A Brief Insight into Issues Concerning Colleges

The Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act (USA PATRIOT ACT) of 2001 was signed into law on October 26th, 2001. Since it was signed into law the USA Patriot Act has been the subject of numerous alarms from privacy advocates. However little attention has been addressed to the effects of the USA Patriot Act on institutions of higher education.

This paper will provide a brief overview of the USA Patriot Act; included in this overview will be comments and opinions as to the impact of the USA Patriot Act on business world. I will then make a case for my opinion of the impact the USA Patriot Act will have on colleges, and other institutions of higher education, between now and the “sunset” date of December 31, 2005. I’ll conclude with suggestions for pro-active responses addressing potential problems and liability issues facing educational institutions.

The foremost objective of the Congress and the President in enacting the USA Patriot Act was to provide the Federal law enfo

3) Require the inclusion of your AUP’s and Computer Use Policies (CUP’s) in every syllabus;

Some first steps for Institutional Administrators

1. How can colleges maintain “the freedom of academic freedom ” while thwarting the diversion of campus computer power for use in denial of service attacks and other malicious activity directed at other sites?

Prior to the events of September 11th, there were legal benchmarks that required law enforcement officials to have a “reasonable suspicion” regarding suspected terrorist activity to obtain search warrants, pen trap and trace authorization, or wire tap authorizations. Now the Department of Justice, by virtue of the authority granted the FBI under the provisions of federal law, “the Act”, can place software such as {“Magic Lantern,” “Carnivore,” or DCS1000;”} on every Internet Service Provider in the country. In fact, every US based ISP is currently in compliance. The result being, that effectively, all U.S. law enforcement and Intelligence agencies, such as the FBI, CIA, Secret Service, and others, now have the ability to monitor every transmission on the U.S. Internet backbone without the requirement for prior review and authorization. The law states that law enforcement personnel are not allowed review the contents of any transmission, only the first 65 bytes of headers, which mainly provide the source and destination of the communication. Now while the “spirit of the law” is to only collect information after there has been a finding of “probable cause” that a crime or terrorist act is occurring. There are no provisions for any monitoring methods. Leaving the question, “who’s watching the watchers? (Joseph and Worlton, 2002)”

6) Monitor and test network security, on a regular basis;

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