Education

Hacker strikes after San Antonio students forced to wear tracking chips

Font Size:

The loosely associated group of “hacktivists” known as Anonymous hacked a San Antonio, Texas school district’s website over the weekend. The goal of the attack was to protest the district’s requirement that students at two schools wear tracking ID badges that log their whereabouts electronically.

In an online statement, someone claiming collaboration with Anonymous said he disabled the website because the school district “is stripping away the privacy of students in your school,” The Associated Press reports.

The school district’s website was not working as of Sunday.

The hacker described himself as 16 years of age in an email, according to The AP, and said he hacked into the district’s website on Saturday.

A spokesperson for the school district, Pascual Gonzalez, said he has not yet been able to determine that the website was hacked.

The identification cards are part of a pilot program. Beginning this fall, all students at John Jay High School and Anson Jones Middle School have been required to wear or carry IDs embedded with individual microchips at all times while on school grounds. Electronic readers installed in the schools’ ceiling panels then track every student’s location at school at all times.

If the schools can prove that students are, in fact, on campus, they receive more state funding.

The school district, Northside Independent School District, is the fourth largest in Texas. It comprises more than 100 schools with over 97,000 students.

The school district could eventually use the ID tracking system program at all of its campuses. However, at least one potential stumbling block has emerged.

Last week, according to San Antonio television station KENS, a federal district court judge ruled that a student at John Jay High School may continue attending classes without wearing a student-tracking ID badge, pending the outcome of a lawsuit.

The student, Andrea Hernandez, is a devout Christian who says that her religious beliefs prevent her from wearing the badge.

The principal at the high school had threatened Hernandez with expulsion before she and her father filed the lawsuit.

Anonymous is a decentralized, internet-based collective of hackers that has successfully attacked a multitude of targets since its inception including MasterCard, PayPal, the Church of Scientology and the United States Department of Justice.

Follow Eric on Twitter

PREMIUM ARTICLE: Subscribe To Keep Reading

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign Up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
BENEFITS READERS PASS PATRIOTS FOUNDERS
Daily and Breaking Newsletters
Daily Caller Shows
Ad Free Experience
Exclusive Articles
Custom Newsletters
Editor Daily Rundown
Behind The Scenes Coverage
Award Winning Documentaries
Patriot War Room
Patriot Live Chat
Exclusive Events
Gold Membership Card
Tucker Mug

What does Founders Club include?

Tucker Mug and Membership Card
Founders

Readers,

Instead of sucking up to the political and corporate powers that dominate America, The Daily Caller is fighting for you — our readers. We humbly ask you to consider joining us in this fight.

Now that millions of readers are rejecting the increasingly biased and even corrupt corporate media and joining us daily, there are powerful forces lined up to stop us: the old guard of the news media hopes to marginalize us; the big corporate ad agencies want to deprive us of revenue and put us out of business; senators threaten to have our reporters arrested for asking simple questions; the big tech platforms want to limit our ability to communicate with you; and the political party establishments feel threatened by our independence.

We don't complain -- we can't stand complainers -- but we do call it how we see it. We have a fight on our hands, and it's intense. We need your help to smash through the big tech, big media and big government blockade.

We're the insurgent outsiders for a reason: our deep-dive investigations hold the powerful to account. Our original videos undermine their narratives on a daily basis. Even our insistence on having fun infuriates them -- because we won’t bend the knee to political correctness.

One reason we stand apart is because we are not afraid to say we love America. We love her with every fiber of our being, and we think she's worth saving from today’s craziness.

Help us save her.

A second reason we stand out is the sheer number of honest responsible reporters we have helped train. We have trained so many solid reporters that they now hold prominent positions at publications across the political spectrum. Hear a rare reasonable voice at a place like CNN? There’s a good chance they were trained at Daily Caller. Same goes for the numerous Daily Caller alumni dominating the news coverage at outlets such as Fox News, Newsmax, Daily Wire and many others.

Simply put, America needs solid reporters fighting to tell the truth or we will never have honest elections or a fair system. We are working tirelessly to make that happen and we are making a difference.

Since 2010, The Daily Caller has grown immensely. We're in the halls of Congress. We're in the Oval Office. And we're in up to 20 million homes every single month. That's 20 million Americans like you who are impossible to ignore.

We can overcome the forces lined up against all of us. This is an important mission but we can’t do it unless you — the everyday Americans forgotten by the establishment — have our back.

Please consider becoming a Daily Caller Patriot today, and help us keep doing work that holds politicians, corporations and other leaders accountable. Help us thumb our noses at political correctness. Help us train a new generation of news reporters who will actually tell the truth. And help us remind Americans everywhere that there are millions of us who remain clear-eyed about our country's greatness.

In return for membership, Daily Caller Patriots will be able to read The Daily Caller without any of the ads that we have long used to support our mission. We know the ads drive you crazy. They drive us crazy too. But we need revenue to keep the fight going. If you join us, we will cut out the ads for you and put every Lincoln-headed cent we earn into amplifying our voice, training even more solid reporters, and giving you the ad-free experience and lightning fast website you deserve.

Patriots will also be eligible for Patriots Only content, newsletters, chats and live events with our reporters and editors. It's simple: welcome us into your lives, and we'll welcome you into ours.

We can save America together.

Become a Daily Caller Patriot today.

Signature

Neil Patel