Judge: Northside ISD CANNOT Expel Student for Rejecting RFID Tracking Chip

says district's tracking program 'violates fundamental Constitutional Rights'

A judge in Texas has barred a school district from expelling a student because she refused to wear a Radio Frequency Identification chip as part of an effort by the school to track students and make sure they attend class, 1200 WOAI news has learned.

"This is a national issue," John Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute, a free market advocacy from which filed the lawsuit, told 1200 WOAI news. "Do we want to live in a surveillance state where everybody is watched?"

The controversial move by the San Antonio Northside School District to require students to wear RFID locators embedded into their student ID cards so administrators can track their movements in the school building has become a major issue in the fight over personal freedom, and the limits of government agencies to track individuals.

The school district, according to Executive Director of Communications Pascual Gonzalez, introduced the chip policy at two schools this year with an idea to extending it to all of the sprawling districts' 112 schools in coming years. The experiment by Northside, which is the fourth largest school district in Texas, is being closely watched not only by other school systems, but by privacy advocates as well.

He says the goal is not to 'spy' on students or record who they meet with. In Texas, state education funding to school districts is based on the number of students who are in class when the first period bell rings, and Northside is losing $1.7 million per year because students are in the building but not in the classroom.

"If the student is not in first period class but he is in the building, then we are able to locate him, and get him into the class," Gonzalez said.

He says the RFID tracking doesn't extend 'beyond the walls of the school building,' and the school district does not keep any records of the movements of students.

But this issue has angered activists on both ends of the political spectrum. It has been denounced by liberal groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, which say it amounts to 'tagging children like cattle.' It has also been blasted on conservative web sites and radio talk shows as an example of the increasing control the government is attempting to exert over individuals.

"The court's willingness to grant a temporary restraining order is a good first step, but there is still a long way to go," Whitehead said. "Not just in this case, but dealing with the mindset in general that everybody needs to be monitored and controlled."

The judge prohibited the district from expelling sophomore Andrea Hernandez from the Science and Engineering Magnet School that she has been attending, and issued an order prohibiting the district from 'intimidating or retaliating' against Andrea, ruling that the RFID system is a 'clear violation of her constitutional rights.'

Andrea and her father have become vocal critics of the RFID program, and the judge also issued an order preventing school officials from blocking them from 'peacefully distributing literature' about their objections to the program on school grounds.

Whitehead says what is happing in American schools today is symbolic of a disturbing historical trend.

"Regimes in the past have always started with the schools, where they develop a compliant citizenry," he said. "These 'Student Locator' programs are ultimately aimed at getting students used to living in a total surveillance state, where there will be no privacy, and wherever you go and whatever you text or e-mail will be watched by the government."

The boiling frog marketing plan for rfid chips is to set up all the technology requiring rfid chips in cards and then put the chips into your body and get rid of the cards. Rfid chips are data bases of all information on the holder (including personal papers, health care and consumer data) and gives corporate and government authorities the ability to pry into and control your personal business. They also serve as tracking devices.

Actually, the cards themselves don't actually contain the information. What the do contain is a transmitter and a very tiny computer chip that will, when activated. broadcast a 64-bit or 128-bit number. It is the number that identifies the holder of the card by way of a look-up table in the system reading the cards. I haven't looked through the RFCs for these chips in a long time, but I don't thinkthe protocol is, at present, set up so the cards need to have any more information than the identifying number.

Depending upon how it is implemented, the number broadcast may, or may not be encrypted. If the transmission is not encrypted, it is trivial to program another RFID chip to answer with any number desired. What would be cool, would be to determine the superintendant's ID number on his card, and have it showing up at random times in the girls's bathroom.

There are lots of ways to hack the system. A setup like this school could provide lots of opportunities for mischief.

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