orwellian dream



Dawn and Mike Cantrall’s daughter, a seventh-grader at Brittan Elementary School, poses at her Sutter home wearing the Radio Frequency Identification tag that the school asked her to wear.

The only grade school in this rural town is requiring students to wear radio frequency identification badges that can track their every move. Some parents are outraged, fearing it will rob their children of privacy.

The badges introduced at Brittan Elementary School on Jan. 18 rely on the same radio frequency and scanner technology that companies use to track livestock and product inventory.

While similar devices are being tested at several schools in Japan so parents can know when their children arrive and leave, Brittan appears to be the first U.S. school district to embrace such a monitoring system.

Civil libertarians hope to keep it that way (…)