Leave Them Kids Alone

I remember last year reading that at quite a few schools they used fingerprints to allocate school lunches, this meant the schools fingerprinted all the children onto a database. So far so Big Brother is watching you eat (and weren’t the awful meals Winston consumed very like school dinners?). So now our surveillance state wants to bring up our children stamped, filed, recorded and scanned. Then it’s a new library database, now it’s part of the ID card US mandated biometric passport plans. I specifically renewed my passport before new regulations came in, no such luck for the wee ones:-

an estimated 700,000 children are being fingerprinted at school.

Systems in 3,500 primary school libraries allow pupils to take out books by scanning their thumb prints instead of using a card.- The Mirror

-Proposals to fingerprint children aged 11 to 15 as part of new passport and ID card plans are being considered.

Last month the opposition parties expressed anger that all fingerprints collected for ID cards would be cross-checked against prints from 900,000 unsolved crimes.

And campaigners have long battled fingerprinting of children in schools, a practice they estimate happens in about 3,500 establishments. -BBC

leavethemkidsalone.com has come into being to fight this insidious surveillance state attempt to get at the weaker members of society, the children (who knew, Big Brother liked kids in that way?):-

From this month guidelines from privacy watchdog the Information Commissioner will urge schools to get parental consent before taking biometric data.

But under the Data Protection Act schools do not have to seek parental consent, and calls to outlaw the controversial practice have been rejected by the government.-

You see most parents probably though that if their child was going to get fingerprinted and put on a database the school would need to asked for parental consent. The computer says ‘NO’. From LTKA.com:-

Fingerprinting 5-year-olds without asking parents has become a multi-million pound business. Some of the companies involved in school biometrics use some very questionable sales techniques, and have close links with the US military and even the interrogators at Guantanamo Bay.

Data held on these systems is not protected by the Data Protection Act and may fall under the provisions of the Children Act 2004 which allows data on every child in the UK to be accessed and shared by a wide range of government officials including police, teachers, GPs and social workers, without parents’ consent or even knowledge. Head Teachers have no power to overrule this, so any well-intentioned assurances they may give parents about data sharing are worthless. One system, Junior Librarian, “even has a report specifically designed for school inspections”.

Fans of George Orwell might be interested to know that the boss of Micro Librarian Systems is called, perhaps appropriately, O’Brien.-

And all that’s even before we get to the DNA databases…

I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.

NB. 4/6/08 Comments are now closed on this post due to spam.