p2pnet - rss feed: Professor in Tor trouble
p2pnet.net News:- “At 9:15 one Thursday morning, there came a polite knock on my mostly closed office door. I was expecting the knock. A student was coming to talk to me about getting into one of my courses, which he needed to graduate. So when I heard the knock, I said, ‘C’mon in, Kyle.” Someone said, ‘Hello?’ and came in, along with two smartly dressed men extending business cards to me. I recognized the speaker as a network-security technician in my university’s office of information-technology services. The other men were not familiar, but a quick glance at their cards told me they were detectives on our campus police force. They closed my office door behind them, sat down, took out notepads and pens, and ……”
The above is the intro from Paul Cesarini, an assistant professor of visual communication and technology education at Bowling Green State University, in a Chronicle of Higher Education story.
Clearly, Cesarini must have been up to no good to justify the mob-handed approach. What dastardly offence or offences had he committed?
He’d been using The Onion Router, or Tor, an open source application people use to surf anonymously
As Cesarini describes it,it’s a, “browser plug-in, it thwarts online traffic analysis and related forms of Internet surveillance by sending your data packets through different routers around the world. As each packet moves from one router to the next, it is encoded with encrypted routing information, and the previous layer of such information is peeled away - hence the ‘onion’ in the name’.”
“Of course, anonymous Web surfing can be used to conceal fraud and other forms of electronic malfeasance,” says the story. “That was why the police had come to see me. They told me that only two people on our campus were using Tor: me and someone they suspected of engaging in an online scam. The detectives wanted to know whether the other user was a former student of mine, and why I was using Tor.”
However, “I’d read about it for some time, was planning to discuss it in two courses I teach, and figured I should have some experience using it before I described it to my students. The courses in question both deal with controlling technology, diffusing it throughout society, and freedom and censorship online.”
The detectives and network-security technician listened patiently to me, wearing their best poker faces. They then gave me a copy of the university’s responsible-use policy, which employees must agree to abide by when we first sign up for our e-mail accounts. They pointed out that my actions violated at least three provisions of that policy.
And they went on to ask Cesarini to stop using Tor, and avoid covering it in class.
However, “it is being used all around the world, by people in countries that restrict their access to information, by corporate whistle-blowers, and by digital-rights activists,” he says in the Chronicle of Higher Education post.” It’s even being used by average people like me, as a way to keep innocuous and personal online activities private.”
He adds:
“Finally, they shook my hand, thanked me for talking with them, reminded me that I was probably violating the responsible-use policy, and left. They had bigger game to catch: the other Tor user on the campus.
“A moment later, I heard another knock on my door. One of the detectives had come back to ask if I would reconsider my position. I told him that while I would think about giving up Tor, I honestly felt that this was a clear case of academic freedom, and I could not bow to external pressure. I reminded him that Tor is a perfectly legal, open-source program that serves a wide variety of legitimate needs around the world.”
Also See:
Chronicle of Higher Education - Caught in the Network, February 9, 2007
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February 9th, 2007 at 8:05 pm
I was fired because I used Tor.
February 10th, 2007 at 8:11 am
you were ‘tor’minated from your position?
February 11th, 2007 at 12:59 am
That’s terrible. You should sue on the grounds that you were preserving your freedom on speech.
How any respectable ISP (emphasis on respectable) could object to Tor usage is absurd to me.
February 13th, 2007 at 12:22 pm
In the U.S. you have no freedom of speech at work, your rights are far more limited than they are outside the work environment
March 14th, 2007 at 2:41 pm
I’m writing a story about this incident — if you want to talk to me about your experiences please email me at meverit -at- bgsu -dot- edu. Thank you!!