🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1991Jun14.130553.28202@oar.net> karl.kleinpaste@osc.edu writes:
>scotts@qsp.com writes:
>   No, not tricky.  You either tell the students (and all users) ahead of time
>   that their e-mail is not private, or you MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS.
>   You are the system administrator, not the professor.  
>
>Imagine yourself walking through the corporate offices late at night,
>meandering past the treasurer's office.  You notice through the glass
>door that someone is working over a safe in that office's back corner
>in the dark via a flashlight.  How do you respond?

Taking the analogy over into the gov't side - the NSA (National Security
Agency) regularly monitors electronic transmissions of all sorts within
the USA. As such they'd regularly come across transmissions of illicit 
activites - people making phone calls from public phone booths about drug
drops, etc. Because of the protection against "unlawful search and 
siezure" (or was it privacy?) they can't tell any of their sister 
law-enforcement agencies about what they've uncovered, but have to 
pretend it never happened. 

There is the same kind of thing going on at other governmental levels
as well - wanted people on Social Security or other gov't program, and 
the administrators of those respective programs can't tell law-enforcement
agencies where those people are for the same reason outlined above. 

>"I'm just an engineer, not the security guard."

The difference here is the treasurer's office is a (visually) public
place. You can see inside - who's in there, what they're doing. If you 
see something going on in public, or someplace you're supposed to be 
that shouldn't be then you should report it. Email, though, is not 
considered a 'public' place - much like the US mails.

>Gads, I hope not.

>Come on, people, a little ethical consistency, huh?
>Anyone who witnesses a crime and does nothing to stop it is a party to
>it.  In fact, screwed up though the USA legal system surely is, it
>makes a lot of sense that certain crimes are defined in terms of the
>failure _of_the_citizenry_ to report other crimes.

>It is the responsibility of every citizen to uphold the law.  Remember
>the phrase, "We The People"?  We The People are supposed to define how
>law and order are managed, and We The People don't (or didn't used to)
>abdicate that _authority_ to any goddamnable police power.

It's not an abdication, but a vesting of the authority of the society 
which you are a memeber to the police forces. 

Thing is, as I understand it - there's only a few things that police 
officers can do that any Johnny Q. Public on the street can't do. 

However "We The People" can't  be allowed to make up or interpret
laws in any way we please. This leads to legal chaos as everyone 
interprets or makes up laws to match their feeling of the moment. 
And there's no justice in that kind of inconsistency.

>I'm going to assume agreement by all that cheating within the
>university is an academic crime.  If you see it, and do nothing about
>it, _you_ are as much the problem as the cheaters themselves.

That's not the question though. Do you want to give sysadmin's such 
power to search student or other email? This kind of license can 
easily lead to a "big brother" atmosphere. If a prof suspected a student 
of cheating they could 'request' a friendly sysadmin to check into the 
student's materials for evidence. 

>You people who want to turn blind eyes to all these problems really
>sicken me.  Who is going to solve these problems if _you_ don't?

The issue isn't whether the cheating was wrong or not - but rather where
do you draw the line between administration of the systems and keeping 
things running smoothly, and in an open and free environment, and one
where "big brother" prevails, and people may self-censure their email 
or other works of potentially politically-incorrect text because somebody
"might see it"? This stifles the very environment that Universities are 
supposed to foster. And this is Not Good.

>Citizenship is not a spectator sport.  Spectators are mere subjects.

I agree. But let's not cause too much collateral damage in 
the process, ok?

------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
Tim Kuehn			 TDK Consulting Services  (519)-888-0766
timk@wynnds.xenitec.on.ca  -or-  !{watmath|lsuc}!xenitec!wynnds!timk
Valpo EE turned loose on unsuspecting world! News at 11!
"You take it seriously when someone from a ballistics research lab calls you."
Heard at a Unix user's meeting discussing connectivity issues.