A judge has granted her a reprieve [1] based on freedom of speech and freedom of religion grounds. The student claimed it violated her religious beliefs. I don't begrudge anyone the right to practice their religion, but I do wish it had been based on her right to privacy.
> I don't begrudge anyone the right to practice their religion, but I do wish it had been based on her right to privacy.
As much as I dislike it, most of the times when you are on someone else's playground, you have to play by their rules. When the govt. comes at you saying "internet needs to be censored because who will think of the children", making up another "think of the children" argument has more mass appeal than talking about how free and open is good.
> Like most state-financed schools, the district’s budget is tied to average daily attendance. If a student is not in his seat during morning roll call, the district doesn’t receive daily funding for that pupil because the school has no way of knowing for sure if the student is there.
So if this is all there is to it, why not just have a swipe-in and swipe-out at the main gate? If a student has swiped-in, he has entered the campus. Swipe-out will be just an assurance that the student didn't swipe-in and leave immediately. And is some students are concerned that it's still a smart card and can be used for tracking, or they really don't want it on religious grounds, have a biometric system(thumbprint or retina). That will be cheaper than giving everyone an RFID card.
Most important part of the article: "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."
That's kind of how it happened in UK with the CCTV cameras, I think. I don't think that future generations will be bothered by them anymore, unless the Government does something terrible and oppressive with them and the people find out and revolt about it. Then they might be up for discussion again, and someone who opposes them could get enough political support to remove them.
Sticking my foot out - Panopticons are not a bad thing. They're actually a really good thing, because they, theoretically, let you get a lot more security without losing a lot of liberty (instead, you lose privacy).
The problem people have - universally in my limited experience - is with the people and institutions behind the cameras, not the cameras themselves. If CCTV is Big Brother, isn't neighborhood watch something like Little Brother?
Students need the lanyard to use the library or cafeteria, vote in school elections,
I graduated from high school nearly 10 years ago, we had ID cards with magnetic stripes. I graduated from college with some additional voluntary coursework four years ago. We had cards with magnetic stripes and QR codes. Both worked in the function of identifying the student, and swiping in the mess hall as currency. Quantity wasn't a problem even with a student body count of nearly 5500 in a high school, our student numbers started with 0000 and were (iirc) 18 digits long.
So here's my question: why was RFID aggressively pushed if tracking wasn't an explicit understated purpose, when there is tech perfectly capable of performing the duties outlined?
I would guess most of the vendors of these types of systems are going RFID. Magnetic stripes are fragile, as anyone who's had their visa de-magnatized can tell you. They are also perceived as "less secure", as anyone who knows anyone who's had their visa card "skimmed" can tell you.
For these reasons alone, RFID is where the puck is going to be. Then on top of that you add in you can sell institutions on tracking packages and analytics software and all that crap? I'm sure you can still buy mag-stripe versions of all this, but the people who do this are probably pushing RFID hard.
You don't even need cards with magnetic stripes or QR codes. These are relatively modern inventions. Schools did just fine without them for millenia. I went to school without either, and the school managed to serve their student body just fine.
This obsession with tracking people's every movement and action, and the surveillance state built to satisfy it is really disturbing and pathological.
I graduated from a Catholic high school of 1200 ~7yr ago that in my last year actually used a similar RFID-tag system for the doors (was already using plain bar-codes for the cafeteria). AFAIK the (stated) purpose was access control; RFID makes a bit more technical sense simply to keep the doors from backing up or bar-codes getting muddied up (not that it kept the things from breaking continuously anyway). No one ever raised a fuss (not to say I personally agreed).
Corruption's always a possibility -- maybe the RFID provider is owned by a school board member's brother-in-law, or maybe they've paid off the right people.
But we don't need to assume malice where mere incompetence will suffice. I can easily see technologically illiterate school officials being wow'ed by slick company salesmen. Since too few citizens really care about local politics, it also isn't a stretch to think that nobody who realized the implications attended the school board meetings where it was discussed and approved.
By the time things get as far as they've gotten in this situation, the plan's supporters can't back away from the plan without losing money and face.
The obvious counterargument: When I was in primary school, we used paper and pencil cards to track items which were borrowed from the library. Why were barcodes and magnetic strips aggressively pushed when there was tech perfectly capable of performing the duties outlined?
Part of me thinks forcing this on a child is insane. Part of me realizes that I already have agreed to monitoring of this sort in fragmented ways: HID RFID badges to get into my residence building at university and into buildings during work terms; NFC for payments and my transit fare card; Google location history on my phone.
I imagine its a third systems engineer maximising profits/suckered into buying it, a third RFID manufacturers aggressively trying to consume marketing share and a third the proportion of people in the world who are really creepy and should stop spying on people.
Its unwieldy for most purposes in addition to the privacy concerns, but I'm reticent to go all Alex-Jones-fly-off-the-handle hysterical about this.
I went to a high school with metal detectors, reinforced doors, armed guards, dogs, cameras, central electronic locking, road and pedestrian checkpoints, and, yes, ID badges. As a high school student in the late 1990s, I was more closely monitored than your average prisoner.
So my takeaway from the article is pretty specific: Bullshit. Carrying a school ID badge with an RFID chip on the school's campus is no great injustice. It's trivial compared to the routine degradations inflicted on a public school student.
Somehow, this makes it to court, while the routine problems are ignored. It's OK to treat students like prisoners, right up until new technology is involved. The RFIDs are the scary part, not the guards, weapons, bars, and locks.
Where are these schools where these things are allowed and encouraged? Seems like it would be extremely expensive (in terms of money and student/teacher time) and disruptive to learning.
Same here. We had mandatory ID cards, a school police force including a drug dog, regular locker searches (which regularly turned up drugs), trouble for students that didn't attend including suspension and not passing, etc.. I read the article and really don't see it as any different from my old school requiring us all to have our IDs constantly. So it has an RFID instead of a number to read off. Big deal.
This reminds me of this case where the school was spying on students with the camera of the laptops they loaned them. Seriously, what are these people thinking? That 1984 was an instruction manual?
It brings to light once again what fucked up incentives/goals schools are pursuing, if it's not the safety/privacy of their pupils.
I remember when my high school installed surveillance cameras and a friend wrote an article, "Masses of Apathy", for the student newspaper about how it was so passively accepted. The principal of the school wrote a response scathing him for what amounted to disagreeing about students' privacy. Unsurprisingly, the cameras are there to this day.
Although I'm not pushing religion on anyone I feel like it should be mentioned that the religious ground she mentions might have something to do with this part of the Bible:
"He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead." Revelation 13:16
> "Other non-believers think John was a bit too fond of funny mushrooms and shouldn't be taken too seriously."
This kind of remark, regardless of author's beliefs, doesn't sound like a very good journalism style. (Also I guess it's a reference to Pantheocide from Salvation War series, http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/The_Salvation_War)
So, the journalist maybe didn't say it respectfully, but there is a strong possibility in there.
John was originally proselytizing in Rome, but the Romans got pissed off at him, so he was exiled to the island of Patmos. Amanita Muscarias grew on that island! And if you read trip reports (or, trip yourself?) you'll find that Amanitas give very extreme religious imagery.
So if you compare the imagery from modern day Amanita trips with what was written in revelations... you realize that it's very possible that St. John was writing a trip report. And because of that day's lack of understanding about drugs and those experiences are produced, he would chaulk it up to a message from God.
I think the thing that annoys me the most about this, is the money. We constantly hear from politicians and their constituents that we should spend more on education, that our students don't compete well with the rest of the industrialized world and more money will solve that problem, despite the fact that we spend more per student than anyone else -- and then this is what they turn around and spend it on. And they are spending it on things like this without showing us any need for it. And will they ask for money to improve education in schools in the next elections? Yes they will.
(Jumping ship from the other link to the same story)
Success metric fail.
Then again - What is the success metric for education? Attendance is (IMHO) pretty terrible, and standardized testing hasn't worked out the best - so what is it?
A classic answer (but still, probably not all that great of one) is jobs upon graduation - but that doesn't help in elementary school.
So, how would you go about turning such long-term metrics as "employment in ten years" into short term metrics, to figure out what to do next week?
Given that technology is supposed to increase efficiency (meaning fewer can do the work of more) I'm not sure that jobs are a great measure of educational success, or even the ideal goal of education.
We've seen the transition from almost all of society being involved in primary production to a small minority working in "big agriculture". Broad swathes of industry (construction, manufacturing, transport & logistics) being replaced by machines. Why do we assume there will even be a demand for labour which meets the needs of 90%+ of the population in 10 years time?
Often the counter-argument raised to this point is that "other jobs" will replace those which become defunct through new technology - instead of someone picking the crops by hand, they will maintain the harvesting machine. It seems to me there is a natural ceiling on the amount of productive work available before people simply end up rent-seeking/extracting value without creating anything in return - ie. trading futures on those crops, suing one another for selling dubious financial products which benefit no-one, and acting as social media liaison officers for the agro-business, financial services firm and law firm in question.
In my view optimising the education system to produce these outcomes (and then congratulating ourselves when everyone is gainfully "employed") misses the point by a fair margin.
Despite plenty of attention and funding, test scores continue to get worse. It's pretty clear that we have no idea what the solution to the education problem is. So it makes the most sense to try as many different things as possible until we stumble on a solution by accident.
So let every school try their own thing. Publish long-term metrics. Let parents choose where to send their children.
Standardization and centralization of school funding are part of the problem at this point. Tests are great at measuring -- until they become standardized and high-stakes, at which point the pressure causes teachers to start spending all their time "teaching to the test."
Also, many people have an incorrect assumption that every child has the same destiny. The very name of Bush's education masterpiece, "No Child Left Behind," implies that you'll dumb things down to the level of the worst student in the class. High school career counseling often pushes college on students who simply aren't cut out for it, while perfectly honorable but less prestigious life destinations, like the military or skilled trades, are starving for new recruits.
If you work at any big company, or any company with a secured office building, you have to wear or carry some sort of RFID badge, sometimes two. If you drive across a toll bridge or down a toll road, you need an RFID sticker on your car. You carry RFID cards to use public transit or Zipcar. I don't know what my point is, except that this kind of thing seems like part of the modern world, and it's not that strange to see schools implement it.
It's less about ensuring that students are at school, but ensuring that they are counted. The school district receives funding from the state dependent on attendance. That's what is meant in the article by "it's all about money". With the cameras and now RFID, they can record that the student is on the premises even if they are not in the homeroom for attendance taking. (There are legitimate reasons a student may miss roll call.)
I graduated from that school last year and I totally agree with her decision about refusing to wear it not her justification. In case anyone is wondering John Jay only exists still due to a magnet school called John Jay Science and Engineering Academy. The magnet school boosts test scores and attendance to a acceptable level for the state. This RFID Tracker is one last attempt at saving the school from being shut down.
> The school has already installed over 200 CCTV cameras in an attempt to curb truancy, some of which have a live link directly to the local police department, Whitehead said.
I can't even begin to... this is... I have no words.
What a complete waste of money. It's as if they actually expect the cops to sit down and continuously monitor all 200 cameras all day. Horrible waste of tax money on two fronts.
Also, say some cop does happen to see a kid walking out of school at 1:30. It's not like he's going to get all alerted and call the school to figure out the situation. No he's going to think "There goes some kid ... probably called out by his parents" and that's the end of that.
The privacy violation here is clearly of the second order. It is not the position of students which is private, but what can be inferred from their positions in aggregate. Your position data combined with data that you don't have can often say a lot about you.
Part of me is fascinated to see exactly what you can infer from the data. Can you detect drug usage? Sexual activity? Perhaps even some psychological problems like anti-social behavior?
Should parents want perfect information about what their kids do, even if just at school? Does the impersonal nature of this data's acquisition and inference erode the sense of connection and trust between a parent and child?
Although my own reaction to the news of the RFID policy was visceral and negative, I have to admit I sort of want to do the experiment and see what happens. I suspect that, as usual, the result will not be what anyone predicted.
At best I think you can infer who eats lunch in the cafeteria or who enjoys going to the library.... personal behaviors like drug use and sexual activity couldn't really be inferred without other sources of data.
I would be somewhat more tolerant of "required to wear RFID badge" if it were done for safety purposes -- for instance, to maintain accountability over a group 5-6 year olds, or on a trip, or if someone was "special needs" (emotionally/mentally disabled) and prone to running off.
There are lots of advantages of RFID/NFC over magstripe or 2d barcode, even for simple applications like cafeteria payment -- faster reads, and the readers themselves are far more robust.
Issuing the cards with an RF shield envelope pretty much solves legitimate complaints. It turns it from a passive monitoring technology to something active, and it's maybe ok to require people to badge-in to get access to places with expensive or stealable assets -- badge into the computer lab, library, etc.
The problem here is the way the school is funded. The reason that the school put forward is that the school's funding is based on the number of kids marked as in attendance in first period so they are using this system to increase those numbers by locating students already on campus but not in class.
So root cause here is the funding model. That's what needs to be changed. Funding should not be based on a variable number of students that happen to be at school on a given day. There are a number of fixed costs in running a school that the current funding model doesn't take into account.
So if you're pissed at this you should be more pissed at WHY they implemented it in the first place.
Not wearing an RFID badge later in life will severely restrict this student's employment prospects, as they are very prevalent in many workplaces now. Would be interesting to know if her parents have to wear RFID badges where they work.
The student refuses to wear the id even with the tag removed. Can someone explain to me what she is protesting against?
Why shouldn't schools know where the students are on campus and when students enter and leave campus? Attendance would be much better if parents could be called immediately when kids leave campus to skip. Kids could be kept safer since its harder to get away with violence with a log of everyone's location on campus.
[+] [-] nhebb|13 years ago|reply
[1] http://dailycaller.com/2012/11/22/christian-student-wins-rep...
[+] [-] irahul|13 years ago|reply
As much as I dislike it, most of the times when you are on someone else's playground, you have to play by their rules. When the govt. comes at you saying "internet needs to be censored because who will think of the children", making up another "think of the children" argument has more mass appeal than talking about how free and open is good.
> Like most state-financed schools, the district’s budget is tied to average daily attendance. If a student is not in his seat during morning roll call, the district doesn’t receive daily funding for that pupil because the school has no way of knowing for sure if the student is there.
So if this is all there is to it, why not just have a swipe-in and swipe-out at the main gate? If a student has swiped-in, he has entered the campus. Swipe-out will be just an assurance that the student didn't swipe-in and leave immediately. And is some students are concerned that it's still a smart card and can be used for tracking, or they really don't want it on religious grounds, have a biometric system(thumbprint or retina). That will be cheaper than giving everyone an RFID card.
[+] [-] Evbn|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kintamanimatt|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mtgx|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickbarone|13 years ago|reply
The problem people have - universally in my limited experience - is with the people and institutions behind the cameras, not the cameras themselves. If CCTV is Big Brother, isn't neighborhood watch something like Little Brother?
[+] [-] iamdave|13 years ago|reply
I graduated from high school nearly 10 years ago, we had ID cards with magnetic stripes. I graduated from college with some additional voluntary coursework four years ago. We had cards with magnetic stripes and QR codes. Both worked in the function of identifying the student, and swiping in the mess hall as currency. Quantity wasn't a problem even with a student body count of nearly 5500 in a high school, our student numbers started with 0000 and were (iirc) 18 digits long.
So here's my question: why was RFID aggressively pushed if tracking wasn't an explicit understated purpose, when there is tech perfectly capable of performing the duties outlined?
[+] [-] kennywinker|13 years ago|reply
For these reasons alone, RFID is where the puck is going to be. Then on top of that you add in you can sell institutions on tracking packages and analytics software and all that crap? I'm sure you can still buy mag-stripe versions of all this, but the people who do this are probably pushing RFID hard.
[+] [-] gnosis|13 years ago|reply
This obsession with tracking people's every movement and action, and the surveillance state built to satisfy it is really disturbing and pathological.
[+] [-] ConstantineXVI|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] csense|13 years ago|reply
But we don't need to assume malice where mere incompetence will suffice. I can easily see technologically illiterate school officials being wow'ed by slick company salesmen. Since too few citizens really care about local politics, it also isn't a stretch to think that nobody who realized the implications attended the school board meetings where it was discussed and approved.
By the time things get as far as they've gotten in this situation, the plan's supporters can't back away from the plan without losing money and face.
[+] [-] cbhl|13 years ago|reply
Part of me thinks forcing this on a child is insane. Part of me realizes that I already have agreed to monitoring of this sort in fragmented ways: HID RFID badges to get into my residence building at university and into buildings during work terms; NFC for payments and my transit fare card; Google location history on my phone.
[+] [-] chromaticorb|13 years ago|reply
Its unwieldy for most purposes in addition to the privacy concerns, but I'm reticent to go all Alex-Jones-fly-off-the-handle hysterical about this.
[+] [-] hapless|13 years ago|reply
So my takeaway from the article is pretty specific: Bullshit. Carrying a school ID badge with an RFID chip on the school's campus is no great injustice. It's trivial compared to the routine degradations inflicted on a public school student.
Somehow, this makes it to court, while the routine problems are ignored. It's OK to treat students like prisoners, right up until new technology is involved. The RFIDs are the scary part, not the guards, weapons, bars, and locks.
[+] [-] mitchty|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] theorique|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lnanek2|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mercurial|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] derwiki|13 years ago|reply
I remember when my high school installed surveillance cameras and a friend wrote an article, "Masses of Apathy", for the student newspaper about how it was so passively accepted. The principal of the school wrote a response scathing him for what amounted to disagreeing about students' privacy. Unsurprisingly, the cameras are there to this day.
[+] [-] xutopia|13 years ago|reply
"He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead." Revelation 13:16
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|13 years ago|reply
This kind of remark, regardless of author's beliefs, doesn't sound like a very good journalism style. (Also I guess it's a reference to Pantheocide from Salvation War series, http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/The_Salvation_War)
[+] [-] civilian|13 years ago|reply
John was originally proselytizing in Rome, but the Romans got pissed off at him, so he was exiled to the island of Patmos. Amanita Muscarias grew on that island! And if you read trip reports (or, trip yourself?) you'll find that Amanitas give very extreme religious imagery.
So if you compare the imagery from modern day Amanita trips with what was written in revelations... you realize that it's very possible that St. John was writing a trip report. And because of that day's lack of understanding about drugs and those experiences are produced, he would chaulk it up to a message from God.
## edit: more links http://www.erowid.org/plants/amanitas/
http://www.erowid.org/archive/rhodium/pdf/amanita.muscaria.r...
However any references to amanitas or mushrooms are not in the wiki article for the Book of Revelations.
[+] [-] mercurial|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mdonahoe|13 years ago|reply
Can students use a directory to see where in the building their friends are, or where to find a particular teacher?
I wonder if a surveillance society could work if everyone was allowed access to the information.
Opt-in systems seem to work better. Twitter, foursquare, facebook, etc. would be pretty terrible if they were government mandated.
[+] [-] krapp|13 years ago|reply
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eG0KrT6pBPk
tl;dw -- it does.
[+] [-] rizzom5000|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickbarone|13 years ago|reply
Success metric fail.
Then again - What is the success metric for education? Attendance is (IMHO) pretty terrible, and standardized testing hasn't worked out the best - so what is it?
A classic answer (but still, probably not all that great of one) is jobs upon graduation - but that doesn't help in elementary school.
So, how would you go about turning such long-term metrics as "employment in ten years" into short term metrics, to figure out what to do next week?
[+] [-] westicle|13 years ago|reply
We've seen the transition from almost all of society being involved in primary production to a small minority working in "big agriculture". Broad swathes of industry (construction, manufacturing, transport & logistics) being replaced by machines. Why do we assume there will even be a demand for labour which meets the needs of 90%+ of the population in 10 years time?
Often the counter-argument raised to this point is that "other jobs" will replace those which become defunct through new technology - instead of someone picking the crops by hand, they will maintain the harvesting machine. It seems to me there is a natural ceiling on the amount of productive work available before people simply end up rent-seeking/extracting value without creating anything in return - ie. trading futures on those crops, suing one another for selling dubious financial products which benefit no-one, and acting as social media liaison officers for the agro-business, financial services firm and law firm in question.
In my view optimising the education system to produce these outcomes (and then congratulating ourselves when everyone is gainfully "employed") misses the point by a fair margin.
[+] [-] csense|13 years ago|reply
So let every school try their own thing. Publish long-term metrics. Let parents choose where to send their children.
Standardization and centralization of school funding are part of the problem at this point. Tests are great at measuring -- until they become standardized and high-stakes, at which point the pressure causes teachers to start spending all their time "teaching to the test."
Also, many people have an incorrect assumption that every child has the same destiny. The very name of Bush's education masterpiece, "No Child Left Behind," implies that you'll dumb things down to the level of the worst student in the class. High school career counseling often pushes college on students who simply aren't cut out for it, while perfectly honorable but less prestigious life destinations, like the military or skilled trades, are starving for new recruits.
[+] [-] BadCookie|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] z0a|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philwelch|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mhb|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alecperkins|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Androsynth|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] QuantumGuy|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] namank|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quink|13 years ago|reply
> The school has already installed over 200 CCTV cameras in an attempt to curb truancy, some of which have a live link directly to the local police department, Whitehead said.
I can't even begin to... this is... I have no words.
[+] [-] lopatin|13 years ago|reply
Also, say some cop does happen to see a kid walking out of school at 1:30. It's not like he's going to get all alerted and call the school to figure out the situation. No he's going to think "There goes some kid ... probably called out by his parents" and that's the end of that.
[+] [-] javajosh|13 years ago|reply
Part of me is fascinated to see exactly what you can infer from the data. Can you detect drug usage? Sexual activity? Perhaps even some psychological problems like anti-social behavior?
Should parents want perfect information about what their kids do, even if just at school? Does the impersonal nature of this data's acquisition and inference erode the sense of connection and trust between a parent and child?
Although my own reaction to the news of the RFID policy was visceral and negative, I have to admit I sort of want to do the experiment and see what happens. I suspect that, as usual, the result will not be what anyone predicted.
[+] [-] knowaveragejoe|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rdl|13 years ago|reply
There are lots of advantages of RFID/NFC over magstripe or 2d barcode, even for simple applications like cafeteria payment -- faster reads, and the readers themselves are far more robust.
Issuing the cards with an RF shield envelope pretty much solves legitimate complaints. It turns it from a passive monitoring technology to something active, and it's maybe ok to require people to badge-in to get access to places with expensive or stealable assets -- badge into the computer lab, library, etc.
[+] [-] Osiris|13 years ago|reply
So root cause here is the funding model. That's what needs to be changed. Funding should not be based on a variable number of students that happen to be at school on a given day. There are a number of fixed costs in running a school that the current funding model doesn't take into account.
So if you're pissed at this you should be more pissed at WHY they implemented it in the first place.
[+] [-] nekojima|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robotjosh|13 years ago|reply
Why shouldn't schools know where the students are on campus and when students enter and leave campus? Attendance would be much better if parents could be called immediately when kids leave campus to skip. Kids could be kept safer since its harder to get away with violence with a log of everyone's location on campus.
[+] [-] jrockway|13 years ago|reply