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Privacy Your Rights Online

Beware The Campus Police 83

Posted by timothy from the could-have-been-worse dept.
geisler writes: "According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, a professor at Virginia Tech had her computer seized so that university police could try to track down someone who emailed her. She was denied the chance to backup before the computer was taken, and there seems to be some differences in stories between her and the authorities."
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Beware The Campus Police More

Beware The Campus Police

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  • BYOC (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Tadrith ( 557354 ) on Tuesday April 09, 2002 @01:38PM (#3311227) Homepage
    Sounds like this is a case of Bring Your Own Computer.

    Their tactics were too heavy handed, and the situation could have been dealt with better, but if you're going to use a computer and expect privacy, the very first thing you should do is use your own computer! When you're using university property, the idea of "privacy" should be nonexistant.

    It's still infuriating that people get pushed around like this, but this situation isn't exactly good grounds for a valid complaint.

    • Re:BYOC (Score:2, Interesting)

      by software_non_olet ( 567318 )
      And when you are using public streets your privacy is lost and you become public property?

      When I go to a college toilet, they have the right to make their videos, because I could be vandalizing their property or use the paper for my personal (as opposed to official) needs?

      Come on, get your priorities right. Property is NOT topping everything else - except if we make it into that.
      • Locke's "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Property" became Jefferson's "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness" intentionally.

        Depending on the quality of the work, one man's vandelism is another man's graffeti...SoCal is full of (protected) works of "take back the night"-ness.
        • Well, I didn'T mean Locke's or Jefferson's Life or whatever. I'm not breathing for anyone else but myself - nothing to say about speaking -.

          When I happen to have the feeling, that something is bullshit, I express that. Not out of morale, not for a thousand Locke's or a million presidents and a billion countries - no, just because I do so. And because I love myself - especially when I get angry.
  • I just read through the article briefly, after thinking to myself (probably like a lot of other readers) "That sucks -- it's her own machine, and they just came and took it?"

    hmmm. As I read the article, I learned that the machine was "University issued".

    And she got it back the next day. Apparently, they were looking for an e-mail regarding a vandalism incident.

    Now, they could have just asked her for the information, and maybe it was a bit harsh to just up and take the computer, but it was university issued (means university owns it, tough cookies). Maybe the document was sensitive enough that they didn't want to give her the chance to delete it?

    • And just because she deleted it; doesn't necessarily mean it is gone. Deleting files on a harddrive doesn't necessarily imply that the space had been reallocated; all it means is that the blocks have been unlinked.

      On the other hand, doing ANYTHING to her computer in the meantime (even booting it) will create temporary files which can overlap the deleted data and reduce the chances of recovering anything.

    • They *did* ask for her cooperation first. They also had a search warrant. She refused to allow them to access the information they needed. She'd received an email from someone claiming responsibility for about $10,000 worth of vandalism on campus, and forwarded it to some listservs. They wanted the original message to try to track it. She claimed it was deleted, and that she refused to let them look at her machine to see if they could recover it. Given the machine is state property, and she's not allowed to refuse to cooperate, they ended up taking it, and cloning it. All the administrators *above* her agree she was in the wrong. She now claims that she had left the police voice mail offering full cooperation, but only after she went out of town for the weekend, which is a complete 180 from the original story, and particularly interesting given that she physically tried to prevent the police from touching the computer. I've met the cops in question; they're nice guys, and not inclined to histrionics. They wouldn't have done this if she had given them a choice.
  • Quote: "Going by the logic of those cops, the university can confiscate basically any documents stored in our offices (as we use office paper), confidential letters (on official letter pads) and e-mail messages (university software, again), and tap into our phone messages (on the phone machines) as well: without any specific formal legal mandate or explanation or prior notice or warrant." NO SHIT. Anything you do at work(or working @ home) while using your employers property is considered owned by your employer, and you are not entitled to an expectation of privacy while using it. I wonder what these idiots think of the DMCA?
    • Anything you do at work(or working @ home) while using your employers property is considered owned by your employer

      Nonsense. If I scribble a haiku during my break using an company pen on company letterhead, I am the creator of that work, not the company, and the copyright on that work is mine, unless we've signed a contract otherwise.

      The situation is no different than if I was visiting your house and grabbed a pen off your desk to write my poem - it's still my poem. The only claim you might have is to be reimbursed for the ink.

      You are an employee, not a slave - even though our corporate feudalism is rapidly pushing us in that direction.

    • You have to remember that these folks live in an ivory tower. Many university types have little or no idea what the "real world" is like. They don't realize that this is the way that the rest of us live every day of our lives.
      I will not state whether it is right or wrong (IANAL and hopefully never will be), as it is simply a question for the courts and ethics. We know where the courts have stood on it in the past, and we know that many don't care about ethics, so why argue about it.
      As for the privacy point on this, there are certain places where a person legally has no expectation for privacy. If there is a policy that your employer can confiscate and inspect your laptop at anytime (and my employer has such a policy), then you should not expect it to be a private place. On the other hand, there are places that carry with them an assumed amount of privacy (such as public restrooms), you can feel that you aren't being photographed, but is your conversation private? Not likely. Everyone in that restroom, can hear what you are talking about. And as I understand it, you reasonable expectation of privacy is part of what matters in a case along those lines.
    • You are 100% correct. Those of us outside of the sheltered world of the college/university professor have known these things for years, but you have to remember these people are sheltered. A lot of professors don't have that much grasp on the business working world and what goes on in it. I really don't see any issues here. Students also tend to fall into this category (not all, but a lot do). If it was the professors own machine, then I would see some problems. Time to move on to other things.
    • Anything you do at work(or working @ home) while using your employers property is considered owned by your employer, and you are not entitled to an expectation of privacy while using it.

      You, sir, are a slave with a slave mentality. I assume that professionals must extend this to the 24/7? Videotaping your affectionate sessions with your wife at home then is to be expected, since you are chattel property of the Corp?

      There was a police force whose officer's opposed the introduction of computers into their paperwork routine. A bathroom sink continued to overspill, draining downstairs and running into the computer. A secret video camera was planted, but the evidence was thrown out of court because it invaded the expectation of privacy inherent to such a room. Suspect different jurisdictions have different expectations, but I would be "pissed" to be videotaped in the can!

  • Backup (Score:2)

    by crow ( 16139 )
    She had plenty of opportunity to make a backup before the Police seized her computer. If her hard drive had crashed, she would be in the same position now. While it is horrible when the authorities abuse their power, and nothing excuses that, she has no right to complain about not having a backup when she needs one.
  • If my computer where taken by anyone I would want it to contain no information whatsoever, preferably having the people who took it have no access to the box what-so-ever. encrypted fs, encrypted bios, requiring one of those nice USB keychains to use as key to turn the thing on, why aren't there features like that in most bioses?

    Encrypted fs Covered in linux
    bios pass protect in some bioses
    usb key as key ?
    system autodestruct? simple bash script?

    Oh well, I always like the thought of giving a computer the following voise command:
    Computer, Initiate self-destruct

    authorisation Niksie, Omega Beta 9 3 Alfa

    • "If my computer where taken by anyone "

      But, if you're referring to the above article, it's not your computer. More like, it's your employer's computer, but you're using it to get your job done.

      Just like everyone where I work (I used to do support), the computer doesn't belong to them (although there are a lot of people out there who don't think that.... technical people aside, even) and when we used to suggest a replacement, they'd get bent outta shape because they'd lose their desktop configurations, etc. (Our shop doesn't do standard installs where the desktop is the same everywhere -- anyone with a logon to the domain can screw with the local machine..... ugh.)

      :)
    • If my computer where taken by anyone I would want it to contain no information whatsoever, preferably having the people who took it have no access to the box what-so-ever. encrypted fs, encrypted bios, requiring one of those nice USB keychains to use as key to turn the thing on, why aren't there features like that in most bioses?

      BIOS protection is mostly useless. Nobody will try to actually boot your computer. They'll just take the hard disk, make a copy on some read-only media (read-only, so they can "proof" they didn't change any data), and give back the computer.

      Encrypted file systems are a nice idea, and you can get a patch for Linux here [kerneli.org]. Unfortunately, they can't go in the official kernel, because the encryption laws in many countries. Also, I don't know of any distribution that supports this out of the box.

      Autodestruction scripts are easy. Just install a procmail recipe that watches for a certain subject and then executes "cat /dev/urandom > /dev/hda". Pretty effective. An alternative is a CGI script (make sure Google doesn't index it :).

      And those keychains are pretty handy to store your PGP private key on (and a lot more reliable than diskettes!)

  • Bahhh! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Deanasc ( 201050 ) on Tuesday April 09, 2002 @01:43PM (#3311271) Homepage Journal
    The university owned the computer and it was returned. So this is really just a lesson in always backing up important files before the unfortunate event. Not after.

    What's next? Nobel Prize Contending research lost when hard drive crashed.

    Employers right to access company hardware trumps any privacy for the employee. The police were just doing their job. What if they let her erase important evidence?

    Like it or not campus police work for the college and represent the authority of the college in these matters. I say good job.

    • Re:Bahhh! (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Deagol ( 323173 )
      RTFA, dude!

      One of her big concerns was that, as a professor of Women's Studies, she had a lot of confedential papers on her system. The backups seems to be a minor concern to her.

      This wasn't a matter of the university getting to see her shopping list, but rather material from students that thought only she alone would have access to.

      Protecting a student's discussion of past rape or abuse trumps a mere $10k in grafiti cleanup, in my book.

      • If you're going to store information like that then all identifying information should be stripped as the data is entered. It is never going to be needed for a legitimate reason ... so get rid of it.

      • Re:Bahhh! (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Deanasc ( 201050 )
        I did read the article. The fact is she was using university issued equipment. If she had discussions of past rapes on the machine she didn't seem too concerned about the police seeing them. She only wanted to back up the machine before they took it.

        As for discussing rape via the college email system, well, that's just a bad idea. Something so sensative should be discussed in person. For no other reason than this.

        • Re:Bahhh! (Score:3, Insightful)

          by duffbeer703 ( 177751 )
          So I guess if an employee discussed a sensitive subject in a company-owned office, the police should be allowed to record the conversation?

          How about conversations held while walking down a public road? Should the police install listening devices on telephone poles? Should you expect privacy on a government highway?

          Professional employees should have rights in regard to personal and confidential coorespondence in the office.

          • Well you said it. They *should* have rights. Time and again the courts show that employees have no rights. Until the day comes where we see a reversal I will conduct myself at school or in industry (I'm in school) as if I'm being watched.

            As for your specious reasoning with the other points, there is a law that police need wiretap warrants to listen to cellphones as you drive down the highway but do not need a warrant to listen to someone with a parabolic microphone or photograph in a public place.

            As of last September I'm not sure if they still need the warrant.

            In any event if you don't like the status quo then change it. Don't bitch about it. As for me, I conduct myself as if I'm under survailence whenever I'm outside my house. Which I do agree makes me a tool of the man but at least I'm on the winning team.

            • I assume I'm under surveilance act as if I weren't.
              Fuck them, fuck them all. I routinely leave inflammatory messages regarding government officials in places where I know someone will find them. I go out of my way to call attention to myself through annoying acts which are not illegal. I figure as long as they are occupied watching me they won't be harassing someone else.

              Kintanon
        • Are you sure you read the article? ...discussing rape via the college email...not equal to papers that her students have written about sensitive topics, such as their experiences with domestic abuse.

          Especially on-point is her questioning of on-line classes that involve any expectation of privacy, but thats not email.

      • Re:Bahhh! (Score:2, Interesting)

        by eXtro ( 258933 )
        She may have been concerned about revealing discussions of past rapes, but those discussions shouldn't have been on a university computer or via email. She showed concerned but also poor judgement.


        You're trusting a whole lot of people with confidential information if you're storing it on somebody elses machine or filesystems. You've got to trust the cleaning staff not to touch the machine, you've got to trust the system administrators not to search through the email and you've got to trust that students aren't going to break in searching for next weeks exam.


        I've experienced two of the above things happening: A system administrator searched through my email to find out if there was something going on between myself and a girl at the university. He caught royal shit for it (I kept noticing that it never said I had new mail when I logged in even though I had new (to me) mail). A fellow student broke into a professors office, searched the file cabinets and his laptop for exams (he was never caught - he brought it up over beer years later)

        • She may have been concerned about revealing discussions of past rapes, but those discussions shouldn't have been on a university computer or via email. She showed concerned but also poor judgement.

          She was a womens studies professor. Discussions of past rapes may have some relevance to her research, so their presence is justified. However, they should still be confidential. What if hospital security wanted your medical records to help them track someone (unlikely, but still...), and they read through every medical condition you've had. These records are supposedly confidential, but since your doctor stored them on a machine that belonged to the hospital, they would be accessible.

          I have a feeling you'd feel differently about that situation.
    • Employers right to access company hardware trumps any privacy for the employee.

      You and everyone else here talking about legal rights misses the point. It does not say in this article that McCaughey is suing Virginia Tech. The point is not whether a coporation has the right to do this, but whether a UNIVERSITY should do this. (I said SHOULD, not CAN, not HAS LEGAL RIGHT TO). Is it in a university's best interest to seize faculty machines over a little graffiti? What kind of impact will that have on student/professor relationships, academic freedom or faculty recruiting? Perhaps, for the sake of the University, privacy should trump attempts to stop graffiti.

      I imagine McCaughey's attitude is "well, you have a bad policy, so you deal with the bad PR". I say she did a good job.

      Like it or not campus police work for the college and represent the authority of the college in these matters. I say good job.

      You don't know enough to say that. There is a discrepancy in stories between the professor and the campus police--whoever is speaking mistruth did a bad job. The college doesn't have the authority to lie. And I'm not even sure that "campus police represent the college", on some campuses, they can arrest people--they're real cops. Wouldn't the 4th amendment then constrain them?

      Switching gears back to legal rights, I wonder, if a student submits work to the professor, does the university automatically get the right to see that work? In a world with more and more property owned by coprorations and governments, isn't it time to reevaluate this "Employers right to access company hardware trumps any privacy for the employee" rule?

      • Yes again in a perfect world we would have our privacy at work but the world is not perfect. We need to deal with it the way it's been dealt to us.

        As for the student's work, I know my lab notebooks become property of the college at the end of the semester. (even though I paid for the notebook) I'm sure whatever rule that allows this in science courses can cover any other course. I don't see any reason why any other work done should be kept secret from the university. Try calling your PhD. thesis your own secret.

        Did anyone do anything wrong here? The police have the obligation to do their job. Should the DEA not do their job if it embarasses the CIA? Maybe someone is lying and we don't have the full story.

        The police should do their job and nail those punk assed hooligans. They don't have the right to trash the campus. Failing to identify the lawbreakers when their identity became known to her makes the professor and accessory after the fact. Who should be embarassed?

        • Yes again in a perfect world we would have our privacy at work but the world is not perfect. We need to deal with it the way it's been dealt to us.

          This is nonsense. We live in a democracy, even the constitution can be amended. The hand that's been dealt to us is that we're allowed to change the hand that's been dealt to us. If we think we should have privacy at work, we can change the laws so that we do.

          As to why it would be a good idea for the university to make it their own policy not to search aggressivly--because students are going to be more fearful of being honest in class if they are opening themselves to a vast bureacracy rather than a single professor.

          The police are not obligated to take every possible action to solve every possible crime. In fact, cops getting sued for doing too little to do their jobs is a lot less often (if ever) than getting sued for being too aggressive. If they are indeed employed by the University, the University has a right to decide how much they are willing to treat faculty like criminals in order to discover vandals.

          If they choose to disregard this right, they should be embarrassed. I certainly think less of Virginia Tech now, as no doubt do many readers of the Chronicle of Higher Education. Thus the Virginia Tech has lost the battle.

          You can claim about no one having the right to do this or that as much as you want--but this isn't about legal rights, it's about public opinion, amongst an audience that cares a lot more about academic freedom then catching every last 'punk assed hooligan'.

          Regardless of what you think about their actions, this is incontestible: Virginia Tech should be embarrassed for being so stupid, for not seeing what's in their own best interest.

          • Personally, I think it was a lot more in our best interest for the administration to make it clear that it was inappropriate for faculty members to harbor criminals than it was to worry about what impressions people who have no damn idea of what was going on might get.

    • Re:Bahhh! (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Bouncings ( 55215 ) <ken&kenkinder,com> on Tuesday April 09, 2002 @05:42PM (#3312816) Homepage
      This is different. First of all, owning something does not give you unlimited access to it. My land lord cannot summarily inspect my apartment. If I lease a car, Toyota can't take it back at any given time. Ownership alone is not justification, by any means.

      Secondly, the police weren't just doing their jobs, they were doing their jobs poorly. Typically campus police are the worst of the police force and have authority issues. They were investigating ONE EMAIL and needed her entire computer? That's not very reasonable. Does your ISP take your computer away to investigate an email? No.

      If I sound biased, it's because I am. I've observed that campus police don't have real jobs for a reason. Anyone who spends five minutes with one of these people cannot retain respect for them, IMHO.

      • Typically campus police are the worst of the police force and have authority issues.

        And are there any who know anything about computers? Maybe nowadays there are. Here is a horror story about campus cops and computers from 1990. Risks of posting warnings with the wrong time or date. [ncl.ac.uk]

        Here is the short version: The real police received a bomb threat to the campus. The decision was made to clear the campus. It took hours. There was a lot of confusion, and rumours. About one hundred messages were posted to the local campus newsgroups.

        After the incident someone printed them all out for the campus police. One sharp-eyed campus cop saw that one of the messages appeared to be posted prior to the call to 911, and the author of that message became their prime suspect...

      • They had asked her for a copy of the note they needed. She claimed it was deleted. They asked to examine her system to try to recover the deleted message. The message in question claimed responsibility for about $10K in vandalism on campus. She refused to give them access to the system. (Now she claims she had offered to give them access when she came back into town, which she only recently started saying.) Given they were trying to access deleted files time was of the essence. It was a state owned machine, and both commonwealth law, and her employee contract specifically prohibit her from denying the state access to it, so after exhausting all the polite recourses, they had no choice but to grab the machine, so they could examine it for the file they needed. And even then they went through the extra hoop of getting a search warrant. She's lucky that it was the campus cops, who *want* to interact well with the university. If it'd been, oh, a message claiming responsibility for a death threat to the president, after she got out of jail, the secret service and the fbi computer lab *might* have given her the machine back in a couple of years.
  • They entered and took her university-issued Apple Macintosh computer, she said. ... They returned the computer the next day

    No big deal.

  • Students views.. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by bpb213 ( 561569 )
    Ok, even me (a student) have to agree with the university on this one.

    Do you expect privacy on a work computer in any industry? Of course not. If you dont own said computer, dont expect any rights to it.

    And as for the teacher worried about explaining why her personal life was on it, i would ask, why are you even doing anything that could be considered personal on a work computer? cmon, you should know better.

    • Actually she said that the smut was for her wimyns study research. Damn. I knew I should have gone for the wimyns issues degree, then I could be up to my neck in pr0n. The good girl on girl kind.
    • personal here includes student papers, student-professor communications, etc. How would you like it if the police found out that you had written a paper extolling the virtues of a joining a hacker community or that you used grandiose amounts of bandwidth chatting on slashdot, possibly stating things that were outside of the university usage policy? hmm, no, i think this one is just wrong, universities aren't normal employers, they aren't business, they are special for a wide variety of reasons.
      • First off, i wouldnt do such a thing.

        And second, IF i did, i could probably claim first ammemdment or pass it off as a fictional paper.
        • more or less, the question is not who the computer belongs to, but who the information in the computer belongs to. the answer traditionally, in academia, has been the professor.
  • This is no different than companies using spyware to monitor employees, or reading their email or whatever. The computer, if given to the professor, is the property of the university, and they can do with it what they wish, including reading her email. Would I be annoyed if this happened to me? Sure, but what could I do about it? Now if this was her private computer it would be another matter.

    But people will still get into a lather over this I'm sure.
    • The right of personal freedom and the secrecy of letters (which can be easily extended to email) is higher than the right of doing with your property what you want.

      Isn't that so?

      If not, the declaration needs to be fixed.
    • Sure, but what could I do about it?

      You could tell the press. Just because it's legal for a school to do something doesn't mean I shouldn't consider working for/attending/donating some other school because they do it. Universities care about the opinions of people other than lawyers, or at least they would if sufficiently self-interested.

    • This is no different than companies using spyware to monitor employees, or reading their email or whatever.

      Well, yes. They're both a horrible abuse of someone's privacy and should be illegal, if they aren't already.

      The computer, if given to the professor, is the property of the university, and they can do with it what they wish, including reading her email.

      The bank or your landlord is probably the legal owner of where you live... I suppose that gives them the right to search your property whenever they please?

      --
      Benjamin Coates

  • Encryption? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by pcmills ( 83944 )
    If she was so concerned about the privacy of her files, encryption would have been a good place to start.

    • Re:Encryption? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by duffbeer703 ( 177751 )
      That is outrageous.

      Certain facets of a work computer should be considered personal property. Your home directory should be considered the electronic equivilant of a locker.
  • Would we feel any different if this were a corporation searching a machine? The University owned the machine and can do what they want with it. Of course, not letting her back it up is just plain mean.
    • Of course, not letting her back it up is just plain mean.

      It appears that the campus police were wanting to search the hard drive for files that had been deleted. If they had allowed her to back up the files, she could have inadvertantly overwritten the clusters that they wanted, thus destroying the evidence. Sounds like a legitimate concern to me.
    • actually it is unclear that they can do 'anything they want with it'... University-Faculty relations are not like employer-employee relations. Faculty have a different status than employees. That combined that if an employer entrusts a machine to a person for use without stipulating that the machine is for personal or private use, makes it very unclear as to whether or not the data on the machine belongs to the university and can be searched. It is actually quite clear that certain parts of the data on the machine do not belong to the university, but are the intellectual property of the professor even though the university provides the computer to develop that intellectual property.
      • Faculty have a different status than employees.

        They collect a check, and they can be fired (mostly -- even tenure can be broken). Most of the rest of it is a fiction created by professors to reassure themselves on cold nights, not unlike the stories reporters tell themselves about their "special status".
  • Damn, there is a sad willingness by people here to forfeit their rights in the workplace. Would you allow your employer to search your person?

    I guess this is what 20 years of near ubiquitous piss-testing has reduced us to.

  • Umm (Score:2, Funny)

    by jonnyfish ( 224288 )
    What I want to know is why the university police made such a big deal about anti-rape "vandalism".
    • It doesn't matter what kind of vandalism it is, it could be "University Police Rule!" vandalism and still be illegal.
      • "Vandalism is vandalism" doesn't really fit this situation. If the students feel compelled to do something like this about a problem like rape, vandalism should be the least of the campus police's worries. Instead of putting the culprits to justice, perhaps they should be wondering just exactly what drove the students to perform such acts in the first place.

        • Re:Umm (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Deanasc ( 201050 )
          What we need in this country is some basic respect for law and order. If we let these punks get away with breaking vandalism laws in protest marches then why not let vigilante groups hack to death any man they find who might have raped someone. After all the students feel compelled to do something about the rape problem. In the mean time I haven't raped anyone but have to look at graphitti where the intent is to make me feel guilty for crimes I didn't commit.
          • the anti-rape slogans, which were painted on the night of a campus-sponsored "Take Back the Night" march opposing violence against women

            Anyone else think its ironic that a campus-sponsered function to oppose violence against women resulted in a woman's privacy being invaded?
  • If you assume the police did have the authority to examine data on the professor's drive, it follows logically that the police could not allow the professor to access her data after she had been informed of the action. Such allowance could lead to the professor deleting and overwriting the data.

    The professor should have already had her data backed up. Period. There is no excuse for anybody not to have their data backed up. Only files modified since her last backup should be a problem. The best way to handle backups is not to - put your critical data on a SMB share or AppleTalk share on a server that backs it up for you. Thus, she should only have had a problem accessing the data she had modified that morning.

    She should be using GPG, which would fix her problem regarding sensitive information.

    My 2 cents.
  • You have no idea. In the mid 80's I attended University of North Texas and enjoyed the BBS one of our esteemed student VAX system admins hacked up (very nice, actually). We allowed anyone to access the system but with their real names, or some close approximation. One freshman was, well, a real butthole - a troll in modern parlance. He was banned from the BBS eventually but would still enter the BBS via fake names (a TOS violation, you might say).

    Think Signal 11 towards the end...

    Anyway, this guy was a pest and one night, as the sys admins and I were chatting via talk, he logged into the VAX and then the BBS as, I'll never forget this, "Carl Marks". So, he's not well read, either. We decided to tell him to cut it out once and for all. Looking at the port he logged into we traced his incoming session to an on-campus extension (if only he had come from outside the campus network by dialing out to one of the external phone numbers for community use, we never could have identified him) and dialed his room number -- busy. We got him.

    What to do? We called the residence hall manager and asked if so-and-so roomed in the room we traced the call to. Sure enough, it was our little troll. We then asked the manager to tell the student to stop using the campus system under an assumed name.

    The main sys admin, knowing the manager was on his way up to the room, initiated a talk session with "Carl Marks" and told him the gig was up, we knew who he was and where he roomed, and we were having the authorities come and shut him down. Carl didn't believe us. He talked trash to the sys admin (I can't recall his name) -- this was before "suxors" talk -- and said, "Ha ha, find me."

    Here's where things went awry. The residence hall manager, not understanding what we were talking about, decided we were reporting someone hacking into the schools computers. He called the campus police. They came with guns drawn.

    The type-fest continnued. "Carl" said, where are you? Taunting us for saying someone was on the way. Basically, the cops were clearing the floor in case of gun fire and were thusly delayed. Suddenly, "Carl" said, "Shit. Someone's at the door. They say they're the police." Sure enough, the campus police, with guns drawn, were banging on the door. When the manager opened the door, they shouted, "Put your hands up and step away fromthe computer." The kid peed in his pants.

    After a few minutes "Carl's" talk session started again: "Thank you we have apprehended the suspect" - typed by one of the officers. The manager called the main sys admin and filled in the details above. The kid was arrested and brought to the station. His computer was confiscated. Eventually, Carl dropped out of UNT do to the stress caused by this event.

    Our intention was to scare him, but not with the campus police. We explained that he wasn't hacking, but merely using the system's services inappropriately after ample warning. The Dean of Students talked with him - I don't know how that went. The manager went overboard, and the police overreacted.

    But we had one heck of a good laugh.

    • Not that it's really related, or that I don't think the guy was an idiot, but I found it interesting to know that the search warrant for the raisethefist.com guy was 38 pages long! For anyone that doesn't know, they are normally 1 page long and everything they are looking for is just a long run on sentence.
    • Exactly, it's the campus police that blow it by going way over the top. I'm sure it has something to do with being around snotty sorrority babes all day and feeling castrated.
      Here's my little non-computer related antecdote.
      Once I was riding my bike on the SDSU campus in an area where I wasn't supposed to be riding a bike. I had a cop hiding from behind a tree jump out and tackle me. The impact was enough to twist the bike frame and rims beyond repair. For what? All I had done was ride a bike in a walk zone.
      The guy hadn't expected to cause so much damage apparently as he started getting apologetic as a crowd drew around thinking I must be on the FBI most wanted list or something. He said he wasn't going to write me a ticket, but then we walked, bleeding and bruised, to the police booth on the other side of campus all nice and calm like and he gave me a ticket once we got there.
      I was like --What! You just said you were sorry for overreacting and you weren't going to give me a ticket. He said, I changed my mind. So, I told him my name was Go Fuck Yourself as far as he was concerned and I wanted to talk to his seargent.
      What was his reaction? He went through my pockets, got my ID and wrote me up for midemeanor giving false information! I went to his sergeant the next day with my twisted bike and my story and he promised a full investigation.
      Well court day came around and I never heard anything about this "investigation". The public defender told me to plead guilty and pay six hundred bucks!
      Later I saw that cop quite a few times on campus and I told him I forgave him and I wasn't looking for revenge and he obviously felt guilty about the whole thing and became real buddy buddy like waving at me whenever he saw me. But the moral of the story is the campus cops have their nuts bunched up a bit too tight and don't really understand or particularly care about the law --much less have a reasonable sense of right and wrong.
      I hope this professor gets a decent lawyer and the unversity pays for it. You've got to draw the line on these campus pigs and draw it tight. If you let them make the decisions, I can tell you from unfortunate experience they'll take all they can get and use force to get it.
  • At my college, computer policy is defined a little more cut and dry. Pretty much anything on the unviersity systems has to be logged for the Freedom of Information Act, as we are a state (run by the state of Connecticut) school. Because the school, and hence the network, is owned by the state; pretty much everything that is owned by the state may be logged for FOI requests.

    It pretty much lays down the law: that the college can pretty much read anything that is on their computer, or their servers. Since I think that VT is public (owned by Virginia), they have to follow the same general ideas with their guidelines.

    Since they were forced to comply with FOI, the professor had no real expectation of privacy, as she knew that someone may eventually read her files, or anything on the server, at any time to comply with Freedom of Information requests.

    Now, if this is a private college, we have something else on our hands.

  • Reply to Almost Every Comment (Score:3, Informative)

    by bmasel ( 129946 ) <bmasel@@@tds...net> on Wednesday April 10, 2002 @12:06AM (#3314401) Journal

    VA Tech is a State School. Unlike the security department of a private employer, it's Police are State actors. As such, they are indeed constrained by the 4th Amendment, and any parallel language in the State Constitution.

    Justice Scalia, in Krillo [findlaw.com], the heat imaging case a year ago, still cites Katz [findlaw.com] (any relation?) favorably "As Justice Harlans oft-quoted concurrence described it, a Fourth Amendment search occurs when the government violates a subjective expectation of privacy that society recognizes as reasonable."

    Widely accepted professional doctrines of Acedemic Freedom, as benchmarks of social expectations, can thus trump the University's Acceptable Use Policies.

  • Ms. McCaughey said she is now concerned that discussions in online classrooms may be less private than those that take place in traditional ones.

    If it took something like this to raise that concern for the first time, then maybe it was a good thing. She should be concerned about the security of online discussions, if they are about sensitive topics. Not just because of possible police action, but to stop random snoopers.

  • First there is the incident of vandalism. Like this or not it is against the law. The campus police work for the state or in VA's situation the common wealth and must uphold the law according to the laws of that state and for that matter by the laws of that state. There is usually a clause in the law that states something to the affect of the law enforcement entity's responsibility is to uphold the law by all means including criminal investigation. The police are yet again the target of ingnorance and are under scrutiny for doing their job.
    The second item is the professor. I don't believe her. If there was not a search warrant then there is big trouble on the way for the entire department and the university and I can not see a Chief taking the risk of covering up the fact that there was not a search warrant. Search warrants aren't mysterious pieces of paper. They are legal documents that must have a signature outside of the law enforcement entity. Along with the signature of say a magistrate or a judge the document will note both the time and date of issue. With that said I will restate that I simply do not believe her. It seems to me that she was doing an awful lot of stalling, back-up files, on vacation, I deleted the e-mail, etc. I will grant you this she may be unfairly targeted but afterall she is the leader of women's rights on campus. If I was in the investigator's shoes my feet would hurt and I would have that department and those students that are most active in it at the top of my list of suspects.
    The third side of the coin is the University itself. I don't know where the rest of you have been over the last ten years but intellectual property rights are forsaken for a position at the university level. The feeling is if you use their facility and their time and get paid by them your work is theirs. This has led to many gripes and grumbles but I can trace it back to penicillin (sp.?). The University of Indianna held (still holds?) the patent for it. Did the university discover it? Did the university employ the British scientist that discovered it? The answer is no. But they held the 'intellectual rights' to it and maybe still do. Intellectual rights are not the only grievance facing professors these days. With the flood of professors tenure is becoming a thing of the past. I have to agree with a number of /. posters that argued the university had the right to do whatever they wanted with the computer. Just as they have the right to move her office or replace her trashcan or read her e-mail. The privacy issue is a whole can of worms but for now, right now, the professor had to sign a consent that in affect stating she should expect no privacy and the university could access her account and for that matter their computer. There is a way around the intellectual rights, privacy, etc. and that is in the form of a contract or in the contract for gaining tenure.
    I am not a deviant but I can think of a million ways to avoid the entire situation. The first would be to go back to school and get a law degree if you don't like the laws. The second would be to get a biology degree. The third would be to avoid supporting vandalism. The fourth would be to keep the mouth shut and the eyes open and just maybe you can see what's behind the big bright light in front of you as you enter the tunnel.
  • I can see it in the future "I can't submit my mp because the university confiscated my the code on my machine without fair warning... do you think I can have an extension?"
  • that i worked at a university recently that was developing software to track down sony specific trackinh program, meaning it looked for sony movies/songs/etc
  • Maybe she's just mad because they found her stash of lesbian hentai. ;)

    This case seems pretty cut-and-dry to me - the University decided they wanted their computer back, so they took it. It is a bit rude that they didn't give her a chance to back it up though - and the fact that they treated a Professor this way shows how bad the relationship between the teachers and administration at schools can be sometimes.

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