After reading the chapter please read this article about security vs privacy and then answer and debate the question below.
When F. Scott Fitzgerald told the story of young Amory Blaine at Princeton University in “This Side of Paradise,” he wrote of “the silent stretches of green, the quiet halls with an occasional late-burning scholastic light.” Many of the same halls are still on the Princeton campus, but today the tenderness of the night is often shattered by shrill beeps and a klaxon-like speaker screaming in a robotic voice, “Please close the door securely.”
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Norman Y. Lono for The New York Times |
KEEPING TABS – A card opens campus doors and also feeds information to a computer database.
Princeton University, like many other institutions of higher education, worries about protecting its students.
And one way to protect those students, when you have 4,600 of them, is with an electronic security system. But when most of those students are older than 18, the question is: Do they want to be protected?
In the early 90’s, Princeton began equipping all dormitories and other buildings with automatic locks and a system for unlocking the doors built around slim plastic cards called proximity cards, or prox cards, one issued to each student. This fall, Princeton increased the level of security by keeping all dormitories locked all the time, instead of just between 9 P.M. and 7 A.M.
The change has generated a campus debate over whether students want to trade the inconvenience and what many perceive as a loss of privacy for the increased security provided by keeping the dormitories locked all the time. The privacy question arises because not only does the security system read the prox cards to open doors, but it also records all card usage so there is a computer database of students’ entries into campus buildings.
To get into a dormitory, a student places a prox card — which doubles as an identification card, library card and charge card for the university store and dining halls — near a black plastic box encasing a tiny transceiver. (The card is called a proximity card because it just needs to be near the box; it is not inserted into anything.) After the card is read, the door is opened, and a record of the entry is transmitted to the campus police office. Such electronic records are saved for three weeks before they are written over.
Princeton is not alone in adopting electronic security; a number of other colleges and universities have similar systems. For the safety of their students, universities often decide that campuses cannot be as freewheeling about physical movement as they are about the exchange of ideas.
Yale University uses an electronic pass system similar to Princeton’s and also keeps a record. Cynthia Atwood, a Yale spokeswoman, said: “We do have the capability of tracking individuals and their comings and goings from the residential college, but since we’ve installed this card system, we’ve had no complaints about privacy. We’ve not been asked by any authorities for records of the comings or goings of students.”
Mike Doheny, a spokesman for Motorola, which makes electronic security cards for Princeton and others — it calls them RF cards, for radio frequency — said the company “had provided several million RF ID cards over the past year for various applications for businesses and campuses.” He did not have figures for how many were being used for campus security systems. But the increases in campus security have generated some opposition on the Princeton campus. Both The Nassau Weekly, a student newspaper, and The Princeton Alumni Weekly have reported objections and attempts to foil the system.
Some people, like Harvey A. Silverglate, who graduated from Princeton in 1964, doubt whether security systems that keep records of students’ movements are appropriate for campuses.
Silverglate is one of the two authors of “The Shadow University: the Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses” (Free Press, 1998), which argues that speech codes and authoritarian impulses are making campuses today too restrictive.
Asked about the new security system at Princeton, Silverglate called it “just another example of overreaching and overbearing administrators who insist on controlling student life.”
Deborah Hurley, the director of the Harvard Information Infrastructure Project, which addresses policy issues involving information technology, said: “There are two issues from a privacy point of view. One is proportionality and the second is the locus of control. Is the personal data collected proportional to the risk of harm? I think the answer is no. It’s not only an individual’s privacy — it’s freedom of movement and freedom of association.”
She added, “In this case, Princeton is gathering reams of data about all of its students, and the students are the appropriate ones to have control and ownership of that data.”
Ms. Hurley said she had been distressed to discover that her own university maintained a record of when she entered and left her parking garage.
Princeton’s students have been making their opinions known. A poll was taken in the last school year about the plan to keep the dormitories locked all the time — known as “24-hour prox” — said Jeff Siegel, a former student body president who is now a trustee of the university. “About 80 percent of the males and only 60 percent of the women didn’t want the 24-hour prox,” Siegel said. “The 40 percent of the women, however, were very adamant.” M OST of the arguments for keeping the system active all the time at the dormitories can be summarized as anticipating “what if” situations. Richard Spies, vice president for finance and administration at Princeton, said: “We just began to worry about what were still by anyone’s standards a small number of incidents. But there were people who were in the dormitories who shouldn’t have been there. We don’t want to wake up one morning and find we had a very tragic incident that we could have prevented.”
Crime statistics reported by the university show 33 burglaries on campus in 1995, 43 in 1996 and 42 in 1997.
The debate over the new system has led to a new policy governing when information gathered by the prox card system can be used.
Barry Weiser, a crime-prevention specialist at Princeton, said an investigating officer who wanted such access must get approval from both the dean of student life and the head of campus security. Weiser said the records had been opened only once in the last six months or so, when the city police subpoenaed the records for one door in a case involving vandalism. The dean of student life and the head of security initially rejected the impulse to make the data available.
That dean, Janina Montero, said: “The threshold for checking that information was determined to be fairly high. The director of public safety meets with me, and together we would arrive on a decision as to whether to take that step.”
Dana Bernemen, a senior in the electrical engineering department and the chairwoman of the Undergraduate Student Life committee, said: “Privacy is something we fought for pretty hard last year. We think we did an O.K. job with it. It takes a pretty reasonable or substantial issue to unseal those records.”
In conversations with more than two dozen students, in person and by telephone, many said they were surprised to find out that the university was recording their movements. Most of the students said their primary objection was over the inconvenience of the system; privacy concerns were generally listed second.
Ms. Bernemen said she liked the security system. “I don’t think that it’s that much of an inconvenience,” she said. “For the added safety, it’s worth it.”
Dan Grech, a senior who is actively involved in the debate, said, “It seems as if you’re living in a prison.” Grech said he lived in a new dormitory room with a key-operated door that locked automatically. “There is no way to unlock your door,” he said. “Whenever you leave, it locks behind you.” That complicates sleepy late-night trips to the bathroom down the hall and forces students to look for ways to circumvent the system.
Some students interviewed also wondered about the system’s effectiveness. In mid-October, a freshman, Alicia Wright, found a man she didn’t know in her room. After he politely excused himself and left, Ms. Wright became suspicious and telephoned one of the student advisers assigned to freshmen. The adviser assured Ms. Wright that the man was probably an authorized fire inspector and told her not to worry. Only later did her roommates discover that two laptops and some jewelry were missing from the room, she said.
“After the burglary, I don’t think very much of the security here,” Ms. Wright said. “A lot of times, you see people letting others in the door. I would do the same thing.”
Jessica Collins, a freshman who is one of Ms. Wright’s roommates, said: “If people’s parents come, everyone says, ‘Have someone prox you in and come up to my room.’ There is this trust.” She said students would often let others enter the dormitories under the assumption that the people were friends or relatives of dormitory residents or simply residents who had forgotten their cards.
Many of the students complain that the way the system is run forces them to be so lenient about allowing others entry. There is no simple way for students to provide a visitor a spare set of keys, they said. The security office will issue visitors prox cards for short periods, but most of the students interviewed were not aware of that.
Princeton is trying to add more flexibility by expanding a system in which visitors can call students on the telephone to ask to be allowed into a dormitory and the students can open doors remotely by pushing the 5 button on the telephone.
Many students interviewed said they often used other students’ cards, grabbing the nearest card that worked, like a roommate’s card. Most said they did not mind confounding the system, and a few said they were happy to do so.
In the past, the prox card came without a picture or other identifying marks and was used only for security.
Now one prox card does it all, acting as identification and as a student charge card for campus purchases.
Such systems are opposed by Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a research group in Washington. He said such a system was “more appropriate for a prison or a secure military installation instead of a college campus, where trust and openness have been part of the tradition.”
In speeches, he said, he often suggests electronic disobedience in the form of card swapping for supermarket discount programs. He said swapping cards destroyed the system’s ability to track people over the long term.
In New York City, some people say they often swap the unlimited-ride subway Metrocards to confound a similar tracking system, according to 2600, a hacker magazine.
No one has challenged the legality of Princeton University’s collection of tracking data on its students. Silverglate, who has served on various committees of the American Civil Liberties Union and taught at major law schools, including Harvard, called the system of data collection “creepy.” But he added, “We shouldn’t confuse that with illegal, unconstitutional or unethical.” The Constitution, he explained, prohibits unreasonable searches but says little about the gradual aggregation of routinely collected data.
Rotenberg said few legal precedents govern the vast databases developing in public and private hands. The Supreme Court has visited the issue of searches many times but has provided little guidance on data collection.
But Ms. Hurley said the situation would be different in Europe because a directive issued by the European Union strictly limited the collection of personal data by private groups.
Rotenberg said some students would inevitably buck such security systems.
He added, “People who think they have a technical solution to a social problem are invariably disappointed.”
David Ascher, the current student body president at Princeton, said he thought that the university had reached the right decision on the security system, given the substantial minority of students who felt so strongly about using the prox cards 24 hours a day. But he added, “Do you know that scene in ‘Jurassic Park’ where Jeff Goldblum said, You guys have been so intent on building the technology without wondering if it’s a good idea? I often got the impression that the university was intent on building the system because it could, not because it was a good idea.”
Question/Debate
–Does a person’s privacy have to be compromised for security reasons?
–Does a person’s security have to be compromised to maintain that person’s privacy?
There are no right or wrong answer if you back up your opinion with clear and honest thought. Keep it school appropriate and respect others. To finish you must state your opinion (150 words to 300) and then you must comment on 3 others posts. Must say more than I agree and I disagree. Don’t forget about your current events. If you can’t get on facebook I have posted them on here for you.
mrfolkerth 