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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."
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'.
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?
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they should put RFID tags on those chatty secrataries, I mean, administrative assistants instead, after all they're the one's demanding outragous salaries!
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
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.
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.
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None of us is as dumb as all of us
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
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.
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 ----
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.
If children grow up accustomed to living in a safe, secure, surveilled environment, they will realize that the ones reanding about "privacy" and "liberty" are the true "paranoid freaks".
> Continous tracking gives a sense of dis-trust and that is totally worng psychologically, A kid needs to feel secure and trusted in a learning environment.
You only say this because you grew up in a presecurity environment. A generation from now, we'll have learned to deal with omnipresent surveillance. Indeed, your kids won't feel secure or trusted without it.
I already get so much pr0n in my spam I don't care if I ever see naked people again. Why would I want to watch you fuck? Why would anyone want to watch me beat off? When the cameras are everywhere, you're as invisible in the crowd as you are in the middle of the Australian outback at midnight. When was the last time you heard a fish complain about not being able to move around with all this damn transparent liquid in his way?
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.
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.