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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."
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...
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.
Because we get them used to and comfortable with the concept of the government tracking their every movement when they grow up. If we don't imbue in their mind the wrongess of this being done to them, they'll be totally prepared and calmly waiting for when the next megalomaniac in charge gets the idea to finally implement the Big Brother society that will be the end of democracy.
If you're really unlucky, you might still be alive when that happens.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
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
I guess because if you have technology that prevents you technologically from being irresponsible, you can never learn how to be responsible?
What happens when they get out? "Wicked, I'm not being tracked anymore! I can do whatever I want to do, consequence free!"
I have strong feelings about technology 'absolving' humans from learning about responsibility and accoutability, and the merits of making the right choice when you're not forced at RFID-tag-point to do so.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Because as far as /. is concerned RFID == evil.
It doesn't matter if its used for a reasonable purpose.
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?
--
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
Deep down near the end of the article, you see this:
"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."
Kinda takes the steam out of the story. Since whoever wrote this story left out or hid gigantic facts, I'm going to continue to call many privacy activists paranoid.
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.
Now, whether or not kids should be tracked is a different debate. I don't think there's any doubt that the idea is good on that level. What parent wouldn't feel more secure leaving their kids at school with this in place? Of course it's smart.
But becoming accustomed to being tracked everywhere, anytime, all the time is something that children shouldn't have to grow up blindly accepting.
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
FUCK THIS! My kids are going to be homeschooled!
"Suzie, we think you were skipping school. But, we'll let you off the hook if you can answer this question for us: why was your tag within a few inches of Dave's for most of 6th period?"
*Suzie blushes*
*Dave's friends start giving him high-fives*
It is for my own's sake. I trust my children. I don't trust yours.
Defecation occurs.
No, they WON'T! With this kind of surveilance you are teaching them that it's ok to have your privacy violated. They will grow up to be real wimps and give away all the freedoms that so many have died to obtain and keep. I have kids myself and never have, never will, subject them to this. I just teach them right from wrong, then TRUST them to follow through, they have NEVER let me down, and many parents commend me and my wife for bringing up such great kids. We Americans have been brainwashed into thinking that someone else always needs to take care of us and stick their nose in our business, this is patently childish; I guess many of us never really grow up.
It should scare the HELL out of everyone to have this going on. It starts small with things you really don't object to because on the surface they seem to help... so you give up a little freedom for security, then a little more, then a little more, until something happens that you think is going too far then you find out you no longer have a choice in the matter because you gave up your right to decide bit by bit. We all need to take responsibility on our OWN shoulders, grow up and get everyone elses noses the hell out of our business. People in the Soviet Union are more free than we are! But if you like being under constant scrutiny you can always move to China.
Paranoia was conceived to make you feel that your reasonable suspicions are unreasonable and unwarranted.
So lets tell Mr Stillman and all the teachers and secretaries there that they have to wear the tags as well so the PARENTS can watch them. I want to know just how "punctual" they are and what their attendance is.
Think their tone will change?
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I take no responsibility for any spelling mistakes in the above post.
"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
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)
Rights come with responsibilities. Children are inheriently irresponsible, precisely because they are children, thus they lack rights. Until they come of an age to take care of the associated repsonibilities they do NOT have the rights an adult has.
You live in fantasy land if you truely believe children have every right an adult does.
Even the Bill of Rights is limited in it's application to children.
It is the job of the child to earn those responsibilites, and the adults should nuture and enable the child to be able to handle responsibilities. However, should the parent not do so, the child is at fault when they come of majority age if they do not appropriately live withing the rights and responsibilities.
A child should learn to deal with those rights and responsibilites irrespective of the parents and the upbringing they receive. The fault lies with the child, not with the parent. While we may condemn the parent for the lack of parenting, when the child becomes an adult, it is the former child whom is punished, not the adult that failed to instruct the child.
Kirby
What happens when they get out? "Wicked, I'm not being tracked anymore! I can do whatever I want to do, consequence free!"
This line arguement reminds me about my experience in the Air Force. After basic training, where they tell you when to sleep, when to get up, when to eat, what to wear and when to take a dump, you go to Tech School for training. They used to just let you do whatever you wanted once you got to tech school, but it was just like SirSlud said, everyone went batshit insane, ran into town and partook in general mayhem and too much merriment. They had to put a system in place so that you were slowly given back one freedom after another in phases. In phase one you could wear civilian clothes but only inside. Phase two you could wear them outside but you couldn't get off base. I don't remember all the stages but it took six weeks to get to "normal" freedom.
To try to get on topic again, we could say that it is human nature to react to oppression and ill-treatment in exact magnitude in the opposite direction. When people are subjected to extreme controls they will act in an uncontrolled manner when let free. When they are overly controlled, they will expect to be able to control others in like manner once they get in charge. I hope none of those kids gets elected President or to Congress. They will think that it is perfectly all right to try to control the rest of the population the way they were controlled and would probably use all the tools (violence) at their disposal to deal with the "unreasonable" (from their point of view) people who protest.
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.
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.
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.