The Chronicle of Higher Education has an amazing story by a brave prof, Paul Cesarini, who got leaned on by his university's IT department to stop using Tor, the anonymizing network tool. They even wanted him to stop teaching it. Cesarini stuck to his guns — and won.
My visitors next produced page after page of logs detailing my apparent use of Tor. While I couldn't dispute most of the details in the logs, they seemed inaccurate. For example, the technician said I had been using Tor earlier that morning. In fact, I had been at Wal-Mart that morning looking for a good deal on an HDTV; I had reached my office only about five minutes earlier.
More important, the logs did not prove any wrongdoing on my part. All they demonstrated was that I, like thousands of others around the world, had installed and infrequently used Tor. In my case, of course, there was no wrongdoing.
Nonetheless, my visitors made two requests: that I stop using Tor, and that I avoid covering it in class.
Having been on the administrative end of academic technology, I appreciate the difficulties facing the information-technology staff. No one pats you on the back if nothing goes wrong, but if something does – if a virus or worm sweeps through the campus's network infrastructure, or someone hijacks some computers to churn out spam – you are off everyone's Christmas-card list. The last thing my former colleagues needed was some smarmy faculty member spouting off about academic freedom and threatening to demonstrate Tor to 100-plus students each semester.
Their job is to protect the network that allows me to do my job: to teach classes that are mostly or entirely online, and to conduct research. If they weren't here as the first or even only line of defense against the unscrupulous elements of our technological society, my university would cease to function. It's as simple as that.
(via /.)
