A few months back I posted in semi-paranoid dudgeon about Wal-Mart's impending adoption of RFID tags for their goods. Ever-sensible brother Dylan commented and suggested I hold off on the paranoid tip, since Wal-Mart's RFID adventure consists in "only using it to track pallets". "It all depends on the application," he wrote.
Well, an undeniably sinister application has inevitably come to pass. Here's the story according to The NYT Online:
Hoping to prevent the loss of a child through kidnapping or more innocent circumstances, a few schools have begun monitoring student arrivals and departures using technology similar to that used to track livestock and pallets of retail shipments.Here in a growing middle- and working-class suburb just north of Houston, the effort is undergoing its most ambitious test. The Spring Independent School District is equipping 28,000 students with ID badges containing computer chips that are read when the students get on and off school buses. The information is fed automatically by wireless phone to the police and school administrators.
And as the story continues, it becomes clear that the system is immune to even the most trivial cost-benefit calculations:
The administrators ... said the technology, when perfected, would eventually be a big help. Parents at the Spring district seem to feel the same way. They speak of momentary horrors of realizing their child did not arrive home when expected.
So, in this view, the "momentary horror" of not knowing your child's location outweighs the everlasting horror of state-sponsored tracking of individual movements. This is "security at any price" politics taken to ludicrous extremes. It starts with the children, because they are viewed as having no rights (or rather, they have rights only through their parents). But once these children grow up, accustomed to being monitored wherever they go, the value they place on privacy will be effectively nil -- having had it torn away from them during their minority. At that point, it will be trivial to install tracking devices on everyone, even adults.