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A school district in San Antonio, Texas, is implementing mandatory RFID tracking of students in two of schools, John Jay High School and Anson Jones Middle School, at a cost of over $500,000. Andrea Hernandez, a student at one of these high schools, is refusing to wear the RFID badge. The Hernandez family and their supporters are protesting against the system over concerns of it being used to violate privacy rights.

RFID tracking devices such as these students are to be forced to wear can be detected up to about 70 feet away. Some say the ranges may already be longer than this with recent RFID systems.

Although the basic underlying technology is very similar to proximity cards that been used widely in businesses for decades, most of those ID cards have to be in close physical proximity to a scanner (within a foot) for their RFID information to be captured. The badges being used in San Antonio reportedly contain batteries and higher power transmitters that can be tracked at much greater distances.

Some have been attacking this family as Christian wackos who believe the RFID badges are the “mark of the beast” mentioned in Revelations in the Bible. But there is plenty that can be said about the potential problems of abuse of this technology that has nothing to do with religion.
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Poster by Art Chantry

I ran across the article 6 Completely Legal Ways The Cops Can Screw You while writing another article today and found it quite alarming. It makes it clear that the United States we live in today is by the government, for the government, and against the citizens and US Constitution.

A quick summary:

1. The police can take your things, sell them, and keep the proceeds. All they have to do is state they suspect your property was used while a crime was committed, even if they don’t think you committed the crime. They don’t have to charge or convict anybody of a crime to do this, just state a suspicion.
2. Police in Ohio can give you a ticket for speeding and get a conviction against you with no objective speed measurements, only an “expert observation” that you were speeding.
3. Police in Texas can arrest you for drinking even if you are of legal age in a legally operated bar. This law has reportedly been used to harass gays and Hispanics by rounding them up in bars and arresting them.
4. Police in Illinois, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Hampshire, and several other states can arrest you for filming or video recording them and confiscate the films and recordings, even if they are breaking the law and abusing somebody. Nobody seems to have considered how this may make legal surveillance cameras suddenly illegal if the police show up.
5. In Washington, D.C., police can arrest women who carry more than two condoms. They can legally assume any woman carrying more than two is a prostitute.
6. In Ohio, police can obtain your identifying information including name, address, and social security number without your permission and then use it just like an identity thief. One woman found this out after the cops used her name, address, and social security number to pay and plant an undercover stripper in her community while other cops watched the performances live and via the Internet. They are under no obligation to clean up the mess they made of your identity.

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Writer Brian Rothery of website Inquisition 21st Century claims that the American FBI is one of the world’s foremost publishers of illegal child pornography in his article America devours its young. That might sound like a shocking claim, but to those who have seen American “law enforcement” operate, it is totally plausible.

American law enforcement makes a regular practice of violating the Constitution and civil rights by running persecution campaigns to frame, denigrate, and ruin people accused of crimes which they probably never committed. They do this to people who have never even been charged or given a trial, fair or not. Many of these people are in fact victims of crimes such as computer hacking, credit card theft, and false accusations made by people who have something to gain by hurting them. Yet too many cops think that their jobs are attacking and throwing people in jail and that somehow this means that complying with the laws themselves is optional.
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Readers of our website know we’re concerned about the erosion of Constitutional rights in the United States. It’s commonplace for American governments to violate Constitutional and federal law protections for due process, equal protection under the law, unreasonable search and seizure, and innocent until proven guilty in cases involving alleged child abuse and divorces with contested child custody. But the erosion of civil liberties is spreading far beyond family law.

While researching another article I’m writing, I ran across an article from the Washington Post which really disturbed me. Whether you’re an architecture student or common citizen, you now have reason to be fearful of government oppression if you snap a picture of a building while taking a walk on a public sidewalk or a drive on public streets. Taking such pictures is in no way unlawful. First Amendment rights and court cases have established that taking photographs from public areas, especially outdoors, is lawful. But that doesn’t stop law enforcement and especially security guards who sometimes illegally impersonate police officers for intimidating and even assaulting photographers who are not breaking any laws.
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