Ravi Blogs about IT Topics

I talked in the ATR on Monday, Nov 7 on three topics – E-Discovery, CALEA and Net Neutrality. All of these are issues that will have serious implications on how we do business in the future. There was a lot of interesting discussion around Net Neutrality than the other topics.
E-Discovery – This typically refers to the process of trying to discover ESI (Electronically Stored Information) in response to an inquiry. The inquiry could be internal or coming from a law enforcement agency. I explained how we take the privacy of an individual’s data very seriously and that despite the fact that there are many useful tools and techniques available for us to assist in an investigation, we follow strict procedures before we get there. We get direct inquiries from our own users or other external agencies about information. It can be as simple as “can you confirm that user A tried to get access to one of our computers on 01/23/2006 at 12:37 PM?” or a more detailed examination of E-mails. Our procedure is that such requests come to me and that I will get clearance from the Dean’s Office (for students), Academic Affairs (for faculty) or HR (for staff) before proceeding. In a few cases, such as the E-mail store being corrupt or a question about the delivery of an email or spam deletion, we fix the problem with the user’s consent or look ONLY in the logs to try to answer a question from the user.

CALEA – Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act. This is basically a ruling by FCC that all higher ed institutions should reconfigure their data network hardware to help law enforcement to be able to monitor traffic from a suspected user on our network. This was challenged in the courts and you can read a lot about this all over the net, but the best source for you in EDUCAUSE. Especially the FAQ.

There is no clear answer at this as to what we should be doing about this. The general consensus amongst the Higher Ed IT Organizations is, if we satisfy the following two conditions, we are exempt from CALEA:

• All access to the internet from our netowrk is by authenticated users.
• The hardware that actually connects us to the internet is not owned by us.

Unfortunately, we still have many points of guest access (a few machines in the library and wireless guest access). So, we need to close this down. Obviously this will cause a lot of inconvenience, but we may not have a choice. And we do not own the hardware that connects us to the internet. It is owned by Connecticut Education Network (CEN). However, they will be required to be CALEA compliant, so they have to change that hardware and pass on the cost to us. So, we wait…

In my personal opinion, this is just plain ridiculous. We are already required to help law enforment in investigating a crime. CALEA is just unnecessary burden on everyone and does not add any value. With most traffic going encrypted, the complexity of wiretapping is just too much and asking the University to designate a CALEA contact is even worse. But, personal opinions don’t count when the topic of discussion is the law of the land…

Net Neutrality – Again, there are many places on the web that one can go to read about this interesting topic. Basically, internet has evolved over the years in a way that as a consumer who is willing to pay to get access to the net, you are in control of where you want to go and what you want to see. In other words, you are paying for the access and you want the ISP to simply provide you the bandwidth and go away. In that sense, the access to content does not have any added preference as defined by the ISP.

During the past year, the congress passed telecommunications laws (which include access to the internet) without proper Net Neutrality protections. What this simply means is, the ISP can choose to influence the content that is available to you. The ISP can make financial deals with content providers so that as a consumer the content that you have access to can be influenced by these deals.

As an example (extreme of course), Google may be the preferred search engine when you go to Comcast, but AT&T may take you to Yahoo. Access to Google may be blocked altogether by AT&T, for example. The supporters of Net Neutrality have a series of arguments that support their cause. Primarily, the lack of it will curtail innovation and that the ISP is making a decision on behalf of the consumer.

Of course this is not as simple as what I have tried to describe here and I strongly encourage you to read both sides of the story. Chris Hogendorn, a faculty member in Economics, is very knowledgeable in this topic and contributed a lot to this discussion and beyond. We talked for another half an hour after the meeting.

The problem here as I understood in talking to Chris is that offering net neutrality protections at the ISP level by itself is not enough. Why is it that we never talk abou that level of neutrality at the content provider level. In other words, why is it OK for Google or Yahoo to selectively highlight certain content for their economic advantage but not OK for the ISP to do the same?

In my simplistic way of looking at this net neutrality issue, I sure hope we don’t get to a point where one of the other Wesleyan Universities in the US pays enough to certain ISPs so that their consumers will see them (and ONLY them) when they want to look at this Wesleyan University….Or even worse, that our pages load so slow…