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Edition:UKUSAUSign inMobile About us Subscribe This site uses cookies. By continuing to browse the site you are agreeing to our use of cookies. Find out more hereHide The Guardian home search News US World Sports Comment Culture Business Money Environment Science Travel Tech Media Life & style Data Comment is free The NSA's next move: silencing university professors? A Johns Hopkins computer science professor blogs on the NSA and is asked to take it down. I fear for academic freedom Follow The NSA Files by emailBETA Share 6689 5 inShare 66 Email Jay Rosen Jay Rosen theguardian.com, Tuesday 10 September 2013 12.40 EDT Jump to comments (555) A computer user is silhouetted with a row of computer monitors at an internet cafe in China On 9 September, Johns Hopkins University asked one of its professors to take down a blog post on the NSA. Photograph: AP This actually happened yesterday: A professor in the computer science department at Johns Hopkins, a leading American university, had written a post on his blog, hosted on the university's servers, focused on his area of expertise, which is cryptography. The post was highly critical of the government, specifically the National Security Agency, whose reckless behavior in attacking online security astonished him. Professor Matthew Green wrote on 5 September: I was totally unprepared for today's bombshell revelations describing the NSA's efforts to defeat encryption. Not only does the worst possible hypothetical I discussed appear to be true, but it's true on a scale I couldn't even imagine. The post was widely circulated online because it is about the sense of betrayal within a community of technical people who had often collaborated with the government. (I linked to it myself.) On Monday, he gets a note from the acting dean of the engineering school asking him to take the post down and stop using the NSA logo as clip art in his posts. The email also informs him that if he resists he will need a lawyer. The professor runs two versions of the same site: one hosted on the university's servers, one on Google's blogger.com service. He tells the dean that he will take down the site mirrored on the university's system but not the one on blogger.com. He also removes the NSA logo from the post. Then, he takes to Twitter. The professor says he was told that someone at the Applied Physics Laboratory, a research institute with longstanding ties to the Department of Defense and the National Security Agency, determined that his blog post was hosting or linking to classified material, and sounded the alarm, which led to the takedown request from the dean. He says he thought Johns Hopkins University, his employer, had come down "on the wrong side of common sense and academic freedom", particularly since the only classified material he had linked to was from news reports in the Guardian, the New York Times and ProPublica.org – information available to the public. Word gets around, and by late afternoon, the press starts asking questions. Now, Johns Hopkins is worried about how it looks in the media. The university bureaucracy scrambles the jets and comes up with a statement: The university received information this morning that Matthew Green's blog contained a link or links to classified material and also used the NSA logo. For that reason, we asked professor Green to remove the Johns Hopkins-hosted mirror site for his blog Upon further review, we note that the NSA logo has been removed and that he appears to link to material that has been published in the news media. Interim Dean Andrew Douglas has informed professor Green that the mirror site may be restored. So the university backs down, leaving many unanswered questions. Possibly, they will be addressed today. (Update: Johns Hopkins dean apologizes.) Here are some on my list: Who was it in the Applied Physics Laboratory, with its close ties to the NSA, that raised the alarm about what a (very effective) critic of the NSA was writing ... and why? Did that person hear first from the government and then contact the Johns Hopkins officials? Why would an academic dean cave under pressure and send the takedown request without careful review, which would have easily discovered, for example, that the classified documents to which the blog post linked were widely available in the public domain? Why is Johns Hopkins simultaneously saying that the event was internal to the university (that the request didn't come from the government) and that it doesn't know how the whole thing began? The dean of the engineering school doesn't know who contacted him about a professor's blog post? Really? The press office doesn't know how to get in touch with the dean? Seems unlikely. Johns Hopkins spokesman Dennis O'Shea told me this morning that university officials "were still trying to trace" the events back to their source. Clearly, there's a lot more to the story. Matthew Green said the original request to take down his post could have referred to his Blogger.com site and the site hosted on Johns Hopkins servers. Since a request to unpublish your thoughts is one of the most extreme and threatening that any university can make of a faculty member, what kind of deliberation went into it? That Johns Hopkins backtracked so quickly after the press started asking questions suggests that the reasoning was pretty thin. But the request was momentous. These things don't fit together. What gives? Dennis O'Shea told me the original concern was that Matthew Green's post might be "illegally linking to classified information". I asked him what law he was referring to. "I'm not saying that there was a great deal of legal analysis done," he replied. Obviously. But again: given the severity of the remedy – unpublishing an expert's post critical of the NSA – careful legal analysis was called for. Why was it missing? In commenting critically on a subject he is expert in, and taking an independent stance that asks hard questions and puts the responsibility where it belongs, Matthew Green is doing exactly what a university faculty member is supposed to be doing. By putting his thoughts in a blog post that anyone can read and link to, he is contributing to a vital public debate, which is exactly what universities need to be doing more often. Instead of trying to get Matthew Green's blog off their servers, the deans should be trying to get more faculty into blogging and into the public arena. Who at Johns Hopkins is speaking up for these priorities? And why isn't the Johns Hopkins faculty roaring about this issue? (I teach at New York University, and I'm furious.) Notice: Matthew Green didn't get any takedown request from Google. Only from Johns Hopkins. Think about what that means for the school. He's "their" professor, yet his work is safer on the servers of a private company than his own university. The institution failed in the clutch. That it rectified it later in the day is welcome news, but I won't be cheering until we have answers that befit a great institution like Johns Hopkins, where graduate education was founded on these shores. And another thing: America's system of research universities is the best in the world. No one argues with that. It's one of biggest advantages this nation has. If it becomes captive to government and handmaiden to the surveillance state, that would be an economic and cultural crime of monstrous proportions. What happened to Matthew Green's blog post yesterday is no small matter. Print this Article history The NSA Files: Decoded What the surveillance revelations mean for you World news NSA · The NSA files · Freedom of speech · Barack Obama · United States · Surveillance Law Civil liberties - international Media Education Higher education · US education More from Comment is free on World news NSA · The NSA files · Freedom of speech · Barack Obama · United States · Surveillance Law Civil liberties - international Media Education Higher education · US education More commentary on the NSA Inside the mind of NSA chief Gen Keith Alexander NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. Time to tame the NSA behemoth trampling our rights Yochai Benkler: From leaks and Fisa court papers, it's clear the NSA is a bloated spying bureaucracy out of control. It can't be reformed by insiders What makes US-Israeli intelligence co-operation 'exceptional'? Perhaps I'm out of step and Britons just don't think privacy is important NSA encryption story, Latin American fallout and US/UK attacks on press freedoms Share inShare Email What's this? More from the Guardian How to make sure your family inherits your money and not your problems 18 Nov 2013 We need economic theories fit for the real world 21 Nov 2013 So what do teenage girls make of Miley Cyrus, Lily Allen and that video? 17 Nov 2013 How green is David Cameron? Tories need clarity 21 Nov 2013 For Pope Francis the liberal, this promises to be a very bloody Sunday 18 Nov 2013 On Comment is free Most viewed Latest Last 24 hours 1. Gerry Adams: Britain's dirty war in Ireland exposed 2. I was Virginia's executioner from 1982 to 1999. Any questions for me? | Jerry Givens 3. My experience as a nurse on Christmas Island changed the core of my being | Emma Hunter 4. 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Ban them Today's best video Xbox One: hands-on review Xbox One: the hands-on review Keith Stuart and Cara Ellison get to grips with Microsoft's next-gen machine, putting the interface, controller and Kinect through their paces 1939, GONE WITH THE WIND The one film to watch this week Peter Bradshaw recommends the re-released epic Gone With the Wind 99 comments three pills A personal guide to anti-depressants Footage from patient interviews shows inside story of anti-depressants Rob Ford Rob Ford's greatest hits Did you know that the NSA can track the location of your phone even when it is turned off and the batteries have been removed? This admission went largely unnoticed in a Washington Post report entitled NSA growth fueled by need to target terrorists. In the article, writer Dana Priest details how teams of NSA employees stationed around the globe are dedicated to tracking phones in real time. By September 2004, a new NSA technique enabled the agency to find cellphones even when they were turned off. JSOC troops called this “The Find,” and it gave them thousands of new targets, including members of a burgeoning al-Qaeda-sponsored insurgency in Iraq, according to members of the unit. At the same time, the NSA developed a new computer linkup called the Real Time Regional Gateway into which the military and intelligence officers could feed every bit of data or seized documents and get back a phone number or list of potential targets. It also allowed commanders to see, on a screen, every type of surveillance available in a given territory. The technique by which the NSA can wiretap cellphones even when they are turned off and powered down is most likely being performed with the complicity of telecommunications companies who have proven friendly to NSA snooping. Trojan horse programs disguised behind routine system updates are the likely method through which the NSA gains direct access to millions of Americans’ cellphones and other devices. “You may recall the fact that Verizon and AT&T notably did not sign the collective letter asking the government to allow affected companies to release information on government requests for data,” writes Tim Cushing. “Given this background, it’s not unimaginable that Verizon and AT&T would accommodate the NSA (and FBI) if it wished to use their update systems to push these trojans.” As we have also previously highlighted, terms of agreement for many of the apps you download to your smartphone now use your microphone to listen to you and your camera to take pictures of you without your knowledge. The notion of the federal government tracking your location via your cellphone is particularly prescient given yesterday’s report concerning the DHS-funded mesh network system that Seattle Police eventually intend to roll out across the city, but have temporarily been forced to deactivate due to a privacy outcry. Aruba Networks, the company behind the system of wi-fi hubs which can record the last 1,000 locations of cellphones belonging to anyone in the coverage area, bragged in their promotional material that the grid could track “rogue” or “unassociated” devices. In other words, even if you do not allow your phone to connect to such wi-fi networks, they can still access your device, record its current and historical location, as well as download private information from your apps and other settings. 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