"Give me a dozen healthy infants ... and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select" John Broadus Watson (1878-1958)
"There's a butterfly trapped in a spider's web" Sting & The Police
Schools seem to deliberately try to play down what they are doing. Some parents are not informed at all. In other schools, short. unclear, misleading letters, usually in a small typeface, and certainly without the bold hightlighting which embellish most school letters, are sent to parents WITHOUT the opt-in slips commonly used for school trips and many other matters.
The Department for Education have distanced themselves from issues of legality and have stated that "the matter was one for head teachers and governing bodies, who had to ensure they stayed within the law."
A statement by the Information Commissioner regarding Data Protection issues only is being used in glossy promotional literature to imply an entire scheme is legal.
The widespread use of biometrics in schools, such as thumbprinting for taking out library books, fingerprints instead of the daily school register, iris scanning to check school dinner entitlement, etc, needs to be strictly regulated and closely monitored.
Schools are not a secure environment in which to store or take pupils' sensitive data. And a standard PC is certainly not a secure piece of hardware.
Although the system does not store fingerprint scans, a full fingerprint is scanned each time a child uses the system. This serious vulnerability, and the fact that the scanners are kept and used in insecure areas, could easily be used by hackers to steal children's actual fingerprint scans, which could then be passed on or sold to third parties.
"There were no lines of defence. There was a permanent tenancy of foreign hackers. You could run a command when you were on the machine that showed connections from all over the world, check the IP address to see if it was another military base or whatever, and it wasn't. The General Accounting Office in America has again published another damning report saying that federal security is very, very poor. " Gary McKinnon tells the BBC how he hacked into Nasa and the US military computer networks.
"Education, Education, Education" Tony Blair "Consent, Consent, Consent" Parents
We are campaigning to have the widespread use of biometrics in schools debated in Parliament, and henceforth strictly regulated and closely monitored, with a statutory requirement for explicit parental consent wherever biometrics are used.
