News/Research

BCNM's Greg Niemeyer Featured in Daily Cal on UC Surveillance

03 Feb, 2016

BCNM's Greg Niemeyer Featured in Daily Cal on UC Surveillance

In additional coverage surrounding the controversy on the UC system's coordinated monitoring of campus network traffic, BCNM Director Greg Niemeyer has been featured in an article on The Daily Californian, Berkeley's independent, student-run newspaper. The issue has sparked outrage among faculty members who see the undisclosed monitoring and surveillance as a threat to privacy.

Below is an excerpt from the article:

Several UC Berkeley faculty members first heard about the ongoing monitoring in early December from campus information technology staff who were instructed by the university to keep the information confidential. These staff pointed out the device to associate professor of practice of art Greg Niemeyer because they felt “sufficiently uncomfortable” with the lack of transparency.

Niemeyer visited the campus data center located in Warren Hall to see the installed device for himself and identified the hardware as a product sold by the company Fidelis Cybersecurity. Few people are privy to exactly what the system is currently doing or the types of information it collects — one of the many ambiguities around the university’s actions that faculty say is cause for concern.

"Right now we don’t know, we can’t ask and we can’t find out," Niemeyer said. "The whole operation is covert, and we can only assume from the hardware we see that it’s extremely expansive."

An earlier article about the monitoring system was published in the New York Times.