[Air-l] turnitin issue [and privacy+security of students]

[Miraj Khaled]

well, are we sure it is  only 'hash' of the papers?
have turnitin made that clear? any way,  Dan, the Feds
may not even need to reconstruct the full papers. they
can just execute search strings on arbitray terms and
then just put the author names into the "No Fly List".

but even if we leave this aside there's another issue
of concern. let's say a young muslim student [in
Canada] is given an assignment to write a paper on
Contemporary US policy in the Middle East. so if s/he
knows that his/her paper would be required to be
sumbitted to the turnitin database and can be searched
at will by US authorities. would s/he be freely
expressing his/her opinion against the US government
and their policy if s/he knows that s/he may be
travelling to US in near future? This may seem
far-fetched, but can any of you [or turnitin] assure
us  [the students] that the rights of the authors of
submitted papers are NOT being trampled??

I thank Richard Stevens for bringing forward some of
the scenarios that may happen and probably IS already
happening. I remember reading some times ago of a
student in US who wrote a graduate thesis on the
location/vulnerability of network/power grids and
other critical infrastructures and mapping them on
topographic maps. all the data were gleaned from
publicly available sources. yet the feds heard of this
thesis and basically restricted it's publication and
even denied the author access to his own thesis paper.
I know this is not related to turnitin, but this is
one example that is of concern to me at least.


miraj khaled
============
Graduate Student
Simon Fraser University


--- air-l-request at listserv.aoir.org wrote:


Message: 15
Date: 09 Mar 2007 12:09:47 -0600
From: burkx006 at umn.edu
Subject: Re: [Air-l] turnitin issue [and
privacy+security of students]
To: air-l at listserv.aoir.org


On Mar 9 2007, Richard Stevens wrote:

>Why would the gov't be interested in electronic forms
of student 
>papers? Well, considering that Homeland Security has
in the past 
>stated a focus on incoming exchange student programs
(thereby 
>granting student visas) as a high-level security
threat for allowing 
>potential terrorists to enter the country, I'd say
this desired 
>access is not beyond the realm of interest to our
government.

Although I think this is a good point, everything we
know about Turnitin indicates that they are storing a
hash of the paper, rather than the full 
paper itself. I can see that the feds might well be
interested in the topics of certain student papers,
but I am not at all certain that the content can be
reconstructed from what could be subpeoned or NSL'd.
DLB

-- 
Dan L. Burk
Oppenheimer, Wolff & Donnelly Professor
University of Minnesota Law School
229 19th Avenue South
Minneapolis, MN  55455
**********************************
voice: 612-626-8726
fax: 612-625-2011
bits: burkx006 at umn.edu

> ------------------------------
> 
> Message: 8
> Date: Fri, 9 Mar 2007 11:08:31 -0600
> From: Richard Stevens <stevensr at smu.edu>
> Subject: Re: [Air-l] turnitin issue [and
> privacy+security of students]
> To: air-l at listserv.aoir.org
> 
> Why would the gov't be interested in electronic
> forms of student 
> papers? Well, considering that Homeland Security has
> in the past 
> stated a focus on incoming exchange student programs
> (thereby 
> granting student visas) as a high-level security
> threat for allowing 
> potential terrorists to enter the country, I'd say
> this desired 
> access is not beyond the realm of interest to our
> government.
> 
> The relative ease of student visas granted to young
> men and women 
> from abroad has been one fo the chief arguments for
> increasing the 
> surveillance of library use, allowing government
> access to school 
> records, etc.
> 
> What a student writes in a university classroom
> should (in my humble 
> opinion) be seen as a product of an experimental
> period in one's 
> life. Probably never before are afterwards will a
> student be exposed 
> to the opportunity for intellectual exchange and
> informational 
> resources.
> 
> And I'd hate to think that one of my middle east
> students would be 
> impugned by our government because a paper on
> nontraditional 
> approaches to the problem of terrorism (for example)
> violated the 
> contemporary political sensitivities of whomever
> happened to in power.
> 
> Not taking up this branch of the argument, just
> acknowledging that it 
> does exist.
> 
> -Rick
> 
> >I am as concerned about electronic privacy as
> anyone -- and far more
> >concerned than most -- but I am having a difficult
> time seeing why the
> >government would want to access a hash of a student
> paper, or what might be
> >the privacy interests that would be violated if
> they did.
> >
> >There is plenty of other stored student data
> (health records, library
> >usage, brower logs) to spend time worrying about.
> >
> >DLB
> >










 
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