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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?
--"The other men were not familiar, but a quick glance at their cards told me they were detectives on our campus police force."
_Detectives_ of the campus police force. What's next? Agents of the Campus Intelligence Agency?
the Department of Campus Security?
This is really ridiculous.
I think the issue was not with his use of it but being told that he couldn't talk about it in his classes.
How does Tor enable those things, and how would more people using Tor make those things worse than they already are?
According to the article, he's in Bowling Green State University, which is in Ohio. So DHS will be on this case in no time.
Nothing really happened to him... no sanctions, penalties, threats of actions... they didn't even say "Halt thy nefarious actions, or I shall chastise thee anon!"
Overblown.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
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.
After all, they were able to identify him as one of the users of the application.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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."
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!!!!
If using the service was against university policy, they very well could have Tor him a new one.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
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.
http://outcampaign.org/
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.
I attended said university, I know Paul very well. I still run into him in town occasionally, and I will be sure to shake his hand for this.
I could say a lot of BAD things about *university* ITS, but I'd probably get me in far more trouble than it is worth to say them out loud. I am not there anymore, they don't effect me. I will just be happy that Paul is still the fine individual I have always looked up to.
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
If he had only used Log Deleter 5.0, there would have been no record of his router hopping.
Proud member of the American Non Sequitur Society. We might not make much sense, but boy do we love pizza!
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
Need a professional organizer?
No they don't. Its a public university.
Do you think they have the right to say "Whites Only" or "No visiting Republican Websites"?
Now, that is not to say that the University is not allowed to draft up a reasonable set of rules. Perhaps it could even be argued that the right to anonymous communications and encryption fall under the 1st amendment, but thats not really my point here.
Lord High Crapflooder The Right Honourable Vlad Craig Esther McDavenpherson III
Destroyer of Mercatur.Net
He did not say that he had the right to and no one else did. He said that he could understand that it was a nightmare to administer. I understand that driving a car is very hazardous, I want to continue driving, that does not mean I am telling other people not to drive. Acknowledging that it is difficult to scale does not imply not scaling up, it means that they should find a solution. By saying that he should be allowed to continue using tor, he is making the statement that asking everyone to stop using it is not the best solution.
Why is this someone elses network? It is a network that has been provided for his use. It may not be his exclusive network, but it is his network. Please clarify who you think owns it? The university? As a member of the university staff, wouldn't that make it his? or is it the exclusive network of the IT department of said university. Or maybe it is the sutdents who pay the money for said network. I am getting tired of people using the phrase "not their network" to imply that you have to take whatever is handed you. Can only call who Ma Bell wants because it's not your network, can't do anything about warrentless phone taps because it's not your network. If I have been given use of a network, then the part of the network I have been given use of is mine for the duration of that use. There might be contracts or agreements that stipulate what is or is not allowed, but when they add one sided rules after the agreement has been reached, then "it is not your network" is not an acceptable answer.
Just because you don't need tor to browse the web anonymously, does not make it a valid application for doing just that. I don't need to have firefox installed to access the web, that does not automatically exlude firefox as a legitimate application for doing just that.
"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".
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
From TFA: "Someone looking up potentially sensitive information might prefer to use [Tor] -- like a person who is worried about potential exposure to a sexually transmitted disease and shares a computer with roommates."
So, sharing a computer with roommates might give you an STD and Tor will protect you from it? Hmmm...
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
Its possible that I'm simply missing the point, but if Tor is so effective then how exactly did a university IT guy and two campus cops find out it was in use and trace it so easily to the professor in question? Isn't anonymity the whole point?
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..."
Tor keeps you from being detected by the remote end of a connection. Nobody said you can't be detected as a Tor user on the local network itself.
Lord High Crapflooder The Right Honourable Vlad Craig Esther McDavenpherson III
Destroyer of Mercatur.Net
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.
WTF is Tor?
It's where the virus Megabyte lived with his army of viral binomes and henchmen Hack and Slash while plotting to take over Mainframe and the Supercomputer.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
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.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
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.
I'm curious about the problems that Tor creates. I was talking with someone who runs a Tor node, and he was dismayed that he was banned from most EFNet IRC servers. My guess was that people had abused Tor and used it to escape bans on IRC. It seemed perfectly reasonable to ban all Tor nodes if it created those problems.
So my question is, what problems does Tor create for us all? I'm all for people being able to escape governments that want to control what they do.. but I can't imagine that this doesn't create other problems, so of which might not be immediately apparent.
AccountKiller
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.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
I was a university IT director a few years ago. The university told me outright when they hired me that they expected to pay me 25% less than an identical job would pay in industry, because they're a not-for-profit organization, and that I should desire to accept this because of the benefits of working in an academic environment (which they listed as long term job security and minimum of four weeks of vacation per year). Okay, fine. They weren't happy when I came back with documentation showing that my industry value was about twice what they thought, but they coughed up the 75% of my industry value that they said they would.
Then when I wanted to hire anyone, however, they dictated to me what I could offer, and refused to accept any input regarding what industry norms were. So, when I needed a DBA (and frankly needed a really good one), they told me I should get someone Oracle certified, and that I should pay no more than $50k. Skilled, experienced, product certified DBAs, as you may know, tended to go for over twice that (usually more like three times that) a few years back in Boston, and our database wasn't Oracle anyway. I ended up hiring a junior-level person (when I really needed a senior level person) because that was the best I could get for the money they were offering (in fact the only applicant we had received who had any experience with the database products we actually used), and told HR they could forget about certification. Their response was to complain a lot that I hadn't hired a good enough person, despite that they hadn't actually asked me (his manager) about his performance, and he was actually doing unusually well for someone of his level. They also nagged me extensively to replace him with a woman who had applied who was oracle certified (which was still useless because we still didn't have oracle), but didn't actually speak English. (Presumably that's why she was willing to take the lousy pay rate.)
10 months after I was hired the university outsourced my job, proving that their claim of long term job security was a lie in the first place. (I hear they had to hire three consultants to replace me, each one at a cost of two to three times my salary.)
I've seen this pattern repeatedly in university IT groups; they won't pay what it really costs to get someone who can really do the job, but they insist on unreasonable qualifications given the pay level they're offering, so instead of either shelling out what it costs to get what they want or accepting the best qualified person who would normally be in the pay range they're offering, they instead hire the loser who is willing to both take the low pay rate AND inflate their qualifications (either by exaggeration or outright lies) to meet the university's unreasonable demands. So, when they most need a skilled, experienced person, they're most likely to get a lying fraud who can't get the job done and will give everyone else a hard time to try to make it look like nothing is their fault.
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 school still has every right to direct what he teaches at thier institution. If they don't want him teaching that, he should stop. After all, he works for them.
"The school" has that right to some degree, but a network manager is not "the school" and does not have the right to set school policy. At best, the network manager can make a temporary decision (arguing that this was necessary to protect the university), which the faculty and university administration can overturn. And if faculty and the university administration don't like what the network manager did, they can fire him.
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
Rules of Conduct:
#1 - The DM is always right.
#2 - If the DM is wrong, see rule #1
I used to work for a large Midwestern University, and we blocked outgoing connections to some services, such as VPNs and some proxies. The reason we did this was during the outbreak of the virus (can't remember the name), that hammered Windows on Port 135, we blocked incoming Port 135 connections at the University border. It was hypothesized that if users VPNed to other networks, they would circumvent the port block and become a vector.
I know everyone worth their weight in IT realizes that a secure border isn't enough. We had virus protection available for free for every seat on campus, however, in a huge distributed environment (where departments and colleges were "islands" in a network ocean, with their own IT staff) we couldn't gaurantee the integrity of these machines. But we were sure going to be the ones to take the hit when their "nice kid that they liked to much to see them move on after graduation system admin" didn't bother to CHECK to see if the definitions his AD-out-the-box for dummies was pushing those defs.
We also disallowed some of these services because it became harder to effectively monitor our network. When some s5r1pt k1dd13 in CIS 201 decides that he is now a UNIX god is and is going to put "Bush Sucks - $college_name is #1, fark $rival" on whitehouse.gov to impress his pink haired, pot smoking, PETA member across the hall in the dorms who only talks to him when he removes the spyware she got trying to download off KaZaa, we look like complete dickheads when the Feds show up (or the **AA) and the best we can do is say "I don't know... what goes on in them there tubes" the suits tend to get pretty agrivated.
On the other hand, even if they are SSHing into an intermediary (which we strongly encouraged over telnet), we can at least say "Well, we had an outgoing SSH connection from 4 machines on campus at that time going to these 4 addresses, do any of those ring a bell? We happened to have authenticated WPA, so we can tell you who these folks are even if the machine name is PoPPySeeD420 and done from the student union.
Privacy is wonderful, but when the shit hits the proverbal fan, IT would like to know who is pulling shenanagins on the network. The rest of the time, 99.9999% of the time, we'd rather NOT know what you're up to, and every one of us in the office (except for that one windows fanboi MS office specialist who we used to throw beanbags at) had our open source/linux/free as in beer and freedom/crypto-privacy street cred.
Forgive my spelling from time to time. I'm often posting during short breaks.
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
Admins should be more concerned about Tor's Hidden Service feature. It's handy to avoid censorship and all, but it allows you to connect to hosts behind a NAT or firewall (the node keeps a circuit open). Not only that, the person using the service remotely is unrelated to the host that shows up in the logs... It's a drop-in backdoor tool. Instant access to the internal network.
"Strangers have the best candy" -Me
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
I remember some time back a comparison of a number of universities by their computer-access and use policies. Some were very open and permissive for students, others were severely limiting. This sort of thing could be one more factor in helping prospective students determine which school is right for them.
I think this also sends a message about what students may expect on the network. At many universities, students will expect (and have) almost total freedom as long as their actions are benign. Included in this is a recognition that they may largely utilize the Internet without unnecessary restriction or undue scrutiny. I suspect at this university, they can't assume a right to privacy on their transactions, or even a presumption of anonymity should they desire it. Some universities provide this - as long as students don't interfere with the basic function of the network, or necessary operations don't require inspection of their network traffic.
I also think this uniersity might be taking the easist approach. A thoughtful approach to network security incorporating network sensors and intrusion detection packages could very well largely mitigate risks they are concerned about, especially with an appropriate overall security architecture - which their campus may - or may very well not - have in place.
If breaking into a single professor's computer can take down a backroom server, then the IT staff deserves the pitchforks and torches. By your rationale Tor should be banned completely from every network in existence, because hey, my laptop might get owned and take down all of Verizon.
A university network is not a typical business environment. You can't control every computer that gets connected to the network, and you can't shut off encrypted traffic. So by your rationale, "a lot of firewalling and intrusion detection" is already COMPLETELY useless.
Here's a legit situation I can see coming up - if a faculty person was somehow using 90% of our internet bandwidth, we'd have to have a chat. Sure, it might be for their research, but that doesn't matter in that case. It's a shared resource, there's a limited (by the University) budget, and it's not an academic freedom issue. It might be convenient for one of the physics faculty to have a supercollider as well, but it's not in the University's budget. You have to partner with someone outside, or get grants, etc. Every instituation has limits and priorities.
But this? This is bizarre. The only awkward situation I can think of in some states is that state schools can fall under open records laws that require that the public can check on certain information (in some states, browser histories have come up in the past). In that case, as a state employee, they might be violating the open records law by going out of their way to hide their activity. Hell, even under a Patriot Act search, we'd have to give them whatever information we had about a user, but we're not obligated to keep information to track back every outbound internet connection - even under CALEA. We probably can't link a PAT assignment on the outside of our firewall to an inside machine for more than a couple of days, at best We just don't have the space to keep the logs.
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);}
I think he needs to add another country to his list. And find a better technology.
the purpose of tor is not to hide that you're using tor. the purpose is to hide what you're doing and where you are. a man in the middle (IT in this instance) has no clue where you are going or what you are accessing and the server on the other end has no clue where you actually are.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
http://www.bgsu.edu/downloads/cio/file9602.pdf
12. Attempting to circumvent computer system or computer network security systems. Attempting to circumvent University computer system or computer network security systems, or using University computer systems or computer networks in attempting to circumvent security systems elsewhere.
and
22. Anonymous use, or use of pseudonyms on a computer system or computer network to escape responsibility. No person shall use a computer system or computer network anonymously or use pseudonyms to attempt to escape from prosecution of laws or regulations, or otherwise to escape responsibility for their actions.
Now, the first one seems like it is worded vaguely and may or may not apply in this situation, but the second one is pretty clear: as long as you are using anonymity services "to escape responsibility". Clearly, the professor was not trying to skirt the law or detection for any shady behaviour. of course, in the eyes of admins, allowing any use of such anonymizers could be dangerous to their network, and make their jobs harder.
I take most issue to the detectives' request that the professor refrain from discussing Tor in his classes. It would be academically unethical for the prof to bend to this pressure because a little pressure was put on him by the rent-a-cops. The detectives can ask the professor to do whatever they want, but dictating what he can and cannot teach in his classroom is inappropriate.
Shriver
And a thousand thousand slimy things
Lived on; and so did 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.
Can Tor successfully fight Google logging all your search queries? More than once now, Google -- who are reported to have a database of every query ever made to their search engine -- have given police lists of searches made from a given computer. Would Tor stop them from being able to do this? Would this destroy a valuable asset of Google if Tor became widely used?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."