"Don't spy on a privacy lab" (and other career advice for university provosts)
This is a wild and hopeful story: grad students at Northeastern successfully pushed back against invasive digital surveillance in their workplace, through solidarity, fearlessness, and the bright light of publicity. Itâs a tale of hand-to-hand, victorious combat with the âshitty technology adoption curve.â
Whatâs the âshitty tech adoption curve?â Itâs the process by which oppressive technologies are normalized and spread. If you want to do something awful with techâââsay, spy on people with a camera 24/7âââyou need to start with the people who have the least social capital, the people whose objections are easily silenced or overridden.
Thatâs why all our worst technologies are first imposed on refugees -> prisoners -> kids -> mental patients -> poor people, etc. Then, these technologies climb the privilege gradient: blue collar workers -> white collar workers -> everyone. Following this pathway lets shitty tech peddlers knock the rough edges off their wares, inuring us all to their shock and offense.
https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/great-taylors-ghost/#solidarity-or-bust
20 years ago, if you ate dinner under the unblinking eye of a CCTV, it was because you were housed in a supermax prison. Today, itâs because you were unwise enough to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for âhome automationâ from Google, Apple, Amazon or another âluxury surveillanceâ vendor.
Northeasternâs Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Complex (ISEC) is home to the âCybersecurity and Privacy Institute,â where grad students study the harms of surveillance and the means by which they may be reversed. If thereâs one group of people who are prepared to stand athwart the shitty tech adoption curve, it is the CPI grad students.
Which makes it genuinely baffling that Northeasternâs Senior Vice Provost for Research decided to install under-desk heat sensors throughout ISEC, overnight, without notice or consultation. The provost signed the paperwork that brought the privacy institute into being.
Students throughout ISEC were alarmed by this move, but especially students on the sixth floor, home to the Privacy Institute. When they demanded an explanation, they were told that the university was conducting a study on âdesk usage.â This rang hollow: students at the Privacy Institute have assigned desks, and they badge into each room when they enter it.
As Privacy Institute PhD candidate Max von Hippel wrote, âReader, we have assigned desks, and we use a key-card to get into the room, so, they already know how and when we use our desks.â
https://twitter.com/maxvonhippel/status/1578048837746204672
So why was the university suddenly so interested in gathering fine-grained data on desk usage? I asked von Hippel and he told me: âThey are proposing that grad students share desks, taking turns with a scheduling web-app, so administrators can take over some of the space currently used by grad students. Because as you know, research always works best when you have to schedule your thinking time.â
Thatâs von Hippelâs theory, and Iâm going to go with it, because the provost didnât offer a better one in the flurry of memos and âlistening sessionsâ that took place after the ISEC students arrived at work one morning to discover sensors under their desks.
This is documented in often hilarious detail in von Hippelâs thread on the scandal, in which the university administrators commit a series of unforced errors and the grad students run circles around them, in a comedy of errors straight out of âAnimal House.â
https://twitter.com/maxvonhippel/status/1578048652215431168
After the sensors were discovered, the students wrote to the administrators demanding their removal, on the grounds that there was no scientific purpose for them, that they intimidated students, that they were unnecessary, and that the university had failed to follow its own rules and ask the Institutional Review Board (IRB) to review the move as a human-subjects experiment.
The letter was delivered to the provost, who offered âan impromptu listening sessionâ in which he alienated students by saying that if they trusted the university to âgiveâ them a degree, they should trust it to surveil them. The students bristled at this characterization, noting that students deliver research (and grant money) to âmake it tick.â
[Image ID: Sensors arrayed around a kitchen table at ISEC]
The students, believing the provost was not taking them seriously, unilaterally removed all the sensors, and stuck them to their kitchen table, annotating and decorating them with Sharpie. This prompted a second, scheduled âlistening sessionâ with the provost, but this session, while open to all students, was only announced to their professors (âBeware of the leopardâ).
The students got wind of this, printed up fliers and made sure everyone knew about it. The meeting was packed. The provost explained to students that he didnât need IRB approval for his sensors because they werenât âmonitoring people.â A student countered, what was being monitored, âif not people?â The provost replied that he was monitoring âheat sources.â
https://github.com/maxvonhippel/isec-sensors-scandal/blob/main/Oct_6_2022_Luzzi_town_hall.pdf
Remember, these are grad students. They asked the obvious question: which heat sources are under desks, if not humans (von Hippel: ârats or kangaroos?â). The provost fumbled for a while (âa service animal or somethingâ) before admitting, âI guess, yeah, itâs a human.â
Having yielded the point, the provost pivoted, insisting that there was no privacy interest in the data, because âno individual data goes back to the server.â But these arenât just grad studentsâââtheyâre grad students who specialize in digital privacy. Few people on earth are better equipped to understand re-identification and de-aggregation attacks.
[Image ID: A window with a phrase written in marker, âWe are not doing science hereâ -Luzzi.]
A student told the provost, âThis doesnât matter. You are monitoring us, and collecting data for science.â The provost shot back, âwe are not doing science here.â This ill-considered remark turned into an on-campus meme. Iâm sure it was just blurted in the heat of the moment, but wow, was that the wrong thing to tell a bunch of angry scientists.
From the transcript, itâs clear that this is where the provost lost the crowd. He accused the students of âfeeling emotionâ and explaining that the data would be used for âdifferent kinds of research. We want to see how students move around the lab.â
Now, as it happens, ISEC has an IoT lab where they take these kinds of measurements. When they do those experiments, students are required to go through IRB, get informed consent, all the stuff that the provost had bypassed. When this is pointed out, the provost says that they had been given an IRB waiver by the universityâs Human Research Protection Program (HRPP).
Now a prof gets in on the action, asking, pointedly: âIs the only reason it doesnât fall under IRB is that the data will not be published?â A student followed up by asking how the university could justify blowing $50,000 on surveillance gear when that money would have paid for a whole grad student stipend with money left over.
The provostâs answers veer into the surreal here. He points out that if he had to hire someone to monitor the studentsâ use of their desks, it would cost more than $50k, implying that the bill for the sensors represents a cost-savings. A student replies with the obvious rejoinderâââjust donât monitor desk usage, then.
Finally, the provost started to hint at the underlying rationale for the sensors, discussing the cost of the facility to the university and dangling the possibility of improving utilization of âresearch assets.â A student replies, âIf you want to understand how research is done, donât piss off everyone in this building.â
Now that they have at least a vague explanation for what research question the provost is trying to answer, the students tear into his study design, explaining why he wonât learn what heâs hoping to learn. Itâs really quite a good experimental design critiqueâââthese are good students! Within a few volleys, theyâre pointing out how these sensors could be used to stalk researchers and put them in physical danger.
The provost turns the session over to an outside expert via a buggy Zoom connection that didnât work. Finally, a student asks whether itâs possible that this meeting could lead to them having a desk without a sensor under it. The provost points out that their desk currently doesnât have a sensor (remember, the students ripped them out). The student says, âI assume youâll put one back.â
[Image ID: A âpublic art pieceâ in the ISEC lobbyâââa table covered in sensors spelling out âNO!,â surrounded by Sharpie annotations decrying the program.]
They run out of time and the meeting breaks up. Following this, the students arrange the sensors into a âpublic art pieceâ in the lobbyâââa table covered in sensors spelling out âNO!,â surrounded by Sharpie annotations decrying the program.
Meanwhile, students are still furious. Itâs not just that the sensors are invasive, nor that they are scientifically incoherent, nor that they cost more than a yearâs salaryâââthey also emit lots of RF noise that interferes with the studentsâ own research. The discussion spills onto Reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/NEU/comments/xx7d7p/northeastern_graduate_students_privacy_is_being/
Yesterday, the provost capitulated, circulating a memo saying they would pull âall the desk occupancy sensors from the building,â due to âconcerns voiced by a population of graduate students.â
https://twitter.com/maxvonhippel/status/1578101964960776192
The shitty technology adoption curve is relentless, but you canât skip a step! Jumping straight to grad students (in a privacy lab) without first normalizing them by sticking them on the desks of poor kids in underfunded schools (perhaps after first laying off a computer science teacher to free up the budget!) was a huge tactical error.
A more tactically sound version of this is currently unfolding at CMU Computer Science, where grad students have found their offices bugged with sensors that detect movement and collect sound:
https://twitter.com/davidthewid/status/1387909329710366721
The CMU administration has wisely blamed the presence of these devices on the need to discipline low-waged cleaning staff by checking whether theyâre really vacuuming the offices.
https://twitter.com/davidthewid/status/1387426812972646403
While itâs easier to put cleaners under digital surveillance than computer scientists, trying to do both at once is definitely a boss-level challenge. You might run into a scholar like David Gray Widder, who, observing that âthis seems like algorithmic management of lowly paid employees to me,â unplugged the sensor in his office.
https://twitter.com/davidthewid/status/1387909329710366721
This is the kind of full-stack Luddism this present moment needs. These researchers arenât opposed to sensorsâââtheyâre challenging the social relations of sensors, who gets sensed and who does the sensing.
https://locusmag.com/2022/01/cory-doctorow-science-fiction-is-a-luddite-literature/
[Image ID: A flier inviting ISEC grad students to attend an unadvertised âlistening sessionâ with the vice-provost. It is surmounted with a sensor that has been removed from beneath a desk and annotated in Sharpie to read: âIf found by David Luzzi suck it.â]
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