Posted on 09/15/2010 8:22:46 PM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
A California school district is using some $115,000 of federal stimulus money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 to have kids wear vests with RFID chips embedded so their every move inside the school complex can be monitored.
A report from TechNewsDaily cites the work of the Contra Costa County Employment and Human Services agency, which already has spent $50,000 setting up the system for a first Head Start site.
"We did some research and we thought this would be a good utilization for the money," Karen Mitchoff, an agency spokeswoman, told TechNews Daily.
The action has raised some alarms among privacy advocates, but also met a qualified endorsement from a columnist at the RFID Journal.
There, Mark Roberti wrote, "I think it is fair to say that there are several good reasons to use RFID to track school children. But I was struck by a New York Times editorial on the topic ... that was unusually balanced for an article about RFID. The editors wrote, 'Concern that school officials would use the ID chips to keep tabs on children's behavior – and tag them perhaps as hyperactive or excessively passive – seems overwrought.' But it also asks the question, 'Though it may seem innocuous to attach a chip to our preschoolers' clothes, do we really want to raise a generation of kids that are accustomed to being tracked, like cattle or warehouse inventory?"
He continued, "This is a profound question. If we track all children with technology and they get used to it, do we open the possibility that they will accept government tracking of them as adults?"
(Excerpt) Read more at wnd.com ...
I remember getting into arguments here on FR 10 years ago about how RFID would lead to large scale tracking. It could never happen of course because RFID at the time could only be tracked when it was within a few feet of the scanner in a direct line of sight.
However, like all electronics technology, things improve...fast. And here we are.
Next stop, RFID implants for newborns.
When I was about 11 I remember walking across US 441 a couple tiems a week at school to buy the principal his daily 3-4 packs of Kent 100’s. At recess after lunch about 90% of the boys in the class headed across a hill on the school playground to the creek to smoke cigarettes. That event in today’s schools would make national headlines.
Someone needs a pink slip.
I always walked home from school and immediately jumped on my bike and wasn’t seen again until it got dark. All without chips, or cell phones, or the mom mobile following close behind. Oh, and no helmet or pads or pepper spray. Summers were spent in the river all day without adult supervision. At 14, I went through customs at JKF by myself with a bottle of booze and not an eye was batted.
Hmmmm, they spent stimulus money (i.e. our tax dollars) to basically treat these school kids similar to cattle. Whatever happened to "teaching" the kids the three R's+? How do these vests improve the education of these children? It seems their use of the funds are a big FAIL!
However, like all electronics technology, things improve...fast. And here we are.
Yup. Even further back, I was discussing these things on BBSes. We were way ahead of the curve on a lot of things back then.
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