Schools conduct 'Minority Report-like' iris scans on students as young as six

Parents in Polk County, Florida were outraged after being informed that their children’s irises had been scanned without permission as part of a new security program. Parents first heard about the scheme in a letter sent out on Friday May 24, four days after the compulsory iris scans program had already begun.

The scans were taken as part of a new security program being introduced by the Polk County School Board, called Eye-Swipe Nano, which impacts students at Daniel Jenkins Academy, a high school, Davenport School of the Arts, a middle school, and Bethune Academy, an elementary school.

The schools allowed officials from Stanley Convergent Security Solutions to take iris scans of students between May 20 and 22. The scans are essentially optical fingerprints, which the school intended to collect to create a database of biometric information for school-bus security, much like the technology used in the 2002 Tom Cruise movie Minority Report. Read more >>