UPDATE: Students in Texas to be monitored with microchips (Mark of the Beast)

[Opmmur]

Students in Texas to be monitored with microchips

Students walk through campus between classes at Santa Monica College in Santa Monica, California April 4, 2012 (Reuters/Bret Hartman)

If it’s good enough for a dog, it’s good enough for a kid, right? A school district in Texas will be watching over its students a lot more closely, but not with the aid of extra teachers. Instead each pupil will be monitored with microchips.

Officials at the Northside Independent School District in rural Bexar County, Texas have approved a plan to track the whereabouts of each and every student by requiring them to walk the halls with identification cards in their pockets that are equipped with RFID microchips.

By using Radio Frequency Identification System technology, teachers and faculty will be able to monitor the move of over 6,000 students at two select schools and every pupil with special needs throughout the district as soon as next semester. If the pilot program is a success, the district intends on expanding the tracking system to all of its 112 schools, totaling nearly 100,000 students.

Backers of the program say the move is well intentioned and will actually bring the school millions of dollars in extra funding. Ghastly attendance rates in Bexar County currently keeps the district from earning around $175,000 a day in state assistance, reports KHOU News out of San Antonio, TX. Speaking to that city’s Express-News, district spokesman Pascual Gonzalez explains that the school wants “to harness the power of (the) technology to make schools safer, know where our students are all the time in a school, and increase revenue.”

When each step of the students is being watched by administrators, the district expects to see their absentee count drop drastically. But is it worth the cost of killing the privacy of thousands?

“It’s going to give us the opportunity to track our students in the building," Principal Wendy Reyes of Jones Middle School tells KHOU. “They may have been in the nurse’s office, or the counselor’s office, or vice principal’s office, but they were marked absent from the classroom because they weren't sitting in the class. It will help us have a more accurate account of our attendance.”

It will also let teachers know who is in the bathroom and for how long and monitor the group habits of students. It could also become catastrophic, of course, if the very sensitive data ends up in the wrong hands. Similar programs were pitched elsewhere in recent years, but in other instances the American Civil Liberties Union stepped up to speak out; in many cases, the programs were shot down after the ACLU intervened.

"We are urging the school board to recognize the important civil liberties concerns and safety risks implicated in RFID technology," the ACLU’s Nicole Ozer, the technology and civil Liberties policy director of their Northern California office, wrote in a statement back in 2005 . "RFID badges jeopardize the safety and security of children by broadcasting identity and location information to anyone with a chip reader and subject students to demeaning tracking of their movements. We hope the school district reconsiders this serious issue."

In that case, the ACLU was opposed to a program at Brittan Elementary School Board in Sutter, California where youngsters were being tracked with RFID chips. Even though that kind of technology has become both more advanced and commonplace in the seven years since, it doesn’t change the concerns that continue to arise.

"The monitoring of children with RFID tags is comparable to the tracking of cattle, shipment pallets, or very dangerous criminals in high-security prisons," Cédric Laurant of EPIC told the ACLU in 2005. "Compelling children to be constantly tracked with RFID-enabled identity badges breaches their right to privacy and dignity as human beings."

But, hey — how else is the school going to raise a few grand?

 

[Opmmur]

Texas schools punish students who refuse to be tracked with microchips

A school district in Texas came under fire earlier this year when it announced that it would require students to wear microchip-embedded ID cards at all times. Now students who refuse to be monitored say they are feeling the repercussions.

Since October 1, students at John Jay High School and Anson Jones Middle School in San Antonia, Texas have been asked to attend class clasping onto photo ID cards equipped with radio-frequency identification chips to keep track of each and every pupil’s personal location. Educators insist that the endeavor is being rolled out in Texas to relax the rampant truancy rates devastating the state’s school and the subsequent funding they are failing to receive as a result, and pending the program’s success the RFID chips could soon come to 112 schools in all and affect nearly 100,000 students.

Some pupils say they are already seeing the impact, though, and it’s not one they are very anxious to experience. Students who refuse to walk the schoolhouse halls with a location-sensitive sensor in their pocket or around their neck are being tormented by instructors and being barred from participating in certain school-wide functions, with some saying they are even being turned away from common areas like cafeterias and libraries.

Andrea Hernandez, a sophomore at John Jay, says educators have ignored her pleas to have her privacy respected and have told her she can’t participate in school elections if she doesn’t submit to the tracking program.

To Salon, Hernandez says subjecting herself to constant monitoring by way of wearing a RFID chip is comparable to clothing herself in the “mark of the beast.” When she reached out to WND.com to reveal the school’s response, though, she told them that she was threatened with exclusion from picking a homecoming king and queen for not adhering to the rules.

"I had a teacher tell me I would not be allowed to vote because I did not have the proper voter ID," Hernandez told WND. "I had my old student ID card which they originally told us would be good for the entire four years we were in school. He said I needed the new ID with the chip in order to vote."

Even after Hernandez politely refused to wear an RFID chip, Deputy Superintendent Ray Galindo offered a statement that suggests that both the student’s religious and civil liberty-anchored arguments will only allow her some leeway for so long.

“We are simply asking your daughter to wear an ID badge as every other student and adult on the Jay campus is asked to do,” Galindo wrote to the girl’s parents, WND reports. If she is allowed to forego the tracking now, he continued, it could only be a matter of time before the school signs off on making location-monitoring mandatory and the repercussions will be more than just revoking voting rights for homecoming contests.

“I urge you to accept this solution so that your child’s instructional program will not be affected. As we discussed, there will be consequences for refusal to wear an ID card as we begin to move forward with full implementation,” Galindo continued.

The girl’s father, Steve Hernandez, tells WND that the school has been somewhat willing to work with the daughter’s demands, but insists that her family “would have to agree to stop criticizing the program” and start publically supporting it.

“I told him that was unacceptable because it would imply an endorsement of the district’s policy and my daughter and I should not have to give up our constitutional rights to speak out against a program that we feel is wrong,” Mr. Hernandez responded.

By reversing the poor attendance figures, the Northside Independent School District is expected to collect upwards of $2 million in state funding, with the program itself costing around one-quarter of that to roll out and another $136,005 annually to keep it up and running. The savings the school stands to make in the long run won’t necessarily negate the other damages that could arise: Heather Fazio, of Texans for Accountable Government tells WND that for $30 she filed a Freedom of Information Act request and received the names and addresses of every student in the school district.

“Using this information along with an RFID reader means a predator could use this information to determine if the student is at home and then track them wherever they go. These chips are always broadcasting so anyone with a reader can track them anywhere,” she says.

Kirsten Bokenkamp of the ACLU told the San Antonio Express-News earlier this year that her organization was expecting to challenge the board’s decision this to roll out the tracking system, but the school has since gone ahead anyway. Steve Hernandez tells WND that he approached the ACLU for possible representation in his daughter’s case, but Rebecca Robertson of a local branch of the organization said, “the ACLU of Texas will not be able to represent you or your daughter in this matter,” saying his daughter’s case in particular fails to meet the criteria they use to pick and choose civil liberties cases to take on.

 

[Samstwitch]

Beware, it's coming folks! This is just the beginning...

Mark of the Beast: MARC = Multiple Automated Readout Computer Chip

 

[JTFriend]

This is so awful I can't even read it.

 

[titorite]

My nephews and nieces in houston have had this for years now.... it started out as just a chip to track who was getting on and off their busses.... then it evolved.

Reject the chip folks.

 

[Samstwitch]

Judge: Texas school can force teenagers to wear locator chip

SAN ANTONIO (Reuters) - A public school district in Texas can require students to wear locator chips when they are on school property, a federal judge ruled on Tuesday in a case raising technology-driven privacy concerns among liberal and conservative groups alike.

U.S. District Judge Orlando Garcia said the San Antonio Northside School District had the right to expel sophomore Andrea Hernandez, 15, from a magnet school at Jay High School, because she refused to wear the device, which is required of all students.

The judge refused the student's request to block the district from removing her from the school while the case works its way through the federal courts.

The American Civil Liberties Union is among the rights organizations to oppose the district's use of radio frequency identification, or RFID, technology.

"We don't want to see this kind of intrusive surveillance infrastructure gain inroads into our culture," ACLU senior policy analyst Jay Stanley said. "We should not be teaching our children to accept such an intrusive surveillance technology."

The district's RFID policy has also been criticized by conservatives, who call it an example of "big government" further monitoring individuals and eroding their liberties and privacy rights.

The Rutherford Institute, a conservative Virginia-based policy center that represented Hernandez in her federal court case, said the ruling violated the student's constitutional right to privacy, and vowed to appeal.

The school district - the fourth largest in Texas with about 100,000 students - is not attempting to track or regulate students' activities, or spy on them, district spokesman Pascual Gonzalez said. Northside is using the technology to locate students who are in the school building but not in the classroom when the morning bell rings, he said.

Texas law counts a student present for purposes of distributing state aid to education funds based on the number of pupils in the classroom at the start of the day. Northside said it was losing $1.7 million a year due to students loitering in the stairwells or chatting in the hallways.

The software works only within the walls of the school building, cannot track the movements of students, and does not allow students to be monitored by third parties, Gonzalez said.

The ruling gave Hernandez and her father, an outspoken opponent of the use of RFID technology, until the start of the spring semester later this month to decide whether to accept district policy and remain at the magnet school or return to her home campus, where RFID chips are not required.

Christian Family Refuses Mandatory RFID Chip at Texas School

 

[Samstwitch]

This update is really great news! The School District that was forcing Students to wear an RFID computer chip has cancelled the requirement. Prior to this, students had protested the order. One student's family filed a lawsuit. Many considered it a prelude to The Mark of the Beast as described in Bible Prophecy. (So do I.) Here's the latest on this story below.

ID chip no more: NISD cancels controversial student-tracking program

SAN ANTONIO – July 16, 2013 - A controversial student-tracking system has been officially 'ditched' by Northside Independent School District officials.

The ID chip was supposed to increase attendance by tracking students' locations on campus, in an attempt to boost attendance rates. Instead, the chips led to outrage and a lawsuit.

“The RFID device used at John Jay High School and Jones Middle School will cease,” NISD spokesperson Pascual Gonzalez said.

The expected gains-in-attendance numbers never materialized. At John Jay attendance jumped from 94.2 percent to 94.7 percent; the middle school's rate increased by a mere 0.7 percent.

What did climb was nation-wide criticism of privacy and civil-rights violations.

And then, there was a student who refused to carry the ID, Andrea Hernandez. She filed a lawsuit and was eventually expelled -- district and appeals courts upheld the school district’s decision.

Hernandez’s family cheered the news of the dropped program on a Facebook page administered by Hernandez's dad.

The post stated: “WE WON WE WON THANK YOU EVERYONE FOR YOUR PRAYERS NO MORE RFID…”

Hernandez's attorneys said the 'court of public opinion' prevailed.

The Rutherford Institute attorney John Whitehead said, “I think you’re going to find as these things go on -- especially with all the revelations we’re having with the NSA and government watching people -- there are going to be more people who are going to object to this.”

“The key to these programs is having an opt-out procedure, for those who don’t want to be part of the program,” Whitehead added.

Northside officials said the RFID program wasn’t cost effective; it actually increased workloads on staff at John Jay High School and Jones Middle School.

NISD officials said a survey of parents, students and teachers’ opinions about the RFID badges were lackluster. Less than 50 -- of more than 4,000 -- surveys were returned.

Students were mostly negative, Gonzalez said, while teachers and parents remained positive about the program.

Still, the district isn’t done with it's $271,659 investment just yet.

“This technology is valid. This technology is powerful. We just have to figure out how this technology might be tapped in a public-school setting,” Gonzalez expanded.

CLICK ME to see the related News Video.

 

[Ren]

The voluntary police state is coming. Many Tokyo children already have cellphones that, with the slam of a button, sound an alarm, call an emergency response service and track the child. Adults will soon carry these themselves out of fear of being victimized. The private human security business is going to be big business. There will also be cameras everywhere with people being paid at home to watch and report crimes on those cameras. This is already fact in the London area. It will prove to be so popular that many countries will adopt the CCTV plan. Money will also be eliminated and your debit card will be the only thing you can use other than bartering. Everything you buy will be secretly tracked. Neighbours and people around you will be paid to spy on you.

 

[paradox404]

How horrible that people had to have this rubbish in order to participate at school, It is possible that the governments will make GPS chips mandatory for all people, except for certain ethnic groups, Thus literally making these the mark of the beast. Hopefully the government of the United Big Brother States of America will be taken out like John Titor said. Something to add to the post above is that it is quite likely that before WWIII guns will be forcefully removed from all homes. (Its looking that way in Australia.)

As for the Tracking I find it appalling that practically ALL laptops these days are fitted with a camera and an OS that has to be ripped off. It has been proven many times that computers can be easily hacked and the web cam can be used by the hacker. I keep a sticker on mine despite it not working.

I know that Microsoft can remotely access peoples computers and delete files that they dislike. I know this is true because it happened to my mother and the computer is brand new. There is also some other data that Microsoft sends to HQ, but I don't know what it is exactly. The same can be said for Ubuntu, as they have tried downloading goodness knows what from my computer, however thankfully Ubuntu is the only Linux that does that.

Phones have had the privacy intrusive GPS feature for a long time, when I had one of the slide phones before smart phones went mainstream I discovered an anti feature that told me the town/city I was in. What was odd is that the Info sheet never mentioned the phone having a GPS, yet there it was, my phone was telling me where I was, and I couldn't disable it... On my new smartphone however I can disable this stupid anti-function, yet it is *always* enabled by default on every phone, regardless of if it apple, or android or cyanogenmod. I personally believe that it was the UBBSA that asked them to do that. As the goverment "Owns" you and your GPS data. Just look at PRISM and the NSA. That is why I keep my GPS off at all times.