Fingerprinting Students

Every Progressive's favorite security expert, Bruce Schneier, has a blog entry today ripping its way through all the big sites. He talks about two cities, Phoenix and Spring, TX, that have implemented systems to track when students get on and off of school buses; the former is a wireless ID system, the latter a fingerprint based system.

He derides these systems as offering no real security to the students and asks why would cities go to such expense for such lousy protection? He writes that the reason is self preservation for the adults:

If a kidnapping occurs on school property, the subsequent investigation could easily hurt school officials. They could even lose their jobs. If you view this security countermeasure as one protecting them just as much as it protects children, it suddenly makes more sense. The trade-off might not be worth it in general, but it’s worth it to them [the school officials, ed.]

But I think he hit upon the real reason earlier in the piece when he said: "We are raising children who think it normal that their daily movements are watched and recorded by the police."