Big Brother is Coming to School

A generation ago, there was real concern with privacy. There are plenty of people writing blog entries and bringing up privacy concerns in the techie world news publications, but nobody is doing a thing about it. We have our phones tapped, and "that's okay, it's only on international calls". It turns domestic, and you hear "it's only a problem if you have something to hide." DNA databases are popping up for Law Enforcement and people think it's cool that CSI type things are turning into a reality where they live. It's as if nobody ever read 1984.

Here's a news flash people. Government employees sometimes get overzealous with their power. Government employees are sometimes irresponsible. Identity theft has escalated exponentially in the last decade primarily because of a lack of respect for the magnitude of responsibility that goes along with maintaining privacy-related data.

I'm going off on a privacy rant because 3 elementary schools in California are installing fingerprint scanners. They will be scanning students daily. Before you start thinking of things to say like "they have a good reason for installing them", "nobody would use the data for anything questionable", or "what does your kid have to hide", I present you with a poem originally written by german pastor Friedrich Gustav Emil Martin Niemoller:

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.

The reasoning excuse behind the fingerprint scanners has something to do with reimbursement for government subsidized meals. It sounds like a good idea to somebody entirely unconcerned with technology abuse - kids tend to forget pin numbers and would probably lose RFID tags. They never forget their hands. Technology like this would make sure the school is reimbursed for all of the meals they should be reimbursed for.

But then again... what about the system that we used when I was a kid? Paper punch cards. It worked back then. It's working in plenty of other schools. And... if you lose a puncher, it's like 4 bucks to replace. If a puncher breaks down somehow and won't put a hole in anybody's punch card, it's like 4 bucks to replace.

What is the potential for abuse? What could somebody do with a fingerprint, anyways? Initially, nothing. In fact, it'll probably take a few years for the concerns of people like me to die down enough for a principal to do something really stupid. Take for instance this scenario: There's a bomb threat at an elementary school. The call came from a payphone at the school. The tech savvy principal realizes he can get a print off of the phone and compare it to his database. He grabs the print, runs it through the database and suspends the kid who he found. All jimdandy right? Wrong. First - identification by fingerprint is nowhere near as accurate as you were raised to believe. Second, only kids having subsidized meals would be in the database (rich kid? no problem. poor kid? suspension). Third, parents unwittingly allowed government authorities to collect forensic evidence on their child under false pretenses.

The moral of the story is this: Stand up for your kids. Don't give up their privacy before they have a chance to protect it themselves. Don't simply accept that technology is a better solution where no problem exists.