Back in November we covered the story of a Texas student whose refusal to wear a school-issued ID card with an embedded RFID chip led to her suspension. Her family, along with the Rutherford Institute, took the school district to court, seeking a temporary restraining order which would allow the student to return to her school without wearing the Smart ID card.

The student's parents cited religious objections to the ID card/tracking device and the filing pointed out that requiring her to wear the badge violated both her First Amendment rights (by compelling speech -- conveying a message she didn't agree with) and the Texas Freedom of Religion Act.

Considering the whole program itself was implemented almost solely in hopes of securing more funding by boosting attendance numbers and that the district had no specific policies in place when it began requiring the ID cards, one would hope that we'd be hearing of the student's return to school sans ID when the decision came down.

Unfortunately, the court's decision went the other way, and Andrea Hernandez has until January 18th to decide whether to wear the badge and return to her original school or transfer to another district school that has yet to implement the Smart ID cards.

A Texas high school student who claimed her student identification was the “Mark of the Beast” because it was implanted with a radio-frequency identification chip has lost her federal court bid Tuesday challenging her suspension for refusing to wear the card around her neck...

[Judge Orlando Garcia] tentatively halted the suspension, but changed course Tuesday after concluding that the 15-year-old’s right of religion was not breached...

Hernandez's family feels the ID card and embedded chip represent the "Mark of the Beast" as detailed in Revelations 13:16-18. The school's counteroffer -- to have Andrea wear the badge without the RFID chip -- was rejected by her family, which still felt the badge itself was representative of the Antichrist. Judge Garcia saw it differently, however.

“The accommodation offered by the district is not only reasonable it removes plaintiff’s religious objection from legal scrutiny all together,” (.pdf) U.S. District Judge Orlando Garcia wrote.

The Rutherford Institute plans to appeal this decision, claiming this decision is "not permissible under our constitutional scheme" and turns the district court into "an arbiter of what is and is not religious."

The Institute has a point, for whatever it's worth. Hernandez's parents claimed that both the ID card and the embedded chip were offensive to their religious beliefs but the court here seems to have decided the compromise offered by the district negates the family's opinion on the chip-less ID card. The school's offer to transfer the student to another school within the district is also reasonable on its face, but it does take away a few options -- namely, the classes Hernandez was attending this specific school for.

The school's interest in having Hernandez only appear to support the program could probably use some further examination as well, although angling for outward complicity isn't a violation of rights in and of itself. It does "compel" speech in a way, but more than simply rubbing the First Amendment the wrong way, it sends a message about what's truly important to the school district: that students show "support" for the district's policies... even if they object to them.

A few months back, Tim Geigner covered the story of a Texas school district's efforts to track its students' whereabouts using student ID cards with embedded RFID chips. The district attempted to paint this "students-as-livestock/prisoners" effort as being there for the safety of students and staff. But underneath all the "safety" talk was a large pile of money that the school district hoped to pocket. The so-called "Student Locator" project Texas' Northside Independent School District was implementing put school officials within handout distance of nearly $1.7 million in state government funds.

Although many students and parents have expressed their displeasure with the new program, it wasn't until a student at John Jay High School's Science and Engineering Academy opted out that any punishment had been handed out in connection with the RFID cards. Andrea Hernandez has refused to wear the ID card, citing religious and privacy reasons. In response, the school district has suspended her indefinitely, moving her to another high school in the same district that has not yet implemented the Smart ID policy.

Despite all the talk about "safety," the school district was more than happy to undercut the entire stated purpose of the Smart ID in order to keep Hernandez and her family from speaking out against the program.

The school offered a special lanyard with the RFID tag removed, in the hopes to put a damper on the whole situation. The student’s father refused the deal, however, because it came with strings attached.

“He told me in a meeting that if my daughter would proudly wear her student ID card around her neck so everyone could see, he would be able to quietly remove her chip from her student ID card,” Steve Hernandez told WND. “He went on to say as part of the accommodation my daughter and I would have to agree to stop criticizing the program and publicly support … 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.”

Apparently, the ID cards are so essential that the school district is willing to suspend a student for not wearing one, but not essential enough that the ID card needs to be fully functioning. Any stated concerns about "safety" are completely laughable if the district is willing to let students wander the school grounds untracked, sporting only plastic badges.

It's pathetic that this attempt was even made. The school district's main concerns seem to be a) having students appear to support the program, b) using the RFID cards to provide proof of attendance in exchange for funding and c) shutting down criticism.

Unfortunately for the school, the attempted suspension is now on hold.

The Hernandez family decided to take action against the school with the help of the Rutherford Institute, a civil liberties and human rights group which immediately took the view that the school district is looking for more public funding, which it can only receive if there is proof of positive student attendance rates. Rutherford attorneys filed a petition for the aforementioned TRO, as well as immediate injunctive and declaratory relief alleging that the school’s actions violate Hernandez’s rights under Texas’ Religious Freedom Act, the First Amendment, and the Fourteenth Amendment.

“The court’s willingness to grant a temporary restraining order is a good first step, but there is still a long way to go—not just in this case, but dealing with the mindset, in general, that everyone needs to be monitored and controlled,” John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute, said in a statement. While the TRO has been granted, a hearing on the preliminary injunction will take place next week.

The Rutherford Institute's filing (PDF) states that the district currently has no policy or procedure in place that deals directly with the RFID badges, much less one stating that students can be suspended for failing to wear the new IDs. It also points out that requiring Hernandez to wear a nonfunctioning ID as a "show of support" for the Student Locator Project violates her First Amendment rights by compelling her to convey a message she does not agree with. The filing also claims that the school district's ID program clearly violates both her Fourteenth Amendment rights as well as Texas Freedom of Religion Act. According to Hernandez, many other students have refused to wear the ID cards, but none of them have been punished to the extent that she is, prompting claims of religious persecution.

All in all, this doesn't look good for the school district, which has pushed through an intrusive student surveillance program in order to secure additional government funding. The "safety" of the student body is just the sales pitch. Any supposed "concern" for student safety went out the window, along with the legitimacy of the program, the moment the district offered to remove the tracking chip. The audacity of the district's actions is breathtaking -- both the implementation of such a controversial program, and its response to this student's refusal to participate.

The only other situation in which human beings might need to be constantly surveilled at an individual level is at a maximum security prison. But if you're willing to treat minors looking for an education like dangerous convicted criminals, there's no telling what your next "bright idea" might be. Here's hoping this early effort leads to the entire program being scrapped before it can do any more damage.

Usually when I think of RFID chips, I tend to think of them being used for safety purposes. After all, my dog is chipped in case she decides to run off for greener pastures or tastier treats (DAMN IT, DOG, I GIVE YOU BACON ALL THE TIME!). But, despite safety often being the front man for using RFID technology, it often ends up being more about the money, such as when we previously wrote about Cleveland chipping citizens' garbage and recycling cans because recycling was a financial benefit for the city.

So reading the Wired article covering a Texas school district's decision to impliment RFID student cards, I wasn't surprised to find that it looks like this is about cash rather than keeping students safe. Now, as you'd expect, proponents of the system, did trot out their "for the children" cannon and set it on full auto.

[District spokesman Pascual Gonzalez] said the chips, which are not encrypted and chronicle students only by a serial number, also assist school officials to pinpoint where kids are at any given time, which he says is good for safety reasons. “With this RFID, we know exactly where the kid is within the school,” he said noting students are required to wear the ID on a lanyard at all times on campus.

Unfortunately, as the article notes less vulgarly, that's a big steamy pile of bullshit for two reasons. First, due to lack of encryption and the nature of the technology, any tech-savvy kid can fool the system.

The lack of encryption makes it not technically difficult to clone a card to impersonate a fellow student or to create a substitute card to play hooky, and makes the cards readable by anyone who wanted to install their own RFID reader, though all they would get is a serial number that’s correlated with the student’s ID number in a school database.

If you're wondering, like I did, why they would allow such a gap in the system through which their safety-minded goals could be subverted, the likely answer is that they don't care. Because this doesn't appear to be about safety at all; it appears to be about federal funding based on attendance.

Like most state-financed schools, their budgets are tied to average daily attendance. If a student is not in his seat during morning roll call, the district doesn’t receive daily funding for that pupil, because the school has no way of knowing for sure if the student is there. But with the RFID tracking, students not at their desk but tracked on campus are counted as being in school that day, and the district receives its daily allotment for that student.

So, with the chip system, even if a student is not in class and is just wandering around campus, he's counted as being in attendance and the school gets their funding. It's essentially a high tech way to game the federal funding metrics. It doesn't help keep students safe. It doesn't help make sure the kids are actually in class or learning. It's a money grab. And all this, despite the concerns of privacy advocates like the EFF and the ACLU, who signed on to a paper (pdf) blasting use of the chips, citing health concerns over electromagnetic radiation as well as the dehumanizing of children through constant surveillance.

A tip for school districts: if you're going to use RFID chips as a way to get more federal funding while pretending it's about student safety, pretend harder.

Reader Stan alerted us to a recent report out of Cleveland, where the city will apparently be placing RFID chips in recycling bins to monitor whether or not you've been a good little earth saver lately. The way it works, apparently, is that the system will monitor whether or not you bring your recycling bin to the curb, and if you haven't in a while, "a trash supervisor will sort through the trash for recyclables" on the assumption that if you're not recycling, you're probably throwing stuff out. After checking those trash cans for recyclables, if more than 10 percent recyclable material is found, a $100 fine could be assessed to the home owner.

Not surprisingly, the reasoning for this has a lot more to do with money than saving the earth's resources:

Recycling is good for the environment and the city's bottom line, officials said. Cleveland pays $30 a ton to dump garbage in landfills, but earns $26 a ton for recyclables.

While perhaps it's a good thing to see something "good" like recycling line up with a way for the city to earn extra money, it still seems pretty intrusive to monitor how often people recycle.

In a followup to the story about credit card company lawyers killing an episode of Mythbusters concerning RFID vulnerabilities, Daniel Terdiman got a response from Texas Instruments, who had organized the call that Mythbusters host Adam Savage had described. TI's spokesperson tells a somewhat different story:

"In June 2007, MythBusters was interested in pursuing some great myth-busting ideas for RFID. While in pursuit, they contacted Texas Instruments' RFID Systems, who is a pioneer of RFID and contactless technology, for technical help and understanding of RFID in the contactless payments space," TI spokesperson Cindy Huff said. "Some of the information that was needed to pursue the program required further support from the contactless payment companies as they construct their own proprietary systems for security to protect their customers. To move the process along, Texas Instruments coordinated a conversation with Smart Card Alliance (SCA) who invited MasterCard and Visa, on contactless payments to help MythBusters get the right information. Of the handful of people on the call, there were mostly product managers and only one contactless payment company's legal counsel member. Technical questions were asked and answered and we were to wait for MythBusters to let us know when they were planning on showing the segment. A few weeks later, Texas Instruments was told by MythBusters that the storyline had changed and they were pursuing a different angle which did not require our help."

This bit of he-said/she-said could actually be true from both ends, with each side having a rather different perception of the call in question. The folks on the call may have been a bit combative over certain issues, and that resulted in Discovery producers getting worried about the episode and "changing the storyline." Either way, if what Huff says is true, is Texas Instruments willing to get the credit card companies to publicly agree that Mythbusters and Discovery should move forward on a story about RFID vulnerabilities? Update: Now Savage is backing down and saying he got the facts of the story wrong...

It's amazing to watch just how sensitive some companies are concerning the rather well-known security vulnerabilities associated with RFID tags and smart cards. We've seen time and time again, companies try to suppress such research from getting published -- and every single time, those efforts to suppress the publication of the vulnerabilities backfires, often badly.

But that never seems to stop companies from flexing their legal muscles.

The latest example comes to use via the Consumerist blog, who dug out a clip of Adam Savage from the TV show Mythbusters talking about what happened when the show tried to do an episode on RFID vulnerabilities:

Texas Instruments comes on along with chief legal counsel for American Express, Visa, Discover, and everybody else... They were way, way outgunned and they absolutely made it really clear to Discovery that they were not going to air this episode talking about how hackable this stuff was, and Discovery backed way down being a large corporation that depends upon the revenue of the advertisers. Now it's on Discovery's radar and they won't let us go near it.

Check out the video of him saying this (while admitting he's probably not supposed to talk about it) here: Perhaps it's an exaggeration by Savage, but do the credit card companies really think that security through obscurity (with a healthy dose of legal threats) is the best way to protect their customers?

Chris Lindquist writes "Despite the late Sam Walton's self-proclaimed distrust of computers, Wal-Mart has long seen itself as a technology leader. The company was an early adopter of bar-code scanning and eventually established the gold standard for supply chain efficiency thanks to highly integrated point-of-sale systems, satellite-communicated inventories and even RFID tracking. But Wal-Mart seems recently to have lost some of its tech luster. Questionable business decisions and global economic realities have caused the retail giant's earnings to stumble while aggressive competitors such as Target match Wal-Mart's every tech move--and sell higher-margin products to more affluent customers. Now it's unclear whether the command-and-control, technology-enabled culture that allowed Wal-Mart to flourish will be able to help it maintain its market dominance."

The Associated Press has a story that got plenty of attention this weekend, pointing out that a series of studies which found that VeriChip's RFID products induced malignant tumors in animals. This information was not made public as the company continued to hype the devices for implant into humans. The article notes that the devices were approved by the FDA... but leaves out a rather revealing bit of history. VeriChip and its parent company Applied Digital have done an amazing job generating publicity for the company, but often in very questionable ways. It might help to go through some of the history.

Back in 2002, prior to getting FDA approval, there was the too good to be true story of an entire family that just couldn't wait to get themselves chipped. The whole thing sounded sketchy from the beginning, and many suspected that the entire thing was merely created by VeriChip to get publicity. Soon afterwards, VeriChip announced that the FDA had said that implantable RFID chips were not regulated medical devices, and therefore could be used for chipping humans. Note that the announcement came from VeriChip. That's because the FDA did not say what VeriChip claimed it said. VeriChip had asked the FDA to declare the chips unregulated devices, and the FDA simply requested more information. VeriChip, in turn, took that request for more info and claimed that the devices were unregulated, leading to a rather unhappy FDA.

A few months later, the FDA finally gave conditional support for the device, saying that VeriChip could be used, as long as it was not advertised as a "medical device." VeriChip, of course, once again put out a press barrage claiming that it had FDA approval. And, not surprisingly, it kept advertising the chips as medical devices, leading the FDA to warn the company to knock it off. Then, the company went south of the border, and started focusing on convincing people in Mexico to get chipped for the safety of the children. See? Down in Mexico, you don't have to worry about the pesky American FDA. Two years later, we were a bit surprised that the FDA finally did approve the device for medical purposes -- but would you really want a company like that sticking stuff in your body?

Oh yeah, if that wasn't enough, the company had borrowed a bunch of money from IBM, and when IBM tried to collect, Applied Digital sued. Yes, they sued the company who gave them money when they were unable to pay back the loan. This latest article on the cancer link plays up the fact that former FDA head Tommy Thompson later joined the board of VeriChip, but leaves out his own reluctance to have a VeriChip RFID installed in his own body. Anyone else feel safe having this company stick RFID chips under your skin?

In certain paranoid circles, there's a big fear that at some point, people will be forced to get RFID implants. North Dakota and Wisconsin have already passed laws making it illegal to force somebody to get an RFID implant, and now a California state senator has pushed a similar bill through. This isn't new ground for Joe Simitian, the senator in question. He's sponsored anti-RFID bills in the past, but with little success. The fact remains that few people have any interest in RFID implants, while even the federal government has said that tracking humans with RFID isn't a good idea. Perhaps the bill will assuage the senator's paranoia, but meaningless bans like this won't do much to deal with the real privacy issues surrounding RFID.