when conspiracy theorists have a valid point
A while ago, a seemingly harmless opinion article about digital currency on a current events site provoked a flood of conspiracy theorists claiming that digital money was a tool for the New World Order to track down those they didn’t like, or that it was one of the signs of the End Times which were described in Revelations. Considering that the Illuminati probably don’t care about how you spend your time and money while planning global domination and whatnot, the odds that digital money was going to make you a target for the NWO seem rather slim. But there’s another news-making Mark of The Beast out there, according to a Texan high school student, an RFID tag to track attendance and make sure that a certain district gets its daily allotment per student. When she refused to wear it, the school suspended her and told her parents she should either wear a tag or find a new school. The parents were quite obviously furious about what they see as major violations of their freedom of religious expression and the legal manure soon hit the fan.
Considering that equating the mark of a demonic creature most historians say serves as a rather heavy-handed metaphor for Roman emperors, with an RFID tag in a badge seems hyperbolic at best, there is a very valid issue in all this. There’s significant potential for abuse if you can track the movement of every student at will and if the webcam case in Pennsylvania is any indication, administrators will abuse their privilege and law enforcement will decline to punish them, which really makes the mind boggle because the administrators in question took hundreds of candid pictures of students involved in various stages of undress and the FBI would’ve had a very solid child pornography case on its hands, one they should’ve made and prosecuted. What will RFID tags reveal about students’ habits and will administrators drunk with newfound power abuse this information to met punishments that cross the line? As the above-mentioned case shows, the only way to prevent that is not to give the administrators this information in the first place.
I suppose one could argue that millions of adults wear RFID tags in their ID badges for work and seem no worse off for it. But adults choose to work at a place that tracks their movements. High school students have very little say or choice in the matter and for many, moving to new districts may not be an option and if it is, an unfair one at that. For conspiracy theorists who ran with this story in InfoWars, this disregard for students’ rights is just the latest reminder that schools exist as brainwashing factories for the powers that be, an long held idea that both left wing and right wing conspiracy theorists believe. But the real issue we need to address is why this idea was not vetted with the public before it was implemented and what it says about how schools view how to educate their students. Are the kids and teenagers entrusted to them merely id numbers, exam and standardized test scores, and fund sources? How quickly the administrators wanted to tag their students and how they reacted when one said no seems to say an awful lot about how that school district views education and its students, and what it says is not encouraging.
