www.nytimes.com/library/tech/98/11/circuits/articles/12prin.html
Lono for The New York Times KEEPING TABS - A card opens campus doors and also feeds information to a computer database. Princeton University, like many other institutions of higher education, worries about protecting its students. And one way to protect those students, when you have 4,600 of them, is with an electronic security system. But when most of those students are older than 18, the question is: Do they want to be protected? In the early 90's, Princeton began equipping all dormitories and other buildings with automatic locks and a system for unlocking the doors built around slim plastic cards called proximity cards, or prox cards, one issued to each student. The change has generated a campus debate over whether students want to trade the inconvenience and what many perceive as a loss of privacy for the increased security provided by keeping the dormitories locked all the time. The privacy question arises because not only does the security system read the prox cards to open doors, but it also records all card usage so there is a computer database of students' entries into campus buildings. To get into a dormitory, a student places a prox card -- which doubles as an identification card, library card and charge card for the university store and dining halls -- near a black plastic box encasing a tiny transceiver. Such electronic records are saved for three weeks before they are written over. For the safety of their students, universities often decide that campuses cannot be as freewheeling about physical movement as they are about the exchange of ideas. Yale University uses an electronic pass system similar to Princeton's and also keeps a record. Cynthia Atwood, a Yale spokeswoman, said: "We do have the capability of tracking individuals and their comings and goings from the residential college, but since we've installed this card system, we've had no complaints about privacy. Stepped-up security means the ability to track students' movements. But the increases in campus security have generated some opposition on the Princeton campus. Both The Nassau Weekly, a student newspaper, and The Princeton Alumni Weekly have reported objections and attempts to foil the system. Silverglate, who graduated from Princeton in 1964, doubt whether security systems that keep records of students' movements are appropriate for campuses. Silverglate is one of the two authors of "The Shadow University: the Betrayal of Liberty on America's Campuses" (Free Press, 1998), which argues that speech codes and authoritarian impulses are making campuses today too restrictive. One is proportionality and the second is the locus of control. Is the personal data collected proportional to the risk of harm? Hurley said she had been distressed to discover that her own university maintained a record of when she entered and left her parking garage. Princeton's students have been making their opinions known. A poll was taken in the last school year about the plan to keep the dormitories locked all the time -- known as "24-hour prox" -- said Jeff Siegel, a former student body president who is now a trustee of the university. Richard Spies, vice president for finance and administration at Princeton, said: "We just began to worry about what were still by anyone's standards a small number of incidents. But there were people who were in the dormitories who shouldn't have been there. The debate over the new system has led to a new policy governing when information gathered by the prox card system can be used. Barry Weiser, a crime-prevention specialist at Princeton, said an investigating officer who wanted such access must get approval from both the dean of student life and the head of campus security. Weiser said the records had been opened only once in the last six months or so, when the city police subpoenaed the records for one door in a case involving vandalism. The dean of student life and the head of security initially rejected the impulse to make the data available. That dean, Janina Montero, said: "The threshold for checking that information was determined to be fairly high. Most of the students said their primary objection was over the inconvenience of the system;
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