Loss of Privacy

The entire freshman class at Carvers Bay High School in South Carolina has been enrolled in JROTC classes. The principal, who happens to also be a retired Navy man, says that the Marine JROTC fulfills the physical education requirement at the Freshman Academy.

But Charles Holloway, the parent of a freshman student at Carvers Bay, said he did not want his son in that program and when he asked that his son be taken out, his son was put in a class by himself.Holloway said he feels his son was being punished for not wanting to take part in that class.

Holloway said the JROTC class simply showed up on his son’s schedule in place of gym class and he did not receive any information about the class or how to get his son out of it.

According to the South Carolina Department of Education, high school students must take at least one credit of physical education in order to graduate. ROTC can also fill that requirement.

While it’s fine to allow ROTC to fulfill the P.E. requirement, making it mandatory is not necessary. There are many students and parents who object to forced military classes and presumed recruitment.

Neal said he initiated the program because studies show that students in leadership programs are more likely to stay in school and graduate. He said so far the program has had an “extremely high positive response,” but “any parent who did not want their son or daughter [to participate] has the opportunity to participate in other elective classes.”

If this were true, then why did he require students to enroll in the classes to begin with. Why not inform them of their choices and let the students and their parents decide whether to take ROTC or regular P.E. classes?

Neal said letters and fliers about Ninth Grade Academy were sent to parents. The class is an elective and students had the option to select other programs as well, he said, but noted that the ninth grade class was “enrolled” in the program.

You can’t have it both ways. It’s either an elective or it’s not. You can’t claim that the class is optional when you’ve forced an entire class of students to enroll in ROTC. This case is similar to many privacy issues found on the internet. The individual finds themselves in a situation where they must take the action and opt-out of what is unwanted. In the mean time, students might feel peer pressure to stay in the ROTC program so that they aren’t ostracized by those who choose to stay in. given the fact that the principal is a former military man, students may also feel as if they must stay in ROTC or face punishment later from the principal who is a huge authority figure in a school.

Adding students to an ROTC program without properly informing parents is irresponsible and bordering on criminal. The US military is a volunteer force. There is no valid reason to make students feel like they have to enroll in a pre-military program.

While many people are comparing this to beginnings of the Hitler Youth movement, and there are similarities, there is also concern as to whether such a move by the principal is even legal. Until there is legal action, every freshman should challenge this action and return to regular P.E. instead.

Right now, if you report a crime in the UK, your name and information is being placed into a secret database. So far, the police have logged at least 18,000 names. If you call 999 for any reason, be it to report a crime, as a witness or to any other incident, you will be asked for your ethnicity and date of birth. That information is then being placed into a database that also contains information on suspected criminals.

On the database of one force alone, the personal details of 180,000 people who phoned police were recorded  -  four times more than the number of suspected criminals listed on the site.

North Yorkshire Police’s information management system contained data on 181,917 innocent informants, 38,259 suspects and 107,566 victims recorded as aggrieved or ‘vulnerable aggrieved’.

The information is held for a minimum of 15 years, and can be stored for up to 100 years in the most serious cases.

Personal details can also be passed from North Yorkshire Police to other forces.

The police defend their actions by stating that the collection of personal information is done to accurately identify repeat callers, possible fraudsters, and those who participate in anti-social behavior. The police have seemingly crossed the line from protector to enforcer of political agendas. Now that this information is in the public hands, the public will probably stop reporting crimes. It will also further remove the police from the public it claims to protect.

The New Canaan school district in Connecticut is toying with the idea of electronically tracking their students.

New Canaan already has GPS and video cameras on all their buses, but is only exploring being part of an experiment testing such tracking. Under the program, students would be carrying an ID card with radio frequency strips. It pinpoints a student’s location, be it in the classroom or off grounds in nearby downtown.

As usual, the company that would provide the tags has brought out the old standby that they would be useful in an emergency.

“In an emergency they would be able to take attendance and know which students were where in a matter of seconds,” he explained.

As has been pointed out numerous times before, these devices are easily defeated. This idea isn’t new and it will fail.

The Sequoia touch-screen voting machines that will be used by voters this November has had Pac-Man hacked onto the system without breaking the tamper-evident seals.

This particular Sequoia DRE (Direct Recording Electronic) voting machine model is known as the AVC Edge. It used to be described on the Sequoia website and promotional materials as “tamperproof.” It has been hacked previously and has failed time and again in recent elections, even though election officials continue to force voters to use the machines.

For example, the AVC Edge miscounted votes in New Jersey in 2008, the same election during which the systems also failed to even boot up when polls opened at a Hoboken precinct, forcing voters, including the state’s then-Governor John Corzine, to wait some 45 minutes before they could cast votes on them at all. Whether those votes were recorded accurately as per the voters’ intent, once the machines finally booted up, is scientifically impossible to know. Use of any touch-screen voting machine is the equivalent of a 100% faith-based election. No votes cast during an election — none — can be verified as having been accurately recorded on such systems. Ever.

“The software can be replaced without breaking any of these seals, simply by removing screws and opening the case.”

At some point, you would think that politicians would realize that these types of machines are far easier to tamper with than plain, old-fashioned paper.

Learn more about these machines at The Brad Blog.

The controversy over the full body scanners at airports hasn’t even died down yet and they are starting to be used in vans roving around US streets. According to Forbes, “American Science & Engineering, a company based in Billerica, Massachusetts, has sold U.S. and foreign government agencies more than 500 backscatter x-ray scanners mounted in vans that can be driven past neighboring vehicles to see their contents.”

The Z Backscatter Vans, or ZBVs, as the company calls them, bounce a narrow stream of x-rays off and through nearby objects, and read which ones come back. Absorbed rays indicate dense material such as steel. Scattered rays indicate less-dense objects that can include explosives, drugs, or human bodies. That capability makes them powerful tools for security, law enforcement, and border control.

“It’s no surprise that goverments and vendors are very enthusiastic about [the vans],” says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of EPIC. “But from a privacy perspective, it’s one of the most intrusive technologies conceivable.”

It’s no surprise that law enforcement are so happy about these vans. They can infringe on your privacy without you even knowing about it. AS&E claims that there isn’t a need to worry about these vans because they don’t see as well as the airport scanners. They are attempting to deflect privacy advocates from the fact that these vans still violate a person’s privacy and their fourth amendment rights. Unlike the airports and the TSA, AS&E freely admit that these scanners can save the pictures that it takes.