Privacy of Students' Card Key Data Is Important

I am writing on behalf of the Executive Board of the Civil Liberties Union of Harvard (CLUH) to express our dissatisfaction with some of the comments made by Jonathan Samuels in his recent editorial ("Left Out in the Cold," April 28, 1994).

Currently the University tightly restricts the release of information on students' movements collected by the card key system.

Samuels apparently believes that such protections are unnecessary; he writes that "[w]hile students may not like the fact that the University can check its records to see when they come and go, this system will probably help track down troublemakers and also serve as a deterrent to crime. The card keys' benefits outweigh their costs to privacy." Samuels is wrong on both counts.

First, the information collected by the card key system cannot be used to prove that any individual student left or entered a building; only that a particular doorway, at which time any number of people could have entered as well as left through that doorway.

As well as violating students' privacy, without additional evidence blind searches of card key data can at best produce no specific information to stop troublemakers or deter crime, and a worst will produce misleading information if a card key has been lost or borrowed.

The Administrative Board has recognized this fact and does not even attempt to engage in the type of monitoring of individuals that Samuels appears to advocate; it has restricted the use of specific card key data to "circumstances when the information is important to investigating a crime or other incident related to campus security."

Second, by Samuels' logic, any gross violation of our privacy, even if the resulting information is of negligible value, is justified if it is done for our "protection." By that same standard, Harvard should read and censor students' e-mail in violation of the Electronic Communication Privacy Act of 1986 in order to prevent any possible disturbances or crimes; likewise, the Harvard Student Telephone Office should be able to tap our phone lines and the Harvard Mail Service open our packages and letters without any cause and in violation of the law.

Further, Samuels is apparently not at all concerned about when or how administrators might choose to use card key data if given free rein. Until the Civil Liberties Union of Harvard proposed a set of restrictions last spring, there were no written barriers to the use of the data at all.

For example, if they so chose, administrators could have used the card key system to track the movements of an individual student to check if he or she was going home to bed every night, or any other number of Orwellian possibilities.

There are many complex civil liberties issues on campus worthy of debate and discussion. The privacy of card key data simply isn't one of them; it is almost blatantly obvious that the benefits of allowing the administration uncontrolled access to the data collected by the card key system simply do not outweigh the costs.

This conclusion was clear to every administrator CLUH worked with last year, as well as The Crimson in a series of articles and editorials; the focus of our discussion was how to best implement restrictions.

It is therefore highly ironic that in an editorial calling for Harvard to allow students greater access to its physical space, Samuels asserts that Harvard should engage in a widespread program of violations of their privacy. Jol Silversmith '94   Former Director, CLUH