The sun has come back out in Anaheim and the fires are out, so things are looking up !
Yesterday morning I attended a not very inspiring session on IT governance in higher education. It’s too bad, as it’s an important topic and one on which we’ve been spending a lot of time at our institution, setting up new committees and other vehicles for communicating with the folks who use the services we provide.
In the afternoon I heard a great talk by Tracy Mitrano from Cornell on the state of federal laws affecting IT security and privacy at higher ed institutions. The talk was based on a paper she wrote titled “Civil Privacy and National Security Legislation: A Three-Dimensional View”. The paper will appear in the November/December 2003 issue of Educause Review. I recommend that everyone dealing with computing policy issues in the US read this paper – it’s scary as hell.
In her talk, Tracy noted that over 13,000 warrants have been issued under the Forign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, 1,000 of them in the year 2000 alone. The only public records of these warrants are the annual reports that that Vice President issues to Congress – no other details are available. Yikes.
