Step 5: What costs and trade-offs does the security solution impose? There are two. Where is this information collected? Who has access to it? How long is it stored? These are important security questions that get no mention. Step 4: What other risks does the security solution cause? The additional risk is the data collected through constant surveillance. You could imagine a movie-plot scenario where this kind of tracking system could help the hero recover the kidnapped child, but it hardly seems useful in the general case. Yes, it would tell investigators if the kidnapping happened before morning attendance and either before or after the school bus ride, but is that one piece of information worth this entire tracking system? I doubt it. Otherwise - if the kidnapping took place either before the child got on the bus or after the child got off - the system wouldn’t record anything suspicious. If a kidnapper - assume it’s someone the child knows - goes onto the school bus and takes the child off at the wrong stop, the system would record that. Let’s imagine how this system might provide security in the event of a kidnapping. Step 3: How well does the security solution mitigate those risks? Not very well.
My guess is that the current rates in Spring, Texas, are much lower.) Very few of these kidnappings involve school buses, so it’s unclear how serious the specific risks being addressed here are. (These statistics are for 1999, and are from NISMART-2, U.S. the odds of a child being abducted by a family member are one in 340 and by a non-family member are 1 in 1200 (per year). Child kidnapping is a serious problem in the U.S. Step 2: What are the risks to these assets? Loss of the child, either due to kidnapping or accident. Step 1: What assets are you trying to protect? Children. In the book, I applied the five-step process to everything from home burglar alarms to military action against terrorism. The idea is to be able to determine, rationally, whether a countermeasure is worth it. In Beyond Fear, I delineated a five-step process to evaluate security countermeasures. It’s expensive, invasive, and doesn’t increase security very much. What’s going on here? Have these people lost their minds? Tracking kids as they get on and off school buses is a ridiculous idea. The system is supposed to help prevent the loss of a child, whether through kidnapping or accident. Another school district, in Phoenix, is doing the same thing with fingerprint readers.
Hoping to prevent the loss of a child through kidnapping or more innocent circumstances, a few schools have begun monitoring student arrivals and departures using technology similar to that used to track livestock and pallets of retail shipments.Ī school district in Spring, Texas, is using computerized ID badges to record this information, and wirelessly sending it to police headquarters. is tracking schoolchildren when they get on and off school buses.