Students Against Mass Surveillance on Campus
studentsagainstsurveillance.com
studentsagainstsurveillance.com
For instance, if you use a student ID as a wifi login, that ties your MAC address to your identity. Then the wifi access points report which MACs they've seen, and some (thanks Cisco) let you query historical data by MAC. This has legitimate uses for tracking stolen items but frequently no privacy controls or oversight.
Add a little machine learning and you can also identify people's associates with decent accuracy.
Not only did the surveillance help in nabbing the criminals in a short time, it also helped prevent the same happen to other students as the thieves were caught looking for other scapegoats near by.
What is needed is oversight on this technology. Not outright banning. There is good and bad for any technology, surveillance is no different.
Maybe we'll agree some day that this level of surveillance is a price we're willing to pay, but that needs a rigorous and well-informed public debate.
Our letter ends by calling on the U.S. government to "bring the NSA back within the bounds of the constitution," not to scrap the NSA entirely.
Hope this clarifies. :-)
The NSA/GCHQ is a nation-state level issue, effecting populaces on the same scale.
> governments monitor our communications and social media activity
> The fact of the matter is that if you're using the Internet, you can bet the NSA is watching. They keep a record of what you’ve visited and whom you’ve been talking to. The NSA has the ability to build a complete picture of your day-to-day activities.
> if you have called a Pizza Hut, and a known drug dealer has called that Pizza Hut, then the NSA is currently keeping records of your actions -- and the actions of everyone you’ve spoken to.
It also addresses the good - there isn't any, or at least no good reason has been given:
> If it’s to prevent terrorism or keep the public safe, it’s not working. On December 12, 2013, the President’s Review Group found that this data collection was “not essential to preventing attacks”.
If there's a lot of bad (it gives details) and no known good ... I believe their point is, why have it in the first place?
"In societies where there is mass surveillance, it’s harder for people to think, learn, and explore. "
US, England, France, Germany, Sweden have mass surveillance. All leaders in progress, innovations, and exploration.
Cuba, Venezuela, Vietnam, Brazil, Argentina, Greece, Iraq, .....you get the idea. They don't.
"Privacy is important not only for students and academics, but also for journalists, lawyers, activists, doctors, entrepreneurs -- anyone who wants to think and act freely without worrying about who is watching them and why."
In this country, we have freedom of press. Much more important than privacy. Surveillance doesn't prevent you from acting freely. Living in an authoritorian country does. So you can't curse out the president and hold protests.
"Additionally, privacy helps ensure that everyone in our society is treated fairly, no matter their religion, sexuality, race, or other traits."
What? Huh?
More importantly, the US government actively takes steps to stop a free press. Take for example the recent attempts to stop Glenn Greenwald, punish Snowden, etc. The US govt also takes active steps to push the "free" press in particular directions, such as hiring retired commanders to pose as independent analysts to bolster the Iraq war, or by infiltrating online news networks to post via shills.
How exactly is the press "free"?
Is there any evidence of this? Why would monitoring students' social media activity and emails negatively affect their ability to learn?
In “The Chilling Effects of Surveillance," a study done by Stanford University psychologists Gregory White and Philip Zimbardo, participants were placed under varying levels of surveillance as they were asked their opinions on the severity of marijuana penalties. Those who were under surveillance (told that their answers would be shared with the police for training purposes) were more likely to denounce pot use.
This happens with writers too: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/01/how_surveilla...
The study you cited [1] is an interesting read, but its applicability to mass surveillance is questionable. Being informed that your opinions on a specific topic - of which you are acutely aware are being immediately recorded - will definitely be reported to the police, is not the same as the more vague notion of some unknown entity recording and possibly analysing your everyday words. There may be a perceptual difference between personal surveillance and mass surveillance, which is not addressed in that study. As an analogy, consider the ubiquitous, largely unnoticed CCTV coverage in urban areas, versus the acutely uncomfortable feeling of being followed down the street - the two perceptions are quite different.
That survey of writers linked by Schneier [2] describes its limitations - namely, that it is not really representative of all writers, only those that self-selected (from an email sent to them on the topic of government surveillance) to answer the survey, and that the sample sizes are relatively small. Also, the writers surveyed are all affiliated with the organisation conducting the survey, an advocacy group for freedom of expression. This may well bias the results towards that group rather than writers in general. Indeed, the report authors explicitly state: "the findings cannot be generalized to represent all writers in any given region or level of freedom."
Another point specific to students is that, if they choose to pursue an academic career, it necessitates publishing research to a wide audience (wider than their professional colleagues, at least). Surveillance involves the intrusion of privacy, but publication is essentially the opposite of privacy, so how can it be negatively affected by surveillance, and mass surveillance in particular?
[1] http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?Location=U2&doc=GetTRDo...
[2] http://www.pen.org/sites/default/files/Global%20Chilling_01-...