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The Register reports on an uproar following the discovery of an Internet traffic spying device on campus at the University of California Berkeley:
Academics at the University of California Berkeley have protested after it emerged that management had put a secret data slurping device into the campus that was mapping and storing all network traffic. "The intrusive device is capable of capturing and analyzing all network traffic to and from the Berkeley campus and has enough local storage to save over 30 days of all this data," Ethan Ligon, a member of the Senate-Administration Joint Committee on Campus Information Technology, wrote in an e-mail to fellow faculty members, the SF Chronicle reports.
Benjamin Hermalin, chairman of the UC Berkeley Academic Senate, also expressed serious concerns about the monitoring, and about the storage of the data off-campus. As a third party company is running the device, rather than the university's IT staff, there were also privacy issues to consider.
The device was installed after UCLA Health was hacked in June. Who ordered the installation of the device? No other than Former Governor of Arizona and United States Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, who is now the President of the University of California.
A statement from the chair of the University Committee on Academic Computing and Communications has this to say about the monitoring:
We have been informed that the monitoring of communications looked only for "malware signatures" and Internet traffic patterns. As neither message content nor browsing activity were monitored, we believe this level of monitoring can be appropriate.
We have been informed that monitoring of transmissions occurs only at campus edge, and does not capture internal campus traffic. Monitoring of traffic patterns for a pre-defined purpose can be appropriate given that results are maintained for a limited time and limited use.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 07 2016, @04:51AM
Except one time, which by accident, as I was doing some upgrade or another, a connection to the Internet at six in the morning caught my attention... like no one is supposed to be at the offices at this time, where is this connection from? Well, on of our top-level guys had a connection to the network from home and what the hell is this guy doing at this ungodly hour?.... Watching porn!
I found so funny that this guy, probably before breakfast and a shower, was using his connection to watch porn that I could not resist later that day to drop some comment like, "Nice site you found, I didn't know about it" or some shit like it. The guy went pale then red, turned about and left without a word... he was a devout christian (or so he seemed) and we never spoke about it again.
Just for fun I traced his Internet connection for some weeks but he never used the company's connection for porn again...
Please send me your resume so that I know never to hire your completely unprofessional ass.
So what is stopping these guys from looking at emails, Internet connections and any other data? How are those rules (assuming they exist) being reviewed and enforced? Who is supervising? Who is watching the supervisor?
God, there are some many things wrong with such a setup that I can't list them all!
Which only goes to show that not only are you unethical, you're ignorant and likely incompetent as well. Thanks for letting us all know.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 07 2016, @10:32AM
Too bad this got modded as "Troll." This snip from the parent, for example...
the only thing stopping me was my lack of desire to look at someone else's data.
...is a red flag, and I wouldn't hire you either.
The "only thing" stopping you should be your code of ethics and sense of responsibility as a System Administrator.
See here, if you need a refresher:
https://www.usenix.org/lisa/system-administrators-code-ethics [usenix.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 07 2016, @02:10PM
Thanks for the link to the code of ethics. For over twenty years I have held myself and my employees to nearly identical standards but I didn't know someone had documented them so nicely. I'm going to hang a copy in each of our IT offices, server closets, and in the break areas near the various labor law posters. The people who trust us deserve to know that we take this stuff seriously...