Student fingerprinting - not so VeriCool
Mark | 28.08.2006 21:42 | Education | Technology
While the national ID card scheme has been watered down a little, moves continue to increase tracking of us by using biometrics. One unexpected front where this dystopia is already rearing its ugly head is in our schools. Several companies, with VeriCool the current front runner, are aggressively marketing fingerprinting solutions – solutions to what is not exactly clear as we'll see – to primary and secondary schools, as well as libraries. Let us start by looking at one particular case, Impington Village College (IVC) on the outskirts of Cambridge.
Read on for the full story.
Links: LeaveThemKidsAlone | VeriCool | Indymedia article | BBC news article | BBC action network article | TES online article | Gummy finger article
In the beginning of this academic year, IVC introduced a new fingerprinting system, which is used to register students at the beginning of each lesson, and that has replaced borrowing cards in the library and money in the school's canteen. This is how it works, at least in theory: before the start of each lesson the teacher logs onto the system with her own fingerprint, and the students register by pressing their thumbs against the plexiglass of a small scanner (with the exception of the Year Eights, who get to give the system the middle finger). A beep signals that a thumbprint has been recognized. Any unauthorized absenteeism is automatically flagged and available to the school office. VeriCool, the makers of the system, claim that taking a register is quicker, the results are immediately available, and that this is a useful weapon in the fight against truancy. The operative word here is 'weapon', but more about that later. When it's time for lunch, the students pay for their food by the same mechanism, and their accounts are debited. This is meant to prevent children being bullied out of their lunch money...
Now to the reality. The plexiglass of the scanner regularly gets scratched or broken when students, either inadvertently or in an act of sabotage, drop keys or other objects onto it. Sometimes VeriCool will stop recognizing a student's fingerprint, which means that the student will have to reregister at the school office. According to one student, "VeriCool can register you as someone else." If a student is absent from school, the parents have to ring the so-called absence hotline. But these authorized absences often do not make their way onto the system until late in the day, which means that students are often flagged as truants. A further threat to the system comes from a study that has shown how easy it is, using cheap ingredients available from supermarket shelves, to literally cook up 'gummy fingers' (Impact of Artificial "Gummy" Fingers on Fingerprint Systems), which students can use to register absent classmates. Imagine the surprise of a teacher facing a class of twenty, when her electronic register claims there are thirty present.
But these are minor inconveniences compared to what happened to the VeriCool system earlier this year. Says one student, "if it stops working, the computer system crashes." And indeed, as another student reports, some three weeks before the Easter break the VeriCool system crashed, taking the entire school computer network with it in an information blackout. As a consequence, teachers had to revert to taking manual registers, if they took any at all, IT lessons became meaningless, and students could not borrow books from the library (somewhat ironic, as VeriCool claims that the system leads to increased borrowing). In the whole school there was only one computer that was available to the 1500 students. It took a further week after the Easter break to get the system running again.IVC is actually one of few schools who asked parents for permission. But this turned out to be a meaningless gesture, as parents who withheld their permission quickly found out. The parent of one student says that the school handled parents who objected as dissenters. "It was obvious they were trying to railroad the system." Assurances were sought that students would not be discriminated against for a decision their parents had taken. But none were provided, and expectations were confirmed when the school year started. One parent's experience was that, particularly in the first term, the children whose parents had withheld permission became the object of derision and forced to wait until all the other students had registered electronically, and generally "treated as a nuisance". They were subjected to a number of inappropriate comments, mainly from a few individuals who maintained a systematic harrassment. That is until the parent put in a formal complaint, when the behaviour ceased abruptly. But there are fears that in the next academic year, with different teachers, all this could start again.
What are the reasons that parents object to fingerprinting? Most importantly, there is the potential for identity theft. The school has provided assurances that the data is maintained on a secure server yet when questioned about remote, wireless access to the system via laptops in the classroom the school were unsure about how secure their network really was, and therefore how liable the data is to potential misuse. When questioned about the school's claims for the security of the system, the response of a support engineer who maintained IVC's computer network comments is illustrative – outright laughter. It is no surprise that some parents have little or no faith in the school's security policy. One parent voices a second objection to the system – that it removes human contact between a teacher and her students – "you [should] educate students in a focussed and engaged environment, not one where there is no [interaction] between the teacher and the student." As I see it, rather then engaging students as individuals, at the beginning of each lesson they are made to line up like prisoners for a roll call.
But even if the system worked, why would we need it? Students still have to register one by one, so there is no gain in efficiency in time taken to register. And because of ongoing problems with the readers, a number of classes have reverted to registering manually. The fact that the data are automatically collated and centrally stored could just as easily be achieved by the teacher keying the register into her computer. In fact, the system reportedly works without the fingerprint scanners.
What about the bullying argument? I would argue that the way to deal with bullying is not to take away the opportunity for bullying in one area – it will just pop up in another one. Surely the way to deal with it is by taking it seriously and dealing with it sensibly as soon as it occurs. That is assuming that kids don't find a way around the new system. They are smart after all: when schools banned unhealthy items from vending machines, some children started smuggling sweets into school in bulk, and selling them on to willing buyers, undercutting the old prices and making some extra pocket money in the process (BBC news). Bullies aside, students have already discovered that their money is not safe with VeriCool. As one student says: "I hate it because someone registered as me and took £ 4 out of my [cashless catering] account." All this means that some teachers have lost faith in the system, and keep a manual register even as the class trundles past the bleeping scanner. According to one parent, "a couple of teachers are conscientious objectors and refuse to use the system."
Again the military metaphor, again very apt: VeriCool's parent company is Anteon, an American company responsible for the training of US interrogators at the notorious Camp Delta at Guantanamo Bay, and the if possible even more notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq (TES online; full article in the July 21 2006 edition of Times Educational Supplement). Anteon's motto is the sinisterly threatening "When was the last time you felt totally secure?" As their corporate website states, "Anteon is helping federal agencies meet today's Personal Identity Verification (PIV) requirements with flexible end-to-end enterprise solutions that deliver maximum effectiveness for physical and logical security" (Anteon website). In other words, they provide biometric security systems for prisons and the military. And this is the company that owns VeriCool, already providing software to 22 schools in the UK. And as VeriCool is now a technical partner to Capita Education Services, with a client base of over 22,500 UK schools, of which 5,000 already use software fully compatible with VeriCool (VeriCool website), this number can be expected to grow very quickly.
And that's not where the trail ends. Only last June, Anteon was bought up by General Dynamics, a market leader in "mission-critical information systems and technologies; land and expeditionary combat systems, armaments and munitions; shipbuilding and marine systems [including military submarines]" (General Dynamics website). Since information technology is the future of military combat, it is not difficult to see why General Dynamics wanted to acquire Anteon.
We should act to keep these companies and their 'solutions' out of our schools and away from children, whom they want to biometrically track, using the same technology that keeps military bases and civilian prisons secure. But don't rely on the government for support, because systems like VeriCool have the added advantage of familiarizing young people with biometric identification. So that by the time they leave school, and acquire a biometric passport, with their digital photos, fingerprints and iris scans held in a national database, they will be so used to the idea that it won't occur to them why there's anything wrong with that.
But maybe I am being unjust, and children are smarter than that. As one student says, "VeriCool is rubbish and a waste of time! It's inaccurate and you don't know where the information goes." Or as another student puts it, "VeriCool isn't very cool."
Mark
Additions
New A-Z list of schools doing fingerprinting
31.08.2006 09:42
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Little Brother
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http://www.nottingham-defy-id.org.uk
Comments
Hide the following 9 comments
this is education in a different sense
29.08.2006 08:19
The real education is in training kids to get used to being biometrically tracked. The new travel cards will be smart cards, kids being exposed to surveillance technologies from an early age, told to think how cool it all is (so cool, it's "VeriCool"?) so they don't question it, and then hey presto! the next generation will all be neatly tagged and controllable, just like this year's sheep and cattle. Biometrics is a slippery technology: RFID, wi-fi, digitisation of facial recognition capabilities, iris scanning, fingerprinting, pressure to provide DNA to police even without charges being laid, some 3 million CCTV cameras all over the place, key-stroke logging, private user's web and email access logs stored by ISPs at police insistence, two-way GPS tracking, the pressure to not use cash, travel and phone records being stored, detailed passenger manifests for travel to the US, the UK ID card scheme - if we add all of these together we are most assuredly under the governmental cyclopean gaze (all nicely outsourced to global corporations with more than their feet under the military table).
None of this has made us any safer; none of it has made processes any more reliable or efficient or dependable. But all of these aspects have brought us into the position of the prisoners in the modern day equivalent of Bentham's Panopticon: surveilled, 24/7, by unknown watchers until we begin to internalise our own subjugation, becoming docile under the instruments of the gaze. Docile, controlled, mere human cattle.
Yet, this stops with us: we are the last, or close to the last, generation that can stop this before it becomes even more embedded in the social psyche as normal. But, we must sacrifice certain toys and gadgets: we must reject the latest cool toy that has remote sensors, RFID tags, GPS, two-way tracking and so on. We need to be able to stand against the inexorable push to make us swallow these attempts to scrutinise and control. Saying no to the ID card is but one avenue. Now we have RFID in wheelie bins, biometrics in schools. We need to take this down. We need to stand up against this onslaught. We won't have many chances left to do so, and even now, the tide is already against us.
ikhwezi
State intrusion rules, OK !
29.08.2006 16:52
No doubt these people will wheel out the usual catch phrases about the war against something or other.....
The reality of it is that some people stand to make a lot of money from the implementation of these "schemes" sanctioned in Parliament with no consent from the (so called) eloctorate...
Business as usual then!
Kris
e-mail:
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workplace action (shameless plug!!)
30.08.2006 08:30
workers and students in education institutions must come together to form an industrial network of militants who are prepared to fight for a better education sector, and ultimately, a better world. education is a major hinge of the capitalist economic system and the state, and it is up to us to fight.
check out the website- it is a link to the IWW education workers website. you don't have to be a worker to join, students can too. we are all part of the same struggle, after all.
>> an injury to one is an injury to all <<
tony
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Suspect!
30.08.2006 23:52
kris
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Have the control freaks not read 1984 by George Orwell...
05.09.2006 14:21
It doesn't take a white paper or bigwigs talking about it in the house of commons to stop this form of abuse, it takes us on the ground to take our children out of the schools and not let them go back til the freaks take away their control toys, because thats all it is really, management sitting behind desks with no real concept of reality, trying to come up with ideas on how to keep the masses from doing their own thing.
If you want kids to go to school you need to give them an environment that they want to study in, a place that is fun and easy to enjoy, the idea that a child doesn't want to go to school makes me wonder what is wrong with the school not what is wrong with the child. When my first child went to primary school he had to learn something in the region of 354 new expressions and feelings within the first days/week. He of course being of sound mind and body but rather young, thought it was good to bite other children because he believed it would make him friends, (not sure how he worked that one out) but, of course, it did the opposite and so he became confused and lashed out when the teachers responded in a threatening manner. It took the school over a year to sort it out because they went about it in the wrong manner, they looked at my son as the problem not the school or the teachers, I tried to explain but with no 'qualifications' to speak of except 20 years working as a volunteer with all ages of kids, no one wanted to listen til I finally blew my top and spoke my mind in meeting that his mother and I set up with the school nurse, headmaster and 9 other adults including social workers and one nurse who was convinced my son had ADHD.
Within two weeks the problem was sorted and he is now an eleven year old maths wizard with a wicked atitude and very nice disposition, but why did it take so long for the 'experts' to finally except that there was nothing wrong with him and it was their atitude towards him that caused the prolonged agony of a very young and defensless child.
We need schools that work on an individual level, where the food is grown by the kids and eaten by then and also cooked if possible, we need to work from the ground up to change the way schools behave, we don't need to change the childs behaviour because there isn't anything wrong with our children, its our treatment of them that is to blame.
Fingerprinting will only aggravate what is already a very controlling atmosphere, children are taught about freedom and then have it taken from them, no wonder they are so confused and angry at the world...
Hum
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Haven't the powermongers read 1984 by George Orwell...
05.09.2006 16:30
Tagging our children with a system of ID that doesn't even work properly is typical of a system that just loves to experiment with others lives.
The reason all the madness is happening in the world today is not because the average man woman or child is a menace to society, its because we believe in owning so much rubbish like TVs in every room, fast flashy cars, things that the poor yearn for because the media is always telling them in adverts on TV, on hoardings and in every facet of our lives that they need it and must have it, the kids are most susceptable to this form of selling. New skin, brown skin, new boobs, new life etc... no wonder their is so much crime and vandalism. We need to hit the problem from the root not keep sticking plasters on it and hope it will get better without getting rid of the cause. I know this seems at time to deviate from the main story but it seems that we get to wrapped up in the small print and end up not seeing the wood for the trees so to speak. The idea of fingerprinting children is just one more plaster on a raging wound that will not heal itself til we change our entire atitude to the way we live on planet Earth
Hum
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Paranoid much?
14.12.2006 19:41
Truth
The Truth, have you done your homework
26.09.2007 10:45
His comment did not give details and if you are stupid enough to not do your home work you can't comment.
Look up www.leavethemkidsalone.com and then tell me I haven't done my homework
DO YOUR HOMEWORK
WAKE UP
Hum
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http://www.myspace.com/banthewheel
what a load of rubbish!
13.08.2008 09:46
me