Arizona: Last week, the Kyrene Elementary School District Governing Board unanimously approved updating the district’s health curriculum for sixth through eighth grades. The curriculum will now include statements that “sex” refers to vaginal, oral and anal sexual acts, in addition to definitions of STDs. A local parent is quoted saying he doesn’t want his sixth-grade son to hear about oral, anal and vaginal sex at his age, but hates to keep his son out of the program because of peer pressure he would face. “Where’s the boundary? Can’t kids be kids? By expanding the curriculum and terminologies, you are forcing me to have conversations with my kids that I’d rather not have,” the parent said.

Kyrene parents will have an opportunity to review suggested sex-education books, DVDs and other materials intended for middle school students.

Meanwhile an editorial calls on readers to treat “sex education like math for a few moments and look at the simple numbers.” It goes on to say that schools are negligent if they don’t provide a full and accurate sexuality education.

Maryland: An editorial supports a recent decision lowering the ages at which students in Frederick County will learn about pregnancy prevention and HIV/AIDS. Beginning this year, eighth-graders will learn about pregnancy prevention and fifth-graders will receive an introduction to HIV⁄AIDS. Previously, students learned about pregnancy prevention in ninth grade, and HIV in sixth grade.

Michigan: An article from a local Michigan paper demonstrates just how powerful local curricula review committees can be in determining what sort of sex education teens receive. Garden City schools will start using a program that I am not familiar with called Safer Choices for students in middle and high school. Does anyone out there know anything about this curricula?

Mississippi: Administrators at Leflore County schools have applied for a grant to fund abstinence-only-until-marriage programs for high schoolers, saying “[t]he message has to be clear - that there is no such thing as safe sex.”

New York: Teen pregnancy rates are dropping in Rochester, New York, (a city that previously held the distinction of having one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the country). Community activists attribute it to the introduction of the comprehensive sex ed campaign Keeping It Real. Reverend Carlton Veazey, president of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, developed the program and he will be in Rochester on September 12 to give a talk about sexuality education. In an interview last week, Veazey laid out his position: “If we are trying to save lives, I say we must break the silence. No, we are not advocating casual sex. We are very openly saying abstinence is preferred. Abstinence is the safest. But we are also saying: realistically speaking, abstinence doesn’t work for everyone. We must provide comprehensive sex education to our young people so they protect themselves.”

Ohio: More coverage on the teen pregnancy rate in Timkin, Ohio, which I first wrote about two weeks ago. Bill Albert of The National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy says, “[S]ex is more complex than the information about drugs and alcohol. If we say this is health-related, then we lump it in with drugs and alcohol. But the message with sex is more nuanced. It is not a not-now, not-ever message.”

Texas: Worth Your Wait comes to Floresville, Texas. The curriculum will be presented to sixth graders, eighth graders, and high school students through their health classes. SIECUS has a summary of some of the problems with Worth the Wait

Yesterday the FDA finally approved use of the emergency contraceptive, Plan B, without a prescription. Unfortunately, as part of its approval, the FDA included an arbitrary and unscientific age restriction that not only infringes on privacy rights but will also deter women of all ages from purchasing the drug. For more information check out the ACLU’s press release.

Alabama: Last week in Baldwin County school officials put a stop to condom distribution at a talk on HIV awareness.

Arizona: The debate at Kyrene Elementary School District continues. The question is whether schools should tell sixth- through eighth-graders that sex can mean oral, anal and vaginal acts and that STDs can be contracted through all these methods. Another article notes that nearly a third of ninth-graders in the state have already have had sexual intercourse. The Kyrene governing board will vote on the proposed changes in the sex-education curriculum at 7 p.m. Tuesday at the district office, 8700 S. Kyrene Road.

And Kyrene isn’t the only school district in Arizona that’s tackling this issue. The Chandler Unified School District will take up this issue in the coming weeks. Currently Seventh-, eighth- and 10th-grade health classes in the district use programs supplied by Catholic Charities that offer no discussion of birth control.

Nevada: CityLife provides readers with an insider’s look into the Clark County School District’s sexual education curriculum committee. The nine-member committee evaluates materials and makes curricula recommendations to the school board. The article demonstrates how the ideas and opinions of a small committee can have a big impact on what kind of sex education teens are taught.

Ohio: Beginning this academic year, eighth-graders in Frederick County will learn about pregnancy prevention and fifth-graders will receive an introduction to HIV⁄AIDS.

Meanwhile, the school board at Timken High School has decided to expand sex education following news reports that 13 percent of female students at the high school were pregnant at the start of the past academic year. Rev. David Morgan, who served on a committee that developed the new lesson plans, says the new curriculum “moves beyond, ‘Just say No,’ which doesn’t work.” Some of the health textbooks were from 1988.

Memo from D.C., by Lisa Graves, Senior Counsel for Legislative Strategy

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter has attracted some good press for his saber rattling on President Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program, but behind the headlines his bill, co-authored with Vice President Dick Cheney, would basically repeal the Fourth Amendment protections that were written into the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in the wake of Watergate. As they say in the East, a sword is useless in the hands of a coward, which really means that empty threats to hold the president accountable are basically useless.

And so far no “leader” on the hill has been willing to issue a subpoena to the White House or the telecommunication companies to pierce through the rhetoric to find out how many Americans are having their Fourth Amendment and statutory rights to privacy violated by the NSA at the president’s direction. The only way to get a subpoena for the truth issued from the hill is for there to be a majority willing to hold the president accountable and issue the legal command for the truth. This isn’t a partisan issue–it’s a constitutional issue and party loyalty should not trump the checks and balances designed to safeguard our liberty.

The lack of any real check against the president from Congress was evident in the blank check some in Congress tried to give the president right before they left for August vacations. Actually, the check isn’t blank–it’s filled in for the exact amount of power sought by the president: unlimited power to engage in warrantless wiretapping, without any mandatory judicial check. Here’s what happened:

The Senate Judiciary Committee room was packed on Thursday, August 3rd, as many lobbyists and Senate staff waited to see if there would be a vote on the Cheney-Specter bill. Administration lobbyists sat in their usual seats behind the Republican staffers and while the cordoned off press area was overflowing. Slowly, the Members’ chairs filled as Senator Specter waited for a quorum so he could push for a vote on his bill.

Once a sufficient number of Senators showed up, he starting asking for a vote on his extremely controversial and extreme bill to legalize the president’s spying on Americans. But, as you might imagine, members of Congress wanted to debate this radical effort to re-write the law. Actually, most of the debate came from the Democratic side of the room, while Republicans chatted amongst themselves, having already pledged to due what Dick wants, Vice President Cheney that is.

Senator Leahy spoke strongly against the bill, as did Senator Durbin. Then Senator Feinstein began her eloquent and thoughtful remarks. Mid-way through, Chairman Specter interrupted her to ask her how much longer since Republican Senators were eager to vote and leave, and she politely continued. When she concluded the chairman noted that she had spoken for a whole 15 minutes, actually not very long when you consider what is at stake as Senator Leahy pointed out–especially since she serves on both the Judiciary and Intelligence Committees, has been briefed into some of the NSA programs and still opposes the Cheney-Specter bill.

Senator Specter actually asserted that his bill’s language that the president should be able to wiretap outside of FISA was language already in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which would be mistaken, to say the least. Senator DeWine spoke in favor of approving the NSA’s surveillance program and as Senator Feingold and Schumer sought recognition, the clock high on the wall by the frieze of astrological signs (clearly from a different era) buzzed to signal a vote on the floor of the Senate.

Senator Specter recessed the hearing to reconvene in the president’s room right next to the Senate chamber right after the vote. Staff and press quickly gathered materials and began the walk toward the Capitol on the nearly 100 degree day. We had to run the gantlet to get into the room, which is hard for the public to access. Once staff and press assembled in the room with big, old red leather chairs, Senator Specter entered the room. He hit the gavel hard and said someone had invoked the “two-hour” rule. The rule prevents the committee from meeting for two hours past the beginning of that legislative day. This is so members can participate in floor debates in spite of endless committee meetings.

Several people in the bipartisan crowd wanted to applaud or do the wave, but did not. The Senator was obviously disappointed and joked that if there were no objections he would report his bill. He gaveled the meeting to a conclusion, saying he would get the bill out in September. Staff and press drained from the room, as my allies and I took advantage of the big red chairs and cool room to finally breathe a sigh of relief. It seemed that we had been holding our breath all morning and for months, hoping to make it through the summer without these bad NSA bills getting a vote and rolling back our fundamental rights.

As we left that day, staffers were joking that the jets to whisk members away were fueling on the tarmacs and that we would just have jet fumes in a few short hours. And honestly nothing could have smelled better than that, given how hard the White House had been pushing to get the bill it wrote signed by a vote so it could cash out our rights.

Alaska: The Anchorage Daily News has an announcement for a “Now I Know” abstinence-only-until-marriage rally aimed at teen girls. The event is put on by a group called My Sister’s Keeper Alaska. Aside from curiosity about what the event will be like, I also wonder why so many abstinence events seem to be geared towards girls and not boys.

California: There have been several articles this week focusing on teen pregnancy in California. An article out of San Bernardino features the work of a group called HABLO — Helping Adolescents Build Life Options. Founded in 1997, the program recognizes that teens are more apt to listen to their peers rather than their parents or teachers, and it aims to train teens to counsel other teens on topics such as pregnancy, family life, STDs and contraceptives. The program is offered at San Andreas, Cajon, Pacific and Arroyo Valley high schools.

A second article discusses teen pregnancy in Humboldt County. The Director of the Teen-Adult Partnership for Enhancing Strategies Toward Responsible Youth (TAPESTRY) says that “California Education Code requires comprehensive, research-based sexuality education. But as school nurse positions are cut because of budget cuts, the availability of such education is limited.”

And finally, this week the Get Real About Teen Pregnancy campaign in California released the results of a public opinion poll. The telephone survey was conducted among African American, Caucasian, Filipino, Hispanic and Vietnamese respondents and designed to identify the role that cultural identity plays in this issue. Across the five ethnic groups, more than 78 percent of all respondents support providing condoms and sex education to high school students.

Georgia: Four hundred teens from Macon will take part in a national study on the prevention of HIV and STDs. In addition to Macon, the study will include teens from Columbia, South Carolina, Syracuse, New York, and Providence, Rhode Island. The cities were selected based on their high rates of teen pregnancy, STDs, and HIV. The study will teach teens safer sex practices in addition to stressing abstinence. In addition to attending sessions on safe sex and abstinence, teens in two of the four cities, Macon and Syracuse, will be exposed to positive television and radio messages about safe sex and abstinence for further reinforcement.

Nebraska: The Nebraska state department of Health and Human Services announced that it will begin accepting proposals to fund community-based abstinence-only-until-marriage programs. The state has $185,000 from the federal government to distribute in grants ranging from $5,000 to $25,000. Just imagine if that money was going to fund comprehensive sex ed.

North Carolina: Yes! Weekly out of Greensboro has an article about the sex ed survey released last week by the local NARAL and ACLU affiliates. (Take Issue, Take Charge has a link to the study and issued a press release featuring the survey results and commending the passage of new sex ed legislation in North Carolina.)

Pennsylvania: A local paper has a story about the importance of comprehensive sex ed at an early age. The article has a great quote from a teen mother:

Besides gossip from her equally inexperienced teenage girlfriends and her mother’s advice to resist “temptations of the flesh,” Chante Dillingham never really had a solid sex education. So by the time she and other ninth-graders had begun carrying around chicken eggs, pretending they were babies for a health class project, it was too late for Dillingham, then 14. I was already pregnant.

Thank you to the ACLU for allowing me to blog here, and to all of you who sent in questions. Apologies to those I missed, but I didn’t have time to get to them all.

I started this week of guest blogging by posting my essay on the future of privacy. I’d like close with my essay on the value of privacy:

The most common retort against privacy advocates — by those in favor of ID checks, cameras, databases, data mining and other wholesale surveillance measures — is this line: “If you aren’t doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide?”

Some clever answers: “If I’m not doing anything wrong, then you have no cause to watch me.” “Because the government gets to define what’s wrong, and they keep changing the definition.” “Because you might do something wrong with my information.” My problem with quips like these — as right as they are — is that they accept the premise that privacy is about hiding a wrong. It’s not. Privacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect.

Two proverbs say it best: Quis custodiet custodes ipsos? (”Who watches the watchers?”) and “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Cardinal Richelieu understood the value of surveillance when he famously said, “If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged.” Watch someone long enough, and you’ll find something to arrest — or just blackmail — with. Privacy is important because without it, surveillance information will be abused: to peep, to sell to marketers and to spy on political enemies — whoever they happen to be at the time.

Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we’re doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance.

More here.

It was demonstrated today at the BlackHat conference.

Grunwald says it took him only two weeks to figure out how to clone the passport chip. Most of that time he spent reading the standards for e-passports that are posted on a website for the International Civil Aviation Organization, a United Nations body that developed the standard. He tested the attack on a new European Union German passport, but the method would work on any country’s e-passport, since all of them will be adhering to the same ICAO standard.

In a demonstration for Wired News, Grunwald placed his passport on top of an official passport-inspection RFID reader used for border control. He obtained the reader by ordering it from the maker — Walluf, Germany-based ACG Identification Technologies — but says someone could easily make their own for about $200 just by adding an antenna to a standard RFID reader.

He then launched a program that border patrol stations use to read the passports — called Golden Reader Tool and made by secunet Security Networks — and within four seconds, the data from the passport chip appeared on screen in the Golden Reader template.

Grunwald then prepared a sample blank passport page embedded with an RFID tag by placing it on the reader — which can also act as a writer — and burning in the ICAO layout, so that the basic structure of the chip matched that of an official passport.

As the final step, he used a program that he and a partner designed two years ago, called RFDump, to program the new chip with the copied information.

The result was a blank document that looks, to electronic passport readers, like the original passport.

I’ve long been opposed (that last link is an op-ed from The International Herald-Tribune) to RFID chips in passports, although last year I — mistakenly — withdrew my objections based on the security measures the State Department was taking.

That’s silly. I’m not opposed to chips on ID cards, I am opposed to RFID chips. My fear is surreptitious access: someone could read the chip and learn your identity without your knowledge or consent.

Sure, the State Department is implementing security measures to prevent that. But as we all know, these measures won’t be perfect. And a passport has a ten-year lifetime. It’s sheer folly to believe the passport security won’t be hacked in that time. This hack took only two weeks!

The best way to solve a security problem is not to have it at all. If there’s an RFID chip on your passport, or any of your identity cards, you have to worry about securing it. If there’s no RFID chip, then the security problem is solved.

Until I hear a compelling case for why there must be an RFID chip on a passport, and why a normal smart-card chip can’t do, I am opposed to the idea.

Crossposted to the Schneier on Security blog.

An article in USA Today examines a report released Monday by Child Trends that reveals that most sexually active teens don’t regularly use condoms (only 47 percent of boys and 28 percent of girls report always using a condom when they have sex). Co-authors of the report note that “condom use declines a little with age, and more serious relationships are less likely to use condoms.” In addition the authors note that the more sexually experienced the teen is, the more likely he or she will switch to other methods of birth control.

As for the gender discrepancy in the report’s results, Amber Madison the author of Hooking Up: A Girl’s All-Out Guide to Sex & Sexuality attributes it to a possible difference in the frequency of sex within relationships versus casual sex (i.e., girls may have sex more often within the confines of a relationship and therefore may be less likely to use condoms while boys may more frequently have casual sex and therefore use condoms with more regularity). The authors also note discrepancies in contraceptive use by race and ethnicity, “Hispanic girls are the least likely to use birth control. For both first-time sex and their most recent sex, 36% used contraception, compared with 57% of blacks and 72% of whites.” A spokeswoman from the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy says that teens should be given the message that the best protection is to use two methods of contraception: condoms to prevent STDs and a hormonal method to prevent pregnancy.

Meanwhile MTV reports on the controversy between abstinence-only-until-marriage programs and comprehensive sex education. The article provides a fairly detailed summary of what’s behind the debate with dueling positions articulated by the editor of Teenwire, a Planned Parenthood website that focuses on teen sexual health, and a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. The article also delves into some of the church-state issues that often arise from these programs, and notes that the abstinence-only-until-marriage program, Sex Respect, has a radio show on Catholic radio stations.

The Star Ledger out of Texas has an article about a short film called The Pledgers, a mockumentary about virginity pledgers that features the actual pledge used by the abstinence-only-until-marriage program Sex Respect. The directors, natives of Arlington, Texas, and current students at The New School in New York City, got involved in the issue after teaching sex ed to inner-city youth. One of the directors, Rachel Knudsen, is putting together another documentary that compares the effects of virginity pledges and abstinence-only-until-marriage programs to comprehensive sexuality education within schools. You can watch The Pledgers at www.theproject.tv as part of a student short film contest.

And finally, on another film-related note, it seems that The Education of Shelby Knox continues to make an impression. The Bellingham Herald out of Washington has a letter to the editor that says the film makes a powerful argument for comprehensive sex ed and argues that parents who are concerned about the physical and emotional health of their children should support such education.

There has been an enormous push by the government to field data mining technologies, in the belief that these can be effective in foiling terrorism. I wrote about this back in March, comparing data mining’s effectiveness in catching credit-card fraudsters (good) with its effectiveness in catching terrorists (bad).

I wrote this in 2004 for the San Francisco Chronicle, but it’s still important.

In recent years there has been an increased use of identification checks as a security measure. Airlines always demand photo IDs, and hotels increasingly do so. They’re often required for admittance into government buildings, and sometimes even hospitals. Everywhere, it seems, someone is checking IDs. The ostensible reason is that ID checks make us all safer, but that’s just not so. In most cases, identification has very little to do with security.

Let’s debunk the myths:

First, verifying that someone has a photo ID is a completely useless security measure. All the Sept. 11 terrorists had photo IDs. Some of the IDs were real. Some were fake. Some were real IDs in fake names, bought from a crooked DMV employee in Virginia for $1,000 each. Fake driver’s licenses for all 50 states, good enough to fool anyone who isn’t paying close attention, are available on the Internet. Or if you don’t want to buy IDs online, just ask any teenager where to get a fake ID.

Harder-to-forge IDs only help marginally, because the problem is not making sure the ID is valid. This is the second myth of ID checks: that identification combined with profiling can be an indicator of intention.

Our goal is to somehow identify the few bad guys scattered in the sea of good guys. In an ideal world, what we would want is some kind of ID that denotes intention. We’d want all terrorists to carry a card that says “evildoer” and everyone else to carry a card that said “honest person who won’t try to hijack or blow up anything.” Then, security would be easy. We would just look at people’s IDs and, if they were evildoers, we wouldn’t let them on the airplane or into the building.

This is, of course, ridiculous, so we rely on identity as a substitute. In theory, if we know who you are, and if we have enough information about you, we can somehow predict whether you’re likely to be an evildoer. This is the basis behind CAPPS-2, the government’s new airline passenger profiling system. People are divided into two categories based on various criteria: the traveler’s address, credit history and police and tax records; flight origin and destination; whether the ticket was purchased by cash, check or credit card; whether the ticket is one way or round trip; whether the traveler is alone or with a larger party; how frequently the traveler flies; and how long before departure the ticket was purchased.

Profiling has two very dangerous failure modes. The first one is obvious. Profiling’s intent is to divide people into two categories: people who may be evildoers and need to be screened more carefully, and people who are less likely to be evildoers and can be screened less carefully.

But any such system will create a third, and very dangerous, category: evildoers who don’t fit the profile. Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, Washington-area sniper John Allen Muhammed and many of the Sept. 11 terrorists had no previous links to terrorism. The Unabomber taught mathematics at UC Berkeley. The Palestinians have demonstrated that they can recruit suicide bombers with no previous record of anti-Israeli activities. Even the Sept. 11 hijackers went out of their way to establish a normal-looking profile; frequent-flier numbers, a history of first-class travel and so on. Evildoers can also engage in identity theft, and steal the identity — and profile — of an honest person. Profiling can result in less security by giving certain people an easy way to skirt security.

The rest is here.