The COVID-19 pandemic has made surveillance more pervasive than ever in schools, universities, and much of daily life over the past few years. However, graduate students at Northeastern University successfully organized and thwarted an attempt to implement intrusive monitoring devices that were covertly hidden under desks at their institution back in October.
At the school’s Interdisciplinary Science & Engineering Complex (ISEC), a building utilized by graduate students and the location of the “Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute” that researches surveillance, Senior Vice Provost David Luzzi put motion sensors beneath every desk at the beginning of October.
According to a blog post by Max von Hippel, a Privacy Institute PhD candidate who wrote about the situation for the Tech Workers Coalition’s newsletter, these sensors were installed at night—without student knowledge or consent—and when students were asked for an explanation, they were told this was part of a study on “desk usage.”
When academic institutions compete for access to facilities, those with the best funding or who receive the most grant money tend to prevail. It may make sense for the university to attempt and investigate how desks are used in order to increase or optimize access to the ISEC because it is a wonderful building, the computer science department brings in a lot of money, and they get to use it a lot.
But according to Von Hippel, since workstations are assigned and badges are needed to enter the rooms, desk utilization can already be monitored. In
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