Napolitano Brings Big Brother to U of California

FrgMstr

FrgMstr

Just Plain Mean
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It looks as if University of California President Janet Napolitano was looking to keep this on the down-low, but that is not going to happen now as some of the other academic elite seem to have a high regard for privacy. Hit up the Daily Bruin, we read it every day, for all the 411.


The University of California Office of the President has installed computer hardware capable of monitoring email transactions among computers across the University of California system.

In the email sent out to members of faculty, Ligon said the UCOP asked members of the committee to keep this monitoring a secret. He added he thinks as a member of a UC Academic Senate committee, continued silence on behalf of the committee will make them an accomplice in violation of policies of shared governance and academic freedom.
 
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It's technically their servers and anything on it they can monitor. That being said, there are at the very least some serious ethical questions that should be asked.
 
Yeah, this will go over well at Berkeley. Still a bit puzzled by the Napolitano hire.
 
Whew, finally something to negate years of illegal spying from the last US administration!
 
Climber said:
Why? Extreme liberal for an extremely liberal school system. match made in heaven.
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Secretary of Homeland Security, "Big Brother", going to watch over UCBerkeley and Santa Cruz? Doesn't matter that it was under a Democratic presidency.
 
KarsusTG said:
It's technically their servers and anything on it they can monitor. That being said, there are at the very least some serious ethical questions that should be asked.
Click to expand...

There are a ton of legit uses for it. To the best of my knowledge, they have an ongoing mandate in the UC system to share services to reduce costs. This involves treating the whole network of UC schools and their existing networks as a single system.

Given the previous separate nature, and the likely internal balkanization of services, they likely have a metric shit ton of unauthorized email servers that people with tenure who can't be fired protect from being shut off properly, and cutting them off via network controls may be prohibitive, or simply not amenable to internal politics of the UC system.

So they may be doing this to deal with any of the following:
-phishing attempts
-compromised servers getting them blacklisted
-tracking down open relays or other bad behavior the imperils the rest of the userbase.
-monitoring and enforcing HIPPA compliance, ITAR compliance, FERPA compliance, as well as a boatload of other potential acronyms and initialisms they have to be compliant with or be at peril of millions of dollars in fines annually.

This article is just stupid academics at a very left leaning university being dicks abotu something they likely don't understand.

“This is suitable for places like the defense department, not for a school,” added Ligon. “The way it’s being done does not align with our principles.”

Yeah well, you get DoD grant money for any projects? Guess what, you get to have DoD levels of controls. You have health info? You do? guess what you can get hit up at a million a pop for if you don't keep it private. Etc. etc.

Yeah, you are some fucktard in the philosophy department, you don't grasp why your traffic is monitored because you are special snowflake that must be treated differently. There isn't necessarily time or money to deal with that though junior.
 
raz-0 said:
So they may be doing this to deal with any of the following:
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The reason was supposedly in reaction to a cyber attack on UCLA when email monitoring was installed last August (as a "systemwide cyber threat detection"). This blew up a few days ago when Napolitano and another head sent out memos to "clarify" the reasons behind the software, given concerns about it (meaning it wasn't really that secret... UC employees were complaining about the potential for spying on faculty).

Whoever decided to do this should be fired just for not understanding the optics, and Napolitano, who approved it, already had suspect judgement about privacy before this.
 
KarsusTG said:
It's technically their servers and anything on it they can monitor. That being said, there are at the very least some serious ethical questions that should be asked.
Click to expand...

Here is the reporter's words.

According to a letter by Ethan Ligon, an associate professor of agricultural and resource economics at UC Berkeley, the hardware is designed to monitor and possibly record all network traffic, including email traffic, coming in and out of Berkeley’s computer networks.
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The hardware is designed to record or it isn't, so why the word "possibly"? Any decent sized Enterprise Environment wants to know, and will monitor their traffic to know how their equipment resources are being used, where are performance issues. You can't know what's normal if you don't capture stats all the time. You can't react to being spammed if you don't monitor your systems before your shit crashes and burns.

So my question before going postal is, what is this hardware or system, how IS it being used, not how could it be used. Face it, an Admin can pretty much get into anything because physical access to a trained individual is a key all on it's own.

But this article has too many "possiblies" and "coulds" for anyone to get upset over.

Oh, and the part about the UCOA or whoever waiting a few months before telling people, nothing at all underhanded about that either. IT guys are more then aware that if you are going to consider standing up a new system like this you will often want to run it in an evaluation mode to determine if it is really going to give you what the vendor promises or if it will have serious impact on other systems. You bring it online, evaluate it and make a decision, then if you are going to go live with it, then you worry about telling people.
 
raz-0 said:
There are a ton of legit uses for it. To the best of my knowledge, they have an ongoing mandate in the UC system to share services to reduce costs. This involves treating the whole network of UC schools and their existing networks as a single system.

Given the previous separate nature, and the likely internal balkanization of services, they likely have a metric shit ton of unauthorized email servers that people with tenure who can't be fired protect from being shut off properly, and cutting them off via network controls may be prohibitive, or simply not amenable to internal politics of the UC system.

So they may be doing this to deal with any of the following:
-phishing attempts
-compromised servers getting them blacklisted
-tracking down open relays or other bad behavior the imperils the rest of the userbase.
-monitoring and enforcing HIPPA compliance, ITAR compliance, FERPA compliance, as well as a boatload of other potential acronyms and initialisms they have to be compliant with or be at peril of millions of dollars in fines annually.

This article is just stupid academics at a very left leaning university being dicks abotu something they likely don't understand.

“This is suitable for places like the defense department, not for a school,” added Ligon. “The way it’s being done does not align with our principles.”

Yeah well, you get DoD grant money for any projects? Guess what, you get to have DoD levels of controls. You have health info? You do? guess what you can get hit up at a million a pop for if you don't keep it private. Etc. etc.

Yeah, you are some fucktard in the philosophy department, you don't grasp why your traffic is monitored because you are special snowflake that must be treated differently. There isn't necessarily time or money to deal with that though junior.
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Agreed.
 
Having lived under her regime as governor in AZ, I can tell you she is diddling herself when wielding the power of reading 'private' e-mails. She is very bad and needs to be destroyed in an Ash vs Evil dead kind of way. This is fact. KTHXBY!
 
pxc said:
Whew, finally something to negate years of illegal spying from the last US administration!
Click to expand...

last? I thought, even just the stuff we know about, is still going on.
 
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