Archive for February, 2005

Tagging Students: Trial in California Ended

Wednesday, February 16th, 2005

A test of RFID-tagging students in Sutter, California was ended when the technology provider decided to pull out.

“I’m disappointed; that’s about all I can say at this point,” Earnie Graham, the superintendent and principal of Brittan Elementary School in Sutter, said Tuesday night. “I think I let my staff down. Nobody on this campus knows every student.”

The badges, developed by Sutter-based technology company InCom Corp., were introduced on Jan. 18. The school board was set to talk about the controversial policy Tuesday night but tabled the discussion after InCom announced it was terminating its agreement.

So, most decidedly not the way you’d want to try to introduce RFID tracking for monitoring people. The principal’s comments throughout seemed to suggest he was oblivious to perceptions, which can’t have helped.

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More comments on Tagging School Kids

Monday, February 14th, 2005

More comments on use of RFID to monitor kids in school, from Wired Magazine readers…

…The ID tag in itself hurts nobody, but the psychological ramifications of being stamped with a number as a child is a scarring experience for the developing mind. It stunts the growth of individuality, gives the child no sense of privacy, and would have me feel lost in a sea of lanyards, tracking devices and numbers. Our children are individuals and the future of our society, and as such, they need to feel like more than a number on someone’s economical little school data server…

Reminding me a little of an argument against Internet voting, as well, that certain physical rituals, such as class roll call (“Buehler? Buehler?…”) aren’t just recording a tally, but are something of a social exercise.

…the designated “tagger” would be the student who careers in all the tags and his friends can be a few minutes late and the system wouldn’t be able to tell. Because we eventually become dependent on our technology and forget to count assuming the computer is right. Always happens and always will happen that way.

(“Careers” presumably meaning “collects and brings in”… certainly one would expect to see clever students hack RFID systems just like they’ve hacked everything back to the dawn of blackboard & chalk…)

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More on Tagging California Students

Thursday, February 10th, 2005

Continued coverage on tagging California school kids.

Angry parents, saying their children’s privacy rights are being violated, have asked the board of the tiny Brittan School District to rescind a requirement that all students wear badges that monitor their whereabouts on campus using radio signals.

Interesting developments, though it’s hard to know how much of this little experiment might translate to “people tagging” more generally. Given the small size and isolated location of the school, it’s not all that likely that these tags (and they’re huge) will see much use outside of their primary purpose, e.g., local merchants won’t put up readers to detect school kids (perhaps a stretch, but in downtown Berkeley, where a huge highschool is a block away from the business district, the local retailers have a lot of problems managing kid traffic and “five-finger discounts,” and it’s common to see signs indicating that “No more than X minors allowed in store at one time”…).

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More on the U.S. House and RFID

Tuesday, February 8th, 2005

RFID Journal provides more coverage of the U.S. House of Representatives’ request for information on evacuation monitoring, i.e., tracking all members, staff and visitors to House facilities on Capitol Hill.

“An RFID-hybrid solution would be optimal,” [ABI Research's Erik] Michielsen says. Such a hybrid could combine biometric identifiers with RFID. “We’re going to be seeing more of the RFID-biometrics hybrids in the next year,” Michielsen predicts, because the U.S. government has shown an interest in that kind of solution.

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“Security Issues Swamp RFID”

Monday, February 7th, 2005

A summary by Scott Bradner of some recent problems related to deployed or tested RFID, including the recent security crack of automobile authentication, and the ability to read RFIDs intended for passports at a significant distance…

…I wonder how much bad news the RFID business can absorb before it begins to figure out that there are still problems to be solved before it’s time to deploy. So far, the RFID business has shown a remarkable level of absorbency.

To be fair, the issues raised aren’t technology problems so much as system design and policy ones, e.g., longer keys would have made the car authentication issue less a problem (and it’s a somewhat exotic “hack” as it is); I suspect that more problematic in retail use of RFID for inventory will be ensuring accurate reads in the first place, and less so the risks to customer privacy, where item-level tagging seems less likely to occur, given a sketchy plan for return on investment.

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“UC Considers Using Barcodes for Cadavers”

Friday, February 4th, 2005

As reported by the San Francisco Chronicle:

“Shaken by scandals involving the black-market sale of body parts, University of California officials are considering inserting supermarket-style barcodes or radio frequency devices in cadavers to keep track of them.”

The article goes on to note that simply tagging corpses (or parts of corpses) isn’t much of a deterrent to the determined thief, and that audits and other security measures are required.

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Tags, You Know, for the Kids

Wednesday, February 2nd, 2005

Sutter elementary school in California is using RFID in ID badges on children.

The badges contain a “passive antenna” that emit radio waves to a reader mounted above the doorway in each classroom. The readers picks up the child’s ID number and sends it to a handheld computer that tracks attendance.

…

The school board approved the trial run last summer for kindergarten through eighth grade students. All staff members and volunteers also wear badges, said [School District Superintendent Earnie] Graham.

The school board approved the free test run unanimously last summer. Graham held a special meeting Thursday for parents who had concerns about the new policy. Graham apologized for the scant notice given to parents, but said it was to increase school security.

“It’s not an option,” Graham said. “(The badge) is just like a textbook, you have to have it. I’m charged with running the school district and I get to make those kinds of rules.”

The badges are supplied by InCom, a technology firm based in Sutter. The owners offered the school a small donation for the inconvenience of testing the badges and attendance scanners.

Graham’s quote presumably intended to curry favor with the judges for the Big Brother Awards.

The badges were described as “creepy” by one parent, not necessarily for the RFID, but probably because the badge also includes a photo of the child and the child’s full name, which might facilitate stranger abduction…

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Dept. of Homeland Security Planning RFID Trials

Tuesday, February 1st, 2005

The Department of Homeland Security plans to deploy RFID in support of the
US VISIT program:

“Fact Sheet: Radio Frequency Identification Technology”

“Homeland Security Announces Plans to Test Radio Frequency Technology at Land Borders”

“…The tags will not include visitors’ biographic or biometric information. Rather, they will contain only a serial code that links to a visitors’ information securely stored in databases used by US VISIT. It will also be tamper-proof and difficult to counterfeit. There are many other layers of defense to prevent information being used incorrectly including:

  • No personal information will be included on the tag
  • Information on the tag cannot be changed
  • The tag will only be activated once officially issued
  • Personal information is only processed over secure communication paths

These factors will render ineffective so-called “skimming,” the use of unauthorized reading devices to capture information from such tags. A serial code would be meaningless to any third party trying to collect that information.

Also, it will be impossible to “track” the whereabouts of someone holding such a passive tag without a corresponding reading device. Concerns about such tracking using passive RFID are perhaps confused with Global Positioning Satellite devices, which rely on a completely different technology from that used by RFID and will not be used by US VISIT…”

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