Diebold & RFIDs Linked to University Student ID's

[GingerSnaps]

Diebold & RFIDs Linked
To OR University Student IDs
By Biff Bixby
Portland Indy Media
11-20-4


Diebold is a major business partner of Higher One Bank, a company that's about to privatize Student ID & Financial Aid Disbursment services (via a unified Mastercard debit card/campus services card) at Southern Oregon University & Portland State University.

Higher One Bank is a darling of the emerging "contactless" ID industry which is relentlessly pushing for the implementation of at-a-distance electronic readabliity of Identification as well as the encoding of personal physical traits into chips contained on the cards.
1. Furthering the Diebold invasion

If the 2004 election wasn't enough to get you adamantly Diebold-bashing, their key involvment in a local campus corporatization scheme will assuredly have you swelling the ranks. The new id/debit/campus services card being forced upon SOU and PSU students is masterminded by Higher One Bank, whose list of 5 primary business alliances on their website includes, you guessed it, Diebold. They plan to make their card systems "interoperable" so as to create "a simple, one-card solution for students, faculty and staff, allowing campuses to extend the functionality and convenience of their financial services into an off-campus environment ."

http://www.higherone.com/H1_press_Diebold.html
http://www.higherone.com/H1_alliances_home.html

2. Avisian: Cheerleader for Big Brother, and Higher One, too!

"Here are three examples for biometric implementations that can let you realistically begin deployments on your campus...they can likely attach to your current campus card infrastructure."
- - - from www.cr80news.com, publication of Avisian

Biometrics - Electronic capture and analysis of biological characteristics,
such as fingerprints, facial structure or patterns in the eye.

The websites of Avisian publications seem to consistently take interest in the business dealings of up & comer Higer One Bank; their processing of $93.5 million in financial aid this fall was today's top story at www.cr80news.com. If you search Avisian's other news websites such as www.contactlessnews.com and www.rfidnews.com, you'll find a number of other articles tracking the rise of Higher One in the industry (see examples listed at the article's end), as well as a vendor profile at

http://www.rfidnews.org/vendors/28.php.

What makes this interest particularly frightening is the technological vision that Avisian is avowedly promoting. Their own website states that:

"For more than a decade, the AVISIAN team has been 'seeing forward' with respect to identification technologies. The founders have long believed that key advances in this arena held the promise for profound enhancement of individual security, convenience, and privacy. Focused work with RFID, smart cards, and traditional ID technologies, form the basis of AVISIAN's core business lines..."

The "smart cards" they refer to contain microchips which store significant amounts of information on the card itself rather than using a magnetic stripe (which stores very little data) to access information stored within a network. The ID industry has already succeeded in integrating this technology with RFID technology (Radio Frequency IDentification), another kind of circuit attached to a small antenna that can receive and send information. Differences in technology vary the distance from which the circuit can be read from a few inches to twenty or more feet away, as well as vary the amount of information the circuit can transmit. They are already implementing variations of smart card scanning technology such as contactless, proximity, and vicinity, though this researcher has had a difficult time discovering which ones implement the RFID systems.

The potential combination of readability from a distance and storing large amounts of sensitive info on a the card leads to scary enough possibilities (identity theft, government tracking & stalking, etc.), but the demented vision of AVISIAN doesn't stop with that. They are also tireless promoters of biometric technology, which compares a person's physiological features with digitally stored information. Articles on the CR80 news website indicate that the practical combination of contactless tech and biometrics is not far away, and the US has pushed other countries to utilize machine-readable biometric passports. The tenor of most of AVISIAN's "news" clearly shows them taking the stance of forcing people to accept corporate implementation and storage of highly invasve forms of physical analysis and behavior control.

Although the ID Card being promoted for SOU, as far as I can gather, has not initially been planned for biometric or contactless applications, the spread of corporatized universal card systems on campuses could definitely be utilized as a foot in the door towards the general acceptance of these technologies for student information (over time, contractually integrated into the increasingly "friendly" one-card systems). With all these untapped, lucrative markets poised for total invasion by ID tech, it makes since, then, that AVISIAN PR hacks would go to bat for Higher One in discrediting their opposition at Portland State. An article at CR80news.com places quotes around 'opposition' and 'controversy' to discredit the protest's authenticity, and suggests that a particular Higher One spokesperson's response to the students "...can serve as a good reminder for all vendors and campus card administrators on how to constructively address the inevitable VOCAL MINORITY"

http://www.cr80news.com/weblog/2004/09/21/portland-state-l
aunches-new-card-amid-student-opposition/

AVISIAN's mouthpiece Contactlessnews.com already lays out a strategic method to assimilate the unsuspecting campus inhabitants into allowing biometric information into the card systems. A far beyond creepy article entitled " 'Bolt-on biometrics' for the College and University Campus" suggests that "On campus, the reality is that biometric implementations are likely even more immediate...Here are three examples for biometric implementations that can let you realistically begin deployments on your campus...they can likely attach to your current campus card infrastructure." A small chart at the beginning encourages this approach:

*Choose a small test population that has immediate benefit from the biometrics.

* Use that experience to help formulate your institutional biometrics policy

* Position the card program as the "enrollment" station for establishing biometric identity

* Prepare the card program to utilize biometrics for other applications.

The planning and partnerships necessary to foist invasive ID tech on students is ready to deploy, and in some cases is already in place. Higher One is placing radio chips, albeit to open doors, in cards at Portland State

http://www.dailyvanguard.com/vnews/display.v/
ART/2004/09/13/414508212041b

Howard University in Florida made a deal with Siemens to obtain "Smart-card" hybrid security/privilege/cash cards. Mercyhurst College in Pennsylvania has implemented contactless smart cards systems. Johnson & Wales University uses hand geometry scanners, as do others.

http:www.rfidnews.org/news/2003/04/10/sam-houston-
state-university-chooses-higher-one/
http:www.cr80news.com/news/2002/07/26/higher-one-
announces-partnership-with-blackboard-inc

http://www.cr80news.com/news/2003/03/03/cbord-and-
higher-one-announce-new-partnership-to-
provide-a-wider-range-of-offerings-to-higher-education-institutions/

http://www.contactlessnews.com/news/2004/05/17/higher-
one-to-provide-customized-disbursement-
banking-and-debit-card-services-to-university-of-wisconsinla-crosse/

In Texas, 28,000 Students Test An Electronic Eye

By Matt Richtel
11-20-4

SPRING, Tex. - In front of her gated apartment complex, Courtney Payne, a 9-year-old fourth grader with dark hair pulled tightly into a ponytail, exits a yellow school bus. Moments later, her movement is observed by Alan Bragg, the local police chief, standing in a windowless control room more than a mile away.

Chief Bragg is not using video surveillance. Rather, he watches an icon on a computer screen. The icon marks the spot on a map where Courtney got off the bus, and, on a larger level, it represents the latest in the convergence of technology and student security.

"THE LINKS WERE ALL WORKING PRIOR TO THIS POSTING"


"You can read more at"

http://www.rense.com/general59/rref.htm

[Dogmudgeon]

1. I wouldn't mind RFIDs, IF ...

... they were Open Source and controllable by their end users.

Who wants to start an OS/RFID movement?

--bkl

[GingerSnaps]

2. Links worked before & now they are broken (Read about the computer chip)

:shrug:

"Radio frequency & diebold = voting machine & radio frequency possibilities"

The decades-old technology, called radio frequency identification, or RFID, is growing less expensive and developing vast new capabilities. It is based on a computer chip that has a unique number programmed into it and contains a tiny antenna that sends information to a reader.

The same technology is being used by companies like Wal-Mart to track pallets of retail items. Pet owners can have chips embedded in cats and dogs to identify them if they are lost.

[Eloriel]

3. WONDERFUL catch, thanks so much

This will go in my Thread #3 a little later today, Under Background/History:

VOTE FRAUD Links - a DU Compendium
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=201&topic_id=1984#

VOTE FRAUD Links Compendium - Thread #2
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=201x3223

[GingerSnaps]

4. Thanks

:kick: