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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...
Tell me why keeping track of children in a school is such bad thing?
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.
Or what about......The dog ate my ID. Or I forgot mine today. Come on now, these are kids we are talking about. Let's be realistic.
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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
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'll probably require that it be implanted under the skin. You have to think of the children! :)
j.
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...
If they were scanning you passively, I'd say, ya, it's bordering on 1984. But it's passive.
Students have to touch a kiosk screen and then, it can only read your tag at less than 20 inches. So, this makes it just another form of swiping a mag-strip card for access control, or presenting a photo ID badge to a security guard. Having been a teacher, I can tell you this would be wonderful. Automating the roll taking process would save lots of time each class period dealing with absent, late, and excused kids.
Now, in my opinion, they are going a bit overboard with tracking lots of unnecessary information, such as when they boarded the bus. And even with this being just another form of card swiping, all this electronic tracking may still ruffle privacy activists feathers. But one things for sure, it's definitely not 1984.
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
Right to privacy?
Freedom of association?
With these tags, the school administration gains the ability to automatically track social interaction between individuals and groups.
When one kid commits suicide, they can bring in everybody who he interacted with recently for counseling.
They can track the geeks and other loaners and single them out for closer monitoring and socialization normalization.
The list of potential abuses is endless.
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.
Plus they claim that the chips can only be read from about 20 inches away from the reader anyways. There are simply no benefits to this invasion of privacy.
So...Unless a little scanner gnome follows the kid around at all times, how exactly is this different than swiping a time card or something? Kids in school are already tracked six ways from Sunday:
Get to school? Attendance sheet checkoff.
Don't get to school? Parents called to check on you.
Take out a library book? Scan school ID card.
Want school lunch? Swipe card again.
Use a computer? Log in with personal username.
Doctor's Appointment? Sign a log when you leave, and have your parents called to confirm the appointment.
Etc.
Hopefully you get the idea. RFID tags may not be a good thing, but claiming that they somehow destroy school "privacy" is utterly silly.
> How exactly does this take away from the child's freedom again?
That Joe is a troublemaker. Hmm, Janie seems to hang out with him a lot, it's right here in the movement logs. Better bring her in and ask her some questions....
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
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!
Times have changed. Children are now the responsibility of the parents, but they are, essentially, the property of the state.
Some parents find this distressing.
KFG
[sarcasam] Your right we should have been doing this a long time ago, the tag is just an electronic ID number. Before there were RFID tags we just could have tattoed the number on the kids' wrist. Though I think someone else has tried that method before.[/sarcasam]
Monitoring and punishing bad behaviour is very different than teaching someone to avoid bad behaviour and think with good judgement. Oh, and it's cheeper and can be spun better too.
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
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.
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.
"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.
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
> 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
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.
(Note -- I posted this elsewhere in the replies to this article, but forgot to login, so I thought I'd do it again with my ID and in a relevant spot...sorry about the double-post.)
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Total Security = Total Slavery.
Did anyone else spot this one?
Huxley, anyone?