Post-Constitutional America

JUSTICE DEPARTMENT PRESSING TO TAG CHILDREN LIKE CATTLE

CATHERINE KOMP, ALTERNATIVE PRESS REVIEW - As debate over government surveillance rages in adult society, the US Department of Justice is quietly enticing school districts to implement controversial technologies that monitor and track students. Critics fear these efforts will normalize electronic surveillance at an early age, conditioning young people to accept privacy violations while creating a market for companies that develop and sell surveillance systems.

A few of the nation’s schools are already running pilot programs to monitor students’ movements using radio frequency identification. The highly controversial programs, implemented in the name of student protection, see pupils wearing tags around their necks and submitting themselves to electronic scanning as they enter and leave school property. Now, a new federal grant could lure more districts into using these or similar technologies.

Even though school violence is at its lowest rate in a decade, according to the federal government’s own statistics, the Justice Department’s "School Safety Technologies" grants will be distributed to schools that develop proposals in four broadly defined areas: integrated physical security systems, bus-fleet monitoring systems, low-level force devices and school safety training.

In its call for the grant proposals, the National Institute of Justice ­ an arm of the Justice Department ­ says the money will be distributed to schools proposing "effective technology solutions to protect the students, teachers, school personnel, and the educational infrastructure from criminal activities, particularly crimes of violence.". . .

Such technologies have already been implemented in some school districts. North of Houston, Texas, 16,000 elementary students in the Spring Independent School District wear RFID tags, embedded with chips that indicate their locations on a computerized map. The school also has 750 surveillance cameras mounted throughout its facilities, with plans to install 300 more.

In New York, RFID systems are also being used in schools. The Brockport Central School District in northern New York is testing school bus fleet monitoring with GPS technology and scanning students IDs as they enter and exit the bus. Students at the Enterprise Charter School in Buffalo wave their RFID tags in front of two kiosks at the school entrance which automatically transmit attendance to teachers and administrators. . .

Lee Tien, senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a public-interest organization, believes the increasing use of RFID technology in schools could affect how the public views surveillance. "It creates an atmosphere where you normalize the use of surveillance technology… [and] the idea that you should accept that you are being tracked," said Tien.
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