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Schools Scanned Students' Irises Without Permission
schwit1 writes "Parents in Polk County, Florida are outraged after learning that students in area schools had their irises scanned as part of a new security program without obtaining proper permission. Two days before their Memorial Day weekend break, kids from at least three different public schools — Bethune Academy (K–5), Davenport School of the Arts (K–5, middle, and high school), and Daniel Jenkins Academy (grades 6–12) — were subjected to iris scans without their parents' knowledge or consent. The scans are essentially optical fingerprints, which the school intended to collect to create a database of biometric information for school-bus security."
You'll lose both, and deserve neither.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
They are everywhere
pro-tip: when buses are hijacked or children kidnapped, it will be an adult that does it. As for recognizing kids, the driver can work off a paper with thumbnail pictures
Meanwhile, down the hall, students were studying the Bill of Rights.
Really, Florida? Really? Of all the things that need to be fixed about your state you're worried about who gets on your school buses?
the kids went home and said "mommy, the school scanned the pupils today".
Where are these parents when it's time to protest actual privacy violations?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
IMO, this is a terrible place for the feds to get involved. What is appropriate for middle schools in urban high-crime areas is not appropriate for elementary schools in rural North Dakota.
School violence is not historically higher now than it has ever been, and overall violence in the US is at an all-time low.
The centralization of education has been uniformly terrible for the US.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Really? We need military levels of record keeping to keep track of school children getting on busses? Seems wasteful, and overkill.. If you need an ID (which I dont think you should for school busses) then a simple picture ID should do.. Growing up my bus driver (and the kids) knew all the kids getting on and off anyhow..
Am I lying when I tell you that im telling the truth? Or am I telling the truth when I say that Im lying?
The factions/fractions of which you speak are likely the 2 party system, and that exists independently now of any states rights. The powers in both parties pander to a few hot button (but ultimately of little importance) issues to please their base, while steadily ruining this country for their own greed and the greed of those with money (IE big corps).
Silence is a state of mime.
i wonder how hard it would be to make a contact lens that caused the scanner to throw an error (or worse was a backdoor into the system).
Scanning Image
Processing
Identified Krystal Rayne Dawnmeadow approved SYSTEM ADMIN ALL ACCESS
(and of course daddy would have told his favorite minion exactly what to punch into a terminal to .....)
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
All of these issues are pretty much based on so much of the violence which the US schools have been faced for the last 20+ yrs.
Juvenile violent crime has been falling for the past 20 years. These issues must be based on something else.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Utter nonsense.. We should teach our little snowflakes that disciplne and I mean self discipline is a good thing. I realize I'm being a bit atavastic, but teach them to sit down, shut up, and learn.
More from TFA:
"Parents finally put a stop to it when one child told them it was pretty cool, and that the next day Mr. Johnston was going to show the boys how unique, like fingerprints, were stampings of their ball sac patterns."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Bush never performed "extrajudicial killings" on US citizens.
I suppose we don't really know....because the Patriot Act enacted under Bush, made it legal to disappear US citizens in secrecy.
Unlike RFID, iris scans can't be used to remotely track your movements, and unlike fingerprints they can't be used to identify your presence after the fact. (Well they can but only with your permission. Even good security camera mostly produces pictures that makes identifying faces difficult. It certainly can't take a sharp enough image of your iris from a distance.)
Glenn Beck loves big government, as long as it is bombing people he doesn't like or arresting them for drugs that he doesn't like. The deficit? It is horrible, just horrible, unless they are printing up money for war.
He had a real chance to make a real difference with Ron Paul, with hours to talk about him on the radio...but the few times he mentioned him was to crap all over him. Oh the ironies that Beck just likes the Constitution when it works in his favor.
A pox on him.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
Schools can say it was for "Reproductive Health" reasons.
No, there is no concern about over reaching governance!
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I'm going to break this down into a few questions and statement: 1) You know what I really like about this kind of argument is when a few years later a kid gets kidnapped and the one thing they're missing are fingerprints! 2) Why weren't the kids smart enough to ask why? In Kindergarten I would of spoken up and said No. 3) Why does anyone care? So they have an iris scan, what good is it to them if you never do anything wrong! In one way it's a really good thing they took these because now they can automatically exclude innocent parties from being accused. It's like genetic profiling, you only hold back from getting a genetic test done if your guilty or an idiot, the innocent offer them up in heart beat and never look back.
What an ignorant statement. We are a union of states. I don't know where the hell you hail from, but the concept is that states determine their own laws and govern themselves. I don't know where people have this ass-backward concept that somehow it all comes from the top-down and the Federal government legislates and controls everything.
Additionally, this has NOTHING to do with "violence the schools have been facing for the last twenty years". The violence has not changed dramatically (especially of the kind you're likely referencing). This is purely a fear-based personal-data grab. Having a child's iris data on record in no way prevents him from committing a crime or being the victim of a crime. All it does is *commit* a crime against his or her humanity by treating them like a criminal and entering them into a life-long database without having actually committed any crime to justify it.
That so many people have the mindset you've shared is actually kind of terrifying. How the hell can people exercise and defend their rights when they don't even understand them?
I'm all for parents and schools knowing who is getting on the bus and such, as a basic answer to the age old question "Do you know where your kids are right now?" question. But this is insane. Are there really that many kids that a bus driver or school has to have Bio-metric information on their students? Is that data destroyed when the student leaves the school to go to another school, drops out, or graduates? Who else has access to such data? It's bad enough that there are smart chips in Student ID's but crap is getting out of hand.
Parents, it's time for more of you to Home School.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
Stop giving up your civil liberties so readily everytime the news starts churning out the Terrorism drama with every "think of the children" campaign. Life is always going to have it's dangers and none of the DHS/TSA stuff to date has saved us from any of it*. The only reason TFA has happened is because people let it happen.
[*] - http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/01/abolish_the_dep.html
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
If some kid is intent on shooting the driver and everybody else on the bus, do you really think (s)he's gonna stop for an eye exam before going hog wild?
And if it's some PTSD-suffering ex-marine blowing up the bus, it's gonna be the same situation -- even if the attacker DOES stop to look in the scanner.
In this case, you get NOTHING for your lost freedom: no security, no safety, no real knowledge after the fact ...
NOTHING
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Your problem is it was devastating to your case.
The iris scans were NOT DATA before they were scanned in.
But you're not really smart enough to get that because you have a hobby horse you're riding like there's no tomorrow: the statement "Data wants to be free" is that once you start sharing data, you can't stop it without huge problems: it wants to be free.
But that means that when you voluntarily share information (for example, by selling copies of a book you wrote), the data you wrote is now free. Before you published, that wasn't data that you had to put much effort into keeping closed up. If you don't want the data to be shared, don't share it.
Here, the iris scans, EVEN IF THEY ARE DATA, ***did not want*** to be collected in the first place. This is the equivalent of burgularizing your home to get the draft copy of your book and making copies of it to give away.
THAT was theft.
SO IS THIS.
This iris scan device is expensive, ineffective and excessive.
But there are money for the contractors, bribe for the school administrators. Everyone is happy, right?
Your logic is erroneous, human equations aren't black and white, but mostly shades of grey. Force of arms is the only real and true power of our species. As much as any element wishes to rise above this, they will be forced back to it by other human elements. Only in it's complexity can such erroneous logic arise that there is an alternative. If you distill it down, you will find that in the end, it's by force of arms that all order and rules are established with any sustain.
The world is a small place these days and becoming smaller by the nanosecond.
Take the Red Pill.
If some kid is intent on shooting the driver and everybody else on the bus, do you really think (s)he's gonna stop for an eye exam before going hog wild?
And even if he does stop for the eye exam what will it confirm? The columbine killers were both students at the school they shot up (surprise!), so such a system wouldn't have stopped them.
Database thinks, yep, Harris and Klebold are on the bus.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
This kind of imposed "security" measure generally fails to provide any additional security, while at the same time treating children as criminals.
People treated as criminals, frequently respond by becoming so and thus provide continuing justification for the "security" measures that caused the problem in the first place.
Of course there is gain, but I don't think we like where it is going. Take a look at the movie "Minority Report" and the daily mechanics of interaction with technology it portrayed. An iris scan was a fast biometric measure they could track every aspect of a person with, where they were, what they purchased, what interested them.
Think of how entities such as Amazon track our browsing of products and try to anticipate our needs, making suggestions for us. Think of this expanded to every aspect of life. Everything about you will end up in a file and that file will be accessible by whom? I have the presumption that we are all arriving late to the party on this subject. I suspect that vast amounts of data on us all have been farmed, done secretly and who has it and what they do with it would disturb us.
Take the Red Pill.
Changes constantly, as it is what controls pupil size. Don't get how this would be very good at positive ID, especially if lighting is a variable.
sigs are for losers (except to point out that sigs are for losers)
It is information from the moment I write it down.
Actually it is information the moment the thought pops into your head. It is just not accessible to others until you write it down or say it. I am curious about the fuss with iris scans though. This is nothing more than a detailed photograph and in many ways a lot better than a photo because you can't scan someone's iris to identify them without them being aware of it unlike facial recognition. Also, unlike finger prints, you do not leave iris prints everywhere you go so it cannot be used to track where you have been or what you have done. Frankly iris scans are even better privacy-wise than a photo-ID card.
It's not an ignorant statement. What is ignorant, especially in this day and age is to think that total freedom is something you can always get when in the end, you have dependencies to answers to. The notion of 'independent' states in today's world is pure fantasy. Few US states would be able to survive in these times on their own, especially fiscally. California, New York, sure, they could. Heck, there are cities going bankrupt. Anyways, It's a point of view and I believe that mine is valid. When it comes to "SECURITY' and everything that goes with it, it should equally enforced in all US states. Whatever the measures are, they should be equal. It makes sense, because it is "NATIONAL" security. Anyways, we can agree to disagree. But in the end, there is a saying. The needs of the many outweighs the needs of the few or the one.. "I know, totally Star Trek", and it aptly applies in this situation.. :)
LOL.. yeah, it would make things simple if we could achieve that goal of yours. I agree. But, alas, it doesn't seem like it's gonna happen and again, agreeing with you here, so, it's kinda sad.
If it's true that the iris patterns change significantly as children grow, then this would seem then to be a good thing to use for ID kids from the perspective that the ID method would "expire" after some period, making it no longer useful after the original reason no longer exists. This would be different/better than fingerprints that would be useful forever.
This is not to suggest that that I'm necessarily in favor of mandatory biometric ID screening. But if there was a biometric indicator that was reliable and also "expired" after a year or to, that would be awfully handy. If you voluntarily used that form of ID for a temporary purpose you wouldn't be handing over a permanent key.
I'm not talking about centralizing education, but centralizing security measures. Whether it's for employment, education, etc.. If there was a coherent well placed system across the country, it would make more sense. It would be more cost-efficient and would be much more effective. And then you wouldn't be seeing schools such as the one mentioned in this article which decided to do their own retina scans.
The proper thing for these parents to do is organize, arm themselves, head down to the school administration buildings, and kill every official, employee, and agent in sight. If the school board members are not there, hunt them down, and kill them too.
No doubt, that would result it an armed SWAT response, arrests, and deaths.
It would not be legal.
But, it would be proper, and therefore should be legal. Specifically, it should be an affirmative defense against the charge of murder that the slain (a) be an (1) elected member of government, (2) employee or (3) other agent thereof; and (b) (1) had committed, (2) passed into law, or (3) supported the passage into law of (c) an unconstitutional measure that (d) was (1) applied, or (2) applicable, to the accused. In this case, the students', and by extention their parents' fourth amendment rights were violated.
Governments are supposed to exist at the pleasure of the people and be their servant, not the other way around.
The founding fathers didn't go far enough with the second amendment. They had the right idea, that in extremis, armed rebellion against a tyrannical state was justified. But, they failed in thinking a separation of powers and enumerated restrictions on government powers, would be sufficient to ward off that necessity. So, now we are left with a society that has no idea when to take up arms against the state, save the vague notion of "when enough others do". And so, we just sit and look at one another. When the time comes (and, it will), the response will not be a gentle local reminder of who's the boss, but rather a widespread revolution that runs a clear danger of leaving a power vacuum, as revolutions tend to do.
It would have been far better for there to be a "rulebook" as it were, that clearly enumerates, but not in an exhaustive sense, when to kill an agent of the state.
Government is best viewed as a beast of burden: useful for a time, but to be put down when it has outlived it's usefulness, or otherwise become ornery.
Trust no agent of the state who is not willing to enumerate a number of actions that, if they undertook, would justify their killing under the affirmative defense of protecting constitutional rights.
Radical? Obviously, I don't think so. Affirmative defenses are not legal "walks in the park". They shift the burden from the state having to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt to the accused having to prove innocence under the specific affirmative defense shield, having admitted to comitting the act under consideration.
In Liberty, Rene
It's not clear to me how that takes into consideration the vastly different security needs for different organizations, settings, and assets.
The way to prevent florida schools from installing retina scanners is for florida to pass a law saying that retina scanning without prior consent is illegal in public places. Simple as that.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Won't *somebody* think of THE CHILDREN?????
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Actually Shrub did kill Americans with drone attacks, he just went ahead and did it rather than attempt to legally justify it like Obama so the story went away with the next news cycle.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
has nothing to do with whether a kid is going to shoot up a bus, it is purely for tracking purposes so they can monitor the kid's movements.
Database thinks, yep, Harris and Klebold are on the bus.
I see what you did there, H&K thank you for the free ad.
Then to clarify, this offers no gain or benefit at all to the people whose irises were scanned or those around them.
Which basically means this boils down to incompetent and overly zealous school officials doing something they had no permission to do and which can only benefit industry and government, but stands to harm the people who were scanned.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Last time I saw an iris scanning device (installed at Toronto's international airport for any voyagers that would enter or fly over American airspace...), the devices required people to stand still, put their eye socket over a camera device and look straight ahead without moving their eye.
In what scenario does a troublemaker on a bus submit to standing in one place, putting their eye over a camera, and keeping their eye still for even the required fraction of a second? How does this procedure stop a troublemaker from causing trouble?
It's the same with those "there's no separation of church and state" folks. They love, love, LOVE government mandating religious stuff so long as it is THEIR religious stuff. However, if a publicly funded school waiver is used to send a kid to a Muslim school?!!! SHOCK!!! OUTRAGE!!! HORROR!!!
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
That concern about your iris scan being compromised has me wondering if these systems encrypt the iris information in a manner similar to password encryption. If so it strikes me that the decryption problem **might** be harder because AFAIK the unencrypted iris data is just a string of numbers. So... if compromised it won't fall to a rainbow/dictionary attack. What I don't know is... does this make it any more secure?
Can someone knowledgeable in both cryptography and whatever parameters are stored about irises in systems like these comment?
Regarding RFID being replaceable following a compromise... from the other side they're also subject to being stolen and used nefariously that way, a feature that iris's supposedly don't have. (click through to the explanatory video where they make a point about a **live iris**)
Everyone is going on and on about why this is happening and isn't this stupid. Well, if you want answers, follow the money. Who had the money and influence to make this happen in the first place? Who will make money off this in the future? After all, most of the money flowing around American public schools is corporate privatization efforts that use any and all ugly politics and fear to make a buck.
You don't really believe that they just made a mistake and didn't inform the parents until a week later, do yas?
Just to start yas off, Stanley Convergent Security Solutions has so many tentacles in government and corporate interests they make Bond villains look like amateurs.
Of course there is gain
This isnt how life works. You dont just get to declare things. You wrote 8 sentences, beginning here, but not even for a moment did you even pretend to justify this idea that there is a gain.
"His name was James Damore."
Lets not forget how insistent he is that people need to follow Christian values and live a good Christian life to the point of wanting government to mandate specific Christian values. For someone who is small government he sure seems to want government to enforce a specific religious code.
Time to offend someone
Biometric school bus security???
Seriously, what the unholy fuck has gone wrong with this country?
0 1 - just my two bits
Agreed. It's not about security--it's about tracking and CYA.
Currently, the school doesn't know who gets on the bus and where they get off the bus.
FTA:
"There's not a day goes by that we get a frantic call from parents that they can't find their child. It's never been a serious situation."
[...] A device scans the eye of the student to identify him. Then a text message or email would be sent to a parent letting them know what time their child was picked up and the time the bus arrived at school. The electronic device would also notify parents if their child got off at a different bus stop.
With this system, the school can say, "Little Johnny got on the bus and got off the bus at stop 12, the corner of Woodward & Burnstein. Go look for your kid around there." Better yet, the school can say, "Check your own fucking e-mail and leave us alone."
So you have parents who expect the school to keep track of where their kids are--but they don't want the school to actually track the kid because that would be bad/Orwellian.
Without a percieved benefit, I agree that the school should not be taking iris scans of the students, but I have to ask: what is the threat posed by the school doing this? What freedom is being given up here?
I could try to piece together an argument, but I would rather hear from someone that feels strongly about this.
My webcomic
I hope every child on that bus starts a personal suit to coercion under the color of authority against Florida. Last time I checked, only criminals were required to give up their biometrics to the state. Now some Florida moron government employee sees absolutely nothing wrong with violating our children for whatever expense. I wonder if their secret members of the CTA, which has endorsed paying the retirements of children molesters that happen to be union members?
Yes, because the public school in the town where nobody locks their doors needs the same protection as a public school in the Bronx.
This is EXACTLY the kind of thinking that got someone shot and killed at my highschool a few years back. Crazy local homeless guy turns up looking for a job. Administrators refuse to let him in, and call the police because he seems suspicious. Now, this is a small town with a homeless population of four. Everyone, cops included, know who these people are. But hey, post-9/11, something suspicious going on! Every school in the district goes into lockdown and the police pull up with their brand new DHS-funded anti-terrorism gear, all excited to have a chance to finally play with them. Homeless guy sticks his hand in his pocket; cop freaks out thinking he's reaching for a gun; and the homeless guy gets a shotgun blast to the chest. Died right there on the sidewalk with students watching, no weapons or anything found, no investigation conducted into the shooting.
I can't help it if you are thick and can't get the gist of what I'm talking about.
Take the Red Pill.
Protecting a small highschool in Ebensburg, PA is not national security. A freakin' nuclear bomb could go off in that school and, other than fear and paranoia, the rest of the nation would hardly notice.
National security is protecting New York City from nuclear missiles. National security, as the name implies, is about the security of the ENTIRE NATION. That's why the feds control the military, but the local police are controlled by the local government -- because security is one of those things that DOES vary wildly and it is therefore best left in local control. Makes more sense for the feds to control the curriculum than the security. In rural PA, saying something is "secure" means it's tied down so it won't blow away. In NYC, it means metal detectors and armed guards. But the list of US Presidents or the rules of a chemical reaction don't change.
I mean, if you are placing your -children- in the hands of people that are this incompetent, then you better hope they grow up dumb and never realize it.
The flaw in your logic is that you believe "freedom" and "voluntary association" is the same thing, and that they are absolute. Neither is true.
If I choose voluntarily to be locked up in prison, I lose any number of freedoms I had before. For example, I may no longer have the freedom to eat when I please, or go outside whenever I want to.
I have traded those freedoms in exchange for something else I want more -- to be in a prison.
And he can't help it if you don't bother backing up your statements. I see something about Minority Report, and nothing about any "gain" to be had.
No they probably actually are. While such crimes have been going down, they are much more likely to be heard about across the country than they were 20 years ago. If someone got non-fatally stabbed at a high-crime area school in the 80s, it probably would have been local news for a day or two at best. Today it would likely spread quickly through social media and end up being seen as "breaking news" across the country for several days. It may be going down, but the amount of what does happen you hear about has gone up enough to give the perception that juvenile violent crime is going up.
After years of not using a signature, I am going to make one to say the following: Fuck Beta
This iris scan device is expensive, ineffective and excessive.
But there are money for the contractors, bribe for the school administrators. Everyone is happy, right?
This just sounds like theft of public resources. Almost as bad as having a vice squad wrongly bust an autistic high school student for drugs (the school administrators were in on that one too) [1]. Or that case about the school admins who used software to take pictures of their students in their rooms with school laptops [2].
In all these cases, it's these un-impeachable un-elected school administrators who work with seedy police or corporations and are never punished. Instead, the public pays for unnecessary services, or they pay for unneeded lawsuits.
What will it take to get these folks fired and put in jail for reckless negligence and/or corruption?
[1] http://temecula.patch.com/groups/police-and-fire/p/autistic-tvusd-student-wrongly-accused-in-massive-dru6a5c988a16
[2] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/11/lower-merion-school-distr_n_758882.html
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
First about the "gain", someone will gain it, thus "they" will have "gain", it doesn't evaporate. It's probably copied into Christ knows how many databases as we speak. Your browsing history is another big fat bunch of data that gets collected as well. Every mouse click can and probably will be tracked. Data no matter how trivial you think it is, adds up.
Minority Report, watch it sometime and look at how they used iris scanning EVERYWHERE in it. They had moved even to a cashless society, you walk in, take what you want and it's deducted from your account automatically. That's shopping in the future. When they moved into public transit areas, more scanning, go into a store, scanned, iris scanners everywhere. Your every move cataloged and it was used through out the show to market to your "needs" or to track your ass down if they wanted you.
That was the whole deal about the protagonist getting new eyes in the movie, so that he could move about without being instantly nailed by an iris scanner.
When you RTFA (read the fucking article) you will see how this draws parallels to Minority Report. What a wonderful place to start indoctrinating the next generation on being submissive to such tracking methods, in a school. You want safer kids, hire a few more cops. If you want to advance an Orwellian nightmare, buy into this bullshit of "technology will save the day."
Like I said, there is gain, but I don't think we will like where it leads to.
Take the Red Pill.
You don't get the point. Identity and Security go hand in hand. Standardized the identification process, eliminate duplication and confusion. One system which basically tags you from birth to death. That's what I'm talking about.. After all, why are they doing retinal scans in the first place? TO KEEP IDENTIFICATION information! and why is that? AMONGST other reasons, in case there are any security issues. It's not the ONLY reason, it is ONE of the them. Seriously, it is easy to say that it's not because you are on Slashdot that you have any smarts. I would expect more from some of the people who have commented my comments. Sad.
Security?? WHAT security?
Rob Davis (some senior level support guy) states
This is an effort to further enhance the safety of our students
He also mentions it can track when and where the student gets on the bus and to school. So how does this further enhance the safety of the children? Has there been a rash of stoways on the busses? Are they loosing children? About the only thing this can really help with is students voluntarily getting off at the wrong stop.
OK, now I think it's safe to assume your original post was sarcastic and went over everyone's heads, right....?
" The needs of the many outweighs the needs of the few or the one.. "I know, totally Star Trek", and it aptly applies in this situation."
If you have watched star trek it doesn't always work so well for them either.