"Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Systems"
EXTENSIVE ARTICLE BY THE
ELECTRONIC PRIVACY INFORMATION CENTER
AND
IBM: Mining the Next Natural Resource: Big Data:
IBM: "SmarterCities Project" in Rio DeJaneiro, Brazil;
http://chipfreeschools.com/, AND
http://chipfreeschools.com/position-paper-on-the-use-of-rfid-in-schools, or
http://www.spychips.com/school/RFIDSchoolPositionPaper.pdf,
CONTENTS:
I. Introduction
II. RFID Tracking Technology
III. Threats to Privacy and Civil Liberties
IV. Framework of RFID Rights and Responsibilities in Schools
V. Conclusions
VI. Bibliography
VII. Signatories
RFID DEVICES:
THEIR HISTORY, DEVELOPMENT,
USES & ABUSES
For Informational, Educational & Research Purposes we are attempting to give a comprehensive summary of a very large subject that needs to be broadcast over the internet because of the very real potential for abuse, the disregard for constitutional rights, and the chance for cancer when implanted.
MANUFACTURERS AND USERS:
To start, here is a very recent article published by the RFID Journal at:
http://www.rfidjournal.com/articles/view?10971/ and
http://www.rfidjournal.com/articles/view?10971/2, showing the growth and implementation of RFID devices for tracking humans, in this case in schools. It is reprinted below in full unedited for informational, educational, and research purposes.
MANUFACTURERS AND USERS:
To start, here is a very recent article published by the RFID Journal at:
http://www.rfidjournal.com/articles/view?10971/ and
http://www.rfidjournal.com/articles/view?10971/2, showing the growth and implementation of RFID devices for tracking humans, in this case in schools. It is reprinted below in full unedited for informational, educational, and research purposes.
NEW JERSEY SCHOOLS ADOPT RFID TO SECURE THEIR FACILITIES
The Belleville School District is deploying active tags and readers to track the locations of all personnel and students within its schools and on its buses, as well as at "blue light" telephones on the campuses.
Sep 06, 2013—
Initially, to address security problems following the Newtown shooting, the district hired armed safety officers and a security director, and then employed Clarity to conduct an audit to identify any security weaknesses that might exist within its facilities. As a result of that audit, says Joe Longo, a member of Belleville's school board, the district opted to install a single solution consisting of cameras, telephones within each room, access control for employees and middle- and high-school students, and active RFID tags, all of which will be managed by software integrated and installed by Clarity.
New Jersey's Belleville Public School District is implementing an active radio frequency identification solution to locate students and faculty members within its schools, as well as students on its 21 buses. The technology is being implemented as part of an extensive security system that the district believes will make its students and staff some of the best-protected in the United States. The use of RFID, cameras with built-in analytic software, and a new phone system—as well as the posting of armed officers and a new director of security—is intended to prevent tragedies like the December 2012 shooting in Newtown, Ct., and to provide location data for use in generating attendance reports, or during a problem such as a medical emergency or fight.
The solution, which is being installed by Clarity Systems Consulting Group a computer services company located in Mine Hill, N.J., consists of 433 MHz active RFID hardware and software supplied by Wade Garcia and Associates, (http://wadegarcia.com/index.html),
an RFID systems provider based in San Antonio, Texas. Wade Garcia develops active 433 MHz tags and corresponding readers that operate via the company's own proprietary air-interface protocol.
Mike Wade
Bruce Kreeger, Clarity's CTO and president, says the need for RFID became apparent once it was determined that the use of cameras and phones still allowed some vulnerability. For one thing, he explains, cameras cannot always make it possible to identify who is in a particular image. For another, personnel lack the time to scrutinize every photo to determine who is where. In addition, he says, if a shooter were to enter a classroom, the teacher would not have time to pick up a phone. RFIDwould, however, enable the district to locate any individual in real time, while a "panic button" on a teacher's RFID badge would ensure that a distress signal could be sent quickly.
Therefore, the district is installing 190 readers throughout its schools, and plans to provide RFID tags to its 600 staff members and 4,800 students. RFID readers are also being installed on its 21 buses, each with GPS units to identify the location of each tag read, and to forward that data to the software residing on the district's database via a cellular connection.
Staff members' tags come with two buttons. Pressing one of the buttons, Kreeger explains, indicates that help is required (the software can forward an alert to employees onsite), while the other signals a 911-level event (such as a shooter being in a room), and can also trigger a call to police and other emergency services. Staff members' tags, as well as those of middle- and high-school students, will also come with passive low-frequency (LF) RFID inlays to enable access control. Teachers, for example, could use the LF inlays to enter restricted areas, while older students would utilize the proximity function to access bathrooms. If an excessive number of students attempted to enter the bathrooms, they could be denied entrance. Moreover, the software could identify if the same individuals were repeatedly visiting the bathrooms simultaneously, possibly suggesting a drug-use or fighting issue.
Each active-tag reader captures the ID number of every badge within range, and transmits that information to the Wade Garcia software. The badge's active tag is typically set to beacon its ID number every 28 seconds. In the system's software, a tag's ID is linked to the name of the individual assigned to that badge, as well as to some details, such as whether he or she is a student or staff member—and, if that person is a student, his or her grade level. The district can then log into the software at any time and view the locations of specific individuals on the premises. For example, if a parent arrives to pick up a child for a doctor's appointment, staff members can sign into the software and determine in which room that student is located. Employees can also use the software to ascertain where an individual has been throughout the day, or at any given time within the past 30 days, says Mike Wade, the owner of Wade Garcia and Associates' owner.
Each bus will be equipped with two cameras, along with an RFID reader with a GPS unit and wireless modem, that will send read data back to the system's software. In that way, the district knows who is on that bus, as well as at what location each child entered and exited the vehicle. The driver will also wear the RFID badge on a lanyard equipped with panic buttons.
Finally, the school is installing emergency "blue light" telephones (a blue light is installed above a phone, indicating that emergency calls can be placed at the location) around its campus, so that students could instantly contact 911 in the event of an emergency. An RFID reader will be installed on each phone, in order to identify the active tag IDs of all students and personnel in the immediate area, thereby allowing the software to determine who is in the vicinity of the emergency, or is placing the call.
What's more, Wade adds, if a fight or injury has occurred, or if a parent is concerned that a child might not be in class, for example, the software can be used to indicate where that individual was and when. To ensure that every student and staff member brings the tag to school on a daily basis, an employee will check the tags as each person enters. Any students who forgot their tags could then be sent to the office to acquire a temporary replacement.
According to Longo, the technology may also eliminate the need for teachers to take attendance at the beginning of each class. That, he estimates, could save six or seven minutes of teaching time per class. The district's priority, however, is to provide a safe school setting. "My message is simple," Longo states. "As a board member, I never want to have to explain to a parent [after an emergency event] that we could have done more." The technology will be fully installed in about one month, he notes, adding, "By the time we're done, I believe we will be able to claim we are the most secure school district in the country."
The Spring Independent School District installed Wade Garcia's RFID technology at its schools in 2006, beginning with Wunsche High School. This replaced an existing passive RFID solution that failed to provide the location granularity the school district required. The district now knows when every student and staff member arrives at one of the campuses, where each individual moves throughout the day and when he or she exits the building, explains Ringo Tseng, Wade Garcia's VP. The cards also come with a bar-coded ID number printed on the front that can be scanned at the library and cafeteria. When that occurs, the scanned ID is again sent to the system's software, where the bar-coded ID is linked to that particular student. The system then forwards that data to the school's existing management software for library checkout information, or for school lunch payments.
The Spring Independent School District is currently in the process of installing the technology on buses, as well to capture a record of which students are on which of its 200 buses at all times. The Texas district is tracking approximately 30,000 students using 602 readers; its staff declined to comment for this story. A private school in New York is also installing the technology for the current school year, Wade says, though that school has asked to remain unnamed.
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"America’s Schools:
Breeding Grounds for
Compliant Citizens":
Reprinted in full below unedited for informational, educational & research purposes from:
By John W. Whitehead
October 15, 2012
October 15, 2012
"“[P]ublic school reform is now justified in the dehumanizing language of national security, which increasingly legitimates the transformation of schools into adjuncts of the surveillance and police state… students are increasingly subjected to disciplinary apparatuses which limit their capacity for critical thinking, mold them into consumers, test them into submission, strip them of any sense of social responsibility and convince large numbers of poor minority students that they are better off under the jurisdiction of the criminal justice system than by being valued members of the public schools.”—Professor Henry Giroux
For those hoping to better understand how and why we arrived at this dismal point in our nation’s history, where individual freedoms, privacy and human dignity have been sacrificed to the gods of security, expediency and corpocracy, look no farther than America’s public schools.
Once looked to as the starting place for imparting principles of freedom and democracy to future generations, America’s classrooms are becoming little more than breeding grounds for compliant citizens. The moment young people walk into school, they increasingly find themselves under constant surveillance: they are photographed, fingerprinted, scanned, x-rayed, sniffed and snooped on. Between metal detectors at the entrances, drug-sniffing dogs in the hallways and surveillance cameras in the classrooms and elsewhere, many of America’s schools look more like prisons than learning facilities.
Add to this the epidemic of arresting schoolchildren and treating them as if they are dangerous criminals, and you have the makings of a perfect citizenry for our emerging police state—one that can be easily cowed, controlled, and directed. Now comes the latest development in the sad deconstruction of our schools: “smart” identification cards containing Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags that allow school officials to track every step students take. So small that they are barely detectable to the human eye, RFID tags produce a radio signal by which the wearer’s precise movements can be constantly monitored.
A pilot program using these RFID cards is being deployed at two schools in San Antonio, Texas’ Northside School District. In the so-called name of school safety, some 4,200 students at Jay High School and Jones Middle School are being required to carry these “smart” ID cards embedded with an RFID tracking chip which will actively broadcast a signal at all times. Although the schools already boast 290 surveillance cameras, the cards will make it possible for school officials to track students’ whereabouts at all times.
School officials hope to expand the program to the district’s 112 schools, with a student population of 100,000. As always, there’s a money incentive hidden within these programs, in this case, it’s increased state funding for the school system. Although implementation of the system will cost $500,000, school administrators are hoping that if the school district is able to increase attendance by tracking the students’ whereabouts, they will be rewarded with up to $1.7 million from the state government.
High school sophomore Andrea Hernandez, who is actively boycotting the RFID cards, was told that “there will be consequences for refusal to wear an ID card.” Students who refuse to take part in the ID program won’t be able to access essential services like the cafeteria and library, nor will they be able to purchase tickets to extracurricular activities. Hernandez was prevented from voting for Homecoming King and Queen after school officials refused to verify her identity using her old ID card. According to Hernandez, teachers are even requiring students to wear the IDs when they want to use the bathroom. School officials reportedly offered to quietly remove the tracking chip from Andrea’s card if the sophomore would agree to wear the new ID, stop criticizing the program and publicly support the initiative. Hernandez refused the offer.
This is not the first time that schools have sprung RFID chips on unsuspecting students and their parents. Schools in California and Connecticut have tried similar systems, and Houston, Texas began using RFID chips to track students as early as 2004. With the RFID business booming, a variety of companies, including AIM Truancy Solutions, ID Card Group and DataCard, market and sell RFID trackers to school districts throughout the country, claiming they can increase security and attendance. For example, AIM Truancy Solutions, a Dallas-based company, claims that its tracking system boosts attendance by twelve percent.
RFID tags are not the only surveillance tools being used on America’s young people. Chronically absent middle schoolers in Anaheim, Calif., have been enrolled in a GPS tracking program. As journalist David Rosen explains:
Each school day, the delinquent students get an automated ‘wake-up’ phone call reminding them that they need to get to school on time. In addition, five times a day they are required to enter a code that tracks their locations: as they leave for school, when they arrive at school, at lunchtime, when they leave school and at 8pm. These students are also assigned an adult ‘coach’ who calls them at least three times a week to see how they are doing and help them find effective ways to make sure they get to school.
Some schools in New York, New Jersey, and Missouri are tracking obese and overweight students with wristwatches that record their heart rate, movement and sleeping habits. Schools in San Antonio have chips in their lunch food trays, which allow administrators to track the eating habits of students. Schools in Michigan’s second largest school district broadcast student activity caught by CCTV cameras on the walls of the hallways in real time to let students know they’re being watched.
Some school districts have even gone so far as to electronically track students without notifying their parents. In 2010, it was revealed that a Pennsylvania school district had given students laptops installed with software that allowed school administrators to track their behavior at home. This revelation led to the threat of a class-action lawsuit, which resulted in the school district settling with irate students and parents for $600,000. Similarly, in 2003, a Tennessee middle school placed cameras in the school’s locker rooms, capturing images of children changing before basketball practice. Thankfully, the US Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the practice in 2008, ruling that students have an expectation of privacy in locker rooms.
Clearly, there’s something more sinister afoot than merely tracking which students are using the bathroom and which are on lunch break. Concerned parent Judy Messer understands what’s at stake. “We do not want our children to be conditioned that tracking is normal or even acceptable or mandatory,” she shared.
“Conditioned” is the key word, of course. As Richard Hackman and Greg Oldham recognized in their book, Work Redesign, laboratory animals, children, and institutionalized adults “are necessarily dependent on powerful others for many of the things they most want and need, and their behavior usually can be shaped with relative ease.” Taking those ideas one step further, psychologist Bruce Levine noted, “Behaviorism and consumerism, two ideologies which achieved tremendous power in the twentieth century, are cut from the same cloth. The shopper, the student, the worker, and the voter are all seen by consumerism and behaviorism the same way: passive, conditionable objects.”
To return to what I was saying about schools being breeding grounds for compliant citizens, if Americans have come to view freedom as expedient and expendable, it is only because that’s what they’ve been taught in the schools, by government leaders and by the corporations who run the show.
More and more Americans are finding themselves institutionalized from cradle to grave, from government-run daycares and public schools to nursing homes. In between, they are fed a constant, mind-numbing diet of pablum consisting of entertainment news, mediocre leadership, and technological gadgetry, which keeps them sated and distracted and unwilling to challenge the status quo. All the while, in the name of the greater good and in exchange for the phantom promise of security, the government strips away our rights one by one—monitoring our conversations, chilling our expression, searching our bodies and our possessions, doing away with our due process rights, reversing the burden of proof and rendering us suspects in a surveillance state.
Whether or not the powers-that-be, by their actions, are consciously attempting to create a compliant citizenry, the result is the same nevertheless for young and old alike."
WC: 1376
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