How we learned to stop worrying and love campus surveillance

conartist6

https://hacks.mit.edu/Hacks/

Grombobulous

I keep wondering if there’s some kind of positive correlation between prestige of an institution and level of immaturity and fragility of their employees. Look, I’m not trying to be pro-surveillance state or whatever, but in what universe is a handful of cameras (less than 10 per building) in a publicly accessible space on a private university unusual or alarming? I thought every university had this, but I guess I’m now learning that my university wasn’t prestigious enough to be exempted from reality. My high school also had cameras. Isn’t that rather typical? Keep in mind that pretty much 100% of schools this size have assaults take place every single year on school grounds, in a country where school shootings happen on a literal weekly basis. Speaking of the supposed cost waste of these cameras: I would be surprised the university can get reasonably priced insurance without them. Edit: this comment has picked up a lot of attention. I encourage those who are disagreeing with me to go directly to the university’s FAQ on the subject that is linked in the article. They directly state that this surveillance system isn’t new, it merely has some new cameras added to the existing system, audio isn’t recorded, facial recognition isn’t used, AI isn’t used, budget from other programs wasn’t sacrificed to add cameras, and data is stored inside an MIT data center. That’s one reason why I hold skepticism about the objectivity of the authors. I thought the authors were not very generous to the school’s willingness to clarify, and based on that FAQ a lot of accusations/assumptions in the article and discussion seem to be false. https://evpt.mit.edu/campus-security-cameras-frequently-aske...

fouc

If you fail to read the article you might not realize it's being sarcastic.

collyw

Has any of this surveillance bullshit reduced the number of incidents that occurred where they have been installed? I find it terrifying.

xp84

> have set into motion a plan to cancel our subscriptions to 700+ academic journals integral to our research and teaching. ehh, this part is a weak take. All universities should cancel their journal subscriptions because journal publishers are parasites. Lots of other things are done by universities in collaboration with each other, without allowing some random for-profit company to collect rents. Publications should be one of them.

readenough

Somehow this reminds me to think of Aaron Schwartz.

jcomp

There is an effectively unlimited supply of people willing to take sums of money to work on anti-human endeavors, so long as they and theirs are not the humans involved.

jsmo

If you're not bedazzling [surveillance] are you even living [surveillance]?

aetherspawn

Every time we fit out an office building we cover it 100% in cameras, both internally and externally. Fact is, stuff happens. For example: we once had a crazed person run inside and start yelling profanities at people for no reason. Then, he denied it and reported us to the police for assaulting him. He got his girlfriend to act as a fake witness. Having the cameras was a no brainer for legally protecting my staff, we could just pull the footage and show that no one touched him. Similar protections for when male and female staff are working together alone. They are both protected from false accusations, one from harming the other, and the other from potentially false reports/blackmail that they attempted to do something. We’ve caught interns stealing petty cash from people’s wallets (before cameras - caught in the act) Is it sad? Yes. But it’s the world we live in and cameras are cheap. No such smaller incidents since the cameras went up. People behave better when they’re being watched, or at least they think we’re being watched. Nobody has actually watched the footage for months and it rolls over in about a week.

skyberrys

They must really love their security cameras to have decided to start decorating them. The bedazzled cameras are lovely to see. My inner 90's child can't wait to apply sparkly plastic rhinestone to their naked exteriors. What's next? Some fake braids and perhaps a troll doll or two? Also have to commend whoever is in charge of acronyms for this project. I thought I was the most excessive acronym user, but now having read this article, I'm not!

rancar2

I respect that the bling protest. I’d respect the writing to another level if they touch on some of the very public incidents that have happened in/around and associated with MIT, where this level of cost/security was even considered in the first place. This would open more dialog around better approaches as well.

andai

On a completely unrelated note, I hear it's quite trivial to construct a portable, short-range EMP device.

tarpitt

I can't help but notice that the cameras emerged on campus around the same time that our generation gained an israel-concious politic and israel-gaza protests started. Edit: I realize this sounds very conspiratorial and hand-wavey but this is my just my personal anecdote from University of Florida, that the cameras showed up with the protests. There is probably more to university poltics than I am aware of, but my impression is that there is signifigant corruption and adminstrative bloat. A major aspect of college protests was funding wrt Israel. Not that all of my experiences with college have been negative, but I leave with the impression there is something strange in the university system at large.

musicale

> Thankfully, the Sauronic array of electronic eyeballs can suppress that kind of rowdiness, I don't think I've seen this descriptive adjective before, but it is brilliant. MIT may need to establish an endowed chair for its department of Sauronical Engineering.

neilv

As context for this article presumably written for an audience of faculty, a few bits of historical MIT culture: 1. MIT prided itself on having minimal rules. Historically, they think rules are barriers to MIT people doing smart things. 2. MIT valued an open campus. Typical example was that at any time of night students could walk into an empty classroom to work on a problem or something. 3. There is a joke that it stands for "Military-Industrial Technology". There have been very close ties to US govt., more than most than most universities. Whatever goes on at a small set of partifcular universities will be seen by some to affect national security. This is in addition to, like other US research universities, suddenly feeling at the mercy of whatever US administration is controlling the purse strings. 4. Overall strong libertarian bent, of the student body and much of the faculty. This affects how you make non-engineering/science/financial/prestige arguments to this audience. (Excepted are administrative staff, more typically having the background of solid liberal arts educations.) 5. (This one is my own observation) MIT student body overall were less aware of societal and world issues, compared to students overall at the university I was at before. If you see demonstrations on certain issues, that might be originating with international students arriving on campus with concerns felt widely in their home countries, rather than the stereotypical general idealism of young college students. (Aside: I'm surprised by the style of the article, if the audience is broad MIT faculty. The authors seem to be mostly from humanities pockets, so I wonder whether they bounced a draft off some engineering or science professors. Also, although the article might be implying that inhibiting protests is a motivation (not just an incidental effect) of the surveillance, I didn't see the article acknowledge the horrific recent mass-shooting on campus, which would be an obvious motivation. I'm personally highly skeptical of mass surveillance, and I think there are some profound questions for society, so I'd like to see engagement of the broader faculty.)

NoMoreNicksLeft

If one got a cheap laser and attached a medium quality rifle scope to it such that you could target the lens from a quarter mile away (or more), what power would you need to permanently blind these? What would be the correct tactics to make sure that you can't be caught doing so (with practice, each shot should take less than 15 seconds to set up and execute, so mostly it's about not being caught on another camera)?