BoingBoing announced today that a wiki-style Little Brother (by Cory Doctorow) fan-annotated website has gone live at W1N5T0N.
I read Little Brother, and I really liked it. I think it should be on the required reading list for all teens and most adults and young adults who like tech fiction or have a desire to indulge their “more real than you’d think” conspiracy/techpocalypse fantasies. If you haven’t read it, I strongly suggest downloading it and devouring it. Perhaps, like me, you’ll then immediately start reevaluating your passwords and data protection.
I popped over to the W1N5T0N annotation site and noticed that it really must have just gone live recently, for out of 21 chapters and some appendices, there were only 13 comments thus far. To keep the spam down, comments are moderated, and I am guessing that a number of them are probably in queue, especially following BB’s announcement.
I read a few of the comments, and then I read the about/objectives page, and I immediately wanted to start annotating. I’ve done a bit of annotating on this blog as well as in the legal world, and I like it. When reading cases, it was always the footnotes that most captivated me. So, I set about finding a paragraph that I wanted to examine.
My first stop brought me to Chapter 2, Paragraph 3,
“I’m thinking of majoring in physics when I go to Berkeley,” Darryl said. His dad taught at the University of California at Berkeley, which meant he’d get free tuition when he went. And there’d never been any question in Darryl’s household about whether he’d go.
My recent oft-misunderstood DNA satire article focused on a sculpture in Berkeley (although the basis for the satire was elsewhere with an analogous sculpture), so I thought I would redeem myself by doing a comment on the basics of a Berkeley education in physics. I would also research to see whether Cory Doctorow had some relationship with the school, thus giving him the seed for the character. I got as far as finding a mysterious other Doctorow person, apparently with a PhD in something like physics or math, before I started having second thoughts. Was I really on the level of all the techies who get into this stuff and disassemble everything they touch, like a follower of the Owner’s Manifesto? Would people laugh at my feeble attempt to gather information that someone else likely possesses in greater excess and detail? Probably.
So, I paused for a bit, thought about it, and then urged myself to look again and find a paragraph that held more interest to me. And I think I found one in Chapter 1, Paragraph 104:
But it also lets the school track where you are at all times. It was another of those legal loopholes: the courts wouldn’t let the schools track us with arphids, but they could track library books, and use the school records to tell them who was likely to be carrying which library book.
Now this paragraph has appeal. Legal issues with RFID tagging students! The first thing that crossed my mind was, “I wonder if they have actually tried this in the US.” It didn’t take me long to find out, and before a few minutes had passed, I was well on my way toward a fair sized comment supporting Doctorow’s text.
Of course, my comment is still being moderated, so I thought I would write a blog post about the concept and share my thoughts. Then it hit me that I could do more than that. I could cross-comment! In other words, assuming it doesn’t violate any of the copyright restrictions on W1N5T0N, I will be citing the paragraphs here that I comment upon, and posting my comments here as well as there. I’ll be using the Little Brother category I just created. I think it’ll be fun and perhaps informative. There’s a lot of info out there, and Doctorow’s book highlights a lot of ways that tech can be and is abused.
So, without further banter from myself to myself, here is, again, my first attempt at annotating a paragraph from Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother.
Chapter 1, Paragraph 104:
But it also lets the school track where you are at all times. It was another of those legal loopholes: the courts wouldn’t let the schools track us with arphids, but they could track library books, and use the school records to tell them who was likely to be carrying which library book.
Annotation by Procrustes:
In 2005, the Northern California school district of Brittan established an RFID tracking system for students, to track attendance and identify trespassers. The program was opposed by many parents and the ACLU. (See School RFID Plan Gets an F, at Wired; Privacy Rights Are At Risk – Parents and Civil Liberties Groups Urge School District to Terminate Use of Tracking Devices, at ACLU of Northern California; and Keep RFIDs Out of Public Schools, at EFF.)
The ACLU of Northern California, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Privacy Rights Clearinghouse all helped draft legislation in California to limit RFID.
The RFID supplier for the Brittan school district, InCom Corporation, retracted its agreement to provide the RFID tracking system, according to a USA Today article (as noted at RFID Update), Company pulls out of contract to track students.
In October, 2007, InformationWeek reported that ten UK schoolchildren would be tracked with RFID chips in their school uniforms for a pilot program meant to make way for a behavioral reporting and attendance sytem. (See U.K. Kids Get RFID Chips In School Uniforms).
On December 12, 2007, ATT announced that it would offer RFID tracking for schools that would include tracking of buses, assets (like books), student attendance (on ID badges), and visitors. (See RFID Update’s article, AT&T Steps into RFID Student-Tracking Minefield.)
In 2008, the Rhode Island Middletown Public School system established a pilot program to put RFID tags on about 80 children’s school bags. The ACLU responded in ACLU ISSUES ALARM ABOUT MIDDLETOWN PLAN TO ELECTRONICALLY MONITOR SCHOOL CHILDREN.
