Schools are prohibited by law from discriminating against kids without SSN's or whose parents refuse to provide the SSN.
They'll hassle you, because it is a hassle for them (they have to call the district office to get a number to fill into the computer in place of the SSN), but if you press your case they WILL give in. I was on the far side (the tech support side) of many such calls during my career in school administration computer systems consulting.
They've had student Id's for years. The students treated them like a joke. They were supposed to have the ID in order to get into the lunchroom to eat lunch, but nobody ever enforced it, so nobody ever carried their ID's with them.
Besides, hidden student ID's don't solve the real problem they were trying to solve, which is gang members who have been expelled or who dropped out coming back on campus to recruit and sell drugs. Like in most big bureaucratic high schools, there's too many kids for the security guards and teachers to know them all on sight. That's the problem with big high schools. I think they should outlaw all schools with more than 500 students (500 is about the max that you can know everybody there by name).
They have a problem with gang activity on campus. Kids who've been expelled, or dropped out, come back on campus to recruit for gangs or to ply their drug trade.
The Columbine shootings allow them to implement the badges without having to admit what the real problem is that they're trying to solve.
Err, that's Ruston, Louisiana. Home to Louisiana Tech University. A college town.
Believe me, if the local sheriff tried to say "You in a heap of trouble boy!" to one of those college professors, he'd have the ACLU, NAACP, OCR (Office of Civil Rights), and every other acronym you can think of hanging onto his ass for the next twenty years making his life miserable.
There's places in Louisiana where the good ole' boy way of law enforcement still holds. But Ruston ain't one of them.
Like most large impersonal high schools, most of the students' names are not known by the staff or security guards. Ruston High has had drug and gang problems in the past, and has had problems with students expelled for drug and gun violations coming back onto campus and plying their trade. The Columbine shootings gave the Ruston High administration an excuse to implement a policy they've been talking about for at least two years, without having to admit to the general public that they have lost control of their campus.
Federal law requires schools that accept federal funds to provide services to students whether or not they provide their SSN. The schools in Louisiana tend to give you a hassle if you refuse to give your SSN, because it is a hassle for them (they have to call the central office and get a district-assigned 9-digit number off the list that the state gave the district), and it can also trigger an audit (in an attempt to stamp out corruption in Louisiana, i.e. "ghost students"), but they're required to assign you a number if you refuse to give yours.
Now, there's nothing in the law that says they have to take your SSN *OFF* their records once you've already given it to them, but state and district policies may say that you have that right. It's been a couple of years and I forget.
Err, they hit the local Pepsi bottler for the placard holders. PepsiCo didn't have anything to do with it, and probably all they told the Pepsi bottler was "we need badge holders for our students, can you get us some, we'll let you put the Pepsi logo on it!".
The bottler most probably didn't have the foggiest notion what was going to actually be placed inside those badge holders.
Ruston High School has been in denial about their drug and gang problems for years. It's a strange mixture of people attending the school -- half the kids are the very bright kids of Louisiana Tech professors (the school directly adjoins the La Tech campus), the other half are from some of the poorest slum and hill-country families in Louisiana.
The whole point of blaming it on "Columbine" was that it gave the administration an "out". They could introduce the placards because of Columbine, not because they have a drug and gang problem where students expelled for drug and gun violations routinely come back on campus to ply their trade. (It happened, I can't tell you how I know due to legal reasons, but it happened). And for those parents who HAVE been saying for years that Ruston High School needs to Do Something about crime and violence on the school campus, now they can say that they ARE "Doing Something", instead of saying "What crime? What violence?".
The most idiotic part was the use of social security numbers. There is a 7-digit district-assigned Student Identification Number that could have been used. The library system would have accepted that immediately, while the lunch system would have been a bit iffy (due to federal requirements, where free lunch students' SSN's are needed in order to get federal funds), but that could have been worked around by putting the SIDNO in one of the blank fields (I know they had at least one 9-digit field that was blank in the records that I imported into the administrative system) and then contracting Bon Appetite (the vendor of the lunch system) to scan that other field rather than the SSN field when deciding what account to credit or debit.
Instead, it appears they didn't even think twice about using the SSN. *DUMB*.
I'm one of the programmers who designed the school administration system that the Lincoln Parish School Board (and Ruston High) uses, and we DID generate a primary (7-digit) key. The SSN (whoops, State Identification Number, it's not necessarily the SSN) is just another piece of data hidden way down on the screen (and unless you have permission to view it, it's not even visible to you). They had to work hard to generate a student roster that had the SSN on it -- none of our standard reports will print it.
The super duper moronic thing is this: we generated that 7-digit District Student ID number specifically BECAUSE we'd been told that printing the SSN on any reports was a privacy no-no. And the district central office folks were some of the folks telling us this!
For schools that receive federal funds, the rules ARE black and white: the schools are allowed to ask for the SSN, and you're allowed to not provide it. If you refuse to provide it, the school must still provide services (presumably they will assign you a 9-digit student ID number to keep their computers from freaking, but the law says nothing about that).
Of course, for college students banks won't loan you money for student loans without your "tax ID number" (i.e. your SSN), so it's sort of futile anyhow:-(.
The federal privacy laws allow use of the SSN "where specifically authorized".
In the case of schools, the feds have specifically authorized the schools to ask for the SSN. However, the federal law ALSO says that students (and parents) are free to not provide it, and cannot be denied services if they fail to provide it.
In the case of the Lincoln Parish Schools, use of the "temporary" numbers assigned to students who refuse to provide their SSN (the ones starting with 9) is discouraged because too many "temporary" students cause the state and federal computers to go "Cling!" and trigger an audit. The state provides per-student funds and smells corrupt officials pocketing the money from "ghost students" when this happens, while the feds use the SSN to check the student roster against the food stamp rosters to see whether a) there are eligible students not being served free luches, and b) whether there are "ghost students" receiving free lunches (presumably corrupt officials in the school lunch program are pocketing the cash from "ghost students" if it happens). Either way, it's a big hassle for the district.
But: if you refuse to provide your SSN, they CANNOT refuse to provide service to you!
When I was providing support for their administrative computer system at Ruston High, I would often get calls from school counsellors or school secretaries about how to remove the SSN from a students' records and replace it with a '9'-number. (They had to call the central office and obtain a '9' number from the list that the state had assigned to that district that year, it was a big hassle). So I know that, at least back then, they had a policy that if you objected to having the SSN on your records, they would replace it with a '9' number. As far as I know, that's one step more than the federal law requires here (the federal law says they cannot deny you services if you refuse to give the number, but says nothing about you taking the number back after you've already given it).
Agreed. (See my comments about how they could have used the 7-digit district-assigned Student ID Number, which has nothing to do with the SSN, yet instead they decided to print on these badges a number which I, as a programmer of the administrative system, had been explicited instructed by the district NEVER TO PRINT!).
The Lincoln Parish Schools *DO* have an opt-out policy. Basically, if you object to your SSN being used as your State Identification Number (which is used by the state computers to track students -- Louisiana has had corruption problems for many years, with many districts claiming hundreds or even thousands of "ghost students" then corrupt officials pocketing the funds, the student tracking computers are supposed to stop that), then they are required to assign you a 9-digit number starting with '9'.
They discourage doing this because it makes their job harder. They must report both the old number and the new number to the state on their next data transmission, and if more than a certain number of "9" student ID's are shipped down to the state, this triggers an automatic state audit and they must spend weeks with state auditors pulling student schedules and teacher grade books for each of the students shipped down with a "9" number (this is because of the corruption problem in Louisiana). Still, they ARE required to do that.
What I don't understand is this: Their administrative computer system uses a 7-digit district-assigned Student Identification Number for each student, a number which has nothing to do with the SSN. When I was a programmer working on that system (I worked for a consulting firm that wrote the administrative software that Ruston High uses), I was told to never put the SSN on any report printed by the system. I was told this both by my boss and by district officials. So we assigned the Student Identification Numbers based on the order in which students arrived at the school (e.g. the first two digits were school number, then there was one or two digits for starting year, then the rest was sequentially incremented as students enrolled).
So why the did they put the bloody SSN on the ID cards, rather than the district-assigned "SIDNO"?!?!
The numbers on the cards are not social security numbers. They are state-assigned Student Identification Numbers -- which, however, do default to be the student's social security number.
You can opt out (or rather, the students' parents can). State and federal law prohibit discrimination against those who refuse to allow their SSN to be used as the state ID number. Thus if the parent demands that the SSN be removed from the school's administrative systems, the school is required to substitute a new district-assigned State Identification Number.
Still, I wonder what idiot designated this policy. I'm pretty sure it was some idiot at Ruston High School and not anybody at the district level. When I was one of the programmers working on the administrative computer system that Ruston High School uses (I worked for the consulting firm that provided the system), I was specifically told, both by my boss and by district officials, to never include the social security number on any documentation produced by the system. Instead, there is a district-assigned 7-digit Student ID Number (typically called the "sidno" by those familiar with the PAMS system) which has no relationship to the SSN (I believe the first two digits were school number, next two digits were school year, and final three digits were incremented as students came in during that year, very few schools get more than a thousand new students per year!).
So why did these morons use the SSN rather than the 7-digit district-assigned Student ID number?
I suspect some folks of shooting blanks in the brains department there:-(.
Yah, the IRS once tried to get my dad for the same thing (probably because he was friends with a number of people of Italian descent). He ran a barber shop back in the days when people under the age of sixty got their hair cut at barber shops (before "family hair cutters"). So the IRS staked his shop out for a week, keeping track of how many people came in and out, then came in and demanded that he hand over his records for that week. Luckily his records had the right number of people on them!
If a pizza shop is suspected of being involved in money laundering, they'd use the exact same technique.
Rivest, Adelman, and (S?) were all college professors. They were being paid primarily to teach college courses, not to invent new encryption methods. Where MIT came in was that they had to test whether their method actually worked, and MIT (Revest's employer) had computer time available. In addition, Rivest had to "publish or perish", so this was something to publish, but to do so automatically made it property of MIT.
In any event, this is just an example of how an important invention (RSA public key encryption) was invented by college professors trying to get tenure, and how it would have been invented even if there was no such thing as a patent. And this is true of most computer software innovations.
I cannot think of one single computer software innovation that would not have happened without software patents. Or are you saying that the spreadsheet would never have been invented? Or the language compiler? Or databases? Guess what, all of those fundamental inventions were created prior to software patents!
Well, consider the RSA patent. I don't think there's any argumennt that, by pretty much inventing public key encryption using the prime factoring problem, the three people involved made a great contribution to the state of the art.
But: Consider this: None of the three inventors have seen a dime from the patent (other than any consulting money that they've gotten since). The money all went to PKP and MIT, since they gave up their patent rights when they became an employee.
Big Ideas, like the RSA algorithm, are rarely the work of expensive research projects. Ron Rivest and friends were building on the work of previous researchers like Diffie and Hellman (I think it was Hellman who actually said "If we can find a trapdoor function that's hard to reverse, we could do true public key encryption", Rivest et. al' "simply" found such a trapdoor function). It is likely that RSA encryption, arguably the biggest idea in modern cryptography, would have been invented even without patent protection, because at the time it was invented the whole notion of software patents was fairly new (and was being pushed by the NSA primarily to limit the spread of encryption technology). The three primary researchers used a little computer time once they came up with their scheme, but the initial idea itself was the result of a little work with pencil and paper, not the result of a big research project.
Now things have gotten to the ridiculous level that RSADI is patenting mathematical operations "if they're used as part of an encryption routine". Want to patent multiplication as part of a symmetric 128-bit block cipher? Go ahead, the patent office will likely grant it! Pfui. Just as ridiculous as trying to patent human genes...
A collection of components can be copyrighted separately. Thus, for example, Compuserv won a lawsuit against somebody who duplicated their download archives, because while the individual programs were copyrighted by the individual owners, the whole collection was copyrighted by Compuserve.
Corel can copyright their collection (the whole list of programs that make up Corel Linux) without affecting the copyrights of the individual programs involved. You are still free to copy any individual programs and distribute them as the individual licenses see fit.
Now, it would be a VERY bad idea for Corel to do this for their release version... but we'll see. Maybe they'll learn from this response.
At EST Inc. (the BRU guys) we have a simple OSS policy: If it's not OSS, you don't install it. Anything else requires special permission. The reason for this is simple: licensing. I don't want somebody bringing their favorite game from home and illegally installing it on their system.
Of course, we're rather unique in that our workstations are Linux and our main servers are Linux (there's a database server running SCO Unix, but it's being phased out at the end of the fiscal year when we switch accounting software). Well, my own workstation dual-boots Linux and FreeBSD, but hey, somebody has to do it:-).
Strangely enough, while the Amiga hardware is long outdated, the Amiga OS still has many features that would be useful for a first-rate multimedia machine. Hint: virtual memory is not ALWAYS a good thing.
I have the Bach book. The internals of Linux do not resemble the Bach book, except in broad strokes. For example, Linux dynamically adjusts the percentage of memory used for programs and file cache, while the Bach Book explains the rationale used by SysV to have a static partition there. Similarly, the file systems described by the two are totally different. But both the Linux source code and the Bach book do describe a monolithic kernel, is that what you were talking about?
Yeah, Linus hacks other contributors' code too, but that's part of being project lead.
IMHO, you either a) don't know what you're talking about, b) are working for the Microsoft "smear Linux" team, or c) all of the above.
The spurious lie about Andreeson running off with the Mosaic code is just that -- a lie.
The Mosaic code is still available from NCSA. The Mozilla code is still available at mozilla.org. Read the two. There's no real similarity.
Mozilla was very definitely a "second project" (the project that is supposed to be a total re-write "done right", but turns out to be a bloated mess -- read Brookes).
Bruce has extensively cryptanalyzed Microsoft's security and encryption software, and torn it to shreds in so many ways that it is pathetic. Read some of the papers on his site.
The purpose of the CryptoAPI was to enforce U.S. export controls. The failover to the second key, which can be poked with your own public key (as described in his earlier Crypto-Gram article), means that this mechanism is broke broke BROKE. Like so much else in MS's crypto suite. Sigh.
Read his Yarrow paper and you'll get the context for his comment that it's easier to attack MS's PRNG (pseudo-random number generator) than it is to attack their encryption directly.
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They'll hassle you, because it is a hassle for them (they have to call the district office to get a number to fill into the computer in place of the SSN), but if you press your case they WILL give in. I was on the far side (the tech support side) of many such calls during my career in school administration computer systems consulting.
Now, immunizations is another story...
-E
Besides, hidden student ID's don't solve the real problem they were trying to solve, which is gang members who have been expelled or who dropped out coming back on campus to recruit and sell drugs. Like in most big bureaucratic high schools, there's too many kids for the security guards and teachers to know them all on sight. That's the problem with big high schools. I think they should outlaw all schools with more than 500 students (500 is about the max that you can know everybody there by name).
-E
The Columbine shootings allow them to implement the badges without having to admit what the real problem is that they're trying to solve.
-E
Believe me, if the local sheriff tried to say "You in a heap of trouble boy!" to one of those college professors, he'd have the ACLU, NAACP, OCR (Office of Civil Rights), and every other acronym you can think of hanging onto his ass for the next twenty years making his life miserable.
There's places in Louisiana where the good ole' boy way of law enforcement still holds. But Ruston ain't one of them.
-E
-E
Now, there's nothing in the law that says they have to take your SSN *OFF* their records once you've already given it to them, but state and district policies may say that you have that right. It's been a couple of years and I forget.
-E
The bottler most probably didn't have the foggiest notion what was going to actually be placed inside those badge holders.
-E
-E
The whole point of blaming it on "Columbine" was that it gave the administration an "out". They could introduce the placards because of Columbine, not because they have a drug and gang problem where students expelled for drug and gun violations routinely come back on campus to ply their trade. (It happened, I can't tell you how I know due to legal reasons, but it happened). And for those parents who HAVE been saying for years that Ruston High School needs to Do Something about crime and violence on the school campus, now they can say that they ARE "Doing Something", instead of saying "What crime? What violence?".
The most idiotic part was the use of social security numbers. There is a 7-digit district-assigned Student Identification Number that could have been used. The library system would have accepted that immediately, while the lunch system would have been a bit iffy (due to federal requirements, where free lunch students' SSN's are needed in order to get federal funds), but that could have been worked around by putting the SIDNO in one of the blank fields (I know they had at least one 9-digit field that was blank in the records that I imported into the administrative system) and then contracting Bon Appetite (the vendor of the lunch system) to scan that other field rather than the SSN field when deciding what account to credit or debit.
Instead, it appears they didn't even think twice about using the SSN. *DUMB*.
-E
The super duper moronic thing is this: we generated that 7-digit District Student ID number specifically BECAUSE we'd been told that printing the SSN on any reports was a privacy no-no. And the district central office folks were some of the folks telling us this!
-E
Of course, for college students banks won't loan you money for student loans without your "tax ID number" (i.e. your SSN), so it's sort of futile anyhow :-(.
-E
In the case of schools, the feds have specifically authorized the schools to ask for the SSN. However, the federal law ALSO says that students (and parents) are free to not provide it, and cannot be denied services if they fail to provide it.
In the case of the Lincoln Parish Schools, use of the "temporary" numbers assigned to students who refuse to provide their SSN (the ones starting with 9) is discouraged because too many "temporary" students cause the state and federal computers to go "Cling!" and trigger an audit. The state provides per-student funds and smells corrupt officials pocketing the money from "ghost students" when this happens, while the feds use the SSN to check the student roster against the food stamp rosters to see whether a) there are eligible students not being served free luches, and b) whether there are "ghost students" receiving free lunches (presumably corrupt officials in the school lunch program are pocketing the cash from "ghost students" if it happens). Either way, it's a big hassle for the district.
But: if you refuse to provide your SSN, they CANNOT refuse to provide service to you!
When I was providing support for their administrative computer system at Ruston High, I would often get calls from school counsellors or school secretaries about how to remove the SSN from a students' records and replace it with a '9'-number. (They had to call the central office and obtain a '9' number from the list that the state had assigned to that district that year, it was a big hassle). So I know that, at least back then, they had a policy that if you objected to having the SSN on your records, they would replace it with a '9' number. As far as I know, that's one step more than the federal law requires here (the federal law says they cannot deny you services if you refuse to give the number, but says nothing about you taking the number back after you've already given it).
-E
-Eric
They discourage doing this because it makes their job harder. They must report both the old number and the new number to the state on their next data transmission, and if more than a certain number of "9" student ID's are shipped down to the state, this triggers an automatic state audit and they must spend weeks with state auditors pulling student schedules and teacher grade books for each of the students shipped down with a "9" number (this is because of the corruption problem in Louisiana). Still, they ARE required to do that.
What I don't understand is this: Their administrative computer system uses a 7-digit district-assigned Student Identification Number for each student, a number which has nothing to do with the SSN. When I was a programmer working on that system (I worked for a consulting firm that wrote the administrative software that Ruston High uses), I was told to never put the SSN on any report printed by the system. I was told this both by my boss and by district officials. So we assigned the Student Identification Numbers based on the order in which students arrived at the school (e.g. the first two digits were school number, then there was one or two digits for starting year, then the rest was sequentially incremented as students enrolled).
So why the did they put the bloody SSN on the ID cards, rather than the district-assigned "SIDNO"?!?!
Idiots.
-E
You can opt out (or rather, the students' parents can). State and federal law prohibit discrimination against those who refuse to allow their SSN to be used as the state ID number. Thus if the parent demands that the SSN be removed from the school's administrative systems, the school is required to substitute a new district-assigned State Identification Number.
Still, I wonder what idiot designated this policy. I'm pretty sure it was some idiot at Ruston High School and not anybody at the district level. When I was one of the programmers working on the administrative computer system that Ruston High School uses (I worked for the consulting firm that provided the system), I was specifically told, both by my boss and by district officials, to never include the social security number on any documentation produced by the system. Instead, there is a district-assigned 7-digit Student ID Number (typically called the "sidno" by those familiar with the PAMS system) which has no relationship to the SSN (I believe the first two digits were school number, next two digits were school year, and final three digits were incremented as students came in during that year, very few schools get more than a thousand new students per year!).
So why did these morons use the SSN rather than the 7-digit district-assigned Student ID number?
I suspect some folks of shooting blanks in the brains department there :-(.
-E
If a pizza shop is suspected of being involved in money laundering, they'd use the exact same technique.
-E
In any event, this is just an example of how an important invention (RSA public key encryption) was invented by college professors trying to get tenure, and how it would have been invented even if there was no such thing as a patent. And this is true of most computer software innovations.
I cannot think of one single computer software innovation that would not have happened without software patents. Or are you saying that the spreadsheet would never have been invented? Or the language compiler? Or databases? Guess what, all of those fundamental inventions were created prior to software patents!
-E
But: Consider this: None of the three inventors have seen a dime from the patent (other than any consulting money that they've gotten since). The money all went to PKP and MIT, since they gave up their patent rights when they became an employee.
Big Ideas, like the RSA algorithm, are rarely the work of expensive research projects. Ron Rivest and friends were building on the work of previous researchers like Diffie and Hellman (I think it was Hellman who actually said "If we can find a trapdoor function that's hard to reverse, we could do true public key encryption", Rivest et. al' "simply" found such a trapdoor function). It is likely that RSA encryption, arguably the biggest idea in modern cryptography, would have been invented even without patent protection, because at the time it was invented the whole notion of software patents was fairly new (and was being pushed by the NSA primarily to limit the spread of encryption technology). The three primary researchers used a little computer time once they came up with their scheme, but the initial idea itself was the result of a little work with pencil and paper, not the result of a big research project.
Now things have gotten to the ridiculous level that RSADI is patenting mathematical operations "if they're used as part of an encryption routine". Want to patent multiplication as part of a symmetric 128-bit block cipher? Go ahead, the patent office will likely grant it! Pfui. Just as ridiculous as trying to patent human genes...
-E
Corel can copyright their collection (the whole list of programs that make up Corel Linux) without affecting the copyrights of the individual programs involved. You are still free to copy any individual programs and distribute them as the individual licenses see fit.
Now, it would be a VERY bad idea for Corel to do this for their release version... but we'll see. Maybe they'll learn from this response.
-E
Of course, we're rather unique in that our workstations are Linux and our main servers are Linux (there's a database server running SCO Unix, but it's being phased out at the end of the fiscal year when we switch accounting software). Well, my own workstation dual-boots Linux and FreeBSD, but hey, somebody has to do it :-).
-Eric
-E
Yeah, Linus hacks other contributors' code too, but that's part of being project lead.
IMHO, you either a) don't know what you're talking about, b) are working for the Microsoft "smear Linux" team, or c) all of the above.
-E
The Mosaic code is still available from NCSA. The Mozilla code is still available at mozilla.org. Read the two. There's no real similarity.
Mozilla was very definitely a "second project" (the project that is supposed to be a total re-write "done right", but turns out to be a bloated mess -- read Brookes).
-E
Unlike MarcA, Linus still codes. 'Nuff said.
The purpose of the CryptoAPI was to enforce U.S. export controls. The failover to the second key, which can be poked with your own public key (as described in his earlier Crypto-Gram article), means that this mechanism is broke broke BROKE. Like so much else in MS's crypto suite. Sigh.
Read his Yarrow paper and you'll get the context for his comment that it's easier to attack MS's PRNG (pseudo-random number generator) than it is to attack their encryption directly.
-E