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Beware The Campus Police
geisler writes: "According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, a professor at Virginia Tech had her computer seized so that university police could try to track down someone who emailed her. She was denied the chance to backup before the computer was taken, and there seems to be some differences in stories between her and the authorities."
Sounds like this is a case of Bring Your Own Computer.
Their tactics were too heavy handed, and the situation could have been dealt with better, but if you're going to use a computer and expect privacy, the very first thing you should do is use your own computer! When you're using university property, the idea of "privacy" should be nonexistant.
It's still infuriating that people get pushed around like this, but this situation isn't exactly good grounds for a valid complaint.
I just read through the article briefly, after thinking to myself (probably like a lot of other readers) "That sucks -- it's her own machine, and they just came and took it?"
hmmm. As I read the article, I learned that the machine was "University issued".
And she got it back the next day. Apparently, they were looking for an e-mail regarding a vandalism incident.
Now, they could have just asked her for the information, and maybe it was a bit harsh to just up and take the computer, but it was university issued (means university owns it, tough cookies). Maybe the document was sensitive enough that they didn't want to give her the chance to delete it?
Karnal
Quote: "Going by the logic of those cops, the university can confiscate basically any documents stored in our offices (as we use office paper), confidential letters (on official letter pads) and e-mail messages (university software, again), and tap into our phone messages (on the phone machines) as well: without any specific formal legal mandate or explanation or prior notice or warrant." NO SHIT. Anything you do at work(or working @ home) while using your employers property is considered owned by your employer, and you are not entitled to an expectation of privacy while using it. I wonder what these idiots think of the DMCA?
She had plenty of opportunity to make a backup before the Police seized her computer. If her hard drive had crashed, she would be in the same position now. While it is horrible when the authorities abuse their power, and nothing excuses that, she has no right to complain about not having a backup when she needs one.
If my computer where taken by anyone I would want it to contain no information whatsoever, preferably having the people who took it have no access to the box what-so-ever. encrypted fs, encrypted bios, requiring one of those nice USB keychains to use as key to turn the thing on, why aren't there features like that in most bioses?
Encrypted fs Covered in linux
bios pass protect in some bioses
usb key as key ?
system autodestruct? simple bash script?
Oh well, I always like the thought of giving a computer the following voise command:
Computer, Initiate self-destruct
authorisation Niksie, Omega Beta 9 3 Alfa
Sig you!
they did ask for it the day before they took the machine. she had deleted the email.
What's next? Nobel Prize Contending research lost when hard drive crashed.
Employers right to access company hardware trumps any privacy for the employee. The police were just doing their job. What if they let her erase important evidence?
Like it or not campus police work for the college and represent the authority of the college in these matters. I say good job.
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No big deal.
0xB
Ok, even me (a student) have to agree with the university on this one.
Do you expect privacy on a work computer in any industry? Of course not. If you dont own said computer, dont expect any rights to it.
And as for the teacher worried about explaining why her personal life was on it, i would ask, why are you even doing anything that could be considered personal on a work computer? cmon, you should know better.
This
This is no different than companies using spyware to monitor employees, or reading their email or whatever. The computer, if given to the professor, is the property of the university, and they can do with it what they wish, including reading her email. Would I be annoyed if this happened to me? Sure, but what could I do about it? Now if this was her private computer it would be another matter.
But people will still get into a lather over this I'm sure.
And just because she deleted it; doesn't necessarily mean it is gone. Deleting files on a harddrive doesn't necessarily imply that the space had been reallocated; all it means is that the blocks have been unlinked.
On the other hand, doing ANYTHING to her computer in the meantime (even booting it) will create temporary files which can overlap the deleted data and reduce the chances of recovering anything.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"1. How about using a little fucking PGPDisk.
2. Obviously, a group that sprays shit all over God's great fucking earth isn't exactly infuckingconito -- so why all the privacy issues?
3. They emailed 15 people to claim responsibility. See aforementioned comment about infuckingconigto. This is as not fucking infuckingconito as it comes.
4. "Some" professors. Fucking journalists. This is a standard tactic used by both pissnugget jouranalists and lazy English comp students who make blanket assumptions based a small fucking pool of information. More precise: X number of professors. Let's see how many people are keen on flagrant fucking vandalism.
5. "Anti-rape slogans." This makes no fucking sense. I'm sure that a shitload of spray paint will be so fucking effective that rape will drop to zero. This is *not* what that bumfuck Thereau meant by civil disobedience.
6. I cannot count the number of times I have heard some paunchy twink professor claim "academic freedom" as a blanket excuse justifying every action they do whilst acting the part of a PhD.
If she was so concerned about the privacy of her files, encryption would have been a good place to start.
Ask Slashdot - google for stupid people.
The right of personal freedom and the secrecy of letters (which can be easily extended to email) is higher than the right of doing with your property what you want.
Isn't that so?
If not, the declaration needs to be fixed.
Would we feel any different if this were a corporation searching a machine? The University owned the machine and can do what they want with it. Of course, not letting her back it up is just plain mean.
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
Damn, there is a sad willingness by people here to forfeit their rights in the workplace. Would you allow your employer to search your person?
I guess this is what 20 years of near ubiquitous piss-testing has reduced us to.
You and everyone else here talking about legal rights misses the point. It does not say in this article that McCaughey is suing Virginia Tech. The point is not whether a coporation has the right to do this, but whether a UNIVERSITY should do this. (I said SHOULD, not CAN, not HAS LEGAL RIGHT TO). Is it in a university's best interest to seize faculty machines over a little graffiti? What kind of impact will that have on student/professor relationships, academic freedom or faculty recruiting? Perhaps, for the sake of the University, privacy should trump attempts to stop graffiti.
I imagine McCaughey's attitude is "well, you have a bad policy, so you deal with the bad PR". I say she did a good job.
Like it or not campus police work for the college and represent the authority of the college in these matters. I say good job.
You don't know enough to say that. There is a discrepancy in stories between the professor and the campus police--whoever is speaking mistruth did a bad job. The college doesn't have the authority to lie. And I'm not even sure that "campus police represent the college", on some campuses, they can arrest people--they're real cops. Wouldn't the 4th amendment then constrain them?
Switching gears back to legal rights, I wonder, if a student submits work to the professor, does the university automatically get the right to see that work? In a world with more and more property owned by coprorations and governments, isn't it time to reevaluate this "Employers right to access company hardware trumps any privacy for the employee" rule?
What I want to know is why the university police made such a big deal about anti-rape "vandalism".
Uhm. How often does the average user empty their "trash can", or even their "deleted" email folder? I don't think they had to go through alot of effort to get that email, really...
Tomorrow will be cancelled due to lack of interest
If you assume the police did have the authority to examine data on the professor's drive, it follows logically that the police could not allow the professor to access her data after she had been informed of the action. Such allowance could lead to the professor deleting and overwriting the data.
The professor should have already had her data backed up. Period. There is no excuse for anybody not to have their data backed up. Only files modified since her last backup should be a problem. The best way to handle backups is not to - put your critical data on a SMB share or AppleTalk share on a server that backs it up for you. Thus, she should only have had a problem accessing the data she had modified that morning.
She should be using GPG, which would fix her problem regarding sensitive information.
My 2 cents.
Think Signal 11 towards the end...
Anyway, this guy was a pest and one night, as the sys admins and I were chatting via talk, he logged into the VAX and then the BBS as, I'll never forget this, "Carl Marks". So, he's not well read, either. We decided to tell him to cut it out once and for all. Looking at the port he logged into we traced his incoming session to an on-campus extension (if only he had come from outside the campus network by dialing out to one of the external phone numbers for community use, we never could have identified him) and dialed his room number -- busy. We got him.
What to do? We called the residence hall manager and asked if so-and-so roomed in the room we traced the call to. Sure enough, it was our little troll. We then asked the manager to tell the student to stop using the campus system under an assumed name.
The main sys admin, knowing the manager was on his way up to the room, initiated a talk session with "Carl Marks" and told him the gig was up, we knew who he was and where he roomed, and we were having the authorities come and shut him down. Carl didn't believe us. He talked trash to the sys admin (I can't recall his name) -- this was before "suxors" talk -- and said, "Ha ha, find me."
Here's where things went awry. The residence hall manager, not understanding what we were talking about, decided we were reporting someone hacking into the schools computers. He called the campus police. They came with guns drawn.
The type-fest continnued. "Carl" said, where are you? Taunting us for saying someone was on the way. Basically, the cops were clearing the floor in case of gun fire and were thusly delayed. Suddenly, "Carl" said, "Shit. Someone's at the door. They say they're the police." Sure enough, the campus police, with guns drawn, were banging on the door. When the manager opened the door, they shouted, "Put your hands up and step away fromthe computer." The kid peed in his pants.
After a few minutes "Carl's" talk session started again: "Thank you we have apprehended the suspect" - typed by one of the officers. The manager called the main sys admin and filled in the details above. The kid was arrested and brought to the station. His computer was confiscated. Eventually, Carl dropped out of UNT do to the stress caused by this event.
Our intention was to scare him, but not with the campus police. We explained that he wasn't hacking, but merely using the system's services inappropriately after ample warning. The Dean of Students talked with him - I don't know how that went. The manager went overboard, and the police overreacted.
But we had one heck of a good laugh.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
It pretty much lays down the law: that the college can pretty much read anything that is on their computer, or their servers. Since I think that VT is public (owned by Virginia), they have to follow the same general ideas with their guidelines.
Since they were forced to comply with FOI, the professor had no real expectation of privacy, as she knew that someone may eventually read her files, or anything on the server, at any time to comply with Freedom of Information requests.
Now, if this is a private college, we have something else on our hands.
You know who I think is crazy? All my ex-girlfriends!
VA Tech is a State School. Unlike the security department of a private employer, it's Police are State actors. As such, they are indeed constrained by the 4th Amendment, and any parallel language in the State Constitution.
Justice Scalia, in Krillo, the heat imaging case a year ago, still cites Katz (any relation?) favorably "As Justice Harlans oft-quoted concurrence described it, a Fourth Amendment search occurs when the government violates a subjective expectation of privacy that society recognizes as reasonable."
Widely accepted professional doctrines of Acedemic Freedom, as benchmarks of social expectations, can thus trump the University's Acceptable Use Policies.
Ben Masel: 51,282 votes for US Senate in the Wisconsin Democratic Primary
If it took something like this to raise that concern for the first time, then maybe it was a good thing. She should be concerned about the security of online discussions, if they are about sensitive topics. Not just because of possible police action, but to stop random snoopers.
First there is the incident of vandalism. Like this or not it is against the law. The campus police work for the state or in VA's situation the common wealth and must uphold the law according to the laws of that state and for that matter by the laws of that state. There is usually a clause in the law that states something to the affect of the law enforcement entity's responsibility is to uphold the law by all means including criminal investigation. The police are yet again the target of ingnorance and are under scrutiny for doing their job. The second item is the professor. I don't believe her. If there was not a search warrant then there is big trouble on the way for the entire department and the university and I can not see a Chief taking the risk of covering up the fact that there was not a search warrant. Search warrants aren't mysterious pieces of paper. They are legal documents that must have a signature outside of the law enforcement entity. Along with the signature of say a magistrate or a judge the document will note both the time and date of issue. With that said I will restate that I simply do not believe her. It seems to me that she was doing an awful lot of stalling, back-up files, on vacation, I deleted the e-mail, etc. I will grant you this she may be unfairly targeted but afterall she is the leader of women's rights on campus. If I was in the investigator's shoes my feet would hurt and I would have that department and those students that are most active in it at the top of my list of suspects. The third side of the coin is the University itself. I don't know where the rest of you have been over the last ten years but intellectual property rights are forsaken for a position at the university level. The feeling is if you use their facility and their time and get paid by them your work is theirs. This has led to many gripes and grumbles but I can trace it back to penicillin (sp.?). The University of Indianna held (still holds?) the patent for it. Did the university discover it? Did the university employ the British scientist that discovered it? The answer is no. But they held the 'intellectual rights' to it and maybe still do. Intellectual rights are not the only grievance facing professors these days. With the flood of professors tenure is becoming a thing of the past. I have to agree with a number of /. posters that argued the university had the right to do whatever they wanted with the computer. Just as they have the right to move her office or replace her trashcan or read her e-mail. The privacy issue is a whole can of worms but for now, right now, the professor had to sign a consent that in affect stating she should expect no privacy and the university could access her account and for that matter their computer. There is a way around the intellectual rights, privacy, etc. and that is in the form of a contract or in the contract for gaining tenure.
I am not a deviant but I can think of a million ways to avoid the entire situation. The first would be to go back to school and get a law degree if you don't like the laws. The second would be to get a biology degree. The third would be to avoid supporting vandalism. The fourth would be to keep the mouth shut and the eyes open and just maybe you can see what's behind the big bright light in front of you as you enter the tunnel.
Patche says, "You will attract more flies with honey than vinegar... but who wants flies?
I can see it in the future "I can't submit my mp because the university confiscated my the code on my machine without fair warning... do you think I can have an extension?"
Liora
that i worked at a university recently that was developing software to track down sony specific trackinh program, meaning it looked for sony movies/songs/etc
Maybe she's just mad because they found her stash of lesbian hentai. ;)
This case seems pretty cut-and-dry to me - the University decided they wanted their computer back, so they took it. It is a bit rude that they didn't give her a chance to back it up though - and the fact that they treated a Professor this way shows how bad the relationship between the teachers and administration at schools can be sometimes.
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Take one for the team.
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They *did* ask for her cooperation first. They also had a search warrant. She refused to allow them to access the information they needed. She'd received an email from someone claiming responsibility for about $10,000 worth of vandalism on campus, and forwarded it to some listservs. They wanted the original message to try to track it. She claimed it was deleted, and that she refused to let them look at her machine to see if they could recover it. Given the machine is state property, and she's not allowed to refuse to cooperate, they ended up taking it, and cloning it. All the administrators *above* her agree she was in the wrong. She now claims that she had left the police voice mail offering full cooperation, but only after she went out of town for the weekend, which is a complete 180 from the original story, and particularly interesting given that she physically tried to prevent the police from touching the computer. I've met the cops in question; they're nice guys, and not inclined to histrionics. They wouldn't have done this if she had given them a choice.