MI- School security methods go hi-tech, but at what cost to our personal freedom?

The costs of this Raptor system is astronomical (see end of this article) and that Texas school system is involved in a lawsuit over this system.

12-6-2008 Michigan:

"May I have your driver's license please?" asked Mrs. Hamp, the kindly secretary behind the desk at Lemon Bay High School In Englewood, Florida, where I recently had a meeting scheduled with teachers.

I handed it over and watched with interest as she ran it through a small machine. She studied her computer screen while I waited, and shortly a visitor's pass complete with date, time, destination, and my name and photo emerged from a tiny printer. I was instructed to peel off the label and stick it to my shirt.

"Just what comes up on the screen when you do that?" I asked.

"Every single bit of your personal information," she joked.

At least, I think she was joking.

It's called Raptorware, a computerized background check system developed by a Houston firm called Raptor Systems.

Raptorware scans information encoded in the magnetic strip on driver's licenses, sends each visitor's full name, birth date, license number and photo over the Internet, and then checks the information against Raptor's national database of registered sex offenders.

If I had been a registered sex offender, Mrs. Hamp would have known immediately. Authorities would have been secretly alerted and dispatched to the school. Mrs. Hamp would continue to chat nonchalantly without letting on that police were on their way.

It's a slick system, fast, efficient and (hopefully) accurate, and according to the Raptorware website it identified 1,100 offenders on its campuses last year. They claim it has also been credited for numerous arrests of absconded sex offenders nationwide.

No one can fault a school district for going the extra mile to keep kids safe. But we'd be crazy if we didn't wonder about the cost to our privacy.

That's what prompted Yvonne and Larry Meadows to file a lawsuit last month against a Lake Travis school district in Texas, where Raptorware is used.

The Meadows--who do not have criminal backgrounds--say that the district's background check policy violates their constitutional rights to freedom of association, and freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, as well as several state laws.

There are no easy answers. Clearly student safety trumps personal freedom. But our personal freedoms seem to be disappearing awfully fast.

As I watched my driver's license number zip off into cyberspace, it occurred to me that we all place a lot of trust in faceless technology. We don't, at any point, know how vulnerable we are. After all, just how invincible can a database be?

And as I left I wondered about all of the kindly Mrs. Hamps manning front desks in schools across the country, nonchalantly keeping sex offenders at bay.

Their job descriptions, I'm sure, have changed in ways they never could have imagined. ..News Source.. by Kelly Flynn The Flint Journal