After reading the many issues raised about electronic privacy pursued
by such groups as privacy.org and epic.org, as well as the ACLU, I had
assumed that educational facilities would have limited rights to make
use of electronic information or files as employers do.
Particularly after reading the Department of Justice description of
Cyberstalking, and how to avoid harassment from making any use of the
internet (hence the use of just my first name).
What I learned is that the worst example of the actual complete lack
of electronic privacy, as a topic the children going on to these
schools and being asked to use electronic billboards for their
cl*****, etc., with the urging that doing so was completely safe and
that all postings were tem****ary and private to the schools, is the
school were the internet as we know it began, with the development of
Mosaic, the first web-browser, and evidently, the archetype for
cyberstalking, the University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign.
The school has known examples of persons who started as students there
who do cyberstalk with administrative enablement with university
computer equipment, and evidently those persons developed an archive
of all the postings ever made by anyone to UIUC computer systems,
without their knowledge or permission, and last November of 2003,
ex****ted those archives to many sites worldwide external to the
school, including Google Groups, where any person who ever used a
university computer system has been turned into a public spectacle for
the rest of their lives by the school and its administration.
As the FBI and many other groups warn, and as I was horrified to see,
I believe that in***bant students and the public need to be warned
that schools, despite FERPA which is alleged to not cover electronic
records and files, are alleged to be completely outside the law and to
have no restraint on their use of any material on any computer system
they have access to, regarding any person, without any need for
notice, warning this would be the case, etc., much less permission.
That being the case, I also believe the fact needs to be aired, and
students who want to attend such schools need to have electronic
privacy gear if they are forced into using the schools' computer
systems, completely open to any use for the rest of their existence,
including the publication of the collection of all of them developed
by UIUC.
So much for privacy, civil-liberties, electronic privacy, or FERPA.
John
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