Berkeleyans Organizing For Library Defense

The Board of Library Trustees is in full swing of putting Radio Frequency tracking tags in the Berkeley library books. Public Library means that we should have some say about how our libraries are run. $650,000 was borrowed through the city of Berkeley to purchase this very new and untried technology from Checkpoint Systems. The interest on the loan will be substantial.
20,000 books were thrown out (in privately hired dumpsters for some reason). The tracking devices cost about 50 cents each book and this throwing out was to save money so it is said.....
The books could have been given to the Friends of the Library to sell. We don't even have a list of what was thrown out.
These chips can hold 95 bits of information. At the moment they are only holding 1 bit. This can be expanded later on.
There are health and privacy concerns also.
Come join Super Bold and help figure out how to have the contract cancelled and the RFID taken out of our Public Libraries.
RFID bracelets are now being used to track prisoners within prisons and they are able to switch to Global Positioning systems when people are outside of the prison! This creates an electronic fence that can be easily moved around to keep prison work crews under control. This is a new scary technology of the future.
Board of Library Trustees meeting will be June 8th at the South Berkeley Senior Center at 7pm come early to fill out a speaker card. Tell the Board what you think of all this.
We will have a literature table there and a petition.
Come to the Community Forum on June 20th at the South Berkeley Senior Center. When they give us a time I'll post it on this Calendar.