In Texas, 28,000 Students Test an Electronic Eye

All done for their safety, of course:

...a few schools have begun monitoring student arrivals and departures using technology similar to that used to track livestock and pallets of retail shipments....

Isn't it refreshing to finally see our children valued as highly as the valuable commodities contained in retail shipment pallets or heads of cattle? Thank god for Texas!

But it's not just Texas:

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.

In a variation on the concept, a Phoenix school district in November is starting a project using fingerprint technology to track when and where students get on and off buses. Last year, a charter school in Buffalo began automating attendance counts with computerized ID badges - one of the earliest examples of what educators said could become a widespread trend....

Imagine how secure you will feel, knowing that your child's badge has been scanned and logged each and every day! Not that this answers an imminent threat, but one can never be too careful:

At the Spring district, where no student has ever been kidnapped, the system is expected to be used for more pedestrian purposes, Chief Bragg said: to reassure frantic parents, for example, calling because their child, rather than coming home as expected, went to a friend's house, an extracurricular activity or a Girl Scout meeting.

When the district unanimously approved the $180,000 system, neither teachers nor parents objected, said the president of the board....

Isn't that the scariest aspect of this entire 'big-brother' trend?

But at least this new school 'routine' will prepare the students for their future workplaces where they will have to use their ID badges to go to the bathroom:

...some companies are even thinking of tracking their employees' day-to-day exercise levels and caloric intake, according to Astro Teller, CEO of BodyMedia Inc., a Pittsburgh-based manufacturer of wearable body-monitoring devices....

"There are companies that limit employees to 15 minutes of restroom time during an eight-hour shift,"....

Although unionized employees, such as the police in Orlando, can fight the monitoring technologies, nonunion personnel have no legal recourse in the U.S., according to James T. Bennett, a professor at George Mason University who studies workplace privacy. "Employers are assumed to own any information that employees create, including information relative to their physical location," he says....

Meet the new boss, much worse than the old boss.

Need more evidence?

...Most people assume that Federal laws protect Americans from being spied upon in the workplace. To the contrary, over the years, Congress has rejected legislation spelling out basic privacy protections for employees. In fact, in many ways, employers have leeway to scrutinize Americans routinely to an extent that even police can't, unless they first go to court and obtain a warrant....

For example:

...using videotapes with no sound to get around the laws restricting wiretaps and eavesdropping. "In terms of videotaping, that's a loophole in our surveillance laws. There are no Federal laws on it. As long as they use video and are not capturing sound, they are not covered by the eavesdropping and wiretaps statutes."...