Thursday, November 29, 2012

I Know Where You Are

Imagine a government agency that can compel certain groups of people to visit its offices.  The imagine that this agency further compels these visitors to wear identification tags during every visit.  Imagine those ID tags also contain RFID chips so that the government agency can know where each and every person is while in or near their facility.

How many people would be outraged?  How long would this policy last?

The agency is a school.  The "certain groups" would be students.

The number of outraged families is one.

By the time the government gets around to mandating that RFID chips be surgically implanted in every citizen, I fully expect not to hear a single "baaa".

One of the reasons for structuring our public school days in hourly segments was to prepare students for life in an industrial setting.  They had to be trained to move in response to bells and similar broad scale signals.  Independent thought and pursuit of personal interests went right out the window.

Where better to wear down the public's expectation of privacy than in our public schools.  In another 30 years, the government will be able to go where it wants, when it wants, and no one will dare suggest it to be out of place. 

The Fourth Amendment right to be secure in our persons, houses, papers, and effects as well as our expectation that government agents would secure warrants before conducting a search will be so twisted as to become unrecognizable to the men that wrote the Amendment in the first place.  If they can do it to the "commerce clause" and the "general welfare clause" to permit the New Deal, Social Security, and similar extra Constitutional activities, then we can expect people that support a "living Constitution" to fully embrace a government that readily asks the digital equivalent of "papers please" on a routine basis.

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