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.

Comments

Re:Bravo

[TheCarp]

Civil liberties and government funding have little to do with it.

Its about academic freedom, and freedom of inquery.

Realise I worked in IT at a major university. I was there when we decided to impliment virus scanning, not even spam filtering (I was there for that too) but just virus scanning.

It was debated because well... what if someone had a legitimate acedemic need to recieve viruses in email?

Seriously! We gave unfettered internet access. Porn? Well... guess what... someone may be doing acedemic research into porn and needs to access porn sites. These are legitimate debates that come up in that environment because... they take the persuit of intellectual inquery as serious buisness... because it IS their buisness.

No firewalls, no filtering... unfettered access, because if someone needs it, they need it.

-Steve

Re:Bravo

[PopeRatzo]

Even gold-plated health coverage shouldn't cost 6k for everybody if it was done right.

I mean, most people are not usually sick. And I'm sick of people pointing to Canada or Britain and saying: "see, universal coverage doesn't work". We're the USA, goddammit, and we can spit farther, screw longer and piss farther than any other country on the planet, so you'd think we could figure this thing out so we don't have to have kids going without being able to see a doctor when they get sick. The fact that we have such a high infant mortality rate should cause every one of us to be ashamed. Once and for all, can we just build a good health-care system for every American and maybe put gay marriage, protecting the children from video games, and flag-burning amendments on the back burner for just a little while?