Sitting alone in a dorm room and downloading information seems pretty benign. If nobody is watching, how could you get caught?
The Computer Science 4 scandal of Winter term, however, was a rude awakening to students that our use of the Internet can be traced to a certain degree -- a sitting alone surrounded by four walls does not guarantee privacy.
According to Bill Brawley, Kiewit Computation Center's director of user communications, Big Brother is not watching over students at the College -- but that does not mean the Orwellian force is completely absent either.
Brawley said owners of BlitzMail accounts receive exclusive access to their e-mail messages -- even if they are suspected of a crime. "The system is designed to ensure privacy," he said. "We don't turn that information over to anyone except the owner of the account."
He said neither police nor administrators are allowed to view a suspect's BlitzMail account -- but he then qualified his statement, admitting that if a court order or subpoena were produced, access would probably be granted.
Brawley he said the he could not think of any such instances.
All information in the BlitzMail system is saved to a series of databases in Kiewit -- even those messages that have been recently thrown in an account's "trash."
"When you delete a message it could be potentially retrieved, with great difficulty, for about two weeks," Brawley said. "But we would only do that for the owner of the account, and it's not something we'd do every day."
In addition to working to preserve students' freedom to e-mail what they want, Brawley said the Kiewit staff also works hard to allow students as much Internet-surfing freedom as possible. The College does not censor the Web pages that students have the ability to download. "There are no restrictions," he said. "We don't do any filtering."
But Brawley also said students may not enjoy absolute freedom forever. Big Brother may indeed by watching, but in a rather unlikely place.
According to Brawley, many universities currently prohibit their students from visiting websites, such as the popular napster.com, that provide MP3 musical selections, because such traffic often gets so heavy that it reduces the overall quality of the computing network.
He warned that if MP3 traffic at the College gets too heavy, Dartmouth students could potentially be prohibited from visiting such sites in the future.
"We are always watching because that really bears on another part of the communications code -- fair share of resources," he said.
Net users can get themselves into legal trouble by downloading and reusing copyrighted material -- an action for which the owner of such material would have the ability to prosecute. However, the consequences of such actions would be administered by the court system rather than the College itself.
According to Brawley, Kiewit cannot detect which students have downloaded what sites. The information is saved only to the cache of students' own computers.
"Without coming and looking at your computer there isn't any way that I could find that information out," he said.
Chair of the Computer Science Department Scot Drysdale told The Dartmouth that recent allegations of cheating in Computer Science 4 were in no way dependent upon the infringement of student privacy.
"We did have a list of website hits but those were basically port numbers," he said. Because the College numbers dorm room computer ports, it could determine what computers connected to CS 4 professor Rex Dwyer's site -- but could not prove exactly who had used those specific computers.
According to Drysdale, for privacy reasons, Kiewit refused to reveal the owners or locations of the computers corresponding to those port numbers.
Instead, accusations of academic dishonesty were levied only against those students whose assignments were almost identical to the answer key that had been left on the course website.
"There was no tracing of students via the computer from which they accessed the web site," he said, adding that many suspected cheaters were thought to have used public computers, in which case they probably would have remained anonymous anyway.
While individual students may not dwell in the shadow of Big Brother, online anonymity is not as secure as it may seem.
Site sponsors do have access to a certain degree of information about their virtual audience, and this could be exploited by people such as advertisers. Although surfers do not divulge their identities by merely clicking on certain web pages, Brawley did point out that "it might be possible with great difficulty to generally trace the incoming hit on one of these servers."
However, he also emphasized that the process is complicated and laborious, and that it is nearly impossible to obtain the actual identities of individuals.
While surfers may not relinquish their anonymity simply by clicking on Web pages, those who participate in newsgroup discussions or post their e-mail addresses on personal web pages are often targeted for junk e-mail.
