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Higher Education Fears Wiretapping Law
alphadogg writes "Institutions of higher education are up in arms over an FCC ruling on wiretapping they say could cost them billions of dollars in upgrades, expose their networks to more attacks, and jeopardize rights to privacy and freedom of speech.
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You were 80% angel, 10% demon. The rest was hard to explain. - Over The Rhine
"Math in a song is good."-Linford
We're not a big college - we have ~ 5,000 students. We can barely afford to keep our network upgraded and pay our bandwidth bills as it is. Because we are state funded our "income" is very dependent on the state budget which varies significantly (and has been mostly crap for the past 6 years). To do any capital expenditures (which upgrading our network would be) we have to negotiate for a cut of a finite pot of money shared by all state funded colleges and universities in our state, including the flagship university which is large and politically powerful and invariably gets a disproportionate share of the capital budget. We are also saddled with the state's personnel system - we have some departments in the college which have a lot of old employees who can not be fired because they have been here forever. This includes our IT department which has an uneven allocation of funding since it is "new" on college-scale time and not really politically powerful - we have a handful of these old employees who, because they have been here so long, make more money than anyone else in IT but don't actually do much of anything except hang out and go to "meetings" - thus we can't afford to hire many new people (since they eat up a chunk of our already small budget) and even when we can afford to hire them the state requires a long drawn out hiring process and mandates structured pay rates that we can not legally deviate from. If we wanted to hire some network god he would be stuck taking substandard pay and we couldn't even offer him a signing bonus to entice him. Assuming he still wanted the job after the 6+ month hiring process was completed. Additionally, the state system is inherently biased against younger people - if you haven't been in the industry at least 5 years already or if you just "look young" then chances are significantly decreased that you will even be hired in the first place.
So yeah - we fear some bullshit federal regulations that are going to require us to let the Feds poke their noses into our network - it's old and underfunded serviced by too few staff and there is no hope of that changing. Not to mention we have to deal with faculty and students who already distrust us and the Feds AND who get pissed off at us constantly because of the various IT-related failures on campus (due to the obvious underfunding and staffing issues).
Problem is, now everyone is loosing something they love: their freedom and their privacy
By reading this, you have given me brief control of your mind.
Law Enforcement and higher education seem to have been clashing odds for a while. I used to be a PBX guy at a college, and I know that there was at least two occasions while I was there that we had a member of the local PD come in and ask for subscriber information. Unless they had a subponea, we pretty much showed them the door. The only real reason that anyone really looked at the information was for billing purposes, or if we were doing testing on the line (DCONX, anyone?).
PBX means just that: Private Branch Exchange. PBX != "Telephone Company"
I disable sigs...do you?
While I agree with you for the most part (and entirely as a "freedom loving hippie") I have to point out some things.
People, it seems, don't care about their freedom as much as they care about thier bank accounts. The threat of a possible Government operation taking place on campus doesn't scare too many people, but the threat of another $500 going towards the already high tuition costs does scare them.
Most people don't understand that they are losing their liberties, liberties protected by the Constitution. These people feel that the government is going after Terrorist and Bad People and would never infringe upon the rights on Ma and Pa America. They don't care wheter or not you can burn a flag or say Bush is a complete cunt. They don't care if Apu Nahasapeemapetilon gets shipped to some camp in Cuba and no one ever knows. They don't care because they don't think it matters to Ma and Pa America.
But,these people do care about that $500 that could go to something else, something more important than freedom, something special like thier SUVs gas bill. And the worst part..... these people Vote!
The Universities are smart in going about this as it costing too much. Seven Billion dollars (thats $7,000,000,000) is nothing to laugh at. They realize people will get pissed off at College costing more. The Universities realize they will get more people mad about this by playing the Money Card then they probably ever could by playing the Freedom Card.
I may be completely off base, but my years of doing the budget for my office tell me one thing... money talks.
A parody of the current administration I can only assume...
That said, (some) colleges are actually becoming quite notorious for having plenty of "laws" on campus that abridge or ammend what many consider to be their inalienable freedom of speech. Sure, this goes back to the argument of Congress shall make no law, not "college campuses" or the like, but still...
Check out FIRE for an all-you-can-eat look at how colleges are indeed becoming politically correct havens of modified free-speech rules, inequity in education based on race, class, and sex, and the like.
Excuse my speling.
Making The Bar Project
That's my reading as well. The telco has its cabinets here for the SONET connections, which is a pretty clear delineation of where their edge of the network sits. I read it as placing our infrastructure squarely into the realm of the private network, but the ambiguity is really thick here.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Let's analyze your argument. Lincoln, Wilson, and FDR all placed restrictions on the freedom of American citizens during their respective tenures of office. Lincoln, Wilson, and FDR all are revered leaders in American history. These three presidents are revered for their actions as president. A president who restricts freedom in times of conflict is acting like Lincoln, Wilson, and/or FDR. Therefore, a president who restricts freedom is times of conflict is worthy of reverence.
Do you really think that we revere leaders like Lincoln, Wilson, and Roosevelt because they took away our freedoms in spite of war? Or in spite of it?
Or, do you suppose that these presidents are largely revered because historians gain the benefits of their tenures (a free and preserved Union) without having to suffer the restrictions which those presidents induced? FDR and Lincoln were both effectively martyred because they died not only while in office, but before the war was completely finished. Wilson was notably reviled by his generation, which explains in part why the US stayed out of the League of Nations and Wilson couldn't get a third term. No one alive today cares particularly much whether the people in 1863 could freely express themselves; the number of people to whom the internment of Japanese during World War is an issue is rapidly diminishing.
"History is written by the victors, but lived by the losers."