Loss of Privacy

For kids who have four or more unexcused absences, they will now be required to carry a GPS device that will track their movements throughout the day during a six-week trial in the Anaheim Union High School District.

Each morning on schooldays, they get an automated phone call reminding them that they need to get to school on time.

Then, five times a day, they are required to enter a code that tracks their locations – as they leave for school, when they arrive at school, at lunchtime, when they leave school and at 8 p.m.

Students will also be assigned a life coach. The program appears to be a volunteer option to avoiding jail time or prosecution. This begs the question as to how voluntary the program really is.

Story begins at 1:50 and lasts about one minute.

School officials believe the students shouldn’t see this as a punishment, but it doesn’t address many underlying problems that will be associated with the program.

how will this approach help students who are school avoidant because of anxiety disorders or a medication side effect or who are cutting school because they are being bullied or harassed?  How will it help kids who are not getting to school because their parents are disorganized?  How will it help kids who are truant because they are depressed over academic or social failure?

Any child who’s chronically truant should be assessed to determine why they’re truant.

Tracking/check-in systems may work for those who are school refusers because what goes on outside of school is more interesting than what goes on in school, but the approach seems inadequate to deal with the anxious/depressed school avoiders.   Instead of investing in tracking devices, invest in school counselors and assessments.

Instead of looking at the causes of the problem, the school district is only looking at the symptoms, which will never solve the problem of truancy. It will, however, make it appear as if the school is doing something to solve the problem.

Alex Kilpatrick talks about how you can easily “confound the mechanism” with simple changes. It’s your job to fight back against Big Brother technologies.

From msnbc news:

In a bid to set parents’ nerves at ease, a southwest suburban school district has become one of the first in the state to begin tracking students riding buses to and from school each day with Global Positioning System and Radio Frequenty Identification technology.

Palos Heights School District 128 had previously been using ZPass, a GPS technology provided by Seattle-based Zonar Systems, to track the buses.  But now the district is outfitting students’ backpacks with a luggage tag-sized unit that logs when the student steps on and off the bus.

And this will surely work because kids never forget their backpacks and always take them home from school. Children will just get a friend to hold their bags, thus circumventing the system. Once the kid gets off the bus, they aren’t tracked anymore. Good luck finding your child then.

For all you parents that worry far too much, stop worrying. Your kids aren’t in any more danger now than they were 40 years ago. Allowing this intrusive crap into your lives only coddles your children into accepting being tracked as normal for the rest of their lives. You’re not helping.

Ron Paul suggests that the proposed new ID card would probably have GPS in it. At the moment, it’s unsubstantiated, but, given the fact that Ron Paul knows more than we do, it shouldn’t be discounted immediately.

Research completed by grad student, Christopher Soghoian, shows how Sprint Nextel provided law enforcement officials with information on 50 million customers.

Sprint: 50 million customers, 8 million law enforcement GPS requests in 1 year from Christopher Soghoian on Vimeo.

If you can’t watch the video, read the text at Christopher Soghoian’s site.

A request from the author:

All of the mp3 audio recordings & pdf FOIA scans included on this page can be found in this .zip file (100Mb). Please mirror!