Texas schools punish students who refuse to be tracked with microchips — RT

 

Logo of the anti-RFID campaign by German privacy group FoeBuD. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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.

μέσω Texas schools punish students who refuse to be tracked with microchips — RT.

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Anonymous releases how-to instructions on fooling facial recognition (VIDEO) — RT

VIDEO – CLICK ON THE IMAGE

Here’s a predicament: you don’t want the government using high-tech face scanning technology to track every inch of your walk to the post office, but you also don’t want to take a sledgehammer to your neighborhood surveillance camera. What do you do?

Don’t worry, concerned citizen! Big Brother may indeed be watching, but that doesn’t mean you have to make his unwarranted surveillance mission easy to operate.

Although little news has developed as of late in regards to TrapWire, a global surveillance operation that RT blew the cover off of nearly two weeks ago, opposition waged at the world-wide intelligence network is still rampant. Now in one of the newest videos uploaded to the Web to make people aware of TrapWire, a person claiming to be involved with Anonymous is trying to spread a YouTube clip that offers helpful suggestions on how to rage against the machine, properly and peacefully.

Last week, hacktivists proposed several campaigns aimed at eliminating TrapWire feeds by rendering the equipment thought to be linked to the intelligence system completely useless. In lieu of smashing camera lenses and spraying surveillance gear in sudsy liquid, though, a new video, “Anonymous – Fighting TrapWire,” offers instructions on how to prevent the acceleration of the surveillance state by means of passive resistant.

“Many of you have heard the recent stories about TrapWire,” the video begins. “Constant video surveillance is an issue we presently face. However, there are a number of ways that you can combat this surveillance.”

From there, the clip’s narrator offers a few suggestions and helping the average American avoid getting caught in TrapWire without resorting to the destruction of property.

“Wearing a mask is a common way to keep your identity hidden,” the voice explains, “However, a mask does not protect against biometric authentication. In addition, this can also cause problems depending where you want to go.”

“Another way to avoid facial recognition is to tilt your head more than 15 degrees to the side,” the clip continues. “Due to limits in their programming, they will not be able to detect that a face is present, though there are very obvious cons to doing this. Using a similar method, you can distort your face through elaborate makeup. This method also takes advantage of software limits as the computer will not be able to detect a face. But these are tiresome ways that tend to draw attention to yourself. Surely there are better solutions to avoid being added to a database.”

The narrator also explains that laser pointers have been documented to disrupt the powers of surveillance cameras and that, “With nothing more than a hat, some infrared LEDs, some wiring and a 9 Volt battery,” it’s a piece of cake to render oneself completely invisible. By rigging a DIY system of small lights affixed to a baseball cap, the video claims you can create a device that “guarantees complete anonymity to cameras while appearing perfectly normal to the rest of the world.”

“While the government may be hell bent on watching us at every moment of every day, we are not helpless. There are always ways of fighting back. Let’s remind them that 1984 was not an instruction manual,” the video concludes.

μέσω Anonymous releases how-to instructions on fooling facial recognition (VIDEO) — RT.

 

 

 

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‘World being readied for aggression against Syria’ — RT

An image released by Higher Committee of the Syrian Revolution allegedly shows shelling by government forces of the Bab Drib neighbourhoods in the flashpoint central Syrian city of Homs.(AFP Photo / Higher Committee of The Syrian Revolution)

World opinion is being orchestrated towards a military operation against the Syrian regime, researcher and author F. William Engdahl told RT. Still, any decisive action against Assad will be postponed until after the US presidential election.

­The international forces supporting regime change in Syria are continuing to mount pressure on the Assad regime, whipping up the fact that the country possesses chemical weapons. Despite the Syrian government’s firm assurance these weapons will never be used in the internal conflict, countries supporting Syrian opposition are openly discussing plans to take Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles under their control.

Since control could be established only by physical presence of some sort of military force at the sites where the weapons are kept, foreign intervention into the country would be necessary.

Syria’s ex-ambassador to Iraq, who defected to the opposition, has claimed the Assad regime may have already used chemical weapons.

F. William Engdahl, the author of «Myths, Lies and Oil Wars» says all allegations the chemical weapons in Syria have already been used – or will be in the future – serve the single purpose of paving the way for intervention.

Chemical weapons are not precise and could not be used in residential quarters where most of the fighting in Syria is going on. They are “for huge battle field conditions,” insists Engdahl, because “you’ll [poison] your supporters as well as Al-Qaeda mercenaries,” he explains.

Actually, the situation with chemical weapons in Syria is a déjà vu of the hysteria over the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq a decade ago, believes the researcher.

“I smell a re-run of the old Pentagon scenario that Dick Cheney and friends ran to justify the war in Iraq,” Engdahl states. “And now they’re trying to do that with the chemical warfare weapons of mass destruction in Syria, to create a climate that this is the most pressing thing on the face of the Earth. And this is simply not the case.”

The historian wonders how many times it will take for people to wise up to the fact that the WMD hysteria was scripted in the RAND Corporation (American think tank) for Pentagon which put it into its “how-to” manuals.

“They are just toppling one regime after another to create their ‘grand design’. This is not the way toward democracy. This is a way toward a one superpower tyranny,” slams Engdahl.

The efforts to expose the Assad regime as a brutal one are going along the same lines as the media smear campaign against Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in Libya a year ago. Just like in Libya, the Syrian regime is now being accused of using fighter jets against rebels, without any evidence whatsoever being produced. In Libya the alleged use of its air force led to a UN-sanctioned no-fly zone over the country and ultimately the direct military interference of Western democracies into the internal conflict of a sovereign state.

“We’re just watching the orchestration of images being played on to the world opinion,” acknowledged Engdahl. “This is exactly what happened in Libya –‘we must do something’ and ‘humanitarian intervention’ and so forth,” he explained. “Frankly, I don’t think that that is a reality.”

Engdahl believes that “establishing a no-fly zone over Syria now is not feasible given the massive and effective aircraft defenses that Syria has.”

The Syrian conflict will be kept “on a hot burn” until after the presidential elections in the US, he shared.

“Whether Israel, for reasons of its own, in wanting to tip the US elections toward Mitt Romney and away from Obama – whom [Israeli PM Benjamin] Netanyahu despises personally and politically – that I can’t say. I’m not privileged to have inside information on Israeli intent, if they are going to try to hot up this chemical weapons scenario to create the rush toward war,” said Engdahl.

“I think we’re going to see a huge escalation of all of this after the November elections and January oath of office of the next US president,” he concluded. “Obama doesn’t want this breaking into an open war before the election. The last thing American voters want to see is another Iraq or Afghanistan on their doorstep.”

μέσω ‘World being readied for aggression against Syria’ — RT.

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‘End of the world as we know it’: Kaspersky warns of cyber-terror apocalypse — RT

After his eponymously-named lab discovered Flame, «the most sophisticated cyber weapon yet unleashed,» Eugene Kaspersky believes that the evolving threat of “cyber terrorism” could spell the end of life on Earth as we know it.

­Doomsday scenarios are a common occurrence in 2012, but coming from a steely-eyed realist like Eugene Kaspersky, his calls for a global effort to halt emerging cyber threats should raise alarm bells.

A global Internet blackout and crippling attacks against key infrastructure are among two possible cyber-pandemics he outlined.

«It’s not cyber war, it’s cyber terrorism, and I’m afraid the game is just beginning. Very soon, many countries around the world will know it beyond a shadow of a doubt,” Kaspersky told reporters at a Tel Aviv University cyber security conference.

“I’m afraid it will be the end of the world as we know it,» he warned. «I’m scared, believe me.»

His stark warning came soon after researchers at Kaspersky Lab unearthed Flame, possibly the most complex cyber threat ever. While the espionage toolkit infected systems across the Middle East, Iran appears to have been its primary target.

via ‘End of the world as we know it’: Kaspersky warns of cyber-terror apocalypse — RT.