December 1, 2012
-
tracking chips in id cards
Just how private do you want your life to be?
We live in an age where our cell phones can tell the world where we are or have been or we let the world know where we are through our social networks. If it is our choice, we seem to want folks to know that we are mobile.
But what are the limits to that?
In Texas, a school district is involved in a dust up over whether or not students should have tracking chips in their student IDs. One student, Angela Hernandez, has brought a civil suit against the school (which suspended her for not wearing the ID) claiming that the chip represented the "mark of the Devil" and violated her religious rights.
(The mark of the Devil is a sign that the end of the world is coming and that the wearer has signed on to the dark side.)
A judge issued an injunction against her suspension for the moment.
The school district was willing to deal. Tell your dad to zip his lip and you can wear an ID without the chip. Not happening, said the family.
The discussion has been hot and heavy over this. I'll try to condense it in bullet points.
On the girl's side:
>The IDs were assigned to students without an opt out.
>Her Christian religious beliefs are that the Mark of the Devil is a sign of giving up to evil.
>Her civil liberties have been violated.
On the parent's side:
>It's a public school but the public had no voice in the policy.
>Our daughter's civil liberties are at stake.
>The school district is using the badges to create revenue from the government.
>The school should not have tried to shut us up.
On the school's side:
>Being able to keep account of students does help with revenue (schools are paid monies from the state based on attendance).
>The badges help us find students quickly in emergencies.
>The badges help us find students who are skipping class.
>The badges help us keep undesirables out of the building and help us keep the students and staff safe.
On the legal side:
>The judge found issues with the suspension (apparently not wear the badge was not listed in the handbook as a suspend-able offense.)
>The judge had issues with the "deal" with the father to stop talking and let the girl wear a badge without a chip.
>The judge wanted to see if there were precedents about such cases elsewhere.
This issue is a tricky one.
We live in a society where bad things sometimes happen in schools. Without rehashing some of the awful scenes in the past, let's just say that troubled people find themselves using violence to solve their problems and innocent victims as their targets of rage. Schools provide a lot of people in a fairly small area and make dandy solutions to angry people looking for a crowd.
Drug deals are still an ongoing problem in many schools and those engaged in dealing often bring weapons with them.
Kids skip classes and school and the school is responsible for them while they are supposed to be there. If a kid skips and the school does not make an effort to find them and something happens to the kid, the lawyers trip all over themselves to sue.
Non-custodial parents show up at schools and try to get to their kids to violate court orders and leave with them.
Individuals with no business being in a school try to get access for a variety of reasons, such as thievery.
The government ties a lot of revenue up in whether or not the attendance is robust at a school.
What on earth was the district thinking in trying to play "let's make a deal" with the father?
And just what are our rights to privacy?
Radio-Frequency Identification Chips (RFID) are becoming more and more common. These chips are found in clothing to stop shoplifting, in automobiles to track them during their build, animals to keep track of them over wide areas (such as ranches), bookstores and libraries use them to discourage people from stealing materials, in EZ-Pass systems for collecting tolls on highways, on machine readable travel documents, in tracking the baggage at airports and a variety of other uses. The information on the chip can be customizable, being as rich or as bare essential as necessary.
My understanding of the chips being marketed to schools is that the information on the chip contains the students name, identification number (which is NOT the Social Security number), schedule, and parent contact information for emergencies.
If there is a valid reason for not having the chips, it would be this. The FERPA law (which protects a student's information about their education) might be touted as a reason to ban the chips. FERPA protects information about a student's grades, etc. It's a running joke among educators that between HIPPA (which protects health information) and FERPA (which protects educational information), technically schools have no students, since we cannot confirm or deny that they are alive (health info) or that they are a student (educational info). Thus, in a stretch, having a student's grade in the information would violate FERPA because it would indicate that the student is or has had some education (as shown by their grade level).
Don't laugh. Sillier things have been fought out in court.
As for the privacy issue, my questions would be this: Does the student have a Facebook, Twitter, or other social network account? If so, they have signed away a lot of their privacy and their parents were most likely not involved in this or even know what information is out there about their child. Is that child a member of a group that has a webpage or has been mentioned in a news report? Are there photographs of the student online anywhere? If so, the student can be identified from the information coded in the digital photograph which would give the date, time and often location of the photo. A photo at a school event would be a way to locate that student.
Many will argue about civil liberties. True it is that in today's society, liberties are being waived in a variety of small ways. But to say that the school has overstepped their bounds is splitting hairs on this one. Between cameras on buses and cameras in school and cameras in the public, chances are that students have been photographed hundreds if not thousands of times and their location duly noted. In attendance programs where teachers count attendance in the classroom, the student's photograph is part of that system.
Privacy has been already given up by many, often without them paying any attention to when or where or how.
As for the mark of the Devil argument, the mark (as described in the Book of Revelation) was embedded in the person.
We aren't quite there, yet.
This whole situation will play out. It will be interesting to see what happens.
Comments (9)
I see the girls's point, but does she carry a smart phone? Does she use Facebook? These are tracking devices also, and to shrink in fear daily, so as not to be tracked is already nearly impossible. The card is a forerunner to a subdermal implant possibly, yes. It's not the mark of the beast, but that's her opinion and I think you have to respect that. The bible says it will be on the hand or forehead, KJV says "in" the hand or forehead, but not pinned to your shirt, carried in your backpack, etc. The parents have a strong argument I believe, when you look at their first point, which is no public input for the public school, and no, they were stupid to try and shut them up.
I read something yesterday & couldn't find the source today... something in Minnesota to do with per use taxes for driving on the roads there, tracked by GPS in your car. Yes, there's reason to be suspicious of that. The issue always is, if there is a billion dollar profit potential for something, the manufacters will lobby their paid to be there politicians for support, and then we end up with draconian tracking devices on the kids at school, and at home too, as they likely need them for entrance to the school. Yeah, that's crap and I'd refuse too.
We willingly allow ourselves to be tracked. I carry a cell phone, and increasingly it's a necessity as hard line phones are phased out, but they track with GPS at the flick of a switch on the phone, and will and are able to track even if you turn that feature off. Our cars can track us, even without GPS enabled OnStar paid for, if they need to turn them on, they can.
Look for stories promoting this, like the old geezer lost in the woods, found by his GPS pendant, or the lost child, located with her school badge. These are the conditioners for the final rinse... when we have no choice. Eventually the infrastructure for this will be complete, and then, no one will be able to opt out, and tracking chips will go where we are told they will go, and that would be the mark of the beast.
Excellent research! Excellent blog, as always. Well done.
I share your mixed feelings on this topic. I'm inherently a private person, but recognize that once we are in public, we forfeit some of those rights. School is a public institution, and I believe they have the right to know where a student is on campus. I believe they also have a right to document and store student information in a way that is accessible to them, but otherwise private to others.
That said, I would take issue with the location chip being able to be used by the school to monitor non school related off-site activities. Is that realistic? Doubtful. There would have to be some sort of check-and-balance in place to verify that information wasn't being abused.
Grades and other data. Ugh. The fact is that this IS where society is headed. And honestly, I can see a chip under OUR skin as a practical solution to a lot of identity theft or violation issues. It's pretty hard to lose one's hand. And if you have no hands, you definitely have a head. Ergo, we find ourselves in the possible "mark-of-the-beast" scenario. Mind you, I do have radically different ideas about the Book of Revelation than do the theologically conservative Christians ... but I do see where they'd freak. But back to information on one chip. I'd be concerned that a single scan of said chip would hold ALL information - financial, medical, scholastic, legal, etc about a person.
It may be hard to lose a hand ... but it wouldn't be hard for someone to cut a chip out of it.
@saturnnights - I'm a big fan of Person of Interest. The segues of cameras watchng people on city streets, in public buildings, etc are not made up, these actually happen. In the UK, cameras watch the streets all the time and these have had an impact on solving crimes. Still, it's creepy. The building I work in is being renovated and will have (they tell us) over 250 cameras watching the "public" areas. Maybe they will see just how hard I work!
@BookMark61 - Thank you. My understanding of the chips is that they have a limited range and are useless off the school grounds. Is it possible that the "mark of the beast" brings us ever nearer to the knowledge that the "God who knows how many hairs are on my head"? This time the Tower of Babel will be less one of language and more one of storages. Interesting....and creepy....
To me, it sounds like another way government will end up trying to tie our hands. You know the drill: you must do X, but not by doing Y (or in addition to doing the opposite Z.) You must keep track of the kids, but not by any way that we say you can't use.
@DMMeyer -Gee, you sound like a jaded educator
Seriously, we have to watch the kids when they are in our care (loco parentis) and kids, being the slippery creatures that they are, do their best to slip from our grasp. I'm not sure what the answer is....but I'll be keeping an eye on this issue...
@BookMark61 - recalling a sci-fi movie where a guy switched his barcode with some can of produce or something, and another where a guy cut another guy's arm off and used it in a scanner. I think I saw it with fintertips as well... we've been told the truth so many times, but it's called 'fiction", so we go on believing it's a fantasy, but here we living in Alphaville. : )
@brokenbindings2 - These newer buildings can "hear" as well as "see". Folks get used to the cameras, then forget them, but part of the surveillance in buildings is to listen, and wow can they hear! Unless you're in a public restroom/locker room or changing area, I wonder how much privacy we're now "legally" entitled to?
Also, in Argentina, there is a tower of babel built from books, or information. I'm always reminded of the tower of TV monitors an artist had displayed somewhere in a building's atrium... tower of babble
@saturnnights - I'm curious to know more about the buildings that "hear"....I can imagine microphones everywhere but is there also newer technology?
@brokenbindings2 - I was referring to microphones, but yeah, some of the cameras have them built in so that installation is easier. I've seen some very small, inexpensive cameras that have microphones that are uber sensitive, meaning normal tones of conversation are picked up and easily heard... Every word. So, considering what I saw was not all that impressive, at least in the range of others available I can only imagine what a high end mic could hear. Surveillance is surveillance, and cameras are only a part of it.
Comments are closed.