The End Game For The Reform Data Fetishists

The NY Times reports that one Texas district is piloting tracking students through electronic ID's:

SAN ANTONIO —  For Tira Starr, an eighth grader at Anson Jones Middle School, the plastic nametag hanging around her neck that she has decorated with a smiley face and a purple bat sticker offers a way to reflect her personal flair. For administrators, it is something else entirely: a device that lets them use radio frequency technology —  with scanners tucked behind walls and ceilings —  to track her whereabouts. 

Anson Jones is the first school in San Antonio’s Northside Independent School District to roll out the new nametags, which are part of a pilot program intended to ensure that the district receives all of the state dollars to which it is entitled. 

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But the radio frequency identification nametags have prompted concerns from civil liberties groups and electronic privacy watchdogs, which fear a Big Brother atmosphere in Texas public schools.

Matthew Simpson, a policy strategist for the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, said the technology was easy to acquire, meaning people outside a school might be able to monitor a student if they obtained the student’s unique tracking number. 

Mr. Simpson said the technology was originally designed for shipping goods and for cattle. “It was never intended for people,” he said.

Oh, boy - think of the data mining possibilities with this "innovation".

It's enough to give Joel Klein, Bill Gates and Rupert Murdoch Texas-sized hard-ons without the Viagra pills.

And be sure, this abomination will spread, billed as some "safety" innovation or cost-savings.

But of course we know exactly why the powers that be want ID tags on students (and teachers too.)

It's easier to track everything they do, everything they buy, everything they eat, everywhere they go and, eventually, everything they think and feel.

That's why Gates was experimenting with the Galvanic skin response bracelets that measure so-called student engagement in the classroom.

The boys running the country want to control everything, as much for commercial purposes as for political purposes - and more and more, technology is allowing them to do just that.

It's not a mistake that the ID tags that used to be used for products and cattle are now on people.

We're the product.