Large tech firms in the US have asked the government to be more transparent when making requests for their user data, various news agencies around the world are reporting.
The BBC, for example, reported Tuesday that Google, Facebook, and Microsoft have asked the US government to allow them to disclose the security requests they receive for handing over user data. At the present time, of course, those requests are matters of national security and cannot be legally disclosed to the public.
Tribune News Media, which includes the Baltimore Sun, ran a front-page story Wednesday, which reported that officials at Facebook and other companies want the opportunity to disclose requests for user data from the government, along with the companies’ responses to those requests, in order to prove that rumors about what information has been released are overstated.
The BBC story cited an Agence France-Presse report quoting anti-secrecy activist and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. AFP reported Mr Assange characterized Edward Snowden, the NSA contractor who leaked the story about government surveillance of phone records to the Guardian newspaper, as “a hero who has informed the public about one of the most serious events of the decade, which was the creeping formulation of a mass surveillance state.”
That statement is somewhat extreme. I really don’t think Mr Snowden is a hero; nor do I think he’s a traitor or that he committed treason, which would imply aiding an enemy with which the US is at war. What he exposed, it seems, was the government following the laws that our elected officials wrote after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
But people in our own government have characterized Mr Snowden as a traitor guilty of treason. We will await his trial to comment on the NSA leak any further. However, what has us concerned is the possibility that databases like inBloom, which hold a vast amount of school information on American students, might be leaked in a malicious or profit-seeking way. Barring another 9/11-like attack, I think we should be more concerned about our children’s school records—which don’t have the protection of the US Constitution in many cases—than we are about information printed on our phone bills falling into the hands of the NSA.
CNN ran a story Tuesday, wondering what it means for the rest of America if even the National Security Agency can’t keep its secrets safe. “Everything about us is online, waiting for someone to reveal it,” wrote Frida Ghitis in a special produced for the cable news provider.
Last week, we reported on a survey given to students at Batavia High School in Illinois. The survey responses contained both the students’ names and answers to questions about their drug abuse habits and emotions. While we don’t condone the actions of a teacher who advised students they didn’t have to complete the survey as the school district had asked, we strongly warn districts not to send any data on students to companies, where someone might get the urge to show the world how much actual information our schools are releasing about our students to corporations that seek profit. These surveys may very well contain evidence about crimes that have been committed, and the government, wanting to crack down on teenage drug abuse, may very well find a legitimate purpose for requesting this data from the company that stores the survey responses online.
Profit’s not a bad thing, however frequently it eludes us, but we have to object to even the possibility of releasing private information about a student’s learning path in school. Kids make mistakes, and in school, those mistakes become learning experiences as good teachers provide guidance. That’s how education is supposed to work. We don’t want those mistakes tracking with a student long after he’s done the learning to correct them. For example, it is inaccurate and a misrepresentation of a fourth grader’s ability in math to release information about which math objectives he struggled with in third grade. Yet that third-grade information is still out there in some database housed on a corporate server.
I’m looking simply at the possibility that someone with access, who might find a will or a self-declared good reason to release the data, might do something harmful that stays with students for a long time. And of course, it’s possible that someone in the schools with a malicious intent might release that same data, but peer pressure would usually prevent such an illegal release of private data by school officials. The danger is greater if the information is sent outside the school, as was done in the Batavia survey we cited above.
