The NSA's Next Move: Silencing University Professors?

[xchrom]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/09/11-2



This actually happened yesterday:

A professor in the computer science department at Johns Hopkins, a leading American university, had written a post on his blog, hosted on the university's servers, focused on his area of expertise, which is cryptography. The post was highly critical of the government, specifically the National Security Agency, whose reckless behavior in attacking online security astonished him.

Professor Matthew Green wrote on 5 September:

I was totally unprepared for today's bombshell revelations describing the NSA's efforts to defeat encryption. Not only does the worst possible hypothetical I discussed appear to be true, but it's true on a scale I couldn't even imagine.
The post was widely circulated online because it is about the sense of betrayal within a community of technical people who had often collaborated with the government. (I linked to it myself.)

On Monday, he gets a note from the acting dean of the engineering school asking him to take the post down and stop using the NSA logo as clip art in his posts. The email also informs him that if he resists he will need a lawyer. The professor runs two versions of the same site: one hosted on the university's servers, one on Google's blogger.com service. He tells the dean that he will take down the site mirrored on the university's system but not the one on blogger.com. He also removes the NSA logo from the post. Then, he takes to Twitter.

Matthew Green @matthew_d_green

I received a request from my Dean this morning asking me to remove all copies of my NSA blog post from University servers.

[FreakinDJ]

1. Censorship - The NSAs Final Frontier

[jsr]

2. NSA eyes are upon you

is their message for today.

[SidDithers]

4. Which professor. Got a name?...nt

Sid

[SidDithers]

7. And he retired as Professor Emeritus...nt

Sid

[zazen]

5. it's tightly coupled higher ed policing itself to keep $

which is soooo much more effective. Foucault talked a lot about how we internalize disciplining the self so that it looks like we're free.

I haven't read the rest of the article, but I'd bet money the NSA or any related agency didn't make a single call. Rather, deans and research admins are terrified of losing grant dollars and major gifts, so they police the faculty much more than an external agency has to.

I see this all the time in education research. God forbid you question the corporatizing model of education "reform"--or your dollars will dry up. The scarcer the dollars, the more the competition, the more faculty are exhorted to shut up--through things like negative reviews _by their faculty peers_, I kid you not, who are afraid of entire departments being cut through statewide austerity measures. So they're eating their own.

Of course this isn't Nazi Germany and nothing approaches the horrors of the Holocaust. However, the dynamic of slowly having the people who are losing resources fight more amongst themselves and police everything they do rather than question the larger politics is a much milder version of how the Nazis mind-f**ked the Jews at every turn. Maybe it's just the proverbial crabs in a barrel, rather than crabs organizing to turn the f-ing barrel over. I'm sure there's some sociological term for it that I'm forgetting.