Big brother?

Inside Higher Ed reports.

U of California faculty members object to new email monitoring

“Secret monitoring is ongoing.”

Those ominous words captured the attention of many faculty members at the University of California at Berkeley’s College of Natural Resources when they received an email message from a colleague on Thursday telling them that a new system to monitor computer networks had been secretly installed on all University of California campuses months ago, without letting any but a few people know about it.

“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 (‘full packet capture’). This can be presumed to include your email, all the websites you visit, all the data you receive from off campus or data you send off campus,” said the email from Ethan Ligon, associate professor of agricultural and resource economics. He is one of six members of the Academic Senate-Administration Joint Committee on Campus Information Technology.