Investigators later found a hit list of students, school officials and police officers. They also found hand-drawn maps of the high school, computer files on bomb building and a shopping list of weapons and ammunition.

Nee - the son of Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association president Thomas Nee - revealed the plot to cops, which resulted in Kerns’ arrest a month later.

Nee’s attorney, Thomas Drechsler, hopes that at sentencing the judge will consider that without Nee, police would never have been warned about the planned bloodshed. Kerns, 16 at the time of his arrest, was convicted of conspiracy to commit murder and threats to use deadly weapons. He was sentenced to 10 months in jail. The two other plotters were granted immunity.

“Let’s not forget, this entire case would not have existed if not for Joe Nee going to the police,” Drechsler said. “I believe he merits some consideration for that.”

Plymouth District Attorney Timothy Cruz would not say what prosecutors would recommend for a sentence, but said authorities have to take any talk of school shootings seriously.

“We have to let kids know you can’t do these sorts of things,” Cruz said. “You can’t be making statements like that. You can’t be threatening people.”

At a press conference Thursday evening, police said they had no information about a possible motive. The gunman has been identified and is believed to be a student elsewhere, officials said. His name was not released.

Seventeen victims, including three who were critically injured, were taken to Kishwaukee Community Hospital in DeKalb. Those with the most serious injuries were later flown to OSF Saint Anthony Medical Center in Rockford.

The gunman entered an auditorium at Cole Hall shortly after 3 p.m., pulled back a black curtain on the stage at the front of the class, and began shooting, police said.

“It started and it stopped very quickly,” said NIU Police Chief Donald Grady. “... When he died, he was on stage.”

Officers were on the scene within two minutes — but the gunman had already shot himself, he said.

Grady said it would have been all but impossible to have prevented the tragedy.

“I wish I could tell you that there was a panacea for this kind of thing, but you’ve noticed there’s been multiple shootings all over this country within the last six months,” Grady said. “It’s a horrendous circumstance.”

George Gaynor, 23, of Homer Glen, a geography major, said he was sitting in the back of the auditorium at about 3:05 p.m. — about 10 minutes before class was supposed to end. It was Professor Joseph Peterson’s “Geology 104: Introduction to Ocean Sciences” class, and he was discussing diatoms and microbiotic animals from the deep sea.

Suddenly, a skinny white man burst through a door on the right side of the stage holding a short-barrel shotgun.

The roughly 6-foot-tall gunman looked like “a typical college student,” Gaynor said.

He pumped the gun once and fired into the middle of the crowd, Gaynor said.

Another witness told his family as many as 20 shots were fired, and students crawled out of the lecture hall on their bellies. Gaynor ran through the back doors of the auditorium and escaped.

Another student in the class, Kristina Balluff, thought the gunman was playing a joke.

“I thought it was fake. A bright light coming out, like fire,” she said. “I fell to the ground. Then there were people running on top of people.”

There were about 150 people in the classroom. Gaynor was about 30 rows from the stage toward the back. He was attending Geology 104: Introduction to Ocean Sciences, which is taught by Professor Joseph Peterson.

“The gunman walked through a door on the stage and started shooting toward the students,” Gaynor said.

He did not say a word. “He shot one round and I turned around and ran,” Gaynor said. “Other people in the room said he fired more rounds.”

“The shotgun looked like an assault style shotgun like what a police officer would use,” Gaynor said,]]>Fri, 15 Feb 2008 03:24:28 GMThttp://www.11alive.com/news/article_news.aspx?storyid=111232&provider=top

ScienceDaily (Feb. 12, 2008) — If you need information, the Internet offers a wealth of resources. But if you're hunting down a person or a thing, a computer's not much help. That may soon change. Electronic tags promise to create what some call the "Internet of things," in which objects and people are connected through a virtual network.

To see what this future world would be like, a pilot project involving dozens of volunteers in the University of Washington's computer science building provides the next step in social networking, wirelessly monitoring people and things in a closed environment. Beginning in March, volunteer students, engineers and staff will wear electronic tags on their clothing and belongings to sense their location every five seconds throughout much of the six-story building. The information will be saved to a database, published to Web pages and used in various custom tools. The project is one of the largest experiments looking at wireless tags in a social setting.

The RFID Ecosystem project aims to create a world that many technology experts predict is just on the horizon, said project leader Magda Balazinska, a UW assistant professor of computer science and engineering. The project explores the use of radio-frequency identification, or RFID, tags in a social environment. The team has installed some 200 antennas in the Paul Allen Center for Computer Science and Engineering. Early next month researchers will begin recruiting 50 volunteers from about 400 people who regularly use the building.

"Our goal is to ask what benefits can we get out of this technology and how can we protect people's privacy at the same time," Balazinska said. "We want to get a handle on the issues that would crop up if these systems become a reality."

Many businesses already use RFID tags to track products in the supply chain. Now the tool is moving to other areas. Some transit agencies use radio tags in bus and train passes. The new U.S. passports incorporate RFID tags. Technology experts predict that RFID tags will soon be incorporated in consumer devices, such as cell phones, laptops and music players.

Each tag, which looks a bit like a thin, flexible credit card, costs about 20 cents to produce. A specialized reader can scan the card through any non-metal barrier and from up to 30 feet away, depending on the type of tag. RFID tags are miniature computer chips that contain far more information than a barcode. Also, you can write to an RFID tag--meaning the signal could not only identify the item, but what group it belongs to, when it was last seen, and other information.

The technology has already proven its use in tracking goods. A manufacturer can identify a cart of hamburger patties and know which plant it came from, when it shipped out and a history of its temperature during transit. UW computer-science staff members have already requested to participate in the study so that they will be able to track their equipment as it is moved through the building.

But for people, the technology's power raises questions. An RFID card can be read from a distance and without the wearer's knowledge. The associated databases archive vast amounts of information.

"What if RFID readers were everywhere, and everything had RFID tags? What are the pluses and minuses? What do you do with all that data?" said Gaetano Borriello, a UW professor of computer science and engineering. "In computer science, we try to create a future world that doesn't exist yet. We'd like to get some experience rather than just conjecture abou]]>Wed, 13 Feb 2008 06:59:15 GMTTuesday, Feb. 12 2008

VeriChip Corporation Protects More Than One Million Infants in 2007

http://www.foxbusiness.com:80/markets/industries/technology/article/verichip-corporation-protects-million-infants-2007_475855_12.html