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University Professor Chastised For Using Tor
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.
Good to see some university professors still have integrity.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Could they not be bothered with actually checking the policy since they were there to enforce it?
I think the issue was not with his use of it but being told that he couldn't talk about it in his classes.
Asking the professor not to use Tor on the university-owned network is reasonable.
Attempting to censure what he can say to his students is clearly not reasonable.
No, it's not his network, and they aren't his rules, even if he did "co-chair the comittee to decide what color to keep the folder that the proposed amendments to the original proposal were in and they kept it grey".
Good for him, he had a reasonable chat with the detectives and they dropped it. I just cant stand the rhetoric about "rights" and "academic freedoms".
If the police visited him at home, because of his use of tor on his own connection that he paid for - then you got a story. But this guys a guest on someone elses network.
If I let you connect to my AP, then I reserve every right to tell you I don't want you using tor, or kazaa, or bittorrent, or playing WoW, or what the hell ever.
As for police telling him what to teach? He just threw that in there for drama and FUD. Since when the fuck do campus police go around telling professors what they can and cant teach? I don't believe that part of the story is even true. I don't believe the police asked him not to teach his students about it.
I hate empty rhetoric, I hate embellishments, I hate academic dishonesty, and I especially hate it from professors. It made my time at university infuriating. I was there to study math and computers, and instead, I'm constantly bombarded with lefty bullshit propoganda (not that I'd prefer righty bullshit - I just wanted to learn calculus, chemistry, comp sci, and other subjects that deal in facts)
So whatever, this guy talked himself out of trouble. Big whoop. He can get off the fucking cross now, all that happened was a cop came to talk to him about some suspicious behaviour he was engaged in.
Once I was hanging around at night, waiting for a buddy, and a cop stopped to talk to me to ask what I was doing. STOP THE PRESSES MY STORY MUST BE TOLD.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
it might also be noted the BGSU, along with other state universities in ohio force graduate students on assistantships to sign forms saying that they are not members, or have not supported terrorist groups.
Since these are stored in university archives, and not checked, new graduate studies are (more or less) required by the state to sign loyalty oaths.
Mikey
I've always been the kinda guy to fall for the girl dressed like an eskimo.
What is it about university IT departments that attracts such incompetent people?
Hint: If you're pouncing on people as often as a small frisky dog does, you're the problem.
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I think the bigger problem is that they still figured out it was him!
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Open Source Sysadmin
I know it was a joke, but... :)
Many campuses have their own PD and FD. Why?
10,000 staff.
25,000 students.
A couple square miles
It's basically a small, densely populated town...only with higher rates of rape, assault, drug use, theft, and copyright infringement.
You know, the big 5
It's nothing but crumpled porno and Ayn Rand.
Common sense would dictate that the detectives, doing their jobs and trying to investigate an online scam, ask the professor some questions to determine if he was involved. But instead they asked him to stop doing something legal, tried to get him to NOT share something with his students, and used some vague provisions of an IT policy to back it up. This is a direct attack on academic freedom - 'Thou shalt not tell your students about this' and even worse, telling him not to use Tor himself - obviously because they couldn't track what he was doing.
Overblown? Hardly - we are losing our rights bit by bit by bit and people who think something like this is 'overblown' are part of the reason. By the time you all realize you've lost most of your rights it'll be too late.
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With 25% of Windoze PCs already part of a botnet, I imagine more than 1/10 of those computers are already using some form of TOR. What will thwarting my privacy achieve again?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
He likely has several students in his class from countries, such as China, that have such censorship. If he can reach out to a few of these and give them the tools to combat that censorship, then he will have helped them make a difference when they return to China, if they are so inclined.
Ben Hocking
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Large universities commonly have their own police force. Try to find a city in this country with a population over 25,000 without one. We have a number of universities with populations higher than that, even twice that.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
"The university does have an absolute right to dictate how their network is used. That doesn't mean that nothing they do is ignorant or boneheaded."
That's not quite true. As a university, their mission is furthering educational development. They can argue over how such and such use does or doesn't advance educational goals, but there should be no dispute that education is the goal. The campus IT department then, as an administrative branch, is in a unique position of trying to accommodate all party's interests, rather than dictate the limited uses of "their" infrastructure. They're supposed to make it happen, not "enforce the AUP".
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Open Source Sysadmin
Oil, farming, auto (roads), space (NASA), rail (AMTRAK), the defense industry, telecom, utilities,
What if I replace the word TOR with the word "internet". Do you see why your post doesn't make sense?
Bit torrent gets throttled because it is a bandwidth hog, not because its often used for copyright infringement. If that was the issue, it would be blocked totally in the places where it is throttled instead.
What exactly is your point? Shit gets abused all the time.
Lord High Crapflooder The Right Honourable Vlad Craig Esther McDavenpherson III
Destroyer of Mercatur.Net
Of course, anonymous Web surfing can be used to conceal fraud and other forms of electronic malfeasance. That was why the police had come to see me. Sure, that logic is like saying, "Of course, steak knives can be used to commit murderous crimes. That was why the police had began questioning all of the patrons at a local Outback Steakhouse..."
Because, you know, academic freedom is bullshit. Why be allowed to think and teach freely without fear of reprisal? It's much easier to just teach what is government approved goodthink.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
It's not really surprising to have Detectives on a campus police force. There are rapes, burglaries, drug deals, prostitutes, assaults, and even the occasional murder on large college campuses, and the cities that the colleges are located in usually don't have the resources to direct that much attention to that area. Also since much of the in-residence populace is temporary the city's funding wouldn't be as stable for covering that segment of the population. The campus police force is paid for ultimately by tuition and/or state money based on enrollment and need.
Also, campus-exclusive cops would have a much better feel for what's going on around them and would probably also know where to look when there's a problem due to experience. While a Constable on Patrol would be able to address most of what's going on, higher-profile cases would require detectives just like a normal municipal police force, and if a particular kind of crime (rape, assault, and the like) is reasonably common then an internal investigator would remove the need for an outside inspector to attempt to conduct an investigation in a microcosm that is unfamiliar. Obviously crimes like murder would use the municipality's law enforcement, but that kind of crime is also reasonably rare.
I will agree that Campus Traffic Police suck though.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
He doesn't mind sharing the costs for essential services with his peers in good faith. The jobless waifs he's referring to are benefiting from those services in bad faith: they have no intention of bearing any of the burden. Not all of the jobless are waifs of course, but he wasn't talking about them either.
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The university does have an absolute right to dictate how their network is used.
The university does, but the IT department and the campus police don't. Their function is merely to implement university policies, they ultimately don't have a right to make them.
Somehow I suspect that this university's professors do not report to the IT or security staff. They certainly don't at any of the universities I attended or worked at
Having an IT guy show up with campus police and telling you what you are not allowed to teach in class is the sort of thing I'd expect to make interesting conversation at the next faculty meeting. It is not the professor who would be reprimanded in such a situation.
If the CS department chair decides to remove all discussion of anonymizing networks from the class' curriculum, then the professor will certainly have to choose whether to stay or leave.
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If it was about rights, he could run it on his own private connection. It's about responsibility. The university is ultimately responsible for the use and content on its network.
Chastising him for teaching it is ridiculous in the modern age though. It's the equivalent of a chastising a professor in the 60's for mentioning J. Edgar Hoover's files.
Yes, detectives. Note that he's talking about "police," not "security guards." Large enough campuses can benefit from having a focused police force. These aren't thugs in the employ of the university, these are just a real police just like the city-wide force, they just have a more specialized focus. They have the same powers and restrictions. As such it's only logical that they would have detectives, just like the city-wide force. By being specialized they can focus on the more specialized problems of a campus, including the complications of having a large population that moves in and out each year, frequently rotating. They've existed at a number of universities for decades. There is no evil conspiracy here.
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"For all we know, he really was using Tor for something nefarious."
What ever happened to innocent until proven guilty?
You know, 100% of the spam, much of it criminal, that reaches my mail server is from the SMTP protocol. In fact, the majority of traffic on that protocol is spam, and I believe that's true in general. Better block it and send cops after anyone who uses it.
The point of tor isn't to hide that your using Tor, the point of Tor is to hide what you did WHILE you were using it. Sure they know he used tor, there is no way to stop that but the thing that irked them and the thing that tor was designed for was the fact they had no idea what he did while using tor. Without Tor its real easy to ger a nice easy printout of every web page, or ftp server any user on a network has accessed.
Actually, he says "could be a huge headache for network-security administrators" and "could approach technological anarchy". Notice the use of the work "could" as opposed to the more definite "will".
Furthermore, just because something "could be a huge headache" for IT doesn't, necessarily, mean it isn't, still, part of their job responsibilities. Giving students/faculty at a university access to the Internet in the first place will, inevitably, produce headaches for IT. That said, it's also the only reason they have a job. It would be just as absurd for the IT department to attempt to strong-arm all the students/faculty into not using the Internet at all as a method of decreasing the IT workload.
The fact is, there are ways to deal with it in the event it ever, actually, became a problem such as announcing a ban on the software for student PCs and banning systems from the network as soon as Tor use is detected. It's not difficult to do and means that Tor would only cause the network to dissolve into "technological anarchy" if the IT people sat around and did nothing. If they were even more reasonable and even handed about it, they could ban or traffic shape Tor users that were found to be using an obscene amount of bandwidth (most likely to have had their system injected). This, probably, wouldn't even require a re-write of their network use policies.
"He has the RIGHT to use it, of course, nobody else should. It's a tool only for the gifted."
While I'm assuming you meant this to be sarcastic, YES HE DOES HAVE THAT RIGHT! Its called academic freedom and was, clearly, mentioned in the article. It allows him and other professors to do their job. There are plenty of times that professors research/teach about controversial topics or topics that could cause problems if they were abused. He was teaching a class directly related to Tor and was using it as a way to become more familiar with the software. He never suggests that the general student body, or even the rest of the university employees should, necessarily, be allowed to use the software. You and I may not have the right to use Tor on out employer's networks but, then again, we aren't college professors (unless you happen to be). They represent a, very specific, special case when it comes to thing like this.
As an example, I went to school for computer science. In one of my classes, on how operating systems work, our professor explained how a programmer could, very easily, take down almost any flavor of Unix system no matter how well secured the system was (thus causing headaches for anyone else using that system at the same time as was common in our CS computer labs). This was a fundamental flaw in the design of operating systems that, for Unix systems at least, was pretty universal. He also informed us, very clearly, that we were, in no uncertain terms, banned from using this technique on any of the lab systems (which ran Sun Unix). Furthermore, he informed us that, should we decide to try, they would, very easily, find out who did it and deal with them accordingly. This was an issue directly related to the subject of the class. Knowing it meant that we, as students, could avoid it in our own future software. There is a good chance that, at least one time, my professor had to write a program like this himself (or one of his colleagues did) and test it on one of the lab systems just to prove that it did, in fact, work that way.
The story is that an IT guy and two Campus Security goons came to his door and tried to strong-arm him into not using the software or teaching about it. It's like a bad scene from a melodramatic police drama. They tried to feed him some nebulous garbage about it being against "policy" (a policy he actually helped edit and probably knows better than they do) and use it to threaten his job. The story is about a professor having his job threatened for researching a topic they don't like which flys against the very essence of acade
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Everyone says the free market leads to freedom. It seems to lead to people having to shut the hell up or not eat, to me. Wage slavery is still slavery. No matter that you are free to pick your master, if you can't speak your mind or do what you want with your time and resources, you are a slave.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Academic freedom, my ass. Supporting whatever the flavor-of-the-week professor wants, my ass.
University IT, just like a business, is there to keep the IT functions running to complete the mission objectives. In most cases, it means making sure people can get their mail, do their homework, get journals, and all that jazz. It also includes billing, grades, transcripts, payroll and all that other backroom stuff that keeps the lights on.
It may include various research areas, but in order to be able to conduct research safely and not violate the other business areas/be violated by them, they should be isolated.
So, we'll go back to the article.
So, he installed a Tor client.
This serves to render a lot of firewalling and intrusion detection COMPLETELY useless.
If his endpoint was compromised over tor, they would not be able to detect it until maybe after it started attacking/compromising other university systems.
If his endpoint was compromised, it could attack other systems over tor.
If he was acting as a router, rather than an endpoint, the situation gets just that much worse.
So, he did something that broke firewalling, intrusion detection, and/or auditing -- all of which could have compromised everyone ELSE doing their work.
Believe me, if he got his ass owned, and it took down backroom servers or another flavor-of-the-week professor's favorite toy, there would be MOBS outside IT's door -- complete with pitchforks and torches.
Having been in a few meetings where administrators quoted policy to the people who wrote it and then went on to bash faculty and students over the head with illogical interpretations of that policy, I don't find this surprising at all.
These people have hard jobs, but so do we. Should someone teaching computer security not be able to use or talk about things which are important in doing computer security? I know my University administrators think they shouldn't.
Many people come to academia to get away from the frustration of petty, ineffective management only to find it just as entrenched here.
Other than a lot of theft of bicycles (I lost two in six months), there's not all that much crime on campus. Lots of drugs, I'm sure, but bad things happening to people are pretty rare. We're more than adequately served by the same police stations that protect the rest of Auckland City.
Of course, we are a country that doesn't even have permanently-armed police officers. Quite why we would devolve policing functions to employees of some private institution is completely beyond me. I suspect, though, that not even the likes of Cambridge or Oxford would have their own police forces. The notion of letting non-state employees enforce the law seems to be quite uniquely American, witness their gun-toting security guards who patrol gated communities.
"God, root, what is difference?" - Pitr, userfriendly
An important lesson which should be made very clear when the professor suggests to his students that Chinese citizens can use Tor. The fact that the use of Tor can't be (easily or perfectly) hidden severely limits its usefulness when dealing with a government like that in China.
Actually last year a popular news program came to the conclusion that a lot of the cost of medical care can be traced to the "save me at all costs" mentality. An undertsandable mentality (who doesn't want everything humanly possible to be done when they're sick?). However it's not a sustainable mentality. Some hard decisions are going to have to be made. Also IMHO I think that a lot of the publics approach to health care is reactive, instead of proactive. We wait till we are ill before doing something, instead of living a good clean life, and then dealing with the much smaller number of situations were any form of health care would be effective. In other words the system is being overwelmed, and it doesn't matter what kind of system you have. e.g. socialism, capitalism, etc.*
*I lean more towards a blend of minimum socialism with a layer of free market were I can shop for my medical care, and pay for it out of my pretax dollars, with catastrophic (shared risk) for the most extreme medical conditions. e.g. insurance. This does put a burden on me to manage my affairs properly, but then that's the way all things should be, unless I want to pay someone else to manage. e.g. a funds manager, pensions, etc. Freedom will always have a price. That's mine.
I can't stand how the word "majority" has in recent years disappeared from our language and been replaced by the phrase " vast majority" (at least in any context that's even remotely political).
This may sound like mere linguistic pedantry, but it really isn't -- this usage both feeds, and is part of, the trend toward polarization and "extremification" (yes, afaik, I just made up that word) of political discourse. When you claim not just a majority but a vast majority, you're doing more than just adding emphasis: you're actively marginalizing the other side (by implying that they're not just a minority but a tiny, insignificant minority).
And it's self-escalating: it creates a sort of "linguistic arms race", where "everyone else does it", so people feel compelled to tack on the "vast", lest it sound like their side is only a mere "majority". But that just leads to linguistic inflation: when (almost) everyone says "vast", it loses its meaning, sending everyone scrambling to find ever-more-emphatic (and more insulting) modifiers, like "overwhelming".
It may seem to make your argument sound a bit stronger, but the constant minor insults don't help us get anywhere closer to building true consenus. After all, wouldn't the overwhelming majority prefer to see a political arena with more true communication and less poo-flinging?
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
The relation university's have with there network is somewhat amusing in light of the network neutrality debate. American Universities have this massive government funded network with bandwidth up the wazoo that fills all of us in the private sector with envy.
The administrators of these networks share a single minded passion. They do not want commercial activities taking place on their precious little taxpayer funded socialized network heaven. Widespread use of Tor might make avenues where commericial traffic gets in sullies the university backbone with commercial traffic.
It is really funny because professors will come out and spit venom about the idea of a telephone company breaking net neutrality, but will turn a strange shade of blue if you were to suggest that university servers should be neutral and allow commerce on the internet meant exclusively for university traffic.