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RFIDs

Sure, RFID is helpful for stocktaking but the idea of RFID is that eventually there will be no need for cashiers or cash transactions, you'll be scanned and debited as you leave the store, so no more shoplifting. But what if you get overcharged? Another problem is each RFID tag has a unique identifying number and they're toying with implanting it in currency, in theory 'they' could trace all the transactions a paper note has been through, so no more 'cash in hand', more revenue for the tax people. Equally, criminals might be able to scan you, or your house, to see if you have anything worth stealing. Tags are so small that they could be hidden anywhere, perhaps in clothes or shoes, this might trigger readers in a store and enable them to read from a central database. It's true that our movements are traceable via mobile phone, credit cards, etc. but these are out in the open and we have a certain amount of control over them. If RFID is used 'against' us then it could be a very dangerous technology.
 
University of California moots barcodes for corpses

Greets

from the cradle to the grave ...

University of California moots barcodes for corpses
By Lucy Sherriff
Published Monday 7th February 2005 11:10 GMT

The University of California is considering using barcodes and RFID tags to keep track of the bodies donated to medical research, following a series of scandals involving illegal trading in body parts.

Last year, the director of the university's Willed Bodies programme and one other person at UCLA was arrested as part of an ongoing investigation into illegal sale of body parts. Courts suspended the programme pending completion of the investigation. As yet, no charges have been filed, according to AP reports.
Click Here

Some people who planned to leave their bodies to science withdrew their offers after the news broke. In response, the university proposed a series of reforms to the way cadavers will be managed, including the use of barcodes and RFID tags. Organs removed from a corpse would most likely be tagged, too.

The proposals have been given a cautious welcome by lawyers acting for families involved in an earlier incident at the university. In 1996, donor families accused the university of cremating the remains of their loved ones along with medical trash and the bodies of laboratory animals. After this, the lawyer said, the university had also promised to clean up its act.

UC Irvine has also been investigated. In 1999 it was unable to account for hundreds of willed bodies, and the director of the program was accused of selling spines to a hospital in Phoenix. The director was sacked, but denies wrong-doing, and was never prosecuted.

Experts in bioethics have warned that any automated system needs human back-up. Dr Arthur Caplan, a professor of bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, told AP: "Most of this illicit trade in body parts is done by bad guys. Having the barcoded chips is great, but if you want to beat them you need to have someone come in occasionally and say, 'I'm doing an audit'." ®
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http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/07/rdfi_barcode_cadaver/

mal
 
World Cup 2006 'abused for mega-surveillance project'

Greets

World Cup 2006 'abused for mega-surveillance project'
By Monika Ermert
Published Tuesday 8th February 2005 15:19 GMT

Germany's football authorities have been accused of Big Brother tactics over their decision to incorporate RFID chips into tickets for World Cup 2006.

Around 3.7 million tickets are to be sold in four online sale rounds, the last on 15 April, 2006. In the first sales round,Around 160,000 fans applied for one million tickets covering all 64 matches.

To apply for a ticket you have to give your name, address, nationality, which team you want to support and your bank details. You must also supply your ID or passport number and your birth date.

Assuming you are successful, you receive a fully personalized ticket containing an RFID chip; this enables authorities to check the ticket against your passport. Very little information resides on the chip: the identity check is conducted against a database at the German Football Association (DFB).

"The World Cup will be abused to stage a mega-surveillance project, that allows total control over football fans," warned Thilo Weichert, data protection officer of the Independent Center of Data Protection in Schleswig-Holstein (www.datenschutzzentrum.de). While RFID technology makes good sense for logistics purposes, to use it on people breaks the principles of German data protection; also, the amount of information stored by the DFB is against the law, Weichart argues. He is supported in his analysis by several civil rights and consumer organisations such as Foebud.

For example, it is only necessary when selling tickets to know if a person was over or under eighteen. The exact birthday on the other hand is very much appreciated by marketing companies; and opt-in procedures on the online sale questionaires were not clear-cut enough. Data protection rules of the system provider CTS Eventim, are also questionable, Weichart claims.

"This is a World cup," says Jens Grittner, spokesman for the Organisation Committee. "We have to address very delicate security concerns," he said. The personalizing of the tickets would help to avoid black market sales and fraud in entering the football stadions. Controls in which RFID number and the set of personal data in the DFB database where matched would only be made at random or in suspicious cases.

The ticketing scheme had been presented to the Data Protection Authorities in Darmstadt, the German Ministry of the Interior and even to the European Commission, he said. "Every comment we got has been considered and we are somewhat amazed by the imagination of the critics." According to Grittner, it is "very German" that the World Cup had now gained such attention - for the wrong reasons.

Football fans may not care about being tracked - but they are complaining about practical issues. It is impossible to order tickets first and then decide later who you will take to a match, because of personalization. According to BAFF, a Germany-wide fan club, applicants can't buy tickets for different people for different matches. So if you take your husband to one match you have to take him to every match.Clear rules on what happens if he is ill on the day of the match are still lacking.

BAFF is calling for an easy-to-use official platform for ticket changes. Said one BAFF spokesperson: "With all the technique in use this shouldn't be a big problem." ®
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http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/08/world_cup_2006_big_brother_charges/

mal
 
Hospitals ga-ga over RFID

Greets

from the cradle to the grave ....

Hospitals ga-ga over RFID

Steven Deare, Computerworld

24/06/2004 15:12:15

Tagging babies with radio frequency identification (RFID) chips has gained traction in the Western Australian healthcare system with strong interest in an industry-leading trial.

The maternity ward of Osborne Park Hospital, Perth, has had few difficulties tracking the movement of its tiny assets since an RFID-based security system was installed in February, according to clinical nurse manager Graeme Boardley.

Battery-powered tags are attached to a newborn's leg using a rubber band. The devices send signals to readers installed at three- to four-metre intervals along corridor walls, which transmit the signals to the asset locator terminal.

On screen, red icons with each child's name shows the babies' locations within the ward. This is updated every four seconds, and can track the infants as they are carried by parents or staff.

The catalyst for the security measures was the kidnapping of a baby girl from the ward in January last year.

A state-wide review of all maternity security ensued, and Osborne Park Hospital was appointed as a pilot site for e-tagging and as such, the public hospital received special funding before its tender.

No specific technology was earmarked for the e-tagging project, but RFID proved best, Boardley said.

"We selected the best system. Some [proposals] didn't have RFID."

"We decided on cost, and that the system had to work underwater for [babies'] baths etc," he said.

The hospital chose the Honeywell Asset Locator, which with three years of ongoing support, "came in just under our $50,000 budget", Boardley said.

The system took two to three weeks to install, during which time about 40 square metres of cabling was laid throughout the (estimated) 500-square metre ward.

A critical part of the risk management system is its alarm capability. Sensors near two exit points of the ward will trigger the alarm if tags come within range.

The alarm will also sound if a tag is stationary (ie removed), or tampered with. The time allowed before the alarm is sounded can also be adjusted, Boardley said, which is helpful when dealing with babies.

"You'll find that babies are constantly moving, even when they're sleeping," he said.

The hospital has had the occasional false alarm with the system, he said.

"We're finding that with some of the larger women, at the odd time where a baby's being fed and the mother has her back to the reader, it affects the signal.

"But this is overcome by increasing the area covered the signal," Boardley said.

The system will later be linked to all staff pagers.

The ward has recently received new versions of the tags featuring an easier attachment mechanism and rechargable batteries, Boardley said.

"The batteries last three to four weeks, and the average stay here is two days for babies," he said.

The pilot will run until both the hospital and vendor are satisfied with the system.

While there had been no unexpected benefits from the RFID system, it had delivered "peace of mind" as a risk management tool, he said.

The system has attracted several representatives from other public and private hospitals interested in the technology, according to Boardley.

The RFID system will be adopted by a South Australian hospital in August, Boardley said.
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http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/index.php/id;484455565;fp;2;fpid;1

mal
 
School RFID Plan Gets an F

Greets

from the cradle to the grave ...

School RFID Plan Gets an F

By Kim Zetter

10:15 AM Feb. 10, 2005 PT

Parents of elementary and middle school students in a small California town are protesting a tracking program their school recently launched, which requires students to wear identification badges embedded with radio frequency, or RFID, chips.

School superintendents struck a deal with a local maker of the technology last year to test the system to track attendance and weed out trespassers.



Dawn and Mike Cantrall's daughter, a seventh-grader at Brittan Elementary School, poses at her Sutter, Calif., home, wearing the Radio Frequency Identification tag that the school asked her to wear. The Cantralls have filed a formal complaint against the school board, protesting the tag. The elementary school in this tiny rural school district has become an unlikely pioneer on the technology frontier by agreeing to test student I.D. cards designed to automatically take attendance.The badges use the same Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology that has been used to track livestock and store inventory _ and have outraged some parents with privacy concerns who say they were never consulted.

But students and parents, who weren't told about the RFID chips until they complained, are upset over what they say are surreptitious tactics the school used to implement the program. They also question the ethics of a monetary deal the school made with the company to test and promote its product, using students as guinea pigs.

"This is not right for our kids," said Michele Tatro, whose daughter received a badge. "I'm not willing for anybody to track me and I don't think my children should be tracked, either."

The InClass RFID system was developed by two local high school teachers in Sutter, California, who helped found the company, InCom, that markets the system. Last year, the company approached the principal and superintendent of Brittan Elementary School District with the idea of testing InClass. The company offered the elementary school a donation of "a couple thousand dollars," according to the school's attorney, Paul Nicholas Boylan, as compensation for possible inconveniences caused by the test.

Boylan said the plan seemed like a good idea at the time and that the outcry was "completely unanticipated."

"But these issues are far more complicated than they first looked," he said, admitting that "this is a test of something new. No one knows whether this technology is going to work or not."

The system consists of a photo ID card affixed to a lanyard and worn around the neck. Embedded in the card is an RFID chip that contains a 15-digit number assigned to each student. As students pass beneath a doorway scanner on their way into a classroom, the scanner records the number and sends it to a server in the school's administrative office. The server translates the digits into names and sends an attendance list to the teacher's PDA, identifying all of the students who walked through the door. The teacher then visually verifies that the names on the PDA list match the students in the classroom.

The company installed the scanners and server last summer, but students only recently received the badges. InCom didn't return a call for comment, but according to a press release (PDF) on its website, the company plans to market the product nationwide next week at the American Association of School Administrators conference in Texas. Attorney Boylan said the school district stands to earn a royalty on future sales, and InCom has promised to install a schoolwide system at Brittan free of charge after the test is completed.

Brittan is the first school in California to use RFID, but not the first in the nation. Spring Independent School District near Houston, Texas, recently gave 28,000 students RFID badges to record when students get on and off school buses. The information is monitored by the police and school administrators to prevent child abductions and truancy. A handful of other schools have tested similar projects.

Nicole Ozer, technology and civil liberties policy director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, said the technology's privacy threats are real.

"The proliferation of RFIDs and their use in identity documents is of serious concern," Ozer said. "Not just for people with children but for all of us in terms of monitoring."

Last December, when her 13-year-old daughter, Lauren, mentioned that students at her school would be getting "nametags," Michele Tatro thought nothing of it.

"They've always had student IDs to get into dances and get discounts at football games," Tatro said. "So I didn't even fathom the tracking (aspect). I had never heard of RFID until it came to my doorstep."

Then, when Tatro collected Lauren from school a few weeks ago, her daughter was furious.

"She shoves (the badge) in front of me and says 'Look at this!'" Tatro said. "She's mad and exasperated because someone has forced this upon her, and she feels like she can't do anything about it."

The Tatros and the parents of another student told the school, which includes grades kindergarten through 8th grade, that their children wouldn't participate in the project. The school sent a letter threatening disciplinary action if students didn't participate. So the parents contacted the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California and other civil liberties groups. A handful of other parents have withdrawn their children from the test project as well.

"We tried talking to (the school superintendents) twice," Tatro said. "They didn’t see our concerns."

Parents and civil liberty groups are also concerned about who has access to the collected data.

Boylan said the system offers security advantages since administrators would immediately know if a student didn't show up for class and could notify parents quickly. School officials could also quickly identify anyone who didn't belong on campus if they weren't wearing an RFID badge. But the main draw is a more efficient and accurate way to track and verify attendance in order to receive state funds.

"In California, the funding of schools is based on attendance," Boylan said. "Therefore we want (attendance) to be as accurate as we can. If we are wrong for whatever reason, it means we are getting less money than we should be getting." The system provides an audit trail to back up the district's claims if the state questions their numbers.

Boylan couldn't say how scanners above bathroom doors would help track attendance. InCom installed scanners outside 7th and 8th-grade classrooms at Brittan and above bathroom doors in a cafeteria. But Boylan noted that the bathroom scanners never worked properly anyway, and the school has since asked InCom to remove them.

Boylan said the school properly notified parents about the test, as the law requires, and got no complaints. He said the school held an open board meeting to discuss the test and posted public notices describing the essence of the test, but could not say where exactly the notices were placed.

"At the office, possibly in town," he said.

On Jan. 12, Brittan did announce in its weekly newsletter (PDF) that the school would soon require students to wear ID badges, but didn't mention RFID chips or scanners in classroom doors.

It said only that the school would soon issue "new safety ID badges" that students should wear "at all times" during normal school hours. The announcement also said students would be held accountable for the cost of replacing lost or destroyed badges.

Lauren Tatro said that when principal Earnie Graham distributed the badges, he didn't mention the RFID chips in them or give students a choice about wearing the badges.

"Students asked questions," Tatro said, "but they couldn’t really be answered very well. We got just the basics of what they were but nothing about the tracking."

A week after receiving parent complaints, the school scheduled a gathering to demonstrate the technology and answer questions, but notified parents only a day in advance.

"We're not opposed to technology," Tatro said. "We’re opposed to the way they're applying the technology. This is a test bed (to gauge) public acceptance of this. If they get away with it here, somebody else will try something even more invasive somewhere else."

Boylan said the school is currently discussing with the company how much data it needs to test the system. And the school has decided to allow students to opt out of wearing badges until it makes a formal decision about the status of the project next week.

But Tatro said that even if the school modifies or cancels the project, they plan to lobby schools to abandon such plans nationwide.

"We feel a bit of responsibility that we have to make this known," Tatro said. "We don't want to deal with another application of it somewhere else. Even if they retract, we will press forward in any lobbying to the appropriate people that we don't want this technology used in this application in society."
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http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,66554,00.html

mal
 
US group implants electronic tags in workers

By Richard Waters in San Francisco
Published: February 12 2006 22:02 | Last updated: February 12 2006 22:02

An Ohio company has embedded silicon chips in two of its employees - the first known case in which US workers have been “tagged” electronically as a way of identifying them.

CityWatcher.com, a private video surveillance company, said it was testing the technology as a way of controlling access to a room where it holds security video footage for government agencies and the police.

Embedding slivers of silicon in workers is likely to add to the controversy over RFID technology, widely seen as one of the next big growth industries.

RFID chips – inexpensive radio transmitters that give off a unique identifying signal – have been implanted in pets or attached to goods so they can be tracked in transit.

“There are very serious privacy and civil liberty issues of having people permanently numbered,” said Liz McIntyre, who campaigns against the use of identification technology.

But Sean Darks, chief executive of CityWatcher, said the glass-encased chips were like identity cards. They are planted in the upper right arm of the recipient, and “read” by a device similar to a cardreader.

“There’s nothing pulsing or sending out a signal,” said Mr Darks, who has had a chip in his own arm. “It’s not a GPS chip. My wife can’t tell where I am.”

The technology’s defenders say it is acceptable as long as it is not compulsory. But critics say any implanted device could be used to track the “wearer” without their knowledge.

VeriChip – the US company that made the devices and claims to have the only chips that have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration – said the implants were designed primarily for medical purposes.

So far around 70 people in the US have had the implants, the company said.
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http://news.ft.com/cms/s/ec414700-9bf4- ... e2340.html
 
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/4886598.stm

Alarm over shopping radio tags
8 April 200. By David Reid
Click reporter

Supermarkets have already brought everything under the sun under one roof, and along the way been accused of denuding the High Street of butcher, baker and candlestick-maker.

Now they are introducing a new technology that some say threatens a fundamental invasion of our privacy.

We are all familiar with barcodes, those product fingerprints that save cashiers the bother of keying in the code number of everything we buy.

Now, meet their replacement: the RFID tag, or radio frequency ID tag.

These smart labels consist of a tiny chip surrounded by a coiled antenna.

Good tracking

While barcodes need to be manually scanned, RFID simply broadcasts its presence and data to electronic readers.

It means the computer networks of companies can track the position and progress of billions of products on rail, road, sea and shelf.

Albrecht Von Truchsess, from the German supermarket chain Metro Group, which uses this technology, says: "RFID really brings a revolution to everything that is transported from one point to the other, and in the future you will have it really on everything.

"That means that we don't have to do anything while the goods are on the way from the production site to our stores. It is just done automatically."

For all the benefits the technology promises, the roll-out of RFID is in danger of being derailed by the public's perception of it.

A Christian author in the US, for example, has just published a book claiming RFID will evolve into the mark of the beast featured in Revelations and presage the end of the world.

'Big Brother'?

The technology has also attracted criticism from more moderate voices.

Among these is Vint Cerf. He is one of the inventors of the internet and is now employed by Google as the company's internet evangelist.

He told Click: "What everybody worries about is that these identifiers will be used not to keep track of the object, but of the person associated with the object and then there's a Big Brother scenario that everybody worries about.

"But when the economics get to the point where the readers are inexpensive and the chips are inexpensive, then you start to ask yourself who has the ability to read the chips and what do they do with the information?"

Metro sees RFID working for it by having food traceable back to the farm, queues cut to nothing, and shelves that shout when they are empty.

But with remotely readable tags on everything from boots to beans, is it the customers or what they buy that is being labelled?

Former Australian privacy commissioner Malcolm Crompton says: "If done wrongly, it really is possible that I can buy things in one shop and be tracked in another shop, that the data, once collected, stays there for someone to come in and collect and use under circumstances that I don't know about or that I don't approve of.

"I think that is when society is on a slippery slope."

The fear is that what we buy will be forever linked to us. In the nightmare scenario, an innocently discarded soft drink can could end up in what later becomes a crime scene.

RFID could open a whole new field of forensics where the tag on the can removes any reasonable doubt.

Taking steps

Concerns about RFID have been taken up by Viviane Reding, the European commissioner for information society and media.

She has recently launched a public consultation process with a view to seeing whether RFID needs to be regulated.

She says: "A new technology that is bound to be multiplied by 10 to 15 times in the next coming years in numbers of sales will not fly, and will not be of benefit to the community and to the economy if the consumers are afraid that this technology might be a threat to their privacy."

One solution being floated is the idea of killing the code on the chip as customers leave the shop.

Whatever comes out of the European Commission's consultation, it looks likely that your Saturday shop will never be the same again.
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Chip You: Tracking Humans

LINK
RFID Chips Now Human-Compatible

Most people have seen RFID technology in action – anyone with a Cruise Card has used one to pay a toll. Now, though, humans can be implanted with the same kinds of chips.

RFID – Radio Frequency Identification – is used to pay tolls and track inventory by using readable microchips. The FDA has now approved similar chips to store medical history and conduct everyday transactions. But is it safe to put that much information into a single chip?

Mark Krieger of New York logs onto his computer using a tiny microchip implanted between his thumb and forefinger. “I just swipe my hand across the reader and it puts my credentials in,” he said.

The computer programmer voluntarily had the device inserted to, as he says, make his life easier. "It’s always with me, always in my hands, and I'll never lose it."

A chip about the size of a grain of rice is implanted beneath the skin and encoded with a unique identifying number that, when scanned, allows access to information placed on it.

Bill Koretsky, a New Jersey police officer as well as a diabetic, had a chip embedded in his arm for health reasons. When Koretsky crashed during a high-speed chase, doctors were able to assess his medical history in minutes. "I couldn't answer all their questions fully,” Koretsky said, “but they had all the information there in front of them."

The VeriChip Corporation introduced the first human-implantable microchip. Now, nearly 100 hospitals nationwide use the technology.

"We're very dependent on getting rapid information on critically ill patients, which sometimes is a challenge,” said Dr. Joseph Feldman, who is in charge of the emergency trauma department at Hackensack Medical in New Jersey.

But experts warn that using RFID to exchange personal and financial data could compromise security on many levels. "You have the ability to have electronic pick-pockets, except you never know it, because everything is still in your wallet,” said Mark Rasch, Senior Vice President of Solutionary, Inc., a computer security firm. “It's just been stripped clean."

To prevent that, Rasch said lawmakers need to set standards to keep this latest technology from chipping away at personal privacy. The cost of getting a human-compatible microchip ranges between $100 and $150. In addition to hospitals, more than 200 doctors across the country are offering the microchip to patients.

The state of Wisconsin has already taken proactive measures to protect residents’ privacy. In June, a new law banned the forcible implantation of RFID tags in humans.
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Farmers See 'Mark of the Beast' in RFID Livestock Tags
By David Kravets September 09, 2008

A group of community farmers, some of them Amish, are challenging rules requiring the tagging of livestock with RFID chips, saying the devices are a "mark of the beast."

Michigan and federal authorities say the radio frequency identification devices (RFID) will help monitor the travels of bovine and other livestock diseases.

"Use of a numbering system for their premises and/or electronic numbering system for their animals constitutes some form of a 'mark of the beast' and/or represents an infringement of their 'dominion over cattle and all living things' in violation of their fundamental religious beliefs," according to the farmers' lawsuit filed Monday in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

As radio frequency identification devices become a daily part of the electronic age, RFID technology is increasingly coming under fire for allegedly being the mark of Satan. The technology is fast becoming a part of passports and payment cards and is widely expected to replace bar-code labels on consumer goods.

The suit (.pdf) mentions various verses from the Book of Revelation. "He causes all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hand or on their foreheads, and that no one may buy or sell except one who has the mark or the name of the beast, or the number of his name." Revelation 13:16-17

The farmers' lawsuit, brought by the Virginia-based Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund and some of its 1,400 members, seeks to block enforcement of the National Animal Identification System. Some of the group's members so staunchly oppose the program that "they may have to quit farming," according to the lawsuit.

And if they quit, U.S. citizens could be in jeopardy during a terror attack. According to the lawsuit:

"All plaintiffs preserve and protect Americans' agricultural heritage and traditional farming techniques, they maintain and protect heirloom varieties of plants and animals constituting a valuable genetic resource which may help to protect America's food supply in the event of a disease outbreak, and they also provide a national security benefit founded in a diverse system in the event of a terrorist attack or natural disaster that interrupts the distant transportation of centrally produced food across the country."

They may quit farming and imperil the United States because RFID tagging "forces them to, in part, violate tenets of their Old Order Amish beliefs, i.e., they are forced to use technology they would ordinarily not use," according to the suit.

The lawsuit also claims the program places a financial burden on small farmers and that the U.S Department of Agriculture has failed to show "any rational relationship to or causal link with animal disease control."

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/0 ... cryin.html
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Edit to amend title.
 
A school student see the mark of the beast in RFIDs in her ID card but there are civil liberty issues.

Texas schools punish students who refuse to be tracked with microchips
http://rt.com/usa/news/texas-school-id-hernandez-033/
Published: 09 October, 2012, 22:34

A school district in Texas came under fire earlier this year when it announced that it would require students to wear microchip-embedded ID cards at all times. Now students who refuse to be monitored say they are feeling the repercussions.

Since October 1, students at John Jay High School and Anson Jones Middle School in San Antonia, Texas have been asked to attend class clasping onto photo ID cards equipped with radio-frequency identification chips to keep track of each and every pupil’s personal location. Educators insist that the endeavor is being rolled out in Texas to relax the rampant truancy rates devastating the state’s school and the subsequent funding they are failing to receive as a result, and pending the program’s success the RFID chips could soon come to 112 schools in all and affect nearly 100,000 students.

Some pupils say they are already seeing the impact, though, and it’s not one they are very anxious to experience. Students who refuse to walk the schoolhouse halls with a location-sensitive sensor in their pocket or around their neck are being tormented by instructors and being barred from participating in certain school-wide functions, with some saying they are even being turned away from common areas like cafeterias and libraries.
Andrea Hernandez, a sophomore at John Jay, says educators have ignored her pleas to have her privacy respected and have told her she can’t participate in school elections if she doesn’t submit to the tracking program.

To Salon, Hernandez says subjecting herself to constant monitoring by way of wearing a RFID chip is comparable to clothing herself in the “mark of the beast.” When she reached out to WND.com to reveal the school’s response, though, she told them that she was threatened with exclusion from picking a homecoming king and queen for not adhering to the rules.

"I had a teacher tell me I would not be allowed to vote because I did not have the proper voter ID," Hernandez told WND. "I had my old student ID card which they originally told us would be good for the entire four years we were in school. He said I needed the new ID with the chip in order to vote."
Even after Hernandez politely refused to wear an RFID chip, Deputy Superintendent Ray Galindo offered a statement that suggests that both the student’s religious and civil liberty-anchored arguments will only allow her some leeway for so long.
“We are simply asking your daughter to wear an ID badge as every other student and adult on the Jay campus is asked to do,” Galindo wrote to the girl’s parents, WND reports. If she is allowed to forego the tracking now, he continued, it could only be a matter of time before the school signs off on making location-monitoring mandatory and the repercussions will be more than just revoking voting rights for homecoming contests.

“I urge you to accept this solution so that your child’s instructional program will not be affected. As we discussed, there will be consequences for refusal to wear an ID card as we begin to move forward with full implementation,” Galindo continued.

The girl’s father, Steve Hernandez, tells WND that the school has been somewhat willing to work with the daughter’s demands, but insists that her family “would have to agree to stop criticizing the program” and start publically supporting it.

“I told him that was unacceptable because it would imply an endorsement of the district’s policy and my daughter and I should not have to give up our constitutional rights to speak out against a program that we feel is wrong,” Mr. Hernandez responded.

By reversing the poor attendance figures, the Northside Independent School District is expected to collect upwards of $2 million in state funding, with the program itself costing around one-quarter of that to roll out and another $136,005 annually to keep it up and running. The savings the school stands to make in the long run won’t necessarily negate the other damages that could arise: Heather Fazio, of Texans for Accountable Government tells WND that for $30 she filed a Freedom of Information Act request and received the names and addresses of every student in the school district.

“Using this information along with an RFID reader means a predator could use this information to determine if the student is at home and then track them wherever they go. These chips are always broadcasting so anyone with a reader can track them anywhere,” she says.

Kirsten Bokenkamp of the ACLU told the San Antonio Express-News earlier this year that her organization was expecting to challenge the board’s decision this to roll out the tracking system, but the school has since gone ahead anyway. Steve Hernandez tells WND that he approached the ACLU for possible representation in his daughter’s case, but Rebecca Robertson of a local branch of the organization said, “the ACLU of Texas will not be able to represent you or your daughter in this matter,” saying his daughter’s case in particular fails to meet the criteria they use to pick and choose civil liberties cases to take on.
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Edits to fix img and typo.
 
The Beast Wins!

Pupil Hernandez, who refused to wear RFID, loses appeal
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20957587

The school is one of 112 in Texas meant to introduce badges equipped with RFID tags

RFID technology thwarts bird's nest counterfeiters
A Texan student who refused to wear a badge with a radio tag that tracked her movements has lost a federal court appeal against her school's ID policy.

The radio chips track attendance, which in turn helps secure school funding.

But Andrea Hernandez, 15, stopped wearing the badge on religious grounds, saying it was the "mark of the beast".

After John Jay High School suspended her, she went to court and won a temporary injunction to continue her studies at the school, without the tag.

The federal court ruling overturned that, saying if she was to stay at the school, she would be required to wear the badge. Otherwise, she would have to transfer to a new school.

The new identification policy at the Northside Independent School District (NISD) in San Antonio, Texas, began at the start of the 2012 school year.

John Jay High School is one of two schools piloting the programme, which eventually aims to equip all student badges across the district's 112 schools with radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips.

The badges reveal each student's location on their campus, giving the district more precise information on attendance.

The daily average of the attendance is related to how much funding each school receives.

But Miss Hernandez said the badge was the "mark of the beast", as described in chapter 13 of the Book of Revelation in the Bible
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I have to wear a micro chipped tag at work - maybe my boss is the Anti Christ?
 
Now its microchips under your skin.

Want to gain entry to your office, get on a bus, or perhaps buy a sandwich? We're all getting used to swiping a card to do all these things. But at Epicenter, a new hi-tech office block in Sweden, they are trying a different approach - a chip under the skin.

Felicio de Costa, whose company is one of the tenants, arrives at the front door and holds his hand against it to gain entry. Inside he does the same thing to get into the office space he rents, and he can also wave his hand to operate the photocopier.

That's all because he has a tiny RFID (radio-frequency identification) chip, about the size of a grain of rice, implanted in his hand. Soon, others among the 700 people expected to occupy the complex will also be offered the chance to be chipped. Along with access to doors and photocopiers, they're promised further services in the longer run, including the ability to pay in the cafe with a touch of a hand.

On the day of the building's official opening, the developer's chief executive was, himself, chipped live on stage. And I decided that if was to get to grips with this technology, I had to bite the bullet - and get chipped too. ...

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-31042477
 
I remember talking about this with a colleague in a previous job.

He told me that his dad worked for BT and that when he got bored he'd go to the toilet and jack off.

I did suggest how embarrassing that could be if the RFID chip was in his hand.
 
Yea, hes flushing the toilet, hes not, hes flushing the toilet etc...
 
I wonder if wearing a magnetic ring/rings would be able to jam the signal if the chip were implanted in your hand?. You could punch the munchkin to your hearts content then.
 
The downside if every employer decided to do this would be lots of chips in you after you'd had lots of jobs.
 
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Who was that professor off of the 90s who tried to become a cyborg by placing a chip under his skin? I think it opened a door for him - not figuratively, it literally unlocked a door.
 
That's the man! I expect he looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger at the end of Terminator 2 by now. No?
 
He appears to be the developer of the automated wanking arm, as seen on another thread:

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via CNET
School cafeteria's palm scanner is 'mark of beast,' says parent
Take certain parents at Moss Bluff Elementary School in Louisiana. Their arms are raised up high in celestial fright at the school's heathen attempts to introduce a palm scanner into the cafeteria
/snip
Mamie Sonnier, a very concerned parent, told KPLC-TV: "As a Christian, I've read the Bible, you know go to church and stuff. I know where it's going to end up coming to, the mark of the beast. I'm not going to let my kids have that."

Naturally, there will be some who thoughtlessly scoff at such a notion. After all, the school has said very clearly that this scanner is simply a way of getting kids to move more quickly through the lunch line.
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Sounds more like the mark of the feast.
 
I forgot about this other piece of crazy in respect of palm scanners
From Inqisitr
Mark Of The Beast Lawsuit Wins $150k, Man Claims Biometric Scanners Related To Bible’s Antichrist In Revelation
The “mark of the beast” lawsuit against Consol Energy/Consolidation Coal Company’s mining in West Virginia resulted in a Christian man being rewarded $150,000 in punitive damages after he says he was forced to retire over a work disagreement on whether or not a biometric scanner is related to the Antichrist of the Bible.
/snip
Beverly R. Butcher says he was worried that a biometric hand-scanner being implemented at his work place was related to Revelation 13:17-18.

“And he provides that no one will be able to buy or to sell, except the one who has the mark, either the name of the beast or the number of his name. Here is wisdom. Let him who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for the number is that of a man; and his number is six hundred and sixty-six.”

Due to this Bible verse, Butcher claimed the biometric scans used for time and attendance tracking violated his Christian beliefs. Butcher requested an alternative method since two other employees, who both had missing body parts, were provided an exception. Consol denied this request, so the U. S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission started a lawsuit on behalf of Butcher based upon the claims of religious discrimination.
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An anonymous ER doctor treated a woman who claimed she had a tracking chip embedded in her body. At first he disbelieved her -- lots of people suffer from delusions that they have implanted microchips -- but then she showed him the suture.

The woman was had been enslaved by a pimp who'd implanted an RFID chip of the sort used to locate lost pets.

It's not clear to me what the enslaver hoped to gain by this -- an RFID chip is useful for identifying something you have possession of, but it won't let you track down things if you don't know where they are. ...

http://boingboing.net/2016/03/03/human-traffickers-implant-rfid.html
 
ramonmercado said:
An anonymous ER doctor treated a woman who claimed she had a tracking chip embedded in her body. At first he disbelieved her -- lots of people suffer from delusions that they have implanted microchips -- but then she showed him the suture.

The woman was had been enslaved by a pimp who'd implanted an RFID chip of the sort used to locate lost pets.

It's not clear to me what the enslaver hoped to gain by this -- an RFID chip is useful for identifying something you have possession of, but it won't let you track down things if you don't know where they are. ...

http://boingboing.net/2016/03/03/human-traffickers-implant-rfid.html
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Probably to convince the poor lady that she could be tracked.
 
ramonmercado said:
The Beast Wins!
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I'm a believer, but frankly some folks are a bit over the top. They take a passage of scripture and twist it around using it as an excuse to act like a fool.
 
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