PRISM, as exposed by an EFF and Tor (perhaps also FOSS by extension) enthusiast, gives governments across the world access to profiles (personal dossiers trained from data) for all individuals, enabling them to classify members of the population and highlight those deviating from the norm. Any instrument of power through control requires one-way surveillance, meaning secrecy for the government and none for the rest of us. How about if you wanted to highlight children who are not properly indoctrinated, i.e. people whose minds are not absorbing the propaganda decided on by plutocrats in 'education' boards? Well, here too they try to exploit technology for mass control. Who's they? Those with money, power, and no morality. It is a no-brainer. Technology is a wonderful thing, but under the guise of advancement those at the top of the food chain try to introduce more user-hostile facilities by which to conduct en masse surveillance in the classroom, using cameras too (one of Gates' latest adventures).
The Dept. of Homeland Security has finally coughed up its Civil Rights/Civil Liberties Impact Assessment of its suspicionless electronic device searches performed at border crossings by ICE and CBP agents. It's been a long time coming.
Gates and others have begun to collect information about our children from New York to LA and it is about to happen in Seattle thanks to the efforts of the Road Map project, et al, falling all over themselves to receive a pittance of educational funding, $40 M to be split between 7 districts in our state. That’s $5.7M if it were to be divided equally.
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The Gates Foundation is building a national “data store” of such information, and intends to hand all this information to a new, separate corporation, which in turn plans to make it available to commercial vendors to help them develop and market their “learning products.”[1][1] The operating system of this “data store” is being built by Wireless Generation, a subsidiary of the News Corporation, which has been investigated for violating the privacy of individuals both here in the United States and in Great Britain.[2][2]
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The database is a joint project of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which provided most of the funding, the Carnegie Corporation of New York and school officials from several states. Amplify Education, a division of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, built the infrastructure over the past 18 months. When it was ready, the Gates Foundation turned the database over to a newly created nonprofit, inBloom Inc, which will run it.
The Seattle group gathered at Westlake Park and marched to the Gates Foundation in the Seattle Center area for a rally.
In case you missed it, about two weeks ago the Pearson Foundation announced that it was receiving funds from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to create a national K-12 curriculum. Gates ponied up $3 million to have Pearson develop 24 courses, 11 in math and 13 in English-Language Arts. At the announcement, both foundations positioned it as the next logical step in the adoption of Common Core State Standards.
The announcement seemed to go over with a bit of a thud. First, it met some people’s fears that a Common Core would undoubtedly lead to a common curriculum. And for the growing chorus that believes in local control and local decisionmaking, having bureaucrats in Washington (or even with a non-partisan foundation) determine what fifth grade math needed to look like on the third Tuesday of March just reeked of the nationalism folks have pushed back on for decades (or even since the creation of public education in the United States itself).