A good friend of mine was a pig farmer.  He said you have to get the pigs used to the idea that you’re the boss when they’re piglets.  Otherwise, when they outweigh you 4 to 1, you won’t be able to manipulate them.

This has a similar ring to it.  Kids in school are not treated like citizens.  They’re subject to searches, their speech is severely curtailed, and every move they make is scrutinized.  Now this.

The totalitarian society won’t be thrust on us by revolution; it will grow on us in the name of “safety.”

Those who trade their freedoms for some temporary safety deserve neither freedom nor safety?

im sure thats a misquote..

Bottom line is.. i want some privacy in my life and these type of technological advancements have just as many bad features as good.  The technology itself is neutral, but i fear the users of the technology.

Well, given that they don’t have a large range, they wouldn’t be useful for tracking kidnapped children who are taken far away.  Also, if this is being so widely publicised, don’t you think someone out to harm children would think to look for the device and remove it before proceeding with whatever they have planned?
So why should we sacrifice so much privacy (in a small town, no less!) for something that can’t be all that effective?

Originally posted by Pop Tarts:
I never really understood why the moment people talk about tracking or Identification Numbers everyone starts talking about 1984.

Now imagine if the political party most opposite your beliefs gets control of this system.  What kind of privacy do you think you would have?  No one would be safe.  Even if a revolution were successfully carried out against that government, being able to know where your enemies are at all times is not an advantage the revolutionists would get up.

You’re close, Mr. Death.  It’s actually:

“Those who desire to give up Freedom in order to gain Security, will not have, nor do they deserve, either one."--Thomas Jefferson

There’s an article in the current UTNE (the cover has a guy riding a giant snail) about RFID tags. 

--Joe

Theocrat’s point is why people who relish personal freedom fear big government of any sort. RFID mandated by congress for all citizens.  Hmm, Brock, Les, and Mr.Death and DOF have been meeting regularily in Brocks basement! Bring them in for interogation, I mean questioning......

With regards to Theocrat’s point, I would offer the response of Mr Death that technology is neutral.

The argument raised “What if this technology got into the wrong hands” can be effectively used for almost any and everything. For example, we should not use cars for if the bad government had the use of cars they can pursue and hunt people down with greater ease. Ditto for instant email communications that allows the bad government to send wanted posters out. Or what about guns and weapons.

Heck even the good old “discovery” of fire can be used for nefarious actions such as destroying property.

My point is why is such an argument only raised for tracking devices or Identification Numbers when there are a multitude of technology that can do more serious damage.

And the problem with that argument of “it doesn’t matter” is the fact that it really, REALLY does.  Decrepit Old Fool, you said it absolutely perfectly.  Kids today are considered more like livestock than actual human beings, and our educational system is slowly turning into a giant cattle farm where all is assimilated for a generally mediocre product.  And now, kids can’t even sneak out of class because they’re being TRACKED by radio transmitters?  All I have to say is that complete order is never a possibility, and the less trust you put in those who are under your guidelines, and the less freedom you give them, the more they are going to want to rebel.

Well, the smart ones, anyway.

There is a big difference between mobile/cell phones and these tags: you choose to carry a phone.  These other car tracking things - you choose to have them.

Its all about the eradication of trust and liberty.  Our elected leaders and their staff are actually our servants.  In the UK, thats what they are called - civil servants.  We choose what they should do.  When they end up tracking US - its round the wrong way.

Years ago, I had a conversation with the D.A.R.E. officer who visited regularly at the school our sons attended.  Personally, I did not like the man himself, (I poured his coffee as a waitress at the diner) let alone seeing him carrying a gun as an authority figure. Oh, that’s another tale.
Anyway, I went to the classroom the day he was to speak.  He refused to allow this grown-up into the room.  In fact, he even wanted the teacher to leave. (Others did, saying it was a welcome break)
I went to the Principal and complained that I had a mother’s obligation to be there.  In fact, the school stresses that any parent is Welcome for all sorts of events.
Thank goodness, the Principal decided that school policy should prevail, and from then on the teacher must remain in the room for all sessions.
My son told me later that the cop often asked the children if any of their family at home had stuff like this (a bag of marijuana to demonstrate). 
He was using the kids to narc on relatives.  Not that anyone at City Hall would own up to it.

I know as a liberal, I’m supposed to be afraid of this, but as a parent of a small child, I kinda like the idea of the school knowing where my kid is when she is under their supervision, despite all the “pot leads to heroin” analogies. My wife is an elementary school teacher and the authority figures at her school really are the good guys. They’re not out to rob kids of their rights, they just want to keep them safe until their parents pick them up. They can use all the help they can get.

Safety’s great, Brooks.  Who’s going to keep them safe from the authorities? 

I don’t think I’m being paranoid here.  How long a list could you make of examples where the authorities turned out not to be trustworthy? Start from your own town and your own lifetime and work out from there…

As a former daycare teacher, I know that the most help I ever got was from the children themselves.  The ones who stood tall and owned up to their action, whether it was helping with clean-up or coloring the walls with markers.  Running and hiding behind equipment on the playground caused more panic of teachers than any number of deliverymen ringing the buzzer at the entrance to the building. 
It takes parents and teachers who allow the child to think for him/herself,to try new activities,and to understand consequences.  There is a delicate balance not to overprotect or threaten. 
A child who hasn’t built logic and confidence within will follow anyone who is stronger or more affectionate. 
A child molester usually is an acquaintance of the family, contrary to reports on the news about Amber Alerts.

I don’t doubt that “the authorities” can be corrupt, but I’m trying to talk about children IN school. Keeping technology out of schools that might help keep kids safe isn’t going to keep it out of the hands of the authorities outside of school. The technology already exists. The test in question is just that, a test. I don’t see any harm in finding out what it’s potential is, bad and/or good. My problem, if you want to call it that, is that I’m not making the jump from a very limited system with limited capabilities in a school environment with small children to Big Brother tracking my every move as an adult so he can catch me doing something illegal. The difference is akin to conservatives thinking that gay marriage will lead to a man marrying his dog.

Like Mrs DOF said. But then, having raised only six children, I’m not much of an authority on these things. Are these devices supposed to keep the children safe? Wouldn’t keeping them in a plastic bubble or some sort of institution do as well? Then how would they learn the consequenses of their actions? What a conundrum!

Oh fuck me, I wrote a nice long post that’s vanished into thin air.

It’s not the technology itself or its potential to track people that I object to so much, in the case of using RFID in school. More importantly I’m trying desperately to raise my kid NOT to be afraid and ignorant (which is becoming more difficult by the day), and having to let the “authorities” keep track of you in order to keep you safe implies that you aren’t.  In my opinion it’s a backhanded reinforcement of the constant fear-mongering that I find unconscienable, and has a great many Americans joining the herd of sheeple falling to their knees, begging God and government to protect them.

In my household, being a good American means REFUSING to trade liberty for security.

School is not the only area where RFID technology is a concern. How do any of you feel about it being used in a National ID Card and in consumer purchasing? What next? Medical and genetic records?

I do not at all feel comfortable with any entity being privy to my whereabouts and consumer history for any reason. And it is not that I have anything to hide. But with the ever changing criteria for ending up on a terror suspect list or what have you, any one of us could end up on a McCarthy list for innocuous reasons or for reasons never told to us in the interest of cough::: National Security:::cough.

I am not a paranoid conspiracy theory kinda gal but this much governmental voyeurism places a very bad taste in my mouth.

The question is exactly what problem these RFID chips are supposed to solve.

By definition, you can only track the presence of the chip at a short range away from the senders that query the chips. Unless you surgically implant the chips, that doesn’t give you much and unless the country is riddled by a network of senders, once the chip is out of range, you’re back to square one.

So what the schools can get is to monitor movement of the chips inside the premises and probably perimeter control. I wonder what security problem the school addresses by tracking chips, I mean students inside of a building…

Deadscot mentioned a survey of highschool students in which 30% of them responded that the current freedom of press is going too far and that the media should vet their stories with the government. So perhaps students might even support them getting tagged.

However, at our school we would have hacked (in the traditional sense) such a system in a hurry. Imagine all the fun to be had. First, find out how to shield the tags (not hard at all). Next, clone the chips. That shouldn’t be hard, either, and software to read up and modify the RFID content are readily available from some helpful German non-enthusiasts.

Now, the chips must be dirt cheap. Clone a few chips in the hundreds or thousands. How does the monitoring software cope? Keep the chip shielded on the way in or out. Does the software detect the anomaly? If not, why bother using it in the first place? What happens if a student enters once, leaves twice? Hmmm. What about multiple instances present at the same time?

These are just things I can think of at first glance. We would have tried them all and then some.

Some canny legislator - I think it was Lyndon Johnson - once said that you should think more about how a law will be misused than about how it will be used.  That’s a good model for institutional technology.

There are several assumptions that tracking technology in schools require.  The first is that the authorities themselves are trustworthy.  Brooks’ school notwithstanding, (and that is an open question - people with bad actions on their minds don’t advertise) I have seen many examples locally, and state and national where school officials turned out to be someone the children needed protecting from. 

The second assumption is that children should be OK with limitations on their rights as citizens. Kids in school only learn about freedom in abstraction.  No wonder they think freedom of speech goes too far.  The problem is, once conditioned to this mindset, they grow up to become voters with no deep understanding of freedom.

The third assumption is that safety is so important that you should give up freedoms for it.  That is the most dangerous one.  As the essayist Jack Gordon said, “Safety is a fine thing, but an obsession with it rots the soul.”

The obsession with safety is dangerous because it’s an illusion, and because it snuffs innovation.  Stepping off the path is dangerous but new answers won’t be found on the well-worn path.  This is no abstraction as our kids need to know how to interact with a rapidly changing world.  Conditioned to staying on the path, they’re ill-equipped to push any boundaries.  And in the long run, they won’t be safe either.

It’s no use protesting that any risk to our kids is unacceptable; risk can’t be eliminated.  If systems are created that make it impossible for kids to sneak out of school, that small risk is traded for a much larger one of the kids graduating from school with no understanding of consequences to actions.  Kids need to make mistakes.

(I went to a private Christian college.  No drinking allowed, strict curfew, etc.  Who do you think we had to help up the stairs, clean up at night, and put to bed? The ministers’ kids.)

Elwed asks a good question: what problem are these chips intended to solve?  Is there an epidemic of kids being snatched from school?  And would such a system help if there were?  The answer is no, and probably not.

Parents have (until now) recognized the most important agent in their kids’ safety is the kids themselves.  Grims’ fairy tales and native American legends often stylized genuine risks to kids to make them wary. 

Parents today should read Protecting The Gift by Gavin DeBecker and pay special attention to the parts about educating kids to watch out for themselves.  DeBecker then goes on to advocate for lots of authority-based safety programs and for reasons I have just expressed I think those should be limited in scope.

The most hopeful possibility is that the technology would be an expensive boondoggle, due in part to kids hacking the system.  Unfortunately, draconian penalties for tampering with computer systems will discourage young people from developing an eye for real security faults. 

Do we want our kids to grow up to be sheep?

Originally posted by Pop Tarts:
My point is why is such an argument only raised for tracking devices or Identification Numbers when there are a multitude of technology that can do more serious damage.

The private citizen has a use for fire, cars, guns, etc.  The only thing I can imagine a private citizen using an RFID tag for is to track down keys and wallet if they get lost.  The governments and corporations have much more to gain from this technology than the people do.  That’s what makes this technology more dangerous than others.

Brooks said:

but as a parent of a small child, I kinda like the idea of the school knowing where my kid is when she is under their supervision

Call me old fashioned, but if the school officials don’t know where my kid is without a tracking device, then said school officials are in the wrong business and I am back in the director’s office demandning an out of zone form signature. 

Just sayin’.

By definition, you can only track the presence of the chip at a short range away from the senders that query the chips. Unless you surgically implant the chips, that doesn’t give you much and unless the country is riddled by a network of senders, once the chip is out of range, you’re back to square one.

While this may have been true a year-or-so ago, many advances have been made in RFID technology.  One company, Indentec Solutions now boasts chips that can be read from over 100 meters away.  Another company called Tag Master has developed a shield-proof tag and a shield detector just in case some does hack it.

I’ve even heard rumor that a company out of Silicon Valley is preparing to release chips that rival the best cordless phones in range.

I have to admit the technology is impressive but as DOF already mentioned, this is exercise in training to masses and one day we’ll all have been chipped and not remember why.

Everyone is making great points here and I agree with a lot of you even though I’m playing devil’s advocate a bit here. I’m also mainly talking about elementary school, so most of the arguments don’t really apply to what I’m saying. I doubt that a six year old is going to hack the system and start selling counterfeit badges on the kindergarten black market.

As long as the ratio of teachers to students is getting better in this country, oh wait, the complete opposite is happening out here, I’m all for forgoing additional technology to help. We’ll see if something has to give when class sizes get so big that there’s no way to keep track of all the kids.

I guess the loss of a few kids in the name of educating them to take care of themselves is a small price to pay, especially for the parents and kids we don’t lose. Sorry, now I’m just stirring the pot.

I was wondering whether is this RFID fear more of a Western and North American thing than a worldwide fear.

In Asia most notably in Japan and Korea the use of RFID technology is gathering at a fast pace. From public transport cards, to mobile phones even to home appliances such as knives (to track which knives a person use so the company can send you relevant products) and to GPS tracking school bags. And as the post above pointed out RFID can be used for medical purposes. Having a chip in your body that lists the drugs you are allegic to or medical history is very useful if say you are in an accident and emergency treatment is required and perhaps the patient is unconscious, such information could be life saving.

Even in Europe, RFID is used so that people need not bring their wallets to the beaches or clubs. Not too sure if the chip is implanted into the person or not but it is carried about. So I would say that a citizen would gain quite a lot from RFID even with today’s development, more so than guns, which allows a citizen to say hunt or shoot at tin cans or occassionaly blast that thief or attacker.

Is RFID tracking device to N.America similar to GM food fears in Europe? Sure there are significant amount of people in N.America that do not like GM food but compared to Europe it pales in comparison.

Also is this RFID/tracking fear culture based? Two possible reasons:
1) Religion:
Judeo-Christian fears of the device may have expanded into a wider social and cultural context.

One example of this is stem cell research. The objections to it and cloning in the West do not come only from the religious people. But in Asia, their religion is not particularly against such research and thus there is no or little fear spilling out into the general public.

2) Philosophy:
The Judeo-Christian society operates on the idea that there should be huge limitations on government because you cannot trust them and this seems more prevalent in US.

In comparison, the Asian idea of a government seem to operate on the idea that if you control and resist the government in everything, nothing can be done.

3) History:
Linked to the philosophy, is the history of the country’s development. In the West democratic government came about (among other reasons) as a protest to the absolute rule of the monarchy.

But in Asia, democratic governments came about either through a fight for freedom against colonialism or in the case of Japan was imposed on it. In both cases the “bad” guys was not your fellow citizen but some foreigner and the government was “protecting” the citizens. Furthermore, in the case of S.Korea and Taiwan, the military dictatorship gave up power without a bloody struggle.

And finally in many (but not all) of Asia’s democracy a large part of their economic development was lead in part by the government.

An examination of the Philippines shows that the country has a term limit on the President, perhaps as a response the the Marcos era.

Fear based Regime
One thing actually the only thing message from the show bowling from Columbine (since, sale of guns, race, etc has been discounted during the show) is that in the US there is a lot of fear based arguments. The “What you don’t know may kill you” types of argument

Looking at the article posted above on talks about drug lords and terrorists knowing your address, perhaps all that is left for them to claim is that they may sell your information to Osama and he may turn up at your house trying to sell you cookies for his Al Qaeda bakesale. Is it possible? Of course but if one is so afraid of everything, one might as well reject a large part of modern inventions.

BUT you people obviously are not so is there some reason that RFID/tracking fears is so special and unique when as stated above, its usefulness as seen in Asia is quite extensive.

As an aside, I have seen people mention the survey on school children whereby they state that either freedom of press or freedom of expression is going to far. I have not had the opportunity of seeing the actual survey or report but I have some points I wish to raise.

What does the student mean when they feel the freedom is going too far.

Could the students be thinking about hate speech. Perhaps, after 9/11 the students realise that speech can result in violence and terrorism or perhaps they have seen their Muslim friends being targeted and feel there should be protection being afforded to them.

Perhaps, they find the fact that freedom of expression is being used to protect racism or Nazism when in Europe Nazi expression is curtailed (French and Yahoo Nazi case) and yet one cannot really claim that in Europe the freedom of expression is vastly weaker than the US.

Perhaps they realise that all the hate being spewed out in certain places on homosexuals is raising a new generation of bigots.

Perhaps they realise how speech can trigger genocide such as the conviction of Radio Rwanda for inciting genocide.

Furthermore, an examination of students entering college have found that there is an increase in number of students who describe themselves in the extreme of one position rather than a moderate.

What exactly is the students saying?