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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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hate our freedom?
Could the answer be 'They have history departments'?
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Crudely Drawn Games
Higher education vs. government decisions... I do wonder who's in the right.
Ignore this signature. By order.
Remember, if it stops just one terrorist, it's all worth it!
OK, so it was only three weeks before 9/11. And it was some other country. But you have to give him credit for achieving his policy objective, not only in his own country, but in his opponent's country too.
I find it interesting about the things the universities are concerned with. It might just be the article, but it seems the main concern is the cost of the venture est. 400 - 500 dollars a student. The next concern is hackers and the last one is freedom of speech / stifling of research.
I would think that the universities would be worried more about the free speech implications rather than the cost... I don't think the cost issue will hold up in court that well - but free speech (hopefully would).
The only other thing is that the article mentions that a negative ruleing, could force even labtops on campus to be CALEA compliant. Since I'm a student at a university that requires students going into certain majors to have a labtop (to use and plug into the campus network) - I'm wondering if that means that we as students would have to modify our personal labtops (cause they interact with the campus network).
Sadly I bet the universities will compromise on this issue - rather than go to court.
There is always a frontier where there is an open and willing mind
Okay, I'll bite. You spelled it that way three times. What's a labtop?
You were 80% angel, 10% demon. The rest was hard to explain. - Over The Rhine
"Math in a song is good."-Linford
My understanding is the most recent rulemaking by the FCC states that colleges and universities would only need to provide the "wiretap" capability for traffic going to and from the campus and the Internet. As such, a wholesale replacement of all routers and switches on campus would not be necessary; most likely some edge equipment and possibly some VLAN switching.
Of course, the cost complaint ignores the ongoing privacy versus security debate.
In any event, there is an excellent resource for higher education's position on this issue at EDUCAUSE. See http://www.educause.edu/calea
If you RTFA, the FCC ruling was expanded to ISP's. Universities are concerned that they may legally fit in the legal definition of an ISP. If so, then they would have to obey the same laws as, say AOL and MSN. If that happens and the FBI is investigating, say, someone on campus who with a child porn website, the University would be required to give the FBI access to the network to monitor traffic if a subpoena is granted for a tap. So, all in all, the Universities want to provide broadband internet service for all students, but not be classified as providers of internet service.
The previous comment is purposely vague and generalized, but all of the facts are completely true.
If you don't like the laws of this country, nobody is stopping you from picking up and moving your college/business/home someplace else.
Ahhh... that's the great thing about the good ol' USA. We don't have to just leave if we don't like the laws. We can write our representatives, vote, support candidates we like, camp out in front of the president's house, yell, complain, march and protest. Hell, you don't even have to be a citizen of this country or here legally to protest - as we've seen today.
Maybe the people with the different opinions aren't the ones that should leave, maybe it's the people who want to opress free discussions of ideas, like YOU.
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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).
Internet/Echelon Compatibility Protocol
Is your network Echelon-ready?
You got it all wrong. We're back to protecting the kids. Get your talking points right, junior. It'll be back to the terrorists in a year when that's back in style--or when Bush needs to stop making history as the first President to get negative approval rating numbers.
We've become the government we kicked out two centuries ago, except they didn't pretend to be otherwise.
"Made up/misattributed quote that makes me look smart. I am on
I like that summary, especially the order things are put in. "It's expensive, dammit! And omg, it exposes us to attacks!! And.. er... oh yeah, there's that freedom-of-speech thing, too." Very telling.
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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?
Like Spain, for example, where public higher education institutions are the voice of their master.
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Freedom of Speech means that you can speak with out reprisal. If you are affraid of what you are saying then that is an imposition of the freedom of speech. However, Freedom of Speech/Expression/Association is often used as a knee-jerk reaction when it doesn't apply.
However, Freedom of Speech is not the real issue, as you so well pointed out. We are devling into the 4th Amendment protections of 'Unlawful Search and Siezure,' and the implied freedoms of Privacy that has been recognized by the US Supreme Court. That is the real issue. Stating that the issue is Freedom of Speech is blurring the issues. You could also argue that this issue is related to the Due Process protections -- the assumption that everyone is a potential terrorist/criminal and as such their communications should be available.
More interesting is that the report that was released on Saturday or Sunday stated that their have been 3,501 abuses of the Patriot Act -- and that was what was admitted.
The views expressed are mine own and do not express the views of my employer.
>If you don't like the laws of this country, nobody is stopping you from picking up and moving
One of those laws is the Constitution. It's the root law of the US.
Some people seem not to like the Constitution. For example, they want to do mass searches without probable cause. One such person is rumored to have called it "just a God-damned piece of paper".
Are you, perhaps, suggesting that people who pass laws like USAPATRIOT, who imprison with charge or trial, who seize property without court authority and who torture their alleged enemies ought to leave the country? Wouldn't you prefer they stay so we can give them the fair trials they have denied to others?
You are aware, I hope, that during a significant number of those conflicts we lost a lot more of our freedoms than we are currently discussing even the potential of losing right now...
I'm not defending the current administration's policies, but I just think that you should be careful drawing historical comparisons before you know where they're going. President Lincoln -- who history has treated quite favorably -- declared and imposed martial law, suspended habeas corpus, and arrested people that today would probably be termed "political dissidents," including a few members of Congress. (The anti-war Democrats known as the "Copperheads" were the common target.)
When the arrests and courts-martial were declared blatantly unconstitutional by the Supreme Court (under Taney), Lincoln simply ignored the ruling until the conclusion of the war. You can Google this, just type in "John Merryman" or check out Ex parte Merryman (the ruling that was ignored).
That's one of the more well-known and egregious violations, but there are others; the persecution of the Germans in World War I, the Japanese in World War II, and a host of other things, any of which can and were argued to be necessary at the time owing to extenuating circumstances.
So by drawing a historical parallel between 9/11 and any other "war period" in our history, you can quite easily play into the hands of a pro-oppression argument, because there is ample historical evidence for periods of relative oppression (or at least, of substantially reduced civil liberties) during conflicts, followed by a return to normalcy afterwards.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
politics hat off)
:-)
(infosec hat on)
There was a recent scandal in Greece about massive eavesdropping. Many government phone calls were getting involuntarily "conferenced" to multiple prepaid cellular phones. Nobody's caught the perpetrators.
This was done with the "lawful intercept" feature of the telco switching equipment. Depending on the nature of the phone calls it might have been a national security issue.
"Lawful intercept" is a huge security bypass. Bad guys will be highly motivated to exploit it. They won't have to breach physical security either, because CALEA (if memory serves) requires the ISP to offer law enforcemnt remote access.
The threat model also has to include unauthorized users at the law enforcement agency ("Hey, what's this sticky note on the monitor at the CALEA terminal?"). Next worry about the law enforcemnt officer with a personal agenda, e.g. a stalker. Then consider the amount of money in computer crime these days, and ask whether the CALEA operators will be the first incorrutible cops in history. Then reread _The Art of Deception_ and imagine what the next Kevin Mitnick could get the police to do.
That's off the top of my head. For a client I'd get really paranoid
Huh? No, it's more like this:
Somebody sideswipes your car and breaks your leg. As you're lying there with a compound femur fracture, you scream at the other person "For the love of God, man, that door panel is going to cost, like, a thousand dollars to replace! Weren't you even thinking about how much it would cost?! I can't afford that! If you had just waited until I was standing outside the car!"
Not that a person would be comprehensible with a compound femur fracture, but you get the idea. When your first reaction is the cost, it sort of implies that what's going on would be OK or at least closer to being OK, if that were removed. So to have the colleges put a pricetag on their objections is basically sending a message to Congress: "come up with $400 a student and you can have their freedom of speech, with our compliments."
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
President Lincoln -- who history has treated quite favorably -- declared and imposed martial law, suspended habeas corpus, and arrested people that today would probably be termed "political dissidents," including a few members of Congress.
Of course, there was gruesome live combat occuring on American soil between Americans. It's a little different when the main thing propelling the whole argument is just a spun up fear of "terrorism".
So by drawing a historical parallel between 9/11 and any other "war period" in our history, you can quite easily play into the hands of a pro-oppression argument, because there is ample historical evidence for periods of relative oppression (or at least, of substantially reduced civil liberties) during conflicts, followed by a return to normalcy afterwards.
Exactly. That's why I say THERE IS NO WAR.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
Some people seem not to like the Constitution. For example, they want to do mass searches without probable cause. One such person is rumored to have called it "just a God-damned piece of paper".
Such is the way of the facist. The foundation and ideals of his country run contrary to his own narrow and simplistic view of the world. He believes in absolutes, homogeneity, hierarchies, divine right, power and the right to use it.
The facist's deepest desire is to dominate those he feels are beneath him, without oversight or accountability. As he sees fit. The Constitution expressly forbids this to him, and thus is beneath contempt. It becomes, a document of the weak, a powerless writ of those beneath him, a meaningless formality, just a God-damned piece of paper.
That piece of paper is the only thing standing between you and the raw, unrestrained brutality of a brownshirted mob. I suggest you defend what's left of it before the pack brays with delight as they gleefully devour the carcass of your free society.
May the Maths Be with you!
No need to mention how much it costs; to do so says that you'd be okay with such intrusions if they were suddenly free.
Or it could be because the only problem, according to the people promoting this mandate, is that it's not free.
"The use-mention distinction" is not "enforced here."
Clockwurk did a much better job of comparing the two than I could ever hope to do:
(Mod me underrated if you want to mod this post up; I don't want to karma whore off of someone else's work.)
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
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."