The Fight Against the Total Surveillance State in Our Schools
December 3, 2012
By John W. Whitehead
“I would say there is a school-to-prison pipeline, but there is
also a prison-to-school pipeline. [The use of security hardware
(cameras, metal detectors and retina detectors) and the practice of
treating students as suspects are strategies of the criminal justice
system, and they have been flowing into the schools.] It’s like a
two-way street, a two-way system that mixes the educational and criminal
justice systems. The end result is that we have schools in which the
learning environment has been degraded and undermined because we are
teaching kids to fear and feel that they are suspects at any particular
time. Educators talk about the teachable moments. Unfortunately, public
fear of kids, public hysteria around another Columbine, has prevented
people from remembering that the mission of public schools is to
educate.”—Annette Fuentes, author of Lockdown High: When the Schoolhouse Becomes a Jail House
~
The battle playing out in San Antonio, Texas, over one student’s
refusal to comply with a public school campaign to microchip students
has nothing to do with security concerns and even less to do with
academic priorities. What is driving this particular program, which
requires students to carry “smart” identification cards embedded with
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tracking devices, is money, pure
and simple—or to put it more bluntly, this program is yet another
example of the nefarious collusion between government bureaucracy and
corporate America, a way for government officials to dance to the tune
of the corporate state, while unhesitatingly selling students to the
highest bidder.
Oblivious to the impact on students’ fundamental rights, school
officials with the Northside Independent School District (NISD) in San
Antonio, Texas, have embarked upon a crusade to foist ID badges embedded
with RFID tags on about 4,200 students at Jay High School and Jones
Middle School. These tags produce a radio signal that is tied to the
students’ Social Security numbers, allowing the wearer’s precise
movements to be constantly monitored. Although the school district
already boasts 290 surveillance cameras, the cards which the students
are required to wear will make it possible for school officials to track
students’ whereabouts at
all times. Teachers are even
requiring students to wear the IDs when they want to use the bathroom.
NISD officials plan to eventually expand the $500,000 program to the
district’s 112 schools, with a student population of 100,000.
Hoping to achieve full student compliance with the profit-driven
Student Locator Project, school officials have actually gone so far as
to offer gift cards, pizza parties and raffle prizes to classes with the
highest ID badge participation rates. By any other name, you would call
this bribery. No such rewards, however, await the students like
15-year-old Andrea Hernandez who resist the program on principle. Since
voicing her objection to the program on religious grounds, Andrea has
been stigmatized, penalized and discriminated against. Those who, like
Andrea Hernandez, refuse to wear the SmartID badge will also be forced
to stand in separate lunch lines, denied participation in student
government and activities, and prohibited from making certain commercial
exchanges at school.
School officials at Jay High School reportedly offered to quietly
remove the tracking chip from Andrea Hernandez’s card if the sophomore
would agree to wear the new ID, stop criticizing the program and
publicly support the initiative. Andrea refused on principle, because
she believes wearing the chipless Student Locator ID badge would signal
that she endorses a program that not only violates her conscience but
also runs afoul of her constitutional rights. As a result, Andrea now
faces expulsion for refusing to participate in the school’s money-making
scheme. (The parallels to another so-called “necessary” taxpayer-funded
program, full-body x-ray scanners in airports, are evident. Of course,
those scanners, which are now being relegated to a moldering Texas
warehouse, turned out to be little more than a pointless yet costly
means of enriching the security industrial complex.)
Just to be clear, these tracking devices are not being employed to
prevent students from cutting classes or foster better academics. It’s a
money game. Using the devices to account for the students’ whereabouts
on campus, whether in class or not, school administrators can “count”
students as being “in school” and thereby qualify for up to $1.7 million
in funding from the state government. As Pascual Gonzalez, Northside’s
communications director, explains, “The revenues that are generated by
locating kids who are not in their chairs to answer ‘present,’ but are
in the building—in the counselor’s office, in the cafeteria, in the
hallway, in the gym—if we can show they were, in fact, in school, then
we can count them present.”
While this Student Locator program is not yet widespread, it’s only a
matter of time before we see more students facing the same struggle.
Other student tracking programs are currently being tested in Baltimore,
Anaheim, Houston, and the Palos Heights School District near Chicago.
Some cities already have fully implemented programs, including Houston,
Texas, which began using RFID chips to track students as early as 2004.
Preschoolers in Richmond, Calif., have been tagged with RFID chips since
2010.
Attempts to impose these tracking chips on unsuspecting young people
have not gone wholly unchallenged. For example, in 2005 a school
district in Sutter, California was forced to abandon their RFID project
after a backlash from the community. In 2008, an RFID proposal
concerning school buses in Rhode Island was abandoned after parent
objections.
Unfortunately, while parents and students have fought back in some
instances, they have yet to discourage the financial interest of the
security industrial complex, which has set its sights on the schools as
“a vast, rich market”—a $20 billion market, no less—just waiting to be
conquered. Indeed, corporations stand to make a great deal of money if
RFID tracking becomes the norm across the country. A variety of
companies, including AIM Truancy Solutions, ID Card Group and DataCard,
already market and sell RFID trackers to school districts throughout the
country, and with big names such as AT&T and IBM entering the
market, the pressure on school districts to adopt these systems and
ensure compliance will only increase.
In fact, corporations are going to great lengths to secure their
profits by discouraging government officials from allowing students to
opt out of RFID programs. In 2011, the Texas legislature considered a
bill that would have prohibited “certain mandatory student
identification methods,” limiting schools to only an opt-in method of
student identification, qualified with the permission of a student’s
parent or guardian. Michael Wade, representing Wade Garcia &
Associates, a consulting firm responsible for installing the technology
in Northside school district, testified against the bill, protesting
specifically against the opt-out policy. The bill died in committee.
RFID is only one aspect of what is an emerging industry in tracking,
spying, and identification devices. For example, schools in Pinellas
County, Fla., now use palm reading devices to allow children to purchase
lunch. The reader takes an infrared picture of the palm’s vein
structure, and then matches that information with the child’s identity.
50,000 students in the county are using the readers, and another 60,000
are expected to soon join the program. Palm scanning identification
devices are spreading to hospitals and schools across the country, and
can be found in over 50 school systems and 160 hospital systems,
spanning 15 states and Washington, DC.
Due in large part to the technological and profit-driven collusion
between government and big business, every aspect of our society, from
schooling, to banking, to shopping, to healthcare is becoming
increasingly automated and surveillance oriented. RFID tags, for
example, are expected to replace bar code scanning in retail goods, and
they are already found in American passports.
Palm scanning is likely to
enter other industries that rely on identification, including retail,
banking, and cloud computing. There are already palm-reading ATMs in
Japan.
Without strong safeguards for privacy now, it will not be long before
these technologies—sold to us as being for our good and aimed at making
our lives safer, easier and more efficient—will come to dominate every
aspect of our lives. And those who resist, like young Andrea Hernandez,
will be cut off from basic goods and services and treated like
second-class citizens.
We are generally taught to fear the stock images of tyranny: the
jackboots in marching formation, the jail cell door, the batons cracking
down on innocent skulls. Yet while we should be vigilant against these
injustices, most are wholly unaware of the invasive technologies which
are slowly spreading across America: the tyranny of radio waves and
Wi-Fi signals, infrared cameras, biometric scanners and GPS tracking
devices, among many others.
These tendrils of the corporate surveillance-state are slowly coming to
control all our daily interactions, and our nation’s public schools are
merely the forefront of a movement to completely automate all human
interaction and ensure that no one is able to escape the prying eyes of
government officials and their corporate partners.
WC: 1484
This commentary is also
available at www.rutherford.org.
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