‘Human Barcode’ Could Make Society more Organized, but Invades Privacy, Civil Liberties

As tech companies work to develop ID chips, how long until we're no longer anonymous?

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BY MEGHAN NEAL / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Published: Friday, June 1, 2012, 9:38 AM

Updated: Friday, June 1, 2012, 9:38 AM

UNIQUELY INDIA/GETTY IMAGES

The U.S. continues to flirt with the idea of a ‘human barcode,’ an electronic ID chip assigned to every person at birth.

AMAL GRAAFSTRA

Advocates say electronic verification could help parents or caregivers keep track of children and the elderly.

AMAL GRAAFSTRA

A built-in identification chip for humans could invade privacy, civil liberties, opponents say.

Would you barcode your baby?

Microchip implants have become standard practice for our pets, but have been a tougher sell when it comes to the idea of putting them in people.

Science fiction author Elizabeth Moon last week rekindled the debate on whether it's a good idea to "barcode" infants at birth in an interview on a BBC radio program.

“I would insist on every individual having a unique ID permanently attached — a barcode if you will — an implanted chip to provide an easy, fast inexpensive way to identify individuals,” she said on The Forum, a weekly show that features "a global thinking" discussing a "radical, inspiring or controversial idea" for 60 seconds .

Moon believes the tools most commonly used for surveillance and identification — like video cameras and DNA testing — are slow, costly and often ineffective.

In her opinion, human barcoding would save a lot of time and money.

The proposal isn’t too far-fetched - it is already technically possible to "barcode" a human - but does it violate our rights to privacy?

Opponents argue that giving up anonymity would cultivate an “Orwellian” society where all citizens can be tracked.

“To have a record of everywhere you go and everything you do would be a frightening thing,” Stanley, senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union, told the Daily News.

He warned of a “check-point society” where everyone carries an internal passport and has to show their papers at every turn, he said.

“Once we let the government and businesses go down the road of nosing around in our lives...we’re going to quickly lose all our privacy,” said Stanley.

There are already, and increasingly, ways to electronically track people. Since 2006, new U.S. passports include radio frequency identification tags (RFID) that store all the information in the passport, plus a digital picture of the owner.

In 2002, an implantable ID chip called VeriChip was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The chip could be implanted in a person's arm, and when scanned, could pull up a 16 digit ID number containing information about the user.

It was discontinued in 2010 amid concerns about privacy and safety.

Still scientists and engineers have not given up on the idea.

A handful of enterprising companies have stepped into the void left by VeriChip, and are developing ways to integrate technology and man.

Biotech company MicroCHIPS has developed an implantable chip to deliver medicine to people on schedule and without injection. And technology company BIOPTid has patented a noninvasive method of identification called the “human barcode.”

Advocates say electronic verification could help parents or caregivers keep track of children and the elderly. Chips could be used to easily access medical information, and would make going through security points more convenient, reports say.

But there are also concerns about security breaches by hackers. If computers and social networks are already vulnerable to hacking and identify theft, imagine if someone could get access to your personal ID chip?

Stanley cautioned against throwing the baby out with the bathwater each time someone invents a new gadget.

“We can have security, we can have convenience, and we can have privacy,” he said. “We can have our cake and eat it too.”

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/human-barcode-society-organized-invades-privacy-civil-liberties-article-1.1088129#ixzz1wdk3CAqq

UNITED NATIONS' PROPOSAL TO CONTROL INTERNET GOES BEFORE US HOUSE

The UN is considering a grave threat to our freedom, internet freedom. "Top-down, international regulation is antithetical to the Net, which has flourished under its current governance model." Repressive countries, Russia and China, and repressive ideologies like Islam, need to reign in the freedoms afforded by an unregulated internet.


(WSJ) Russia, China and their allies within the 193 member states of the ITU want to renegotiate the 1988 treaty to expand its reach into previously unregulated areas. Reading even a partial list of proposals that could be codified into international law next December at a conference in Dubai is chilling:


• Subject cyber security and data privacy to international control;
• Allow foreign phone companies to charge fees for "international" Internet traffic, perhaps even on a "per-click" basis for certain Web destinations, with the goal of generating revenue for state-owned phone companies and government treasuries;
• Impose unprecedented economic regulations such as mandates for rates, terms and conditions for currently unregulated traffic-swapping agreements known as "peering."
• Establish for the first time ITU dominion over important functions of multi-stakeholder Internet governance entities such as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the nonprofit entity that coordinates the .com and .org Web addresses of the world;
• Subsume under intergovernmental control many functions of the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet Society and other multi-stakeholder groups that establish the engineering and technical standards that allow the Internet to work;
• Regulate international mobile roaming rates and practices.



And let's face it, strong-arm regimes are threatened by popular outcries for political freedom that are empowered by unfettered Internet connectivity. They have formed impressive coalitions, and their efforts have progressed significantly.

The UN is driven largely by the OIC (Organization of Islamic Cooperation), the largest religious and political organization/bloc of countries at the august body (and the world). Close to the Muslim World League of the Muslim Brotherhood, it shares the Brotherhood's strategic and cultural vision: that of a universal religious community, the Ummah, based upon the Koran, the Sunna, and the canonical orthodoxy ofshari'a. The OIC represents 56 countries and the Palestinian Authority (considered a state), the whole constituting the universal Ummah with a community of more than one billion three to six hundred million Muslims. (Bat Yeor)

The OIC is nothing less than a “would-be, universal caliphate.” It might look different from the caliphates of the Ottomans, Fatimids, and Abbasids. It might resemble, instead, a thoroughly modern trans-national bureaucracy. But, already, the OIC exercises significant power through the United Nations, and through the European Union, which has been eager to accommodate the OIC while simultaneously endowing the U.N. with increasing authority for global governance.

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"The caliphate is alive and growing within Europe. . . . It has advanced through the denial of dangers and the obfuscating of history. It has moved forward on gilded carpets in the corridors of dialogue, the network of the Alliances and partnerships, in the corruption of its leaders, intellectuals and NGOs, particularly at the United Nations.” Bat Ye'or

The OIC has been on a jihad to restrict free speech under the blasphemy laws of the sharia (criticizing or offending Islam is punishable by death). In Islam's ongoing war on the truth, it's not the hate that is reviled, it's recognition of the hate. The UN doesn't care when imams preach hatred and violence -- only when anti-jihadists report on what they said does it become "hate speech." Now sharia blasphemy law is being enforced at the UN under the guise of "hate speech."

The OIC has undertaken a media blitz to silence free speech in accordance with the blasphemy laws under the sharia. These modern day barbarians will meet a fierce army of freedom lovers. The first session of the International Freedom Defense Congress, the operating body of the human rights organization Stop Islamization of Nations (SION), will be held in New York on September 11, 2012.The principal focus of the Congress will be a media offensive against Islamic supremacist attempts to restrict the freedom of speech in the free world, and the smear campaigns against freedom fighters in newspapers and media institutions in the West.

The Obama adminstration has partnered with these religious statists and has hosted Islamic leaders, religious scholars and advocacy groups that are pushing for hate-speech laws which, in their most virulent and fundamentalist form, criminalize what they perceive as blasphemy.

Itamar Gelbman, now running for Congress, is right. Defund the UN.

House to examine plan for United Nations to regulate the Internet The Hill
It’s an unpopular idea with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle in Congress, and officials with the Obama administration have also criticized it.

“We're quite concerned,” Larry Strickling, the head of the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration, said in an interview with The Hill earlier this year.

He said the measure would expose the Internet to “top-down regulation where it's really the governments that are at the table, but the rest of the stakeholders aren't.”

At a hearing earlier this month, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) also criticized the proposal. He said China and Russia are "not exactly bastions of Internet freedom."

"Any place that bans certain terms from search should not be a leader in international Internet regulatory frameworks," he said, adding that he will keep a close eye on the process.

Yet the proposal could come up for a vote at a UN conference in Dubai in December.


Atlas Shrugs 2000 ~ Pamela Geller

UN TO REGULATE THE INTERNET? HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES SET TO EXAMINE BILL NEXT WEEK

(Photo: AP)

The Hill is reporting that the United States House of Representatives is due to consider an international proposal that would give the United Nations more control over the Internet sometime next week.

Backed by China, Russia, Brazil, India and other members of the international body, the proposalis drawing fire on both sides of the aisle in Congress, as members of the Obama administration even move to criticize it.

“We’re quite concerned,” said Larry Strickling, the head of the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration.

He described the measure as “top-down regulation where it’s really the governments that are at the table, but the rest of the stakeholders aren’t.”

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) also pointed out that China and Russia “aren’t exactly bastions of Internet freedom,” and just because they support a measure, that’s not exactly a reason to follow suit.

Pledging to guard the issue, Rubio elaborated: “Any place that bans certain terms from search should not be a leader in international Internet regulatory frameworks.”

(Photo: AP)

The Hill continues:

The Internet is currently governed under a “multi-stakeholder” approach that gives power to a host of nonprofits, rather than governments.

[...]

“We lose that when we turn this over to a group of just governments,” [Larry Strickling, head of the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration] said.

In an op-ed earlier this year in The Wall Street Journal, [Robert McDowell, a Republican commissioner on the Federal Communications Commission] warned that “a top-down, centralized, international regulatory overlay is antithetical to the architecture of the Net.”

“Productivity, rising living standards and the spread of freedom everywhere, but especially in the developing world, would grind to a halt as engineering and business decisions become politically paralyzed within a global regulatory body,” McDowell wrote.

(Photo: AP)

“And let’s face it,” McDowell concluded, “strong-arm regimes are threatened by popular outcries for political freedom that are empowered by unfettered Internet connectivity.”

Regardless, the proposal could still come up for a vote at a UN conference in Dubai in December.

The Blaze

Students will be tracked via chips in ID's

By Francisco Vara-Orta

Updated 11:44 p.m., Thursday, May 24, 2012

Northside Independent School District plans to track students next year on two of its campuses using technology implanted in their student identification cards in a trial that could eventually include all 112 of its schools and all of its nearly 100,000 students.

District officials said the Radio Frequency Identification System (RFID) tags would improve safety by allowing them to locate students — and count them more accurately at the beginning of the school day to help offset cuts in state funding, which is partly based on attendance.

Northside, the largest school district in Bexar County, plans to modify the ID cards next year for all students attending John Jay High School, Anson Jones Middle School and all special education students who ride district buses. That will add up to about 6,290 students.

The school board unanimously approved the program late Tuesday but, in a rarity for Northside trustees, they hotly debated it first, with some questioning it on privacy grounds.

State officials and national school safety experts said the technology was introduced in the past decade but has not been widely adopted. Northside's deputy superintendent of administration, Brian Woods, who will take over as superintendent in July, defended the use of RFID chips at Tuesday's meeting, comparing it to security cameras. He stressed that the program is only a pilot and not permanent.

“We want to harness the power of (the) technology to make schools safer, know where our students are all the time in a school, and increase revenues,” district spokesman Pascual Gonzalez said. “Parents expect that we always know where their children are, and this technology will help us do that.”

Chip readers on campuses and on school buses can detect a student's location but can't track them once they leave school property. Only authorized administrative officials will have access to the information, Gonzalez said.

“This way we can see if a student is at the nurse's office or elsewhere on campus, when they normally are counted for attendance in first period,” he said.

Gonzalez said the district plans to send letters to parents whose students are getting the the RFID-tagged ID cards. He said officials understand that students could leave the card somewhere, throwing off the system. They cost $15 each, and if lost, a student will have to pay for a new one.

Parents interviewed outside Jay and Jones as they picked up their children Thursday were either supportive, skeptical or offended.

Veronica Valdorrinos said she would be OK if the school tracks her daughter, a senior at Jay, as she always fears for her safety. Ricardo and Juanita Roman, who have two daughters there, said they didn't like that Jay was targeted.

Gonzalez said the district picked schools with lower attendance rates and staff willing to pilot the tags.

Some parents said they understood the benefits but had reservations over privacy.

“I would hope teachers can help motivate students to be in their seats instead of the district having to do this,” said Margaret Luna, whose eighth-grade granddaughter at Jones will go to Jay next year. “But I guess this is what happens when you don't have enough money.”

The district plans to spend $525,065 to implement the pilot program and $136,005 per year to run it, but it will more than pay for itself, predicted Steve Bassett, Northside's assistant superintendent for budget and finance. If successful, Northside would get $1.7 million next year from both higher attendance and Medicaid reimbursements for busing special education students, he said.

But the payoff could be a lot bigger if the program goes districtwide, Bassett said.

He said the program was one way the growing district could respond to the Legislature's cuts in state education funding. Northside trimmed its budget last year by $61.4 million.

Two school districts in the Houston area — Spring and Santa Fe ISDs — have used the technology for several years and have reported gains of hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue for improved attendance. Spring ISD spokeswoman Karen Garrison said the district, one-third the size of Northside, hasn't had any parent backlash.
In Tuesday's board debate, trustee M'Lissa M. Chumbley said she worried that parents might feel the technology violated their children's privacy rights. She didn't want administrators tracking teachers' every move if they end up outfitted with the tags, she added.
“I think this is overstepping our bounds and is inappropriate,” Chumbley said. “I'm honestly uncomfortable about this.”
Northside has to walk a tightrope in selling the idea to parents, some of whom could be turned off by the revenue incentive, said Kenneth Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services, a Cleveland-based consulting firm.
The American Civil Liberties Union fought the use of the technology in 2005 at a rural elementary school in California and helped get the program canceled, said Kirsten Bokenkamp, an ACLU spokeswoman in Texas. She said concerns about the tags include privacy and the risks of identity theft or kidnapping if somebody hacks into the system.
Texas Education Agency spokeswoman DeEtta Culbertson said no state law or policy regulates the use of such devices and the decision is up to local districts.
fvara-orta@express-news.net


Read more: http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/education/article/Students-will-be-tracked-via-chips-in-IDs-3584339.php#ixzz1vuCFuJoj

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