"Graduate students at Northeastern University were able to organize and beat back an attempt at introducing invasive surveillance devices that were quietly placed under desks at their school," reports Motherboard:
Early in October, Senior Vice Provost David Luzzi installed motion sensors under all the desks at the school's Interdisciplinary Science & Engineering Complex (ISEC), a facility used by graduate students and home to the "Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute" which studies surveillance. These sensors were installed at night — without student knowledge or consent — and when pressed for an explanation, students were told this was part of a study on "desk usage," according to a blog post by Max von Hippel, a Privacy Institute PhD candidate who wrote about the situation for the Tech Workers Coalition's newsletter.... Students began to raise concerns about the sensors, and an email was sent out by Luzzi attempting to address issues raised by students.... Luzzi wrote, the university had deployed "a Spaceti occupancy monitoring system" that would use heat sensors at groin level to "aggregate data by subzones to generate when a desk is occupied or not." Luzzi added that the data would be anonymized, aggregated to look at "themes" and not individual time at assigned desks, not be used in evaluations, and not shared with any supervisors of the students. Following that email, an impromptu listening session was held in the ISEC. At this first listening session, Luzzi asked that grad student attendees "trust the university since you trust them to give you a degree...." The students at the Privacy Institute started hacking into the sensors and working on an open source guide to help other students do the same. Privacy Institute students learned that the devices were not secure and that the data was not password protected. After hacking the devices, students wrote an open letter to Luzzi and Aoun asking for the sensors to be removed because they were intimidating, part of a poorly conceived study, and deployed without IRB approval.
von Hippel notes that many members of the computer science department were also in a union, and thus networked together for a quick mass response. Motherboard writes that the controversy ultimately culminated with another listening session in which Luzzi "struggles to quell concerns that the study is invasive, poorly planned, costly, and likely unethical."
After that, von Hippel took to social media and shared a thread documenting the events from the secret installation of the sensors to the listening session that day. The sensors are taken away.
