Security vs. Privacy: "Human Inventory Control"

In light of the fact that the Patriot Act is working its way through the Senate, consider this disturbing editorial from Scientific American.  SA Perspectives May 2005.

The article describes how last January The Brittan Elementary School in Sutter CA decided to require students in the seventh and eigth grades to wear ID badges that contained radio tags that could be read automatically.  

...the same technology used to determine the whereabouts of cattle and to keep tabs on toilet paper rolls at Wal-Mart.

According to the LA Times,

One student returned from school and told her parents that she felt like a piece of supermarket produce,...

In this case parents, students, the ACLU, and other groups protested and the school ended the program in February.  But...

In another case forty business men in Brazil, have chosen to have radio-tracking chips implanted under their skin because of a rash of kidnappings there.  The company providing the technology said that there was a 2000-person waiting list.

The editorial concludes:

 But, unlike the Brazilian empresarios, students in Sutter had no choice in the matter.  They faced the threat of expulsion if they showed up in the morning without badges strung around their necks.  A seventh grade classroom was clearly the wrong place to implement radio tags that convey precarious implications for individual privacy.  The Brittan school board may have had the best intentions, but tagging junior high kids becomes a form of indoctrination into an emerging surveillance society that young minds should be learning to question.

  Public education and debate about the proper framework for protecting electronic privacy is desperately called for because we are beginning to see the floodgates open.  The U.S. government is pushing agressively ahead with plans for radio tags in passports, which will store personal information and be readable remotely by anyone, whether a customs official at a desk or a terrorist standing nearby.  The Department of Homeland Security has already strapped more than 1,700 immigrants applying for permanent residency with ankle bracelets to prevent those who may be ordered for deportation from fleeing.  The respite for the student-tagging business, moreover, ay be short-lived.  InCom, the company that outfitted Sutter students, has recieved calls from many other school districts interested in implementing similar programs.

  Some segments of U.S. society have always had a visceral aversion to a national identity card.  Those instincts are sound and should be reinforced.  Widespread adoption of human-tracking devices should never be embraced without serious and prolonged discussion at all levels of society.

To say the least!

Put this next to that MARC poster that Kos posted last night.  Is everyone sufficiently 'creeped out' yet.  

•  People tracker

  I heard (I think on NPR) about a company that is selling a system for tracking people.  It used RFID (little tags that can be heard short range) to keep tabs on where employees are.  One company had fielded it so far, for about $1M, and said they had saved a mill$ so far.  Something about detecting where people were spending their time (loitering)... great.  Where's the mood sensor?  Speech recognition to make sure you are greeting or asking X many customers if you can help them.  Super.  

  Privacy and freedom go hand in hand.

  by mz on Wed Jun 08, 2005 at 05:48:21 PM PDT

  •  The adoption of this technology

    by corporations is going on largely unnoticed.  How can we expect regulatory protection from a government that is pushing the same thing?

    by 3card on Wed Jun 08, 2005 at 06:13:44 PM PDT