Texan schoolgirl expelled for refusing to wear RFID tag A plan by a San Antonio school district to continuously monitor its students using RFID has run into legal problems after one of them took a stand against being forced to use the tracking technology. Northside Independent School District (NISD) in San Antonio, Texas has spent over $500,000 on its "Student Locator Project," a …
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Not surprised they are dragging religion into it, my Sis spent "years" on Sumatra in a big ole' compound in the middle of jungly nowhere with her man on a placement, they move with their kids to a Texas city for the next placement, and the only thing the Texan schoolkids wanted to know from the travelling UK kids after their adventures was "what religion are you?" ;)
Proper answer-"Same as you, who do you think you got Independence "from"!
Or possibly "Don''t you want to know about the scary wild animals with the big sharp teeth?" :P
You should really price what it would take to implement the solution.
God I know I'm just going to get down voted for pointing out the obvious.
Its not just the RFID tags, but the software, the additional hardware, etc ...
It adds up quickly.
I am not saying that I agree with the system, or that its a violation of privacy.
Just that 500K isn't outrageous.
Could be wrong but I don't think Martin47 was talking about the sheer cost, but rather that it's 500k to track not a child, but a lanyard.
If they all leave them in their locker / at home / in the bin then that's 500k to track sweet f.a.
Nd skoolkidz being skoolkidz n dat, dey gonna be swappin dem wiv der m8s from diff skoolz for de lulz.
>> "I don't think Martin47 was talking about the sheer cost, but rather that it's 500k to track not a child, but a lanyard".
It wonder how long it will be before someone figures this out and, in order to solve this problem, suggests that RFID chips should be implanted into the students instead (purely for the child's own good, of course).
http://www.in-pharmatechnologist.com/Regulatory-Safety/FDA-clears-RFID-chip-for-humans
Now, that is a GREAT idea!!!!
But, in order to test it properly, a trial must be conducted. For the members of the trial, I suggest this test group:
1) all state governors,
2) all state legislators,
3) all Congress members (House AND Senate),
4) all members of School Boards that want to utilize such a system for tracking students.
Each test group member shall have the RFID tag firmly jammed up their ass, and a law shall be passed to make it a "imprisonment for life" sentence if the tag gets removed.
Any takers????
Seeing none, then I shall conclude that the trial was a failure.
The thing I think most are forgetting that its not just to track the student, but also tie in to their cafeteria billing system and other back end systems.
So the cost could include some additional software too.
We don't know.
As to leaving them in their lockers, I would imagine that they track the student entering and leaving the school.
This would suggest NFC not just a contact against a plate. (Think IPASS that your car uses on the toll roads.)
"...it has 110 campus locations (100k pupils 6K teachers..."
Being the USA, I presume these kilopupils and kiloteachers are extra large examples of the breed?
...or did you mean 'thousand'? in which case why not just put 100 000 and 6000, as writng [or saying] 'K' when you mean 'thousand' makes you sound like a 'kok'
I was merely typing quickly. I tend to make a few typos in my posts and I do abbreviate; I imagine I wouldnt get very far submitted to the broadsheets. Plus, being a site with a technical bent even your pedantry got the mean of 100k. Looking at my own post sure, teachers being cooled to 6 kelvin would be a bit extreme (and a magnificent feat of engineering on such as large scale for the cost) but im sure you got the meaning.
Just a point of interest: If you are going to be putting someone down at least make sure your own house is in order. That is (unless) you can explain the meaning of "writng". Oh and apparantly although unorthodox (assuming wiki is correct) using SI standard prefixes is ok for abbreviations. Oddly enough they are usually capitalised. I appologise to all for incorrectly stating 100k when it should have been 100K. I am unsure how many megajubs this would be or if calculating such a figure on students would put you on list 99.
So fuck off.
Ian,
I actually designed just such a system some years ago. It was meant to track the movements of about (IIRC) 1000 people at various locations across a whole country. Its aim was that we would not leave anyone behind in the event of an evacuation following an armed attack against us.
I cannot remember the actual numbers, but I assure you it was nowhere near half a mill. And back then the necessary technology was a lot more expensive than it is nowadays.
Plus, I like to think at least we had a tolerable purpose.
I worked on a ship where we implimented a personell locator/lone worker system using the motorola UHFs and some badge responders. about 120 compartments wired up to a dedicated machine which displayed where everyone was, and linked into the Man Overboard and General alarms too - most devices had a panic button.
Whole package, hardware, transponders, cabling, and a terminal running some embedded software (OS9, I thihk) - around 20K UKP in the 1990s. We already had the UHFs with lone worker buttons, that was another 12K but was part of the comms package - I could make half-duplex phone calls home from mine.
1980s, I worked in a laboratory where we wore 'lone worker' pendants that called for help if we stopped moving or went horizontal, or pulled the lanyard off.. Around 1.5K total price, for 5 people in 6 spaces.
If anyone's bothered to read The Book of Revelations, I don't think magic mushrooms are far off the mark.
Could've been written by L.Ron.Hubbard, or Joseph Smith. We Christians believe Revelation to be Gospel (oops, did it again) but Rom and Joe's books are regarded as a complete joke in Christian circles. Go on, I dare you. Read, but make sure the toilet is free - you'll need it to relieve the jets of laughter that'll come from your bladder.
I have, and I can't believe millions are fooled by these.
Go on, read it. Mop the bathroom floor when you've finished.
I read the "Book of Mormon" when I was in High School (I won't go into why I embarked on this fool's errand).
A pile of parrot droppings IMHO.
Someone famous claimed to have read the Koran from cover to cover. Apparently a mind-numbing experience of the first order. One is apparently stupider for having read it. YMMV.
However, the King James version of the OT is cracking stuff - a literary cornucopia. Content free of course, but the prose absolutely rocks!
Dweeb
Most non-Muslims who think they've "read the Koran" are wrong. Unless they happen to read Arabic, then what they've read is a translation of the Koran. And once translated, it's no longer "the Koran".
This is because (Muslims believe) the text was dictated verbatim to the Prophet, who took it all down in proto-shorthand. Therefore the words of the Koran are God's own words, i.e. perfect. Once translated, it loses that property and becomes mere human words.
There are myths from the early days of the faith, of heathens hearing the divine Words and being converted merely by the sound of them.
"He's only factually correct if you accept his basic assumption that the Arabic Koran is the divinely dictated word of God."
Not really, to my mind. I wouldn't call a Chinese-translated version of Shakespeare or Mort D'Arthur Shakespeare or Mallory. I'd call it 'a translated version of the Shakespeare/Mort D'Arthur/Koran [or however you care to spell it! Hell: If we can't even get the title in an agreeable English form, it just illustrates my point].
I'm willing to accept that enough nuance can be lost in translation to make the translation 'unworthy' of maintaining the original title and 'authority' on linguistic grounds, without needing to drag mysticism into it.
> Love the way that you are factually correct, but got down-voted anyway
Veti is only factually correct if you believe that the koran is god's own words and becomes mere human words once translated.
According to Veti's logic I have never read War and Peace because I never read it in its original Russian language.
"According to Veti's logic I have never read War and Peace because I never read it in its original Russian language."
So you got all the puns, allusions to Russian sayings, cultural references, word play, etc?
You've read it, but you haven't fully comprehended 100% of the subtleties. So you've missed part of the message. Only a small part, but to my mind - when conveying matters of philosophy and religion - that small, subtle part could be argued as being crucial.
Just sayin'!
"You've read it, but you haven't fully comprehended 100% of the subtleties. So you've missed part of the message"
So, following that reasoning, 99.99% of Christians haven't read the Bible. That explains lots of things! ;)
@AC 15:43
Thing is, no-one cares enough about the precise wording of 'War & Peace' to make that claim. You're not about to take a (translated) quotation from it as evidence that all Russians are savages, and a Russian isn't about to take a quote from it as their reason for stoning an adulteress. It just doesn't matter that much.
The Koran does. The precise wording of it is incredibly important. To get a feel for just how important, consider that the Gospel of St John refers to Christ himself as "the Word" of God.
To Muslims, the Koran isn't "their equivalent of the Bible", it's "their equivalent of Jesus Christ". That's part of the reason why they get so upset when people burn it.
>Love the way that you are factually correct, but got down-voted anyway, just because someone doesn't like religion!
Love the way that someone can get their 'factually correct' facts wrong and get upvoted just because people have studied neither Islam nor comparative religion.
I've always thought this is an interesting argument. Clearly it is a way to keep control over the 'truth' of the scripture, but it has always struck me that following this logic you should never trust the interpretation of any imam or mullah since those interpretations must necessarily be as flawed as any translation.
I'll second that. One of the few impressive pieces of prose to have come out of a committee.
And, you know, Shakespeare was around at that time, and they didn't co-opt him. Didn't need to. THAT'S how good they were at writing English prose in the first decade of the 1600s...
"You mean, most non-Muslims who think they've "read the Koran" are considered to be wrong by those who believe it to be more than just a book."
Actually, I think that's exactly what he means. As far as I can tell, the believers use the term "Koran" for the word of God. If you happen to read and write Arabic, it is possible to reproduce those words in book form as a mnemonic, but that book isn't the real Koran and (quite possibly) unless you are a true believer merely reading the mnemonic won't count. I assume you have to be moved by the spirit to hear the actual words whilst reading before it actually counts.
IT angle: It's a bit like the difference between an EXE file and a running program.
"that book isn't the real Koran"
Try setting light to one, and you'll quickly see just how "real" it is perceived to be!
I do agree with you though. Until it is read, understood, believed etc. it's merely ink and paper.
Analogy - colour. What exactly is it?
Long time reader, first time contributer so excuse the AC.
Ive read the Quran in both Arabic and English and trust me they are different enough to be significant. Far be it for me to comment on the spiritual consequences of the changes in content but my own analogy would be how northerners have many different words for bread (bap, barn cake, butty, teacake etc) classical Arabic tends to have this for a variety of concepts, which i found difficult to get my head round.
Personally the biggest difference is in terms of form, the Arabic version reads like poetry and can be lovely just to hear or read aloud (despite not having a clue whats going on).
So, I would deff give credence to those who make the claim, that to have read the Quran is to have read it in its original form (whilst to understand it requires a fair amount of contextual knowledge)
On topic: i wouldn't say 500k is too much, i suspect there was significant software dev. Also most work places tend to have RFID type systems for entry and exit to various spaces. And I am one of those "baddies" that has exploited such data for a variety of ends. So although i can sympathies with the Rutherford people's claim that this is the sharp end of the wedge, i hate to break it to 'em the thick end is already reality later on in life.
I'm not sure that you understand how much is lost in translation. I tried reading a translation of the Quran myself (I'm pretty much agnostic and was doing it to try to understand the background to the religious conflicts, in the same way that I've read the Bible and the Book of Mormon), and the mess that was the translation I was reading must be poor, because it was difficult to read, and contradicted itself within a few pages. I got about a third of the way through before losing interest.
I've been told by someone who can read Arabic that it is a very difficult language to translate without losing some of the meaning, because the structure of the language differs in several fundamental ways from European languages. I cannot confirm this from first hand knowledge, but I am prepared to believe it.
Thus, I believe that to get the maximum benefit of the Quran, it is necessary to learn and understand (grok?) Arabic, such that you don't need to translate to comprehend.
You know you could have skipped the torture of reading the 'Book of Mormon' and instead waited for the Broadway show...
Yeah I know its not the same thing... but you get the idea...
The Spawn of Satan Icon, because I know I am going to hell for promoting the guys behind South Park... :-P
"You know you could have skipped the torture of reading the 'Book of Mormon' and instead waited for the Broadway show..."
Bet it's nowhere near as funny as the original book. Or, indeed the South Park episode (Dum, Dum,Dum,Dum,Dum,) which was Smart,Smart,Smart,Smart,Smart.
In fact the Book of Ecclesiasticus is not content free - it has some good stuff on dinner party etiquette and some excellent one liners. I imagine it being written by an urban, and urbane, rabbi with a sophisticated flock, kind of like a 3rd century BC Sidney Smith.
There's also some stuff in there explaining the origins of the present conflicts at the back end of the Med, though it is the Fox News version.
I'm with you on this one. I read it for a laugh to see what was in it. Quite frankly I was laughing my ass off and more than a little surprised that these people couldn't smell bullshit. I mean would you or anyone here believe someone if they were told what had happened to them but that they couldn't see the "plates" with the text on them? I mean REALLY?!!??!? Yeah sure Joe Ill believe you on this one. I mean whats the worst that could happen.
As for this girl taking a stand I applaud her. It takes a brass set to stand up to these idiots who think doing something like this is a good idea. I mean making it so you HAVE TO HAVE these tags on for some of the bathrooms? I really find it hard to believe whoever thought that part was a GOOD idea shouldn't be in jail for invasion of privacy and or child endangerment because if someone was to be a kiddie fiddler working there they could have a perfect idea when someone was doing something so they could get pics/videos/etc of said person/act. REALLY!??!!???
I hope she wins and this kind of shit is stopped before it gets to be too big.
"She really could have left out the superstitious BS"
... on the contrary she played it like a pro. If you want to fight back against the next loony govt scheme in Texas you can't do better than suggesting you're doing it for Jesus (whether you are or whether you aren't) cuts the ground right out from underneath those in power.
In passing really good to hear that things have improved so much in the Texas school system that they've nothing better to spend USD0.5M on than a people-control system - the last I heard their public schools would have shamed a third-world country
".....She really could have left out the superstitious BS. It adds nothing to the argument whatsoever." But it adds plenty to the lawsuits. Septic civil rights laws and all that. It's always fun when those preaching on about civil liberties switch the religion argument in or out depending on the need to drive up the settlement payout.
Well you prob should go to Certain Baltic States for hilarity, they "officially" at any rate, localise "all" foreign gents' names with an "S" or "IS" at the end both forename and surname, and all ladies names with "E' or possibly "A".This is so that they kinda match the local ones. And that's just the start, sometimes they need new double vowels or "Dž" because there is no "J".
So, for example, for film stars, they have "Šons Bīns" , for pronunciation, the Š is a "sh" and the Ī is an "ee". That's right- yer man from "Game Of Thrones"..... a missed film product placement opportunity if ever there was one! ;)
If you read the start of the book, it says, "to the seven churches..." It was meant for those familiar with the scriptures already.
Its written using OT imagery. If you aren't familiar with it, you won't understand what's going on. For example, the number "seven" has meaning associated with it beyond just being a counter; the "mark of the beast" is not really going to make sense if you haven't read Exodus where it talks about the "mark of God" being the sign that you have accepted a substitute to die for your sin instead of you. Lots of the book refers back to the book of Daniel where there are some explanations. God's people living in a cubic city makes little sense unless you know that the part of the OT temple where god "resided" was a cubic - i.e. the image is that god's people live without a barrier between them and god. If you haven't read the rest of the OT where God's uses prostitution as an image of how his people have behaved, the hooker of revelation won't mean much to you.
If you want to read revelation, go ahead, but if you haven't read the lexicon which goes before it, don't expect to get much out of it.
Sadly, I suspect the girl at the centre of the row is misinformed. Its nice that she's championing privacy and perhaps "freedom of religion" is the last bastion against being tracked, but its really the wrong argument. Its so wrong and so pop-culture-focused that I suspect its a sham argument being deployed for a good cause.
Nice one then you also know she's called "Babylon the Great", and perhaps understand what that represents?
And then you have probably also identified the beast she's riding, the very beast that will devour her.
Basically that means, if it is as you say that religion is the last bastion against being tracked, say goodbye to a life where you'r not being tracked. At least for an hour.
laugh all you want, but if you think again, the book of revelation was written 2000yrs ago and if you follow technology, you know such tech is readily available and is widely used in the animal world. See how popular pet owners are tagging their pets? just look at oyster card, your movement can be easily tracked and located.
So how hard is it to implant one into the forehead or right arm of a human being? as far as i know, there is prison already tagging their dwellers.
after 911 and continous terrorism, don't you think governments are keen in tracking human movement, with the mainstream media and finances institutions hence, (a street with a bull mascot) controlled by a certain group of people. dont you think they want to enslave us in a more distreet way? it's not a question whether is it going to happen? But it's a question of when is it going to happen？
foot note: in the book of Revelation, it also mentioned that at end times, the whole world will be able to witness the same incidents simultaneously. you have to ask yourself, in a world that had no electricity, no satelites, no tv, no telephone, who an earth would think in 2000years time, everyone can be able to watch the same news coverage, I wonder where else do you find another book that could provide such revolutionary view??
"I wonder where else do you find another book that could provide such revolutionary view??"
On my bookcase. Take out any old, rambling text and you can read prophesy into it.
"after 911 and continous terrorism"
I hate to break it to America, but 'Continuous' terrorism didn't start at 9/11. You guys were nicely financing the PIRA to bomb this country for a long while before that, for example.
Presumably speed (or the lack therefore) of communication in those days was a major pain in the proverbial, so I would imagine that much like science fiction authors everywhere do, the author was imagining that the future would solve issues that they had in the present day, i.e. by having instant communication between far away places.
Well if you actually read the revelation about the mark, you find it in Rev 13:18. Then read the next verse Rev 14:1 and you see an other mark of different origin. And that one is for sure not physical.
The reason why some Christians think it could be an ID or especially an RFID is due to what's stated in 13:17 that nobody might be able to buy or sell except a person having the mark.
Okay, so according to the (translated, transliterated, probably largely MUNGed) legend,
"The Mark of the Beast" (*tm) is applied to:
A) The right hand.
B) The forehead.
Taking into account the difficulty in translating Sanskrit / Arameic into English, this plausibly implicates mobile phones, wristwatches, baseball caps, gloves, jewellery, hair, inoculation scars, lobotomies etc... etc... as "The Mark of the Beast" (*tm).
Given the way a lanyard is worn, it's a weak argument at best, to deny that all these other contrivances could be "The Mark of the Beast" (*tm) and cry foul over this one thing which (quite rightly) makes you feel uneasy.
Don't know where I'm going with this, but, yeah, anyway.
Down with this sort of thing!
Both the unneccesary surveillance and the mumbo-jumbo.
"If anyone's bothered to read The Book of Revelations, I don't think magic mushrooms are far off the mark."
The advisors and members of the Cabinet of *several* American presidents have read & believed it as *literal* truth.
Not really someone you'd want near any sort of nuclear release system. It could end in tears.
I think it's actually outrageous that this single student protested against the lanyard on religious + privacy grounds. The article doesn't say, but there seems to be the implication that not a single other student (or parent) was ready to contest this abomination on privacy issues alone. I find that quite incredible.
The other thing that surprised me is that teh school didn't back down but effectively threw the kid out. It means that there are hundreds of parents who either don't have the nearest clue of what's going on at their children's school, or they are all happy that their children's location is being tracked
To track a phone it would have to be in use for a phone call, sending/receiving data, etc. Otherwise it's location would only be generally known as being 'somewhere near the base station' when it does a Location Area Update (or whatever the 3G equivalent of that is these days). And that'd be no better than knowing that it's somewhere in the school...
Mind you, I reckon that kids' phones are probably permanently on Facebook, etc. so no problems there...
Back in the old days when I were a lad every school had a much more effective way of finding kids that were bunking off. In my school he was called Mr Simmonds, and he could find anyone, anywhere, either in the school or in town. Don't they have people like that in schools these days?
@AC Posted Thursday 22nd November 2012 09:22 GMT
"@bazza, your wrong, mobiles to not need to be in use, just on"
Well if you know of a way for a school to pinpoint a non-radiating mobile phone whilst staying on the right side of the laws concerning spectrum abuse, privacy, investigatory powers, illegal intercept and physics I suggest you patent it or, more likely, go back to telecoms, physics and engineering school to learn why your idea doesn't work.
And even if the phone is doing background email polling (so not a Blackberry then, their push is 'receive only' so far as the phone is concerned which is why their battery life is good) you can't lawfully detect, geolocate and identify it without a warrant. Good luck on getting one of those!
If the aim of the system is just to take attendance and make sure kids are at school and not truanting (and also for valid fire-safety reasons eg make sure that everybody s out if there is an evacuation), then Oyster-like scanners that just show the kids checking in and out of school should be enough. No need to track their movement inch by inch and keep track of when they're going to the john.
That's actually not a terrible idea!
Use WiFi and associate the phones' MACs with the students - give phone-less students a free smartphone (should also help the scheme be more popular), then use existing (or new, if they can't be used) access points to triangulate students' locations.
Cost: if (big if) existing APs can be used and they don't need to buy tons of new phones, then pretty cheap - loading the software and a few days on-site calibrating the triangulation.
Bonus: You're able to detect people wandering around who shouldn't be there. Legit visitors can have their phones registered onto the system at reception.
I did consider that the kids would just switch them off, but if it's the 'official' method of registration for classes, then phone off = truancy, regardless of whether you're off site or not.
NOTE: just a thought exercise, I actually really disagree with tracking and monitoring kids like this!
If this is also about truancy I don't see why the kids couldn't rotate carrying several tags at once. It would work a treat until the teachers realized that something was amiss when RFID attendance was 100% even though only 10% of the children were actually present.
The kids could go a step further and wear several fake lanyards to have the school checking them all the time or better yet a daily ritual of "gee, I don't know why it stopped working? Yes, I do still have the Tesla coil and Jacob's Ladder from my science fair project, why do you ask?" Once the school replaced each a few hundred times they might realize it wasn't such a bright idea. Kids these days, they really should learn a little about passive (well covert-aggressive) resistance.
snip/ free.... without a cellphone /snip
except, someone (French) was arrested for allegedly being suspiciously WITHOUT a cellphone
that was a couple of years ago mind, related news surfaced this week that the UK secret cops with long-hair were very much (allegedly) involved in this French bust of an anarchist cell, triggered by not having a cell
Considering it's needed to open the library (to check out books you need for homework), the cafeteria (so you can have lunch), or the toilet (every so often you can't hold it in), I think those would stop you from taking it off. As for shielding, as they're meant to be shown out in the open, any kind of shielding would likely be visible, too.
All these technical solutions are starting down the wrong path. The girl has chosen the right one - take it to the people and the courts. What would be wonderful is if all the children in that school microwaved their cards as a sign of solidarity with her. If all the pupils did that, then the school could do nothing to them.
...planning to unleash those predator drones to keep an Eagle Eye (dun dun dun) on their own people. And I'm sure there will be ones armed with "less-lethal" crowd control measures in case the people of the "land of the free and home of the brave" get a little too free and brave.
Heck, officials in the Pentagon have already ordered...I mean...obtained restraining orders against protesters unhappy at being monitored as if they live in a police state. I'm a foreign observer to all this, and it worries me. America is supposed to be a democracy. Every one on the street makes up the "DEMO" in "DEMOCRACY" and yet the government wants to use technology honed by the armed forces to...make sure they're safe.
I'm not going to try paint the current government there with TOO much of a sinister shade, but once the technology is in place...and more technology on top of that...what then? It'll be an awful lot of power to just deliver into the hands of the next bunch of politicians and bureaucrats. When all they have to do to enforce legislation will be to click a mouse a few times...what laws will they pass? And who will protest when that is deemed to be against the interests of "the people" by...those who are less and less "of the people".
Does this sound a little too paranoid? I know, but I've watched things come to pass that I thought would never happen. So will I see the people of America, and Europe, for that matter, having to take drastic measures to remind their democratically elected leaders who put them in the seat of power?
This is not the US government however, it is a school district and school districts are controlled at the local and state level.
That is one reason that I find this so fascinating, this is Texas, a state that is usually obsessed with individualism and very much against government intrusion.
Looks like for a little money, those beliefs can be modified.
Hypocrisy...yeah, they've heard of it.
Ok, I'll entertain your pedantic comment: what's to say a student doesn't receive a bunch of "faulty" tags, one after the other?
RFID tags or not, a school that prevents a student from using a toilet while acting in loco parentis would want to ensure they have good legal representation for when they get sued.
Its kind of ironic that while everyone is be-itching about a kid having to wear an RFID tag, I'll wager that their parents routinely wear an RFID tag on a daily basis.
Seriously. You work for Company X. In order to enter the building you need to wear your employee badge. Embedded is an RFID tag. If you work in a secured location within the building, every time you enter that location you have to badge in. If there are no rest rooms, then you have to leave and re-badge in.
The sad thing is that for the child attending the school there is probably no expectation of privacy in that the school is responsible for knowing the child's location. Can you imagine the lawsuit of the child is at school, walks off campus and gets hurt or injured in an accident? You can bet your bottom dollar that there is going to be some lawyer ready to sue the school district over letting the kid leave campus.
Yeah, I didn't use your line, I gave you a better example of why this is a done deal.
All the parents hope to do is to get their daughter back in to the school because its offers a better education than her alternatives.
So do you have a work badge? Did you pop it in to the microwave? Did you protest for having to wear the mark of Satan? (Cue the Church Lady)
Can you imagine the lawsuit of the child is at school, walks off campus and gets hurt or injured in an accident? You can bet your bottom dollar that there is going to be some lawyer ready to sue the school district over letting the kid leave campus.
Rubbish. I don't think kids bunking off school is a problem of such magnitude that tracking needs to be implemented. I don't think I've ever read about a school being sued for an non-academic off-campus accident involving a student.
The bottom line is that this scheme is all about the $2million.
And yes, I swipe in and out at work using a simple mag stripe card. I'm sure my boss would love to have me RFID tracked every time I go for a piss, but the day that happens is the day I look for another job.
First I wasn't commenting on the toilet issue.
I think that's a bit over the top.
The point I was trying to make is that we as adults do this all the time.
Even as parents there are some who use their kids cells to track them.
Put GPS monitoring devices on their cars.
Granted its their parents and not the schools.
But as I've pointed out, that there is some legal responsibility that the schools have towards the children.
All you need is one hungry and creative lawyer to make an argument that persuades a jury that its the school district's fault and voila everyone has one of these things embedded under their skin.
Again another piece of irony. If a company does this we don't bitch while if its a government, we bitch and don't trust them.
Ok, I may not agree with her religious beliefs, but I sure as hell agree with this being a gross invasion of privacy verging on Official Stalking!
If I had a kid at that school I'd be standing right alongside them objecting to this and probably outside the gates handing out leaflets too.
PS And what's to stop students swapping ID tags either through mischief or malice??
PPS " in some cases for toilet breaks, and it allows the school to track their every movement throughout the day" - I'm sure there's a pun there somewhere...!!
I'd play this slightly different. I would just plant a few stories that some pedos were seen hanging around the school with RFID scanners. I am willing to bet that nobody would ask the question of how you could recognise a pedo - the political CYA alone would soon put a stop to this RFID tracking malarky..
What I want to know: did anyone bother to consult students and parent before blowing so much money on a system?
Isn't it funny though that we have to fabricate shady activities to remove an invasive security system, designed to stop said activities.
I find it even more funny, cause my local high school (the one I attended) currently has no more than 40 cameras to manage 800+ students. And even those cameras are only checked when there's a complaint or a crime. Then again I'm an Aussie, so (and apologies for my generalisation) school shootings and other horrendous crimes aren't common.
...as a Christian, I don't quite see how that can be applied to these lanyards. They are not trying to make them wear them on their right hands or foreheads, nor are they trying to make them worship anything that could be construed to be "the beast" (there are actually two beasts, one out of the land and one out of the sea; and the word "antichrist" does not appear in the book of revelation, it appears on the letters of John, referring to people who deliberately distort the Gospel, which would describe someone/something trying to become an object of worship).
While I agree with you on most points, I wouldn't put it past some people to deem the US as the Beast, and what the school is doing as an attempt to force the children into worshipping said beast. (of course that'd be a strange mix of Christianity and non-patriotism, which from what I can tell is quite rare.
...as a christian you should know not to take the words of the bible/book of revelation etc too literally, especially from a book that has been translated many times. I would recommend just trying to get a feel for what the writer is getting at.
As an aside, it amazes me how many people dismiss god/the bible etc but are quite willing to believe in evil/the devil. Like, I don't know many people that would be willing to do a ouija board in their house or attempt to perform some kind black magic.
If you believe in ultimate evil you must believe in ultimate good.
As a Christian* girl myself, I am proud to say I would have done exactly what this girl did, and for exactly the same reasons. While I admit that these lanyards are not the mark of the beast, they aren't far off it, and I certainly would not wear one.
Beer, because I want to buy her a pint.
*Bring on the down votes you bunch of Atheistic Liberals.
People are SIGNING UP to be RFID tracked (just look at the http://www.epicmix.com/ ski-ticket system from Vail resorts, or for public transport there are the UK Oyster Cards or the Oz Myway cards etc).
However for them to be introduced at a public school, with no choice but to comply smacks of the police state.
We all already have barcode/swipe cards used to "Buy and Sell goods" (I wonder if the student in question likewise avoids credit cards and ATMS under religious beliefs), so it's only a small leap to get to RFID tracking of same.
Of course, we all protested something back in high school, and for the student to refuse to comply with an RFID-less lanyard (which appears to mean that she is refusing to carry school ID) it seems that the school is quote within rights to expel her, religious beliefs or not.
Note: If your religious beliefs mean you refuse to be photographed, for example, you can't get a license or photo ID to buy liquor. It's not religious persecution, it's legal bloody sense....
Police state? Hardly. It looks very much like the RFID is just used as an automatic register and possibly door activation technology. In the UK at least, it's a legal requirement to record who attends school, there are some schools which have swipe in systems. There are also some schools which have electronic door locks to allow students and teachers in/out as appropriate. My place of work has electronic doors, which I pass through with - yes - an RFID tag, hardly police state, just a common sense use of modern technology.
The article is hazy, I suspect because the author knows this sort of thing pushes the buttons of the commentators, the five pages of comments would suggest that this is the case. It doesn't say if the tracking is on a who goes through a door basis and it doesn't say that the RFIDs aren't used as a classroom door lock opener. I don't think it's unreasonable to believe that the "need it to go to the toilet" is actually because you need the card to leave a classroom, during a lesson.
I need my RFID card at work to go to the toilet, this is because the door to the toilet is in the same area as the lift lobby and these are potentially areas that the public could get admittance to, should they get past the guy on the entrance lobby. It's all in how you spin it.
Please dont bother using the Oyster card analogy. When oyster cards were brought in they doubled non-oyster fairs to make sure people used them. People didnt particularly want to sign up for them.
And your point is also moot as with Oyster cards one can remain anonymous by not registering the card and paying with cash. I also have a handy RFID-blocking wallet to keep my Oyster in.
The barcode containing 666 is an urban myth which arises from the three pairs of lines which are used to detect velocity/acceleration looking like the number 6. The problem is that (IIRC) they're actually the number 0, most people don't realise that a barcode encodes data in the mark as well as the space.
Is it not 2012? Did we not land a Volkswagon-sized remote explorer on Mars this year? HOW, in this day and age, can supposedly intelligent and educated people still believe in primitive superstition a.k.a religious doctrine? I totally get why the leaders are into it... it's a good business. I'm lost as to why the followers buy into all the nonsense and GIVE MONEY to support it.
Why is your god more credible than Zeus, Apollo, Thor, Santa Claus, etc., etc.? Do you worry that you'll break your mother's back if you step on a sidewalk crack? Why not?
More bad than good comes from religion.
We live among superstitious fools.
What would happen if a bunch (50 or more) students got together and jointly zapped their RFID tags. Then when replaced, did it again. Sounds like a good thing to organize a student protest about.
Kinda like Von Ryan's express: "Parade strip" (when they burned the rags they had for clothes).
You could add "swapping barcodes with each other" - barcodes are very easy to make and read, so I'd invest some time in figuring out what's in them and then generating some more, at random. Oh, and RFIDs can be reprogrammed from a distance, so wouldn't it be a very cool school project to do just that?
With a decent antenna and transceiver you can do it from a good 10 meter or so.
But the principles are fine. We risk raising a generation of human sheep who find this kind of monitoring perfectly normal. It doesn't have to stop at school! History teaches us that human sheep are a fundamentally bad thing*.
* Because human sheep tend to think "Gosh, what a lovely moustache; I'll do as his party says," and that kind of thing rarely ends well.
"If you can start early in life getting people accustomed to living in surveillance society then in future it'll be a lot easier to roll these things out to the larger populace."
THIS, a thousand times this. THIS is what it's really all about. Training the kids to get used to living under constant police-state surveillance so it can be pushed on the public later on. This is why this insidious trend needs to be stopped now, by any means necessary. And people like John Whitehead are absolutely essential to this goal.
A $20 donation is on its way to The Rutherford Institute as soon as this comment is posted. And I don't even live in America, but people like Mr. Whitehead need to be encouraged in their endeavours.
So you'd be happy just letting this slip because the loudest voice against it is someone who's religious? By this logic, even if you believe abortion is murder you would not speak out against it because the loudest voices against abortion are religious.
Pretty damned sad, IMNSHO. The religious and privacy angles notwithstanding, as I feel these get addressed fairly well, let's look at some numbers. The school system is spending $500,000 ($.5 million) to wrangle students in order to win a $2 million grant, a net gain of $1.5 million. I posit that the $.5 million could be spent on mechanisms which work to entice students to desire participation in an educational environment like, oh, better teachers, better trained teachers (good and dedicated teachers, you know I'm not talking about you,) better curriculum, better extra-curricular activities which can only be enjoyed if the student is fully attendant, and so on. $500,000 goes a long way to encourage and entice rather than coerce, bully, and buy-off.
Net gains in this scenario are a better school, happier and more capable students, students who retain dignity and privacy and develop a sense of doing right for its own merit rather than because they have to, less stressed teachers and administrators, more productive individuals going out into the job market, and $1.5 million. Hell, for that matter, the school might not need $1.5 million in pocket-padding if the $500,000 was put to better use.
Paris, could be put to better use.
The numbers tell the story.
The Northside district in San Antonio has 112 schools and 100,000 students.
The middle school and high school in the RFID badge pilot program have 4,200 students.
In the adult world, where will you find a campus that size ---- whatever its purpose --- which doesn't restrict physical access and access to services through the use of keycards, badges, and so on?
John Jay is a STEM magnet school.
Parents are encouraged to enroll their kids with promises of small class sizes, a safe and secure environment, academic rigor and strong discipline.
It's been a winning formula for the Catholic School to generations.
A few years ago every shopping centre was open (still is in the free world, just not in the west).
Indeed most factories used to be open .... but now in the UK they are all closed (but not by turnstiles). The only other reason to have the turnstiles was to extract money ... not to spy on you.
You might come to think "right reasons" if you consider that she doesn't want to be forced to wear a tag because it's against her principles, and you don't want to be forced to wear a tag because ...
The opposition being the people who say fuck your principles, do what we tell you or we'll hit you with something.
Hell, Im a believer and I think John of Patmos was on mushrooms, ate just a little too much Nutmeg, or wrote down one hellacious fever dream as a thinly veiled attack on Roman Imperial authority.
Regardless, isn't the tracking concern why people like RMS refuse to wear RFID key badges? I can't describe him as religious at all unless you count the Cult of GNU, yet he still refuses it on very similar grounds.
"When a place gets crowded enough to require ID's, social collapse is not far away. It is time to go elsewhere"
John of Patmos (allegedly) wandered the desert for 40 day and nights before writing his revelation, there are not many mushrooms to be found in the desert, however there are a lot of very interesting cacti and succulents.
A minor point but peyote is a lot more psychoactive than psilocybin and is far more likely to generate visions etc, just ask Carlos Castaneda to confirm that one.
Icon – effect of peyote & psilocybin.
When I was at secondary school, the general ethos was one of not talking down to pupils but treating us with respect unless we did wrong, in the hope that we would develop into responsible young adults and cause less trouble overall.
This idea is like a reversion to the Victorian era with presumed guilt from the outset, ne'er trusting the little blighters. With cameras monitoring the whole place it must feel like a prison camp, offering new vistas to paedo-headmaster types.
This is a good move on behalf of privacy in general. This sort of tracking should be optional, not required.
BTW, I'm not too sure who else has noticed, but this is NOT a PUBLIC school, it is an INDEPENDENT school. I had the welcomed experience of attending public, christian private, and independent high schools. Independent schools are not magically funded by the state like a public school. Nor do they have charitable donations from one of many fund raisers on behalf of a religious organization. For instance there will almost never be the instance of a independent school participating in a nation wide government funded study program, and you will almost never have your honor programs held in a church funded by the community, and you many not even have typical leaves accepted as excused (FMLA like leaves may not apply to minors attending independent schools).
If this independent school takes the fall for this, it may never recover. Which, if what I'm reading is true, that would be a good thing on behalf of the word privacy alone.
"Maybe they ought to just do away with the RFID tag, and tattoo numbers, perhaps on the inside of her left forearm. :-( :-( :-("
Maybe they should do away with RFID and go facial recognition and biometrics. Exactly the same effect without the barcodes.
You're not going to stop tracking by getting rid of RFID
Don't think you comparison holds water, old bean. With facial recognition, you don't carry the transponder around with you anywhere you go.
I remember when these RFIDs first came out there was this debate on television and this hip Gen Yer said she wouldn't mind having a chip inserted so she could borrow library books at Uni etc. I thought at the time "That's not how it's going to happen". Like Focault knew, it was going to start with all the people and creatures who had the least control over what happened to their bodies, so
1) Domestic pets: check
2) Prison inmates: check
3) Old people with (and no doubt soon, without) dementia): check
4) School kids; check
5) Workers in security environments: check
6) Workers not in security environments: soon.
Lot's of people around here love wearing their identity tags around their necks all the time. I'm not one of them.
"Don't think you comparison holds water, old bean. With facial recognition, you don't carry the transponder around with you anywhere you go."
Ummm last time I check, your face was attached.
They installed hundreds of camera. Facial recog would be fairly easy to install and use
RFID makes tracking easy but not having RFID doesn't make tracking impossible.
There is just too much being forced on to students. I am Herandez' side, technology looking for a problem.
The RDIF system can be easily defeated by simply leaving the tag behind secreted somewhere, or covering it with alumin(i)um foil. For more permanent cures, placing the RFID-equipped device in a microwave, together with a mug of cold water, and giving it 15 second bursts of 100% power. Works well on UK Passports and larger denomination US dollar bills, too.
GAP clothing are sold with several RFID chips in each garment.
ACPO would have a field day with this stuff, with Plod carrying portable readers around so they can scan people and bring up their information and criminal records eliminating the familiar expression: "What's all this then?". Besides Plod now have a handbook for guidance such as the Warwickshire Police handbook Policing Our Communities.
It is already here. Various schools here have spy cameras watching the kids, databases all over the place, and so on. Really the west is being taken to a frightening place because of the apathy and stupidity of the majority. They are too wrapped up in 'big brother' (or whatever it is this week) to care and too stupid to realise the effects of having the police/government/whoever takes over next in control of every possible piece of data about you.
Thats what the west claims... but it seems to be a total lie. We have spy cameras everywhere in the UK, they appear to be everywhere in the USA, chips and tracking all over.... It appears we have been lulled into a police state and the muppets who claim 'nothing to hide... nothing to fear' have clearly forgotten the lessons of history - not least the Jews who didn't need to hide their religion in 1930 but didn't live to regret it. There are other similar examples but that one is the most striking because it happened in a democratic country.
Isn't this about high school?
so a paedophile wouldn't be interested....
paedophile = someone over 16 who's sexual interest is mainly or only in prepubescent children...
in other words a paedophile is someone who needs to be castrated or culled, but teenagers are safe..
Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. If this program were to be analyzed after a year or two they would probably discover that it didn't do a damn thing. They won't do any follow up, of course. It would be embarrassing for them to show that all of the money they took from the classrooms was wasted. It's better for the powers that be to just point to this modern high-tech system and claim it keeps the students safer and in class. I wonder how much time they are going to have to chase students around that are out of class for legitimate reasons. Every time a teacher sends a student to the media center to pick up lessons that weren't printed in time for the teacher to get them in the morning is going to have to be "investigated" by somebody. That somebody is going to be another school employee that has nothing to do with teaching.
It seemed pretty simple when I was in school for the teacher to take roll at the beginning of class. If you were skiving off, you would get a summons slip to appear before the vice principal to have a chat about why you weren't in class at some point in the next couple of days. A few no-shows would trigger a conference that included your parents. The library was the last place you would go if you wanted a bit of free time, so there was no use in having some sort of pass to get in. If you wanted to check out a book, you handed over your student ID card and the book was signed out to you. Bathrooms?! If you really just had to it was at a point where you didn't want to be held up by anything. I never saw the restrooms were I attended school as any place that needed a bunch of security. If a student qualified for a free lunch, it was verified by a check box or mark on their student ID card. I went to the snack bar at the college across the street. The food was marginally better and they had sodas.
... here on planet 'me', I'm somewhat disturbed by this entire fiasco.
Civil liberties - I get that, definitely worth fighting for. but...
"Mark of the Beast?" - lost me there. Argument dead in the water.
I have to remind myself that out there in that 'other universe' there's still plenty of people who believe this utter bullshit. Any credibility they may have had by citing privacy and liberty is thrown down the shitter the moment they bring religion into the argument.
Onto the wider question, as to why a school has to implement this type of scheme in the first place - I'm frankly saddened as to what a *massive* FAIL it is. Worse still, only *one* student protested?
Are the rest of these kids a bunch of sheep? Do they enjoy being treated like criminals?
It's that old chestnut that schools have fucked us over with for centuries. If one or two kids do something bad, well, damn it all, punish everyone! Yeah! That'll learn um! ... or it'll just make the entire lot of them do bad stuff.
I'll get my coat, it's getting cold around here ...
I love the swapping idea. It sounds like something out of Cory Doctorow's book Little Brother. Everyday as you enter campus, you swap badges with the first person you see. Totally random mixing. Whoever is bound to be the next valedictorian and the whole herd of teacher's pets should nuke their badges so it appears they have dropped out.
I thought the UK was big brother, but this? this is mental!
Total invasion of privacy.. OK I might wear an RFID tag a work, but that is a security issue, NOT for the sole purpose of tracking.
Sure I can track MY sons movements on his mobile IF I need to, but that is for emergency use and mainly for tracking down his phone if he looses it or if he wonders off somewhere, he did that last year, so now I make sure he has a mobile phone on him whenever we go out, sure many parents might find a 5 year old with a smart phone odd, but I'd rather be able to call him and him call me if we get separated.. and worse case scenario, I can track him down to a few meters usually (not that I have needed to )
schools already fuck kids up by making value judgments about them base don their toilet breaks.
in the real world nobody ever tells you your a bad person for taking a piss but in school where psychopath teachers get off on their power trips over 8 year olds, that shit happens all the time.
Sheep now have to have an RFID tag in them in the UK for 'welfare reasons'. My sheep have successfully torn their ears really badly cos these tags are basically inhumane.
I just hope everyone else at the school puts a bit of silver paper round them - this isnt a science thing - its 1984 with backhanders.
And no you don’t send Christians to christian schools - everyone has a right to learn.
..and the LORD spoke, and sayeth unto Flob "I will give You a sign, by which others may enter your house, and feast in your canteen and look at Scriptures in your library"
And Flob said "I give grateful thanks, O LORD" and fell to his knees in supplication.
The LORD, being so moved by Flob's contrite nature, He gaveth Flob thousands of these signs.
The lord sayeth to Flob, "Carry them always with thee, as the cost of replacing them will cost thee many sheckels!"
"Thank You, LORD, I shall stuff them onto my ring, and I shall call them...keys!"
A district court judge for Bexar County, Texas, has granted The Rutherford Institute’s request for a temporary restraining order to prevent Northside Independent School District from removing a San Antonio high school student from John Jay High School’s Science and Engineering Academy because she objected to wearing a name badge signifying participation in the school district’s new “Student Locator Project.”
Source: < www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/on_the_front_lines/victory_court_grants_rutherford_institute_request_to_stop_texas_school_from >
To heck with the religious angle..
"What’s happening now is going to spread across the country," Whitehead said. "If you can start early in life getting people accustomed to living in surveillance society then in future it'll be a lot easier to roll these things out to the larger populace."
Good luck to your children and their children...doesn't bode well..systems linked to police systems/state...
I'll be getting off at the next stop..thanks...
Forget that. What if a private enterprise does the same thing, turns it into something everyone wants and becomes the de facto standard. Now you have it even worse because the private enterprise isn't really answerable to anyone (not even the law since they'll probably be an international conglomerate with an HQ no one can approach). Forget Big Brother. Have you considered Big Owner?
It used to be that the students showed up at school in the morning and reported to their home room, where roll call was performed and the student was marked absent or present. This seems to be a much simpler process than all this other techno-babble. What's wrong with the teachers actually doing their jobs and creating a classroom environment that keeps the students interested in their own education and inspiring them to want to come to class. If the teachers today would just do their jobs correctly this "tag" would not be necessary. In my opinion, the necessity of this RFID tag not only violates the individual's personal civil right to anonymity but it also represents a massive failure or flaw in the design of the educational system. What kind of an example is the educational system setting when they treat everyone as if they are all prisoners? What kind of example are they setting when they show everyone that they don't trust any of them and FORCE them to wear such a device? I hope the people involved win this lawsuit and win big. This will set a prime example for other institutions contemplating this "easy way out" for student control.
Stop sign, because this idea has to stop.
Of course the teachers were the first to sign up to wearing these gadgets, not.
For some reason teachers seem to think they're exempt from all the sh:t they foist on students.
By the same token, I'd suggest all new legislation be tested for a couple of years on MPs and the police, before it could be enforced on the rest of us.
I expect the next evolution of this tech will be to monitor who is getting with who around the school.
So student A is found out breaking the rules and they then look back and student B has been spending a lot of time with them outside normal lessons and use that to start questioning them too.
Or they bring in a rule regarding how close members of the opposite sex can be whilst at school.
They could even add in the shock collars/bracelets they want to pass out to air passengers and use remote discipline too.
I believe that Hernandez is going about this entirely the wrong way.
Nobody has an automatic "right" for their religious beliefs to go unchallenged. What if your religion demands you to sacrifice thirteen virgins every full moon? What about blowing up unbelievers by the busload with exploding rucksacks? No religious belief is any more or less riduculous than any other.
If she really, seriously believes, even for one moment, that as much as one word of any of this stuff about the "mark of the beast" is anything but far-fetched fiction, she needs a spell in a mental home.
Tracking a person's movements all the time is wrong because people have a right to privacy, not because of any mythology dreamed up by iron-age tribes of nomadic goatherds.
Obiter Dictum: Has anyone conducted any studies of the long-term effects on an individual's mental health of this kind of intrusive monitoring?
Good for her, really, if such a device would have been invented and implemented during my school years, I would have fought it too. I would also have pointed out that with the US Education system facing so many money problems, that money could have been spent to better improve education, not distrust students. Also, based on my experience from my High School years, thy would have expelled me and anyone else for opposing such a system. I know, because I did oppose something in high school based on principle and was suspended. When I ask about my rights, I was told, and I quote "I don't have any rights as a student".
Oh well, enough with blood pressure trip down memory lane, on the other side of the coin, wait until this young lady get's into the real world of "work". She is in for a real shock as far as her religious believes and rights are concerned.
A pretty good guess for someone who used silver shekels... Maybe he anticipated a solution to what politicians and bankers were already dreaming about back then.
Physical cash is anonymous, it allows the bearer to trade relatively freely without interference from an omniscient and omnipotent government/ dictatorship, and with few restrictions, other than the physical limitations of using a physical medium.
Electronic money, with your ID associated with every transaction, information readily accessible to the State (who take from Peter to give to Paul), ...is a recipe for absolute tyranny in corrupt and greedy hands.
Well done to the student for standing up for herself.
So John wrote about a system which uses a mark (the Greek means an etching in the skin) to facilitate purchasing and sale of goods, and this was written when!? Of course, we all know that nothing like that will never happen.
Pretty good guess, mushrooms or source.
Back to the plot, since the 'Mark of the Beast' is described as a mark on the hand or forehead, and not a lanyard, then I don't see why she made such a fuss. Does she refuse to have her hand stamped when she goes into a theme park?
"It is an implemenation of the Mark of the Beast" can go many ways. Is she mentioning or using "Mark of the Beast"? If she were an atheist, she might argue that the school is promulgating religion through a technological dressing. I recall coming across a grant proposal here, living in Houston, written by a notable land owner. A kind of template or something. One of my colleagues, an English grad from UH criticized it chiefly on the grounds of its heavily religious language, coloring, and imagery. --
And so, seriously. -- No, seriously. She could actually argue this. Atheists argue this all the time. The trouble is, would the consequence be any different from where we have here this "religious privacy" interpretation?
I'm reminded of a comment to some video I read recently:
"When I was in high school a friend's mother told me that one day we would all have bar codes tattooed on our foreheads (mark of the beast) and that is how we would pay for everything. She got mad when i asked her if she thought it would hurt to slide your head over the bar code scanner."
While I believe her objections are purely B.S., she has options. She can be home schooled, she can wear the RFID lanyard like everyone else, she can move and go to a different school, she can launch a meritless court case she can't win, etc.
This girl isn't be persecuted. She has chosen to violate a school requirement designed to protect her and secure the school, which is not only reasonable, most parents expect and often demand that schools provide these protections. If she's that opposed to these security measures then she'll need to explore her options but I doubt she will will a lawsuit on the matter and I hope she doesn't as it has nothing to do with free speech or personal rights. Anyone who's read the Bill of Rights would know this but many folks falsely believe that all speech is protected and it is not nor are all so called "rights".
Our school simply maintained "security" by locking us in via 15 foot high anti-climb-paint-covered fences with CCTV pointed at all exits.
If you know someone cannot leave then they are, by implication, secure. If anyone inside was to come to harm or danger, it wouldn't go unnoticed for long because of all the people locked inside.
But then prison can be defined exactly the same way.
...yes her choices are "anal probing" or "being cast out".
Great list of so-called "choices" there.
According to you it's all good. Doesn't matter if it's someone like Stalin or Hitler in charge. They always have the choice to go live in the ghetto or get themselves a nice farm in Lancaster county.
You think that kids can't figure out a workaround to stay hidden?
Think again.
RFID "chips" are easy to disable. And you can cover them with a nice copper mesh(invisible) in a plastic sleeve when you want to disappear for a while.
Its distressing to see the lack of technological knowledge that educators exhibit and are willing to spend monies on solutions such as these.
As for privacy and constitutional issues, educators are now treating students as sources of funding for their programs and if you can "prove" that a student was at the school, this audit trail assures that they receive their per diem payment from the government.
Sounds no different than a prison system administrator keeping track of inmates. Sad.
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