Loss of Privacy

The Huntsville school district aims to keep track of students who ride the bus with a new RFID system.

the system, called ZPass, will allow school administrators to keep better track of those students who ride the bus each day. Kyle Koski, transportation director of the district, said about 5,000 students ride the bus.

“It is an immediate way that we can have feedback if a child does not get off (the bus) where he’s supposed to,” Ward said.

The district and police went on alert twice in August when, on the first and second days of school, two elementary students briefly went missing after taking the wrong buses.

This system is being implemented because two small children got on the wrong bus on the first and second days of school. This sort of thing happens every year when students try to learn the new bus system. A student may have ridden bus #7 last year, but this year bus #12 runs the route that takes him/her home. The same applies to new students who don’t know the bus system, students who have never ridden the bus before and kindergarteners who simply don’t understand how things work.

Each student in the pilot program will be assigned a personalized radio frequency identification (RFID) card, which they will swipe in front of a card reader installed on the bus’ dashboard. Students will swipe their cards each time they get on the bus and whenever they exit.

Using RFID technology and GPS, the card reader records the location of the bus at the time of the swipe and immediately loads that information onto the district’s computer network. At any time, administrators can pull up the data — including a map — and see exactly where a student both entered and exited a bus.

Though the new system is designed to track students, it has a major flaw. The system appears to only match a head count with the count on the RFID reader. There’s nothing to say the person holding little Johnny’s card is really Johnny. This is not a new flaw, yet every district that attempts to use RFID for tracking students seems to ignore it.

“We were going to take our grandson, he’s five and visiting from California, to see Santa and we were just sitting around the table having something to drink, talking about what we were planning and that’s when my husband took the picture,” said Grandmother Debbie Cassella.

Cassella said immediately a mall employee instructed them to stop taking pictures or they would be thrown out of the mall.

“I believe she said you can’t take pictures at the mall. I thought she was joking and I said ‘I’m taking a picture of my grandson’, I’d understand if I was taking pictures of the architecture or the products in the stores and she became a little hostile and aggressive,” said Grandfather Don Oberloh.

No. You should be able to take photos of the architecture of the mall as well. This is a ridiculous rule.

“I asked to speak with a mall manager and she flashed a badge at me, and I didn’t see it, and asked ‘is this good enough?’ and I tried explaining things to her and she came back, I apologized and she was more belligerent and I asked again ‘may I speak with the mall manager’ and she said ‘that’s me’ and I said ‘there’s nobody higher than you?’ and she said ‘one person’, ‘may I speak with that person’ and then security came over,” said Oberloh.

Oberloh left the mall after being asked by security, but Cassella stayed behind to wait on her daughter, who had gone into a store.

“I told him I can’t just leave and then he said that he would remove me physically and then he called another security guard and that guy came over and then my daughter showed up and I said we were just here to take my grandson to see Santa and he said you can’t see Santa,” said Cassella.

These people need to apologize to the grandparents. Not only were they apologetic when they didn’t need to be, the mall security grew more belligerent as time went on.

From Madison, Wisconsin:

“He (the boy) says he didn’t do it, and the little girl says he didn’t do it. The little girl says he touched the back of one of her buttocks,” Cooper said.

“(The experts say) a 6-year-old child is unable to intellectually and emotionally associate sexual gratification with the act that D has been accused of committing,” Cooper said.

The lawsuit also alleges the charges were brought because the 5-year-old is the daughter of a high-ranking official in Grant County.

H.R. 358, also known as the Protect Life Act, has passed in the House of Representatives and now moves on to the Senate for voting. This new piece of legislation would remove women’s rights that go back to the Reagan Administration.

The bill is officially known as the Protect Life Act, but it, sadly, restricts women’s access to reproductive health care services. Those who support the bill say it is merely changing a small part of the Affordable Care Act so that US taxpayer money will not be used to fund abortions. The fact is, this is already prohibited under the Affordable Care Act. H.R. 358 goes even farther than the Hyde Amendment as it restricts women who have have private insurance from spending their own private money on health insurance.

“Extremists prevailed today in the House of Representatives,” said Debra Ness of the National Partnership for Women and Families, “proving again that they are badly out-of-touch with the majority of Americans who want lawmakers to focus on economic recovery, jobs and promoting, rather than restricting, affordable, quality health care ­– not [on] an extreme, anti-woman agenda.”

The bill, H.R. 358, about which we have written extensively, revives the earlier failed Stupak amendment, which would force health plans to drop comprehensive coverage in state health insurance exchanges, cutting off millions of women from the benefits they receive today and prevent women from paying for health insurance with abortion coverage with their own money.

H.R. 358 contains other provisions revealing complete disregard for women’s health and lives. It permits states to enact sweeping refusal laws that would allow health plans to refuse to cover women’s preventive services, including birth control, without cost-sharing — undoing a new protection under health reform supported by 66 percent of Americans.  It also codifies and significantly expands an already expansive refusal clause (also known as the Weldon amendment) without any regard for patient rights or protections. Under current law (through the 2004 Weldon amendment), hospitals, health care facilities, and insurance plans can refuse to provide, pay for, provide coverage of, or refer for abortions.  The Weldon amendment has no protections for patients to ensure they have access to care and information in a timely manner.  H.R. 358 codifies this unfair and discriminatory provision.  H.R. 358 further allows health care entities–hospitals, clinics–to refuse to “participate in” abortion care.  This could mean that a hospital employee with no medical training or role in a patient’s treatment decisions could refuse to process bills, handle medical records, or even set up an examination room for a patient seeking abortion care.

And finally, it overrides protections for pregnant women under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act.  EMTALA was enacted in 1986 to ensure public access to emergency services regardless of ability to pay, including women in active labor. Under EMTALA, hospitals must stabilize a pregnant patient who, for example, is facing an emergency obstetric condition or life-threatening pregnancy and either treat her–including an emergency abortion–or if the hospital or staff objects, to transfer her to another facility that will treat her.

H.R. 358 overturns decades of precedent guaranteeing people access to lifesaving emergency care, including abortion care and says its ok that a pregnant woman fighting for her life be left to die.

The president strongly opposes H.R. 358 and it is likely to fail in the Senate, but it is important to understand that the republicans continue to push for this type of national policy. By doing so, they are telling women that they no longer matter in this world and are merely baby carriers.

Maryland TSA agent, Michael Scott Wilson, has been arrested by authorities on charges of possession of child porn.

Wilson was charged Monday with possession and distribution of child pornography after agents searched his Perry Hall home.

The TSA released a statement regarding Wilson’s arrest, saying, “The TSA holds its security officers to the highest professional and ethical standards and aggressively investigates allegations of misconduct. The allegations against this individual in no way reflect on the outstanding job our more than 50,000 security officers do every day to ensure the security of the traveling public.”

Anyone still feel comfortable that these people are patting down your children at the airport? This brings the total TSA agents arrested for crimes including murder, theft, rape, and child porn to more than 50.