities that need to correlate items and tags. RFID tag scanners can be connected with WiFi or similar back to a server at each company/entity which will store all the correlations between tag number and item.
So Benneton makes a shirt and puts tag number 123 in it. Benneton shares their list that maps id->item with Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart puts the list into their Big Ol' RFID Server. The RFID scanner at the checkout sees number 123, asks the Wal-mart server, which says it's a Benneton shirt.
Depending on how much traffic it would cause, it might be more secure to make Wal-Mart's checkout box check with Benneton's RFID info server, BUT that could cause problems if e.g. Benneton goes out of business; not to mention great amounts of traffic.
On first glance, this system would be just as secure from the vendor's point of view as UPCs. In fact, it's easier to fake a UPC than an RFID. The only risks would be if the databases were to fall into the hands of nefarious evildoers - and so exchanges of tag to item mapping information would have to be regulated, and there would have to be some way (PKI-based?) to ensure that the information requester is who they claim to be. (So that some dork with an RFID scanner doesn't claim to be a police officer and get your driver's license info from the DMV's tag info server)
K, I'm just throwing this out there, feel free to tear it apart.
Save time now so you can waste it later
it doesn't seem like a serious privacy issue from a single viewpoint. but when you take the system viewpoint that the monitoring point will always have, then you see how much information can be reconstructed simply by watching the who & what & when & where & how.
there have been plenty of people convicted largely on the basis of this kind of evidence in (hopefully) statistically significant quantities:
"you called this number at this time on this day."
i don't think it's quite as dissociated from your actual activity as you seem to.
[|]
If this is the only way that students are tracked, it's possible to skip a class, or a day, undetected. Just give your tag to someone else. Unless it's implanted in your skin, you have nothing to worry about. Maybe I'm nuts, but I personally would have made a business out of carrying other folks tags around had this happened at my school.
Do you have ESP?
I don't see the problem here. It is no different from many colleges, and the students are given the same freedoms as always. The only difference is that all their info is combined which is just the school system finally integrating technology. This is a good thing
"It's as private as anything else can be when your information is stored on a server," he said.
Can anyone say M$ security??
As we all know, M$ is by far the number one most secure and private system on earth. We can all rest well knowing that our childrens private information is sitting all cozy and snug inside an M$ server..
Correct. I'm not threatened by your willingness to pick up a gun to defend what you perceive as your rights. There are very few of you, your numbers are shrinking, and should your kind actually start firing that gun, your lives will be shortened quickly.
In our presently insecure society, the security meme propagates extremely well. It is outcrowding, and will continue to outcrowd, the privacy meme. People need to be led. They're willing to give their lives for security, never mind their privacy. Once the privacy meme has been effectively neutralized and a secure society established, there'll be a few stragglers, but they'll be recognized as paranoids or sociopaths, and given medical treatment to help them overcome their affliction.
> This boils down to our right to be anonymous in our speech and in our beliefs. Lack of privacy means lack of anonymity. A lack of anonymity means a lack of freedom in speech. A lack of freedom of speech means that we no longer control our own lives.
Anonymity (or even Slashdotesque pseudonymity) does not mean that you are not accountable to others for your actions, words, or thoughts. Privacy is not a shield for lawlessness; anonymity is not a shield for privacy.
I don't think I want to comment on the rest of the post, except to say "hmm... interesting", but I do want to comment on one thing...
When you consider that people throughout our history have been doing college-level work at around 12 (Benjamin Franklin, anyone?)
I would like to point out that at the time Benjamin franklin was 12, It was not uncommon to enter a University after an 8th grade education (which most students attain at age 13). The reason was that there simply wasn't as much knowledge required to enter advanced study in a particular field. The entire field of biology could be summarized in a single book. The field of electrical engineering could be summarized in a few pages and physics was limited mostly to Newtonian principals, with substantial limits on what was even understood in areas like wave propigation and molecular dynamics.
Chemistry was fairly advanced, but not nearly to the level provided by the recent discovery of quantum physics and the implications following from that. Mathematics was perhaps the most advanced subject of his day and those who DID enter University at the age of 12 were generally exceptionally skilled at math. Until the 1600s, there existed intellectuals in the world who had read EVERY SINGLE work ever published anywhere in the world. Now, there are hundreds of books published daily and perhaps *thousands* of scientific papers. It would be physically impossible to read every one... or even just every one in a given field such as Physics, Chemistry or Computer Science.
It can be argued that Benjamin Franklin likely was one of the best minds in VIRTUALLY EVERY AREA of science in his lifetime, ranging from chemistry to physics to electronics, mechanical engineering, literature, political science and even sociology. Can you even comprehend how amazing that would be now with the breadth of scientific knowledge that is available today?
That theory of yours is BS if you ask me. There ARE people who enter University study at the age of 12. They are not common, but they exist. Most children I know could probably pass a GED examination by the age of 13 or 14, but choose not to do so. Does that make them "held back" by the school?
I don't think it's the schools trying to hold them down as much as it's the parents who don't want to give their kids an ounce of independence before their 18th birthday, even when many show it by the time they are 10. The government is structured this way, private schools are REALLY structured this way (noticed how strict most of their rules are?) and parents are even more so.
Just another theory....
Stewey
There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.
And the saddest part is... kids to today are LESS educated than they were in generl before forced schooling.
Need proof of that?
Take a look at the popular literature and best sellers lists from 100-125 years ago. Mark Twain and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle come to mind immediately.
Most kids today could barely handle the ABRIDGED versions of those now _classics_, yet the everyone from the "country mice" to the "city mice" were reading the UNABRIDGED versions as their favorite literature.
It could be useful to the nurse's office to know how often and for how long someone takes a crap. Hmmm, Johnny seems to be in that stall a long time, perhaps he's doing his sex-education homework.
Both the parents and the teachers expect the students to be at certain places throughout the school day without exception. Why is having a better way to monitor this a privacy concern? As long as the thing only works on school grounds, it's only helping the school to enforce its policies. Certainly any private school should be able to use such technology. As for public schools, parents may object to taxpayer money going to schools using this technology, but they really don't have a good reason.
Total Security = Total Slavery.
Mod parent up please.
it's just another brick in the wall.
OK 2 things.
:-)
1 - Who hear has to wear ID tags at work. *raises hand*, who needs to swipe them to get into work *raises other hand*. What is the difference.
What is the difference between manual rolls and RFID rolls. or the difference between libary cards which must be manually swiped and rfid where they can just walk past a sensor to borrow stuff.
2 - RFID signals are encrypted and encoded. Yes I know people will be able to crack these codes but do you seriously think shops like kmart will bother to work out the encryption of a school kids ID cards considering every school will have a different encryption.
So The use of RFID tags at school is simply speeds up the roll marking process. There is no privacy difference between a teacher manualy marking the roll and the kids electronically doing it.
Here we are on a geeks and tech forum and everyone is scared of a little electronicalisation. (spelling is bad).
Heck I would have prefered my school to have these systems instead of having to manually mark the roll each day and manually scan ID tags.
What if the students just start giving their RFID tags to each other???? Kids are nieve, not dumb!!!!!
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
If we started recording the converstations in the hall, and sniffers to read sms messages between kids, then its a REAL invasion of privacy.
Ok, let's test your tolerance a bit.
How about if we record who they talk to?
Ok, can we just record where they are standing?
What about just how fast they walk and where?
How about we just see which rooms they're in?
Or do we have to limit it to see who's in the building?
The thing about the RFID concept is that the technology is CAPABLE of measuring all of those things I've just asked you. They may not do it, but I predict it's not long before they start trying to arrange such things. Probably not at THAT school, but somewhere.
The trick with your proximity badges is that they can't locate you exactly. In addition, if you are not required to enter secure locations... perhaps you are for work... but kids are required by law to go to school and usually their parents decide which school... So they have no choice to be scanned. With the proximity badges, you have to swipe your card. When it becomes remotely "scannable" it becomes VERY questionable.
And what's up with abrigating the privacy of criminals? Seriously, is this just DNA fingerprinting, like they use in trials, or are we talking full genetic analysis is legal to conduct on convinced criminals.
Doesn't that reek of facism? Fine, criminals did something agains the law. By the wording of the law where I live, squirt guns are illegal. Nerf guns are illegal. Playing baseball is illegal. Of course, the police don't arrest people for these things unless they want to. But why should they get the option?
I bring this up because I was nearly conviced of 6 counts of "weapons violations" for carrying a plastic toy gun with me to the park. I spent a weekend in jail and nearly found myself there for 6 months. Fortunately, I'm reasonably well off and could hire a really good lawyer who got the case dismissed. But I still found myself less about $5,000, a weekend in jail and half my hair.
Stewey
There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.
I wonder where they plan to implant the chip? This might give the phrase "Get your ass to school" a whole new meaning.
Sorry, does anyone else out there think we should LET kids take risks, LET kids learn from their mistakes, LET kids take actions that aren't good for them so they can see for themselves. And if a few don't make it - well, bluntly, there's plenty where they came from.
The current situation seems destined to produce adult children - people who have never experienced anything outside of the carefully sanitized artificial environment created for them. Maybe experiencing a little danger might be good for them.
Our society is obsessively compelled to believe (in large part thanks to media induced hysteria) that there are psychos and thugs around every corner. The reality is those of us in North America and Western Europe live in the SAFEST SOCIETY THERE EVER HAS BEEN.
Maybe, just maybe, there is a greater good to be had by letting our kids LIVE and LEARN (and risk) than locking them down every moment of their lives and then suddenly turning them loose when they are 18. Our society seems bound and determined to ensure children make the LEAST of the first 20 years of their life.
tell ya what. YOU first. Then tell us after how it feels when you have a completely unknown number of eye's watching you every moment of your waking, and perhaps even sleeping, life. I imagine that it would be a little creepy, if not downright spooky.
You really want children to grow up in this kind of world? Your children too?
Dystopian world view's like this belong strictly in fiction, not fact.
Sometimes people just have to learn and adapt to change, it is one of the requirements of being a living thing.
Point: any kid with a transport pass in a city like Sydney is already been tracked re: movements.
Problem: managing children who forget, abuse, destroy access cards.
Problem: managing parents who don't give two cents about their children.
Point: children these days are more cocky than ever, and well informed and use the web. The strap and stick have gone from schools and now teachers are often in more danger than the children. Exercising some form of control is probably a good thing in such a climate.
Bags not being a teacher in a secondary school, though; I give full praise to those who do such a role.
Just "two words"...
EMP pulse
Yup, and set it so it will explode when issued the right command by radio so you can enforce sheepish conformity ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H, appropriate behavior.
As the children enter the school, they approach a kiosk where a reader activates the chip's signal and displays their photograph. The students touch their picture, and the time of their entry into the building is recorded in a database. A school staffer oversees the check-in process.
So I guess this strategy depends on the attentiveness of the staffer...
Version 2010 will include face recognition I'm sure...
In certain circumstances, it makes sense. It will take away a lot of paperwork (registers etc), lighten the load for secretaries etc and make things that should have already been, automated.
There are *good* uses for this technology you know. Of course, there should always be some kind of opt-out policy
I have heard of the Information Age; however, I have never heard of the Security Age.
Traditionally, an "age" has been defined by a series of significant of technological breakthroughs. The Stone Age was so named because of the invention of techniques to manipulate stone (obviously), thus enabling the creation of better tools, and weaponry. The Industrial Age was driven by innovations in metal working, mining, and steam engines. Similarly, the Information Age is the result of a series of breakthroughs in information processing, and communications technologies. I think we need to make the distinciton between technological advances that are fundamental, and their social implications. In fact, I would argue that the current security climate - don't worry, it'll pass - is actually a consequence of politics, and world events; and is only made possible by a series of very specific technological advances. Our intelligence gathering, survillence techniques, and RFIDs are totally dependent upon the existence of computers, and networking. What the question really boils down to is: "What is more fundamental?" History has shown us that the technological advances always come first, that society changes and adapts as a result, thus driving further innovation.
What parent wouldn't feel more secure leaving their kids at school with this in place? Of course it's smart.
I would feel less secure.
Teacher: Oh good, now I don't have to take roll. The machine handles that for me. If they are supposed to be here, it isn't my problem. That's the machine's job. If she doesn't show, it will let the parents know.
Little Johnny: Little Suzie is skipping today, so I'll just swipe her card for her. We're neighbors and have the same classes, so it will look like she's been here all day. She'll do it for me next week.
Little Suzie (dead in ax murderer's closet): *silence*
Principal: Well Mrs. Little Suzie, we don't know where she is. She showed up for all her classes and logged out from her bus at 3:20 PM. Check around the bus stop.
And the following year we are introduced to the Little Suzie law, requiring implanted RFIDs in children to solve that problem. Once implanted, it's foolproof, and it's good for life!
Yeah right, more secure. Screw that, if I had children there, I would be looking into home schooling. They can't make you send them.
You can leave school without an RFID. Easily. So, even if they did start to track you in every classroom, you could still get away with it as long as you showed up in the morning, no? I know I rarely skipped all of school -- I usually just skipped lame classes like Health. That's what I meant in my post. :)
-l
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The privacy invasion doesn't come with the kids having to wear the chips, it comes with someone accessing the data generated by reading them. Who gets to read the data, who decides who gets to read the data, and who decides what gets to be done about it? Will the school's principal allow himself and his employees to be tagged? I'm betting he would. He sounds that gung ho in the article. Would he go for it if the data generated by reading his and his employees' chips were intended for public viewing? After all, it's to protect the kids from possible predators, right? If a teacher comes to work late, that could indicate a drinking problem. If a janitor leaves early, he might be going out to sell drugs at the bus stop. If the principal's record shows he was offline for half an hour, for all we know he may have been peeping into the kids' toilets, and didn't really just leave it on his desk when he went to lunch. And of course if he changes his mind and decides he's not so hot on RFID after being asked to wear one himself, that only indicates he was really up to something untoward, rather than suddenly feeling like his own privacy was at stake.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Did anyone else spot this one?
Huxley, anyone?
In the army, we routinely had roll-call with about 20 out of the 100 guys in a troop and we were always 'all present'...
Oh well, what the hell...
and a number recognition camera system will work too: They can use the JUDE (Journal Ultimate Detention Number) system and give the teachers all SS (Security Service) arm-bands...
Oh well, what the hell...
Were you born a moron, or did you just work really hard at it?
You're an idiot. I just read about the last ten of your posts and it looks like your 'securities' broker has convinced you of a lot of stupid shit. I don't know whether it's worse that you enjoy seeing people taken advantage of through rape of their privacy in such pointless ways or that you seem to be actively involved in it.
As for this one, the quoted Amendment *spells out* the requirements for a warrant to be issued to authorize a 'reasonable' search. It's sad to have to quote this, but the requirement is upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. It's also sad that I have to spend another paragraph explaining to you what that means, because you seem to either be extremely stupid, or British, in which case none of this applies to you.
That probable cause requirement is particularly important. It means that, in order for a warrant to be issued, it must be probable that the subject of the warrant has been involved in the commission of a crime. Also note that even if Congress made *everything* a crime, it still wouldn't enable blanket, daily tracking of anyone without a warrant.
As for that Amendment having been put there for a reason, on that point you are correct. It, and the entire Bill of Rights, were put in place as a bulwark against idiots such as yourself, who have nothing but interest in your own personal gain at the expense of others.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
According to the omnipresent surveillance system known as Google, that's not what you said on 22 October 2001:
"every citizen's right to be secure against unreasonable search and seizure is violated the instant they flip the switch on the Mother Of All Carnivores."
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Obviously, eventually RFIDs will be hacked for the purpose of illegal surveillance by private parties. Think your wife is cheating? Stick a chip in her purse. Hire a PI with electronics. Think your hubby is working late, or out with that floozy? Tag his shoes and hire some surveillance. Every bad TV show nightmare will come true.
You know what really scares me. That he really doesn't mind it. That there is are people who have had all sense of privacy and freedom bred out of them. And their numbers are growing.
You scare me. Where is our present society insecure?
It's plain wierd, but this crap reminds me of demolition man, where everyone and his brother was implanted so that the monster police computer could track them anytime...
this movie is from 1993, and described the world as it was supposed to have become in 2032...
hell, guess reality joined fiction faster than supposed at the time.
here's an amazon link to this Stallone masterpiece
I have posted on the subject of surveillance many times before. Here is an extract regarding the psychological aspect. This particular part was wrote by another and did a better job of explaining than I could:
"Foucault focused on Bentham's prison model, or the Penopticon as Bentham called it - which literally means, that which sees all. The Penopticon prison, which was popular in the early nineteenth century, was designed to allow guards to see their prisons, but not allow prisoners to see guards. The building was circular, with prisoner's cells lining the outer diameter, and in the center of the circle was a large, central observational tower. At any given time, guards could be looking down into each prisoner's cells - and thereby monitor potentially unmoral behavior - but carefully-placed blinds prevented prisoners from seeing the guards, thereby leaving them to wonder if they were being monitored at any given moment. It was Bentham's belief that the "gaze" of the Panopticon would force prisoners to behave morally. Like the all-seeing eye of God, they would feel shame at their wicked ways. In effect, the coercive nature of the Panopticon was built into its very structure."
Full text is here and also on my personal website.
You can legally place hidden security cameras in the washroom, but there are rules. It can view empty walls for example. A company I was associated with was having problems with vandalism in the washrooms, and they installed security cameras to view the sink ares, paper towel and wast baskets. The placement was reviewed by law enforcement and their lawer. The videotape was used in court successfully against the culprit. The vandal, by the way, was not an employee and if there were notices of cameras they would have been generic signs at the entrances to the building.
continual line of leaders for this Utopian regime you
say is inevitable?
Yes, you people are cattle. I accept that and
I keep from being affronted by my insistence that
you are in fact not really human. You are only people.
Come now, we can find better ways to deal with the
cattle than quantifying the data of where they shit.
themselves when they fart or burp in a room
by themselves.
I know _I_ do. Heh.
Correct. I'm not threatened by your willingness to pick up a gun to defend what you perceive as your rights. There are very few of you, your numbers are shrinking, and should your kind actually start firing that gun, your lives will be shortened quickly.
In our presently insecure society, the security meme propagates extremely well. It is outcrowding, and will continue to outcrowd, the privacy meme. People need to be led. They're willing to give their lives for security, never mind their privacy. Once the privacy meme has been effectively neutralized and a secure society established, there'll be a few stragglers, but they'll be recognized as paranoids or sociopaths, and given medical treatment to help them overcome their affliction.
You sir, scare the Hell out of me. I hope for the sake of the Republic that your kind is in the minority, or at least that the courts won't agree with you.
No matter how little crime there might be in a police state it is not somewhere I want to live.
I am more than willing to accept insecurity in exchange for freedom. I do not need to have my every breath and step monitored by the police, my employer, my insurance company, my parents, my wife, my neighbor, or even some random salesman.
Please, go study the tactics used by repressive governments throughout history. Now please tell me why being able to track someones every movement, possible associates, and purchase is a good thing?
I suppose people like you won't be convinced of the dangers until it is already too late. When you get automatic tickets in the mail every time you violate a traffic law, when your health insurance rates go up because you are buying too many big macs, or you get rounded up in the latest police drag net because the owner of the kabob shop you buy lunch at every day is a suspected "enemy of the state".
Anonymity (or even Slashdotesque pseudonymity) does not mean that you are not accountable to others for your actions, words, or thoughts. Privacy is not a shield for lawlessness; anonymity is not a shield for privacy.
Fortunately the US Supreme Court doesn't agree with you see McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission (93-986), 514 U.S. 334 (1995). The right to speak anonymously is fundamental to free speech. Look no further than The Federalist Papers, or Thomas Payne for examples.
Happy Fun Ball is for external use only.
Freedom is Slavery
War is Peace
Scarcity is Plenty
Happy Fun Ball is for external use only.
your employer and government has an interest in your well-being. Granted, the interest isn't as overarching as the relationship between parent and child; more like rancher and cattle. But show me a rancher who doesn't take care of his cattle, and I'll show you a rancher who's out of business in a year.
You fucking asshole.
The government does NOT own me, nor does my employer.
Nonaggression works!
No, but statistically it would be easy to tell if the pattern were consistent with two people, or two tags consistently too close to each other. Put it this way, I could easily write the algorithm to tell the difference.
Big deal, they have 2 classes together. Unless you're talking about a really big school I think you'll find that most students have a few friends in just about all of their classes. Also what is to stop them from trading between classes?
Doesn't matter. Walking down the hall for about 50m would be enough to tell one person with two tags from two people with two tags. I don't need all day.
Let's say we have three students, A, B, and C. Student A skips class, giving tag to student B. Between periods 1 and 2, tags A and B correlate very highly with position. To attempt to fool the algorithm, student B gives student A's tag to student C during 2nd period. Between periods 2 and 3, tags A and C correlate too highly. Assuming an extremely high degree of correlation is flagged, you'd see student A's tag correlating too highly with a few different tags throughout the day. This could be automated, would be fairly easy to write, and the system could spit out a list of potential anomalies that could be checked on.
Honestly, it wouldn't be that hard to implement, although again I couldn't guarantee they'd do it right. But they could.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat