To the Editor:
In the fall of my senior year, I attended an informal Safety and Security meeting in my cluster -- a sort of question/answer/scare the 'shmen kind of thing. At this meeting, Sergeant Rebel Roberts told us about her desire to have all our campus buildings on an ID card access security system. I immediately asked her what she had to say about the rather obvious privacy issues that would arise with such a system. She seemed confused -- she couldn't grasp the rather simple idea that some of us private citizens like to be just that: private. It made no sense to her that I might not want the College to know my every movement on this campus. No matter how I tried to make her see, the response was always the same, "If you're not doing anything wrong, it shouldn't matter." She tried to convince me that the ID card system would enable Safety and Security to identify students who commit crimes. Give me a break -- we all know that doors can and will be propped or held open, and we all know that ID's can be lost or stolen. You could drop your ID on Mass Row and be picked up by Safety and Security two hours later because someone used it to get into a building and then vandalized something. Information about our personal movements should not be up for grabs. A system that monitors the movements of students provides too much potential for the violation of privacy and abuse of power. Lock the doors and put phones outside for friends and deliveries -- yes, good plan. This can certainly be done without the use of barcodes, but I get the feeling that if it could, the administration would have us all walk around with radio tracking devices embedded in our necks.
