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Students and Bodies Tracked Via RFID Tags
AT writes "The Brittan School District in Sutter County, California, is requiring students to carry RFID-tagged identity badges on them at all times. Readers are currently installed at the doors to all classrooms. Readers were removed from bathrooms when parents protested. The school district is meeting next week to consider parents objections to the system." Relatedly (but not), Leilah writes "The University of California is considering using RFID tags or bar codes to help track their collection of bodies and parts. They are attempting to reopen their body donation program which has been on hold since spring 2004 due to disappearing parts - they've previously had legal trouble over improper disposal as well."
Total Law Enforcement rules. And the trains run on time, too!
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
It reminds me of one class I had in High School. You signed in at the door, and the teacher never checked.
It was the last period of the day, and an extremely easy class. So despite there being the full list of students, the classroom was basically empty.
So, how long do you think it will be until students just give their badges to their friends?
"If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living."
- Seneca
How is using an RFID system which is more accurate, efficient, and convenient any different from tracking students on paper?
Most schools I've seen use paper attendance sheets; keep a paper copy of your schedule (ie. where you SHOULD be during that time period) and require a written record if you leave a class for any reason and also your destination--bathroom included.
I fail to see the difference here, let alone how it's somehow an invasion of privacy.
boggles the mind that someone modded this up.
Society, as a whole, needs to tell these swine that if you have that many children and that young of an age, you are the scum of the Earth and the planet would be better off without you.
don't dare speak for me (society) with hateful shit like that.
I don't envy this kind of freedom....
Sounds like fun to carry.
which then is translated into the student's name by software contained in a handheld device used by teachers to check attendance.
I can see it now: "Hey, Mikey - take my badge and scan it for English class, or I'm gonna beat you up with it!"
Bueller... Bueller... Bueller...
So what? I mean schools require students to reply to a roll call... making them swipe a badge is the same thing.
I'm not a fan of radical RFID use. I'm skeptical of many uses, such as sticking them in bank cards so that when you step through the doors of your local branch, they know whether they can ignore you or if you're a significant enough customer that they should meet you at the door and give you tip-top attention.
This just doesn't seem like a big deal. Rather than wasting class time doing roll-call, they automate it so that as soon as you walk into the class, you're counted as present. This will help parents and school officials know that students are not missing and are where they should be. Maybe they'll even implement full blown java cards to ensure that only the AV-club students can access the AV room, only faculty can access the faculty lounge and so on. Even better would be requiring the use of a java card to gain access to the school at all. Swipe the card to get in the front door. No more lunatics wandering the halls.
Oh, and most adults have to use these cards in the real world, too. The only difference is that we have to swipe our cards and that swipe usually ends up in a database, logging the time, door and building we entered. The only difference here is that the RFID readers in the door eliminate the need to swipe the card.
I also don't see the big deal with tagging body parts like this. It enforced accountability and I'm pretty sure dead people or someone who no longer has that arm attached to them doesn't much care what happens to it - tagged or not.
Also, any remotely intelligent kid will just wrap the card with a couple layers of tin foil, stick it in their lunch box, etc.
Like I said, I'm a really skeptical person when it comes to RFIDs. I hate the idea of tagging, tracking and cataloging EVERYTHING under the sun. But these two cited implementations seem entirely reasonable.
Yeah, I'm totally for having to government replace parents and personal responsibility in general, too. I just don't know where I'd be today if I hadn't had Big Brother watching every move I made while I was in school.
It's amazing how quickly we've transformed from a country which at least claimed to value freedom, civil liberties and self-determination into one which pleads for the government to come in and run our lives, isn't it?
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Parents that either don't care about their child's education, or ones that think their child is immune to the rules or does no wrong are the real problem with the school system.
Free Mac Mini
Hey, as long as we're shifting the blame from teachers to parents, why don't we go ahead and shift it to where it belongs, the students. EVERYBODY'S parent suck. Some worse than others. That is no excuse to go blaming your parents or anybody else for your own actions. Everybody, deep down, knows what is right. Even my three year olds do, because when they are doing bad things, they stop as soon as I come in the room.
If people don't do what is right, then they are to blame, not their parents, not their teachers, not society. If we are to get anywhere as a species, everyone has to be held accountable and responsible for themselves.
Yes, I realize this could be devastating to the law profession, which feeds mainly upon people holding other people responsible for their own foolish actions or lack of common sense.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Frankly, I don't really see any problem with the tracking of the kids, per se. It doesn't tell you what they're doing in the bathroom... it just lets you know that they are in the bathroom... which I don't regard as an invasion of privacy, really. All in all, it's good to keep close track of those meddling kids.
However....
The thing about this that really freaks me out is that it might give us a group of future voters who view this level of tracking as "the way things are". I'm someone who considers the Patriot act to be a dangerous step in the direction of Nazi Germany. However, I think that a group of kids just graduating from a school where they wore, essentially, tracking beacons for four year will think that the Patriot Act is downright lax.
The largest problem facing public schools in America is not parents opposing the system. I'll give you a hint what is: Poor distribution of funding. This trend has been apparent for a long time but no child left behind did NOT help. While we are at it, since I don't agree with your decisions, that makes you the scum of the Earth as well. Just like the 19 year old girl you so despise. Why don't we remove you/your parents/loved ones from the face of the Earth? People make mistakes. Deal with it, you don't have to help them, but you have no right to force abortions on someone.
"Im such a nonconformist I'm going to not conform to the rest of you!"
"Dude I think we just got goth-served"
When I was in HS (which was only 6 years ago), there was no "tracking system" of any kind. Sure, some teachers took attendance. But most did not. And there was definitely no school-wide system.
Seriously, how hard is it for a dumbfuck teacher to notice when a kid is missing 2-3 days a week? It is not like we're talking university-style auditoriums of hundreds of students.. a typical HS class side is only 30-45 kids.
Is there really a *need* to automate this? Seems like a waste of money more than anything else. If I was a parent this would be my protest angle - get the teachers in line.
Did you notice that this system was put in without parental input? Or that the systems was actually a test for the company that makes it (payed for with a donation of equipment).
Also the badges contain name and age (grade) of the kids. If the kids forget to remove them after they leave the grounds then this is a threat to their safety.
So: No parental input.
A corperation testing a system on unconsenting individuals*
A potential threat to the children's safty
This does not seem like its the parents not working with the system, more like the system is not working with the parents.
Can you give me a reason this level of tracking is needed?
Can you give me a justification for the schools approach to the matter?
*Since they are children gaurdian's consent should be needed.
If you're a single mother, you made a mistake. I don't support your decision and I think the world would be a better place if abortions were forced upon you. Just the other night I saw on the news a 19 year old girl who had 3 children and was being brought up on child neglect charges. It is simply sickening. Society, as a whole, needs to tell these swine that if you have that many children and that young of an age, you are the scum of the Earth and the planet would be better off without you. I am sick and tired of supporting someone else's mistake. And of course, those 3 children will grow up to either steal my car, have children they can't support just like their mother, or both.
My mother was single.
I don't steal cars and, as yet, I've not had children that I can't support. I'm three units away from a university degree, I work part time as a software engineer and I do a lot of contract work on the side.
And in my opinion, the education system will never teach anybody who doesn't want to learn: whether they have good familes or bad families, it all comes down to the individual.
Honestly, you bitch and bitch like you know what you're talking about.
You don't, it shows: families aren't perfect. You're obviously not in such a situation, so for fuck's sake stop moaning like you're somehow better than these women. You're not. It's not up to you to judge moral values.
People make mistakes. Life goes on.
Why not just tag us at birth.. add sensors everywhere.. stores. schools. homes. cars.
"Its for the children"
My kid would be home schooled if our system here tried this garbage.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Cross references of all this data via identity is RFID's most frightening "promise." All the arguments had in recent years about privacy are exponentially more critical; already, we are awash in more publically available data about ourselves than we can individually manage. We need tools as individuals being tracked, to manage access to data which identifies us.
Is anyone in the U.S. Congress close enough to technical to understand, to defend individuals from exploitation? Who there can swim in the deep end RFID is pulling us out into? Most /.ers are probably
too young to run for office.
BG
This isn't big brother. This is a school tracking students, something schools have always done. Hall monitors keep an eye on where kids go. Teachers track when a student is in or out of class. As I read it the RFID's are just to make the teacher's job easier, not to add something new to what is already being known.
What privacy is there in school? How many dark corners are there that students should be allowed into with no one knowing? Schools try to make sure this sort of thing doesn't happen. So how do the RFID id's violate privacy any more than a teacher at the hall corners with a notebook watching when and where students go?
The better question is how will the school keep one student from carrying around another students' id.
I love my sig.
This is being used to automatically take attendance. That's it.
Nobody's "rights" are being violated, nobody is forced to take any drugs... Yes, you look like a bit of a dork wearing one, and I am not sure that there has been a rash of elementary kids that have been trying to infiltrate the school.
I am pretty sure that this is not serving any purpose other than enriching the school. How hard *is* attendance anyways? But surely, this is no big deal.
I agree with you 100%. I had a handful of extremely talented and down-to-earth teachers during my 4 years of high school. Many of them took time aside to help me out with projects unrelated to their classes. One helped me start a business and another helped me with legal advice when I got arrested. One teacher even took the time to show a video tape of the Feb 15 Iraq War protests on Democracy Now to our class. This teacher had no reason to do so except that he felt it was right we see what was truly happening in our country. After seeing the video which featured American protesters and interviews with everyday people living in Iraq, it completely changed my perspective on the war.
I realize I'm going off-topic, but the fact is that many people rant about the poor quality of teachers. I'm not saying every teacher I had was great - with the handful of outstanding teachers, I also got a few really bad ones too - but thats life. But getting back to the point, the teachers I mentioned were frequently in trouble with the administration. Never in my life have I seen such a power-hungry group of people so detached from their constituents and reality. They're policy was "we're always right and the students must obey." When they fucked up, no reparations or even an apology were ever considered. When I look back at high school, I do not have one good thing to say about the way my school was run.
In 4 years of highschool I witnessed a number of confrontations involving parents who would basically call a teacher a liar to their face over the behavior of the student. Nine times of ten the student WAS in fact being a complete asshat, disrupting class, starting fights or otherwise breaking rules.
I don't disagree that in some cases administrators take things too far, but there are PLENTY of parents who simply can't fathom their child misbehaving and become very angry when it's suggested he or she is.
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
Parents that either don't care about their child's education, or ones that think their child is immune to the rules or does no wrong are the real problem with the school system.
silly me... and I thought it was lack of funding... but, hey, what do I know?
seriously, though... why does everyone want to blame someone... most of the time, problems are far too complex to blame a single person, group of people, or any single cause for that matter.
It really just kind of makes me sad.
*yawn*
I don't know about you, but when I was in High School I used to sneak off at lunch to fuck.
Right, cue slashdot nerd jokes about none of us getting laid in high school. *waits* Done now? Let's move on.
As soon as this data is available, parents are going to want access to it. All of it.
There is a limit to how much a parent can be involved in a child's life before that child becomes warped. Many, many parents are so scared of teen pregnancy and AIDS because of fear-mongering news programs that they over-interfere. Other parents come from more conservative cultures than the ones their children are adopting. To a certain extent, a child should have the freedom to develop its own values.
See, there's a huge distinction between knowing:
A) "Billy went to all his classes."
and
B) "Billy went to his first class, then his second. He had a spare before lunch, so first he went to the bathroom, then he had lunch in the cafeteria, then he went through the parking lot doors and came back in twenty minutes."
and
C) "Billy went to his first class, second class, bathroom, lunch. Then he went to the parking lot for twenty minutes. Billy and Sarah went through the doors together on the way out and the way back."
If Sarah's parents don't like Billy, this last one is big, big trouble. It's not damning evidence, but maybe Sarah's been told to stay away from Billy. Maybe Sarah's parents are a bit paranoid. Who knows? In a large school system, there will be some bad parents.
There were times in school I'd be furious with a teacher. I'd ask to visit the washroom, and instead I'd take a quick walk around the school. With this kind of monitoring, that trip around the school would be logged, and I wouldn't have the psychological room to calm down. Every door I passed would be a trigger. What would have happened under those circumstances? I don't know.
Students are in school for twelve years. Twelve years of surveillance is just too much. They'll crack. They won't be able to separate themselves from what their parents think of them. It's a big deal, because the amount of data *is* much larger. Having very precise times at which each student passed each scanner is orders of magnitude more than "They were in a classroom near the beginning of that class."
I'm just glad I'm already out.
Seems more like this is less of a "it's for the safety of the kids" and more of a "let's make money by tagging our kids like cattle."
You seem surprised such things happen.
This is not the sig you are looking for...
You're implicitly assuming that "rights" means "legal rights in the US of A".
But "legal" and "right" are different. Slavery still was wrong, and so slaves had a right to be free and to fight for freedom, even when the US Consitution explicitly permitted slavery. Likewise Jews in Nazi Germany had a right to live, no matter what the Nazi legal system said.
Whether or not students have a right to privacy at a public school is a moral question, no matter what the US Supreme Court says. So parents claiming their students have a right to privacy aren't "mistaken about their kids rights" - they are disagreeing with the school about their kids rights.
Sean
I know you were specifically referring to unpowered badges, but unless you remove the battery (and most probably won't), badges like these have a range of fifteen feet. I've worked these badges in the past, and I've been able to pick them up from longer distances on may occasions.
"Where are your papers" is a phrase an American adult should ever endure while minding their own business in the USA. And it is no one's business where an American adult goes, except maybe his wife's.
Minors in a school are a different thing altogether; and I don't buy the slippery slope arguments on that point. Kids do leave the schools without authorization. And no, that is never a good or welcome thing. This way school admin has another tool to know where they are, or are not, during school hours.
Some people have different thoughts on this matter. The most reasonable approach might be to assign these cards only parent request.
--- -- - -
Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
Herr Fuhrer Bush says we must give up our democracy and our civil rights to secure our free society from the terrorists who wish to destroy it...
I think its like ignoring the UN to attack Saddam for ignoring the UN...
Home school.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty." - Ben Franklin
and make gun aiming automatic
Why should a bunch of armed hooligans with guns fare any better than some ragtag bunch of illiterate, underequipped Asian peasants? Because such people could never hope for any sort of victory against the U.S. Armed Forces.
English is easier said than done.
Put yourself in a kids shoes. Just because you are an adult NOW, it's easy to say they should be monitored constantly 24 hours a day.
What do you teach children when you have to tag them and constantly monitor all their activities?
That you don't trust them. They never learn to be trusted, thus either will rebell even more than the kids of today or become complacent slaves to society (neither is healthy for anybody).
When many of these kids grow up, they'll be so used to being monitored and bitched around, when society requires this for adults too, they will not have a concept of freedom that we do. It's the American way of life to be monitored and put under constant surveillance then. Corporations monitoring for maximizing profits will seem natural, because that will make more money, and you don't really have any other options. The concept has been eradicated.
Kids become adults you know. And they become what we teach = our own example mixed with our treatment of them.
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/