In an effort to tighten up security during school hours,
administrators at Ruston High School in Ruston, La., have issued a
policy that requires both students and faculty to wear identification
badges complete with photograph, name and Social Security numbers
encrypted at the bottom.
According to Charles Scriber, principal at the high school, cafeteria
workers, custodians and administrators must wear them as well.
“It’s like a name tag when you go to a conference,” Scriber said of
the badges. “On a campus such as ours that is fairly open from all
sides, we want to be able to identify our students. It would be very
possible for students (from other schools) to come on campus and get
among our students, and we would not be able to identify them until some
time later. But with the badge, at a glance, we can see if they are
ours or if they are not ours.”
WorldNetDaily had reported earlier on a similar policy in Elkins,
W.Va., where a teacher and a small group of students and parents
protested their school’s identification program
on religious grounds.
Besides being used for identification purposes, the badges are used
by the students in the cafeteria and the library. It functions much
like other ID cards carried by students with the difference being that
this card has to be visible at all times during the students’ or faculty
members’ time on campus.
The Social Security number at the bottom of the card has been
encrypted into a bar code, but according to Scriber, if the students
feel uncomfortable with the bar code, they can either cover it up or
have it removed. Even though the student body at the school has this
option, some privacy advocates are concerned that forcing the more than
1,200 students to wear the badges may be little more than a conditioning
to accept the idea of having less privacy.
“I think it’s a conditioning,” said Lisa Dean, vice president for
technology policy at Free Congress Foundation. “The whole issue of
national ID is really at the center here.”
Dean is referring to the national identification card
which was first reported by WorldNetDaily. The national ID card is the
brainchild of the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant
Responsibility Act, which requires, in part, that all states make their
driver’s licenses comply with certain guidelines including the use of
the Social Security number and other digitized biometric information
such as fingerprints, retina scans and DNA prints.
But does Ruston High School policy violate the privacy of its
students? Solveig Singleton, director of information studies at the CATO
Institute, doesn’t think so.
“I don’t think the Federal Privacy Act would be applied to a locally
administered school,” Singleton said. “You might be able to make an
argument there because the Social Security number is involved — it is
federal — but generally, I think the regulation of the schools would be
left to the state.”
Singleton expressed concern, however, that from a philosophical point
of view, the identification badge is very disturbing.
“Once you create that kind of identifier, it just spreads throughout
every day life and pretty soon, you can’t walk down the street without
it. That’s an extreme example, but I think that’s the serious issue
here,” said Singleton.
Dean agrees with Singleton that the school is, in essence, creating a
trend that could very easily spread to other aspects of American
society.
“Sooner or later, you’re going to have a national identity card, and
it will start in the high schools conditioning a generation of Americans
to say that a national identity card is not only useful and convenient
but necessary,” said Dean. “That’s the real privacy violation.”
“Things tend to start out small, but they end up getting larger.
This is no exception,” Dean added.
Scriber told WorldNetDaily he got a legal opinion from one of the
school’s attorneys giving him the go ahead on the policy. He had looked
at the Social Security Act as well and nowhere did he find any language
pertaining to the use of Social Security numbers in encrypted codes.
Nevertheless, at least one parent and two students have already
complained about the policy.
Scriber insists the new policy will help to achieve the school’s goal
of tighter security. Being able to identify a student and call them by
name is a tremendous advantage, Scriber pointed out. Scriber said he
has also noticed a difference in the students’ behavior as it makes them
feel more responsible.
According to unverified reports which the principal himself had heard
about, one student has been able to decipher the encryption. However,
the principal doesn’t believe this poses a security threat to students
since it takes the student a long time to decipher a code. In most
instances, the student wouldn’t have time to decode the encryption
unless another student let him.
Commenting on the school’s policy, Marc Rotenberg, director of the
Electronic Privacy Information Center, said, “I think it’s a terrible
idea to be treating high school students like they’re prison inmates. I
don’t think the need has been established. I think it’s significant
that even at Columbine where they had a terrible tragedy, parents
resisted a lot of the proposals for very invasive monitoring and police
presence at the high school.”
Analyzing the policy as to how it relates to high school students,
Dean said policies such as these start with harmless bits of information
on a card. The student is led to believe the card is a good idea when
trips through cafeteria lines and book checkouts in the library go
faster. Thus, they readily accept the card policies without even
considering what may be coming down the road.
“That’s generally how these things start,” said Dean. “It’s a
convenience or an efficiency and so on … Before you know it, the frog
is boiling.”
