Wired News: School RFID Plan Gets an F

This one goes back a way -- to Feb 10, but Jack, Peter and I discussed it on the show yesterday.

I'm the first to admit, that after revisiting the subject, in this case Jack and I were wrong about the information contained on them -- these RFIDs only contained the Student ID number which the school computers then used to track the students. However, when you read about the financial arrangements between the school and the company producing the RFID badges, it still smells. I love this part, "Boylan couldn't say how scanners above bathroom doors would help track attendance. InCom installed scanners outside 7th and 8th-grade classrooms at Brittan and above bathroom doors in a cafeteria. But Boylan noted that the bathroom scanners never worked properly anyway, and the school has since asked InCom to remove them."


At one point the article mentions "School officials could also quickly identify anyone who didn't belong on campus if they weren't wearing an RFID badge." Come again? Does that rely on RFID, or just plain old ID. Unless you have sensors for warm bodies or cameras at the same location as the RFID reader and full time monitoring, how are you going to do that? You recieve a spurious "non-signal" and run out into the hall to find someone lurking without an RFID? Yeah, right.