During my first semester here at Yale, I received an email that Yale Student Computing was looking for more students in Silliman College to be Computing Assistants. I thought it could be a fun and flexible job, so I applied and was accepted for the job. Since then, our division has changed from Student Computing to the Student Technology Collaborative (with the unfortunate acronym of STC) and we are now Student Techs. I am still an ST now, even three years later.

I know many of you in this class are STs, but for those of you who aren’t, let me give a brief overview of some of our roles. The position really entails two separate, yet equally important jobs. First, we repair students’ computers in our respective colleges, which is vital but not particularly relevant to this class. The other function we perform is supervising the public computing clusters in Bass Library, Connecticut Hall, and Dunham Labs. That is where we are on the front lines of Yale University’s gatekeeping operations.

Yale is an Internet service provider, just like Comcast or Time Warner or any other large commercial service provider. As such, it receives protections under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which describes all the conditions under which “A service provider shall not be liable for monetary relief, or… for injunctive or other equitable relief…” Yale is very concerned about being classified as a private network instead of a service provider, which would remove some of the critical protections necessary for Yale to maintain its network operations.

As the front line employees of Yale ITS, STs are asked by Yale to enforce some policies affecting the maintenance of Yale’s network status. Our protection of Yale’s status was first made apparent several years ago during training when an ST jokingly asked what we should do if a student is looking at pornography in a public cluster. We were instructed in all seriousness to ask, but not force, the student to move to a more private location. This is because of the Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act , which stated that “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” By restricting content, Yale runs the risk of losing its status as a provider thus its safety from legal prosecution.

The second instance where this topic has come up was during the explanation of how Yale’s wireless network operates. Previously, any computer could connect to Yale’s wireless network; however, they had to be registered to access the full Internet, otherwise they would be restricted to sites within Yale’s network. However, this past summer, they implemented new secure wireless networks, which afforded ITS the opportunity to reassess its policies pertaining to wireless access. They decided to not allow unregistered computers to access the wireless network at all. Shortly after students arrived, ITS reversed their policy and allowed anonymous access. The rationale expressed to me was that Yale wanted to maintain its status as a common carrier and avoid being classified as a private network.

My three years as an ST have made me interested in Yale’s technological operations. That is why House Resolution 4137, the Higher Education Opportunity Act , caught my eye. On its face, it was designed to “amend and extend the Higher Education Act of 1965”  (PDF, page 1), but it also contained several clauses of particular interest to us in our discussion of gatekeeping. The act puts a great burden on the educational institutions to police its network for copyright infringement. One particularly onerous requirement was found in Section 493, which requires that the institution certify that it “will, to the extent practicable, offer alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property…” (PDF, page 232) Yale actually subscribed to such a service, Ruckus, but it shut down on February 6th. Ruckus charged the university an access fee of $15 per student. By requiring universities to subscribe to such services, it places an unnecessary and unfair financial burden on them.

The same section also compels the university to certify that it “has developed plans to effectively combat the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material, including through the use of a variety of technology-based deterrents…” (PDF, page 232) This places a serious technological and financial burden on universities to monitor the content on their networks and set up and maintain hardware and software to inspect network traffic for copyrighted material. The Association of Computing Machinery points out three major flaws in this system, and they increase in order of severity and significance. Their first point is that filtering technologies are frequently ineffective and circumvented by encryption, making them a waste of resources. Their second point is that a malicious hacker could “potentially use this infrastructure to gain the same ‘look’ into the network traffic that the filter uses.” That would be a major security hole and could be a serious problem; however, while security is important, their third concern is even more relevant. They say, “filters can undermine existing freedoms, rights and research. Even the best filters cannot determine what is a fair use of a copyrighted work.” Filters as mandated by this Act would bring a sledgehammer down on university network access when more sharp tools are necessitated. They are a blow to fair use and are questionably in violation of the right to due process. They are as bad as the automatic filters YouTube employs, which still aren’t effective enough to prevent a suit from Viacom.

The RIAA, MPAA, and other organizations have long been targeting universities as what they believe to be hotbeds for copyright violations. In 2005, a study commissioned by the MPAA showed that “collegiate file-swappers were responsible for 44 percent of movie studio “losses” to piracy…” They used that number to lobby Congress for tough responses like the Higher Education Opportunity Act. However, a year ago (after the HEOA had been ratified by the House and Senate), they admitted that the number was actually closed to 15 percent. While still a large percentage, universities are receiving an undue amount of attention. As being an ST has made me acutely aware, Yale is in a constant struggle to protect itself and its network. The complexities of gatekeeping in a digital world make that all the more difficult.