Boston.com / Business / Technology / Parents protest student computer ID tags
SUTTER, Calif. -- The only grade school in this rural town is requiring students to wear radio frequency identification badges that can track their every move. Some parents are outraged, fearing it will take away their children's privacy.
The badges introduced at Brittan Elementary School on Jan. 18 rely on the same radio frequency and scanner technology that companies use to track livestock and product inventory. Similar devices have recently been used to monitor youngsters in some parts of Japan.
I blogged the story from Japan here earlier.
Posted by bill at February 10, 2005 10:25 PMI recently received this story in the CASPIAN (Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion And Numbering) Newsletter (http://www.nocards.org):
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ANOTHER WIN: NO SPYCHIPS FOR CALIFORNIA SCHOOL KIDS!
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Hooray! Your calls and letters added to the heat in Sutter, California,
where the Brittan Elementary school principal and superintendent had
mandated that students be tracked with RFID tags worn around their
necks. Now those kids are spychip-free, thanks to the efforts of
freedom-loving citizens, committed civil libertarians, and brave kids
and parents who just said, "No!"
For the last two weeks, national attention has focused on a small town,
Big-Brother school, and its ill-conceived plan to track kids through
spychipped security badges. Bad publicity, parent protests, the
involvement of civil liberties organizations, threatened lawsuits, and
a
torrent of negative phone calls and email finally caused InCom, the
company behind the technology, to call the whole thing off.
Thanks for your help in killing this awful program!
Resources:
Read the letter sent to the board of trustees by ACLU, EPIC, and EFF:
http://www.eff.org/Privacy/Surveillance/RFID/schools/ACLU_EFF_EPIC_letter.pdf
Over 80 stories listed in Google news today:
http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=sutter+rfid&btnG=Search+News
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Good news for privacy advocates. Bad news for Big Brother.
Stand tall and fight, and take care.
jdf @ http://wakeuptheusa.blogspot.com