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Technology Stocks : Identix (IDNX) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: steve who wrote (19860)	2/10/2001 6:36:58 PM
From: biometricgngboy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 26039

A few months old but still, get a load of this guy: "IDX is relying on stock promoters to artificially inflate the price. Most of the "good news" coming out of the company is Westergaard spin. This is not conjecture on my part...it is carefully researched FACT. The absolutely pathetic numbers in the 10-Ks speak for themselves. " Message 14191024

To: steve who wrote (19860)	2/11/2001 2:03:17 PM
From: steve	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 26039

YOUR PAPERS, PLEASE ... 'Fingerprints for food' program criticized School lunch procedure 'desensitizes' kids to government demands? By Jon Dougherty © 2001 WorldNetDaily.com The Libertarian Party (http://www.lp.org) has expressed outrage over a new fingerprint technology at use in 35 Pennsylvania public schools that requires grade-school children to use a fingerprint to obtain a school lunch. Essentially, the program involves children having a fingerprint scanned and a numerical representation of it recorded in the school's database. Later, as kids move through the checkout line, they place their index finger on a scanner. "The print is matched in the database and the price of the lunch is deducted from the family's account," complains the Libertarian Party in a press release, which called the program "another frightening example of how law enforcement-style technology is being used to monitor children in public schools." The schools are using technology supplied by biometrics industry leader Sagem Morpho, a company noted for supplying fingerprint technology to law enforcement agencies around the country and around the world. Officials at one of the Pennsylvania schools -- the Welsh Valley Middle School in Narberth -- declined to discuss the program. "We're just not prepared to release a report on this yet," a spokesman for the Lower Merion School District, which includes the Welsh Valley school, told WorldNetDaily. The spokesman also would not respond to questions regarding parental feedback on the program. "We should be ready to release a story on this in a few months," she said, noting that the biometrics trials were "a pilot program." School administrators claim the fingerprint purchasing system allows kids to move through lunch lines faster and eliminates the problem of stolen lunch money and the violence caused by kids trying to steal it. So successful is the program thus far, say Libertarian Party officials, that school administrators are considering expanding it to include check-out and return of library books, school attendance checks during class and even to force children to give a print scan before entering school busses. "Should 7- and 8-year-olds be required to submit biometric identifiers so they can eat lunch?" asked the party's national director, Steve Dasbach. "Should children in grammar school be treated like criminals for the convenience of public school bureaucrats? Or has schoolyard surveillance finally gone too far?" He says that parents should also be asking if they want schools treating their children like common criminals. "Fingerprinting isn't just for criminals anymore," Dasbach said. "Now it's for schoolchildren who only want a hot lunch. Is that the message we want to send to our children?" Libertarian Party officials wonder if such technologies "desensitize" kids to the demands of government and other authority figures. "Adults are reluctant to allow the government to build databases of biometric identifiers because we know how politicians can abuse such information," Dasbach said, "and because we understand the constitutional prohibitions against such privacy-invading programs. Perhaps the most ominous thing about fingerprinting schoolchildren is that it conditions them to surrender biometric data whenever the government demands it." Party officials also wonder if collected biometric information can or would eventually be misused, not simply by schools, but also by any agencies or firms that collect such data. Also, LP officials wonder: "Are we sacrificing too much for the sake of efficiency?" "This fingerprinting procedure may indeed save time and money -- like any other industrial assembly-line procedure" Dasbach said. "But do we really want our children to be monitored like pieces of machinery? "In a way, this new program exemplifies what is wrong with government-run education: It treats children like interchangeable cogs in a machine rather than respecting each student as a unique individual," said Dasbach. LP officials said local parents should contact their school districts to see if administrators are "planning to start implementing a similar 'fingerprints-for-food' program and speak out against it." worldnetdaily.com steve