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November 26, 2012 By News Staff
A San Antonio, Texas, school district is facing a lawsuit after a student who refused to wear an RFID chip was expelled. Northside Independent School District spent more than $500,000 implementing a new program that requires all students to wear a badge that contains a barcode and an RFID chip, The Register reported. But a sophomore at John Jay High School's Science and Engineering Academy declined to wear the badge and was expelled.
The student, Andrea Hernandez, objected to wearing the lanyard because she said it violated her religious beliefs and invaded her privacy. The school offered Hernandez a lanyard without an RFID chip, but she refused, not wanting to support the school district's surveillance system in any way. "I feel it's the implementation of the Mark of the Beast,” she said, citing the Book of Revelation. The student's family is now suing the school, according to The Register.
The badges are used by students to vote in school elections and access school facilities, including the library, cafeteria and restrooms. The school uses the lanyards, along with more than 200 closed-circuit cameras to track students and prevent truancy.
"What’s happening now is going to spread across the country," said John Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute, a civil liberties group helping the Hernandez family with its lawsuit against the school. "If you can start early in life getting people accustomed to living in surveillance society then in future it'll be a lot easier to roll these things out to the larger populace."
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OK, requiring the card to access the cafeteria kind of makes sense.... limited budget and limited food so making sure you are only feeding students makes a little bit of sense. Access to the library? Is damage or thieving common on this campus? Is there some reason to control access to the library? The Restrooms? What possible reason could you have to require a badge-swipe to go pee? And the ultimate question.... why can't one student swipe their badge and then hold the door open for a group of other students? Which would reduce or eliminate all of the controls put in place in the first place. To me this seems like someone had a good idea but didn't think it out far enough before spending too much money to make it happen.
yep, 'piggybacking' is a common method of bypassing physical access controls. If the devices are meant to provide authorized access to a facility, then it's really pointless, as Charles points out. Perhaps it's phase 1, where phase 2 includes 'man-traps'. Glad I went to school when none of this was even thought of.