I recently saw a notice by a college in my area, which outlines some changes to the rules and regulations governing the monitoring of data on campus computers. To quote [a scanned copy will be up here soon], there is “no privacy” on campus. It is as simple as that. If no one has noticed the change, many public colleges now require students to log in with their usernames and passwords to even use notepad to type something. There is no access to computers for visitors or non-students any longer at these public colleges. At this time, public Universities have not followed the same trend. It does, however, seem that similar moves will be made by every public University.

Even if you were a student, your data is being monitored and recorded [every key stroke and mouse click] each time you log into any of the campus computers. What is being done with this data? No one wants to give an accurate or even a plain answer. Everyone just says it is for “National Security” because of the “Patriot Act.” That is fine as long as we know what is being done with the data. Since we are not told what is being done or how we are being tracked, or even if all the information students type daily is already been analyzed, we are all suspects until proven innocent.

If that was not already severe, all public libraries require you to log in with a membership to use the computers. Let us see; we need a California State ID to get the membership. That is fine with me and many other people. What about people out of State or out of the country? Where will they go to use a computer? Isn’t a public library supposed to be public and not closed? The mere idea of signing up for membership it to keep a track; a track of everything you do from signing up for your membership card to logging in with your membership id and to even knowing what you print, and how many pages you print. Is this not our tax money which runs all of it? And on top of that, we have to sign up to be approved and have a limit of printing papers?

The number of papers we waste is not in question here. It is the idea of being free to move about and do things we want. Without memberships, we can not do certain things. This completely changes the idea of having a flexible society where things can be achieved with each in many circumstances. If the idea of membership does not scare you, paying $15 to get a replacement id may. Why charge for something that’s free? So, new membership is free but to simply get the new id, you charge. This is the same concept as giving two free cell phones to new users while making the current wireless customers suffer with outages, dropped calls and hefty fees.

We live in the digital world. That is it, nothing more. The idea of having a digital world with endless possibilities [the famous “The possibilities are endless”] is a mere myth. We have traded our freedom of exercise [no, not that exercise in the gym or your backyard] and the freedom to have a free life in the sense that we can do anything within our own sense of virtue and to do it anywhere we want. Now we have to let the administrators know what we are doing. Where is the privacy? Is freedom not supposed to give privacy to every individual?

Who cares about these things? No one does, we only care about the number of pages people use in libraries, since the administrators need those pages to print out the daily activities of everything every computer user did that day on the library computer.