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University Professor Chastised For Using Tor

Posted by kdawson on from the control-freaks-ascendent dept.

Irongeek_ADC writes with a first-person account from the The Chronicle of Higher Education by a university professor who was asked to stop using Tor. University IT and campus security staffers came knocking on Paul Cesarini's door asking why he was using the anonymizing network. They requested that he stop and also that he not teach his students about it. The visitors said it was likely against university policy (a policy they probably were not aware that Cesarini had helped to draft). The professor seems genuinely to appreciate the problems that a campus IT department faces; but in the end he took a stand for academic freedom.

3 of 623 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Bravo by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    He is an assistant professor. He is unlikely to have tenure.

  2. Re:Bravo by __aagmrb7289 · · Score: 5, Informative

    FYI (from TFA): My reason for downloading and installing the Tor plug-in was actually simple: I'd read about it for some time, was planning to discuss it in two courses I teach, and figured I should have some experience using it before I described it to my students. The courses in question both deal with controlling technology, diffusing it throughout society, and freedom and censorship online. When I cover online censorship in countries with no free press, I focus on how those countries rely on hardware, software, and phalanxes of people to make sure citizens can reach only government-approved media. Crackdowns on independent journalists, bloggers, and related dissidents all too often result in their being beaten, incarcerated, or worse. Technologies like Tor represent a beacon of freedom to people in those countries, and I would be doing my students a disservice if I didn't mention it.

  3. Re:the ivory tower by wernst · · Score: 5, Informative
    I'm not sure what the story is here, the right to use tor on someone elses network? Does he have that right? It's not his network. I've used tor at home, but completely understand I cant use it at work, and if during my university days, had it existed (maybe it did but whatever), and was told I couldnt use it, I'd just deal with that.

    What are you talking about?

    The use of tor on "someone else's network" is implicit, because you are connecting to someone on the other side of the network as a whole.

    You say you use tor at home, but that's not "your" network either. I think your ISP would say that you are connecting to *their* network. I think the Hosting Provider of the web server you're connecting to would say it is *their* network. I think AT&T, (or whoever owns the backbone your data is traveling across) would say it is *their* network too.

    If any of these network owners told you to stop using tor at home, what would you say to that? I'm guessing it would be pretty close to what this professor said to the IT goons trying to intimidate him into stopping.

    The only time it's "your" network is when you have two of your own computers on your own LAN, and a tor router between them.