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ACLU Rips Plan to Track R.I. Students
PROVIDENCE, R.I. - A tech company with ties to a school district plans to test a tracking system by putting computer chips on grade-schoolers' backpacks, an experiment the ACLU ripped Monday as invasive and unnecessary.The pilot program set to start next week in the Middletown school district would have about 80 children put tags containing radio frequency identification chips, or RFID chips, on their schoolbags. It would also equip two buses with global positioning systems, or GPS devices.
The school and parents will be able to track students on the bus, and the district hopes the program will improve busing efficiency, Superintendent Rosemarie Kraeger said. The devices are intended to record only when students enter and exit the bus, and the GPS would show where the bus was on it's route.
Parents could opt out of the program, Kraeger said.
The pilot program, made by MAP Information Technology Corp., is to run for several months at the Aquidneck School, she said. The district, which serves about 2,500 students, is the company's only client, said Deborah Rapp, the company's director of marketing and communications.
Steven Brown, executive director of the Rhode Island chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, sent a letter to Kraeger and members of the school committee calling the plan "a solution in search of a problem" and saying the school district should already have procedures in place to track where its students are.
On Monday, he said the program raises enormous privacy and safety concerns.
"There's absolutely no need to be tagging children," he said. "We are not questioning the school district's ability to use GPS to monitor school buses. But it's a quantitative leap to monitor children themselves."
Rapp described the system as limited in scope.
"The program is solely designed to provide accountability when the children are in transit, from the moment they enter the bus to the moment they exit," she said. "It is limited to when they are on the bus. We in no way take it beyond that."
Brown also raised concerns that unauthorized people, perhaps using RFID readers that are easily bought online, could exploit information contained on the tags.
Ed Collins, the district's facilities manager, said that would not be possible. Collins and Rapp said the RFID tag would only contain an ID number, not a name, address or other personal information. Only the school administration would be able to match the ID number with the child, Rapp said.
Collins is the brother of Chris Collins, who founded MAP Information Technology last year. The district did not need clearance from the state ethics commission to set up the testing, however, because the program is free during the pilot, Kraeger said.
Officials with the district, which neighbors a naval station and the famed yachting community of Newport, said they didn't have an estimate on what it would cost to put the tracking system in place district-wide.
Kraeger said she was unaware of the controversy ignited three years ago when a Northern California school system planned to put in place an RFID system to track students at school. The proposal died after protests by parents and privacy and civil liberties advocates, including the ACLU.
The Middletown school board approved the pilot program in November. In a recent letter to parents, the company and the district explained the program and invited parents to get in touch with the school system if they had any questions, Rapp said. No one called.
The district was interested in trying out the program in the hopes that it would improve communication with parents, who will be able to check a Web site to see whether the buses are on time and their children are on them, Kraeger said.
Tracking students' movements will be no different from an existing system that allows parents to see what their child had for lunch or check their attendance record, Kraeger said.
"If a bus were delayed, they could look for their own student ID and see where the bus was," she said.
© 2008 The Associated Press
19 Comments so far
Show AllI like the fact that supposedly nobody called. Astounding how domesticated Homo sapiens have become. Just like domestic livestock, safe in their pens.
What's next? Tatooing serial numbers on the children's arms?
What are they smoking?
I suppose if you want people to be sheep you should start to train them young that there's going to be someone watching over them. Not like the idea of a god has worked to accomplish that goal, I doubt this idea would work any better.
"What are they smoking?" I dunno skippyagogo41, but what ever it is has made our entire country afraid of everything. The average suburban dweller, especially those with kids, sees the world as a scary place and is willing to do what ever they are told by high tech marketing and government officials. I am scared too, only I am scared of the ones who are going out of their way to frighten the population into believing that such an intrusion is not only good, but necessary. The only ones benefiting from this are the people selling the technology.
Folks - THINK just a little - PLEASE!!!
This is a preliminary test proposed by our government, using innocent children and schools, to make the 'tracking of citizens' (or others) available to the fascists who're trying to take total control. I'm skeptical enough of any movement of this sort to believe that the hidden examiner of such is the government's way of perfecting their instruments for total control!!! You've read about the biometric study now under way? Think about it - this is just another ploy to get what they want while we, the innocent and gullible, meekly oblige~!!!
why do they need the chips if they have a tracking system on the bus?
This is such BS Ron Paul is against RFID chips and for the constitution
VOTE RON PAUL
So, does this mean that a sexual predator can also electronically track the movements of various sixth graders? The RFID chip won't give the kids' names, just a code, but if kids can be tracked to individual homes the name on the mailbox is a big hint. A predator might look for a kid's typical itinerary. Tracking many kids might help the predator to pick out the most vulnerable kid. For example, will the website say which kids didn't get on the bus? Who didn't come to school and is probably sick at home? Who didn't catch the bus and is probably walking home today?
It'll come to us insidiously out of the edges of darkness.
Perhaps it'll be part of the new automobile anti-drunk and banking/car theft avoidance systems, so that "hard to control" identity theft can not impact our families.
We will be lead into this, and we will choose this as the better of many choices all equally bad, and even more we'll be happy about it.
Mark my words, for future reference, the eventual chipping of Americans is more predictable than either death or taxes.
It's going to look so much better than losing everything else we have, and thereby quite a bargain (for them).
"Do not go gentle into that good night; … Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
-- Dylan Thomas.
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Next is chips in the arses of Brown students and those from URI, Barrington
College, Providence College, Johnson&Wales,
Rhode Island College, the business school,
etc., and EVERYBODY KNOWS HOW DANGEROUS THEY ARE.
During our recent blizzard last month here in Rhode Island, some school buses were stranded in traffic, because... well, it's a long story. Anyway, some students didn't get home from school til 9pm that night (schools were let out at noon). (Many parents weren't sure where their children were exactly, though cellphones allowed communication in many cases). This will ultimately be the argument of the pro-computer chip crowd. Just wondering why the chip will go on backpacks?... wouldn't they rather insert a chip under the students' epidermis? Or staple a chip to the students' ear, like a lion would have? I'm disappointed in their creativity...
There's a recent Dilbert (http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilbert-20071227.html) in which the office cubicle is reduced to a shell around the person.
I think these RFID's go the final step, and put the cubicle INSIDE the person.
Oh, but the children could put their bags down somewhere...we better just put the RFID chips under their skin.
Here it comes people RFID chips for all.
"The average suburban dweller, especially those with kids, sees the world as a scary place and is willing to do what ever they are told by high tech marketing and government officials."
I don't suppose that has anything to do with the fearmongering by the news networks, coupled with "entertainment" programs being 90% bloody murder mysteries. If you go by TV, there is a homicidal psychopath waiting in every single dark alley. I doubt very much anyone consciously thinks "Gosh, I saw three children killed last night on Law and Order -- I should be afraid" but after seeing children raped and killed every night for ten years, I think the subconscious starts to respond with defense mechanisms.
These pussy footers should go straight to the shock collar method of control. The program could be downloaded directly into the chip in the collar so that if one of these little slave units diverts from the Dear Leader's orders of the day they are shocked. Persistent order violators parental units will be shocked for failing to control their component of the gene pool. Further reproduction will not be allowed.
That is where the genital control devices come into play.
Lets keep in mind that this is mostly a suburban "parental control" device. This wild paranoia about "predators" is one part of it, the other part is just parental control. They want to know wher their children go between the house and school-bus stop.
Just as AOL parental controls filter out a lot of politically progressive web sites from curious childrens eyes, this chip will allow parents to see if children are going places their parents don't approve of.
While I'm sure most CD readers are somewhat more enlightened parents, many parents don't approve of their children doing very much of anything at all these days. (mostly in suburbs - I am impressed at what city parents still let their kids do). During my upbringing, I grew and learned about things only to the extent that I snuck away and disobeyed my mother (and others) myself - from going down to the creek to look at the fish, frogs and geology; trespassing on the golf course to fish, skate and sled; reading dissaprived godless or un-american writers like Vonnegut, Keysey, and the tracts of Hoffman or Rubin.
Who was the guy who wrote the "1984"? He'll probably be rolling in his grave. These intrusive devices will probably be able to transmit private household conversations to Big Brother Uncle Sam.
While I'm glad the ACLU is taking on the case, I cannot help but think that we have a lot bigger Constitutional violations they could be worried about.
When all the little children are micro chipped, then Big Brother can keep the parents in line by disappearing the little ankle biters, will they ever be seen again?
A couple of years ago a Champion Whippet dog that was shown at Westminster Dog show, escaped from his crate at the airport. The dog has never been found. With a micro chip, you first have to have the body to scan in order to locate and return.
Now with this article, that is not the case. The chip can be tracked. So, what else are we not being told.
No chip for my dog or my kid.
ALL & CEE OH FARM GIRL -- The technology herein relies upon computers and GPS trackers within the bus _along_with_ the RFID chips.
The lost Whippet dog would be exactly as hard to find as a lost child with this tech in their backpacks.
There is absolutely no "tracking of the children" other than where they are scanned going into and out of the bus door.
Future tech, and the widespread distributed use of scanners that could pick up RFIDs at much greater distances (than say going through a contained space like a door way) -- do not as yet exist.
When the sensitivity can be improved, along with large numbers of scanners embedded and networked everywhere, and perhaps miniature batteries are added to the chips (to act as little beepers), then the tracking will be realized (in the scary sense).