EPIC and the ACLU have weighed into the controversy I mentioned yesterday about schoolkids getting electronically tagged. They have written a joint letter to the Brittan School Board which overseas the school involved. From EPIC's latest Alert:
"The joint letter argues that the monitoring of children with RFID tags is comparable to the tracking of cattle, shipment pallets, or dangerous criminals in high-security prisons. Using this extensive inventory-like tagging is demeaning to children, regardless of age, and creates an atmosphere of disrespect for, and distrust of, students. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, ratified by the United States, protects dignity as an essential component of a human being and a condition for freedom and equality. The RFID badges, the letter continues, also jeopardize the safety and security of students by broadcasting their identity and location information to anyone with a chip reader. The RFID badges will make it much easier for anyone, not only school officials, to target and find Brittan schoolchildren, both at school and in the community at large. Forcing children to wear badges around their necks displaying their personal information also exposes them to potential discrimination since the name of their school may disclose their religious beliefs or social class.
The badges also seem to be a solution in search of a problem since there appears to be no history of either security or attendance problems in the school. Security experts have argued that using RFID technologies to track schoolchildren does not adequately answer school-related security concerns such as limiting the risk of kidnapping or preventing the entry of strangers on school grounds. The security gained, they say, is not worth the money spent and the privacy and dignity lost. The goal of making children safer could be achieved by spending the money elsewhere, from education programs for children and their parents, to the hiring of school guards."
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