University Professor Chastised For Using Tor

Irongeek_ADC writes with a first-person account from the The Chronicle of Higher Education by a university professor who was asked to stop using Tor. University IT and campus security staffers came knocking on Paul Cesarini's door asking why he was using the anonymizing network. They requested that he stop and also that he not teach his students about it. The visitors said it was likely against university policy (a policy they probably were not aware that Cesarini had helped to draft). The professor seems genuinely to appreciate the problems that a campus IT department faces; but in the end he took a stand for academic freedom.

Bravo

[QuantumG]

Good to see some university professors still have integrity.

Re:Bravo

[Maxo-Texas]

I wish I had "tenure" at my day to day job.

ill prepared?

[mhokie]

"The visitors said it was likely against university policy"

Could they not be bothered with actually checking the policy since they were there to enforce it?

Re:Bravo

[Synic]

You aren't preparing the youth of the country for their future lives either, though, are you? ;)

Re:ill prepared?

[Anonymous Coward]

big brother gets pissed off when they cant see everything your doing

Re:the ivory tower

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the issue was not with his use of it but being told that he couldn't talk about it in his classes.

Re:Bravo

[Maxo-Texas]

Even executing my "academic freedom" would result in instant unemployment in the private sector. That severely constrains my interest in executing it since my health care bills would be $300 a month easily for blood pressure and cholesterol medicine alone.

I applaud his efforts. And I chose not to work in academia so it's my responsibility that he has privileges that I do not.

half reasonable request

[Anonymous Coward]

Asking the professor not to use Tor on the university-owned network is reasonable.
Attempting to censure what he can say to his students is clearly not reasonable.

Re:Bravo

[KerberosKing]

The thing is, tenure is earned by outstanding scholarship over years of teaching and research. It is a long-standing tradition of university life. Further, it is crucial that we as a society have high-profile people that can question and critique the status-quo of governments, companies and other powerful groups without great fear of reprisals. Such protections are needed, else the relatively low pay and long hours of professors would hardly seem worth it when contrasted with executives and their exorbitant pay.

Re:Bravo

[Anonymous Coward]

Even executing my "academic freedom" would result in instant unemployment in the private sector. That severely constrains my interest in executing it since my health care bills would be $300 a month easily for blood pressure and cholesterol medicine alone.

That's why the Government should be providing health insurance, and limiting the price of medication, like in every other first-world country.

Re:ill prepared?

[Selanit]

"The visitors said it was likely against university policy" Could they not be bothered with actually checking the policy since they were there to enforce it?

In fact, they brought a printout of the policy to the meeting with the professor. The reason they weren't sure is that when the policy was written, Tor didn't exist yet. It might violate the policy, but they hadn't faced this kind of thing before, so they weren't certain.

Re:Bravo

[QuantumG]

I think maybe there's something you're overlooking: a university is not a business. I know that folks in the US might be shocked to hear me say this.. after all, universities are run as if they are businesses, and typically in a more cutthroat fashion than regular businesses, but how many businesses do you know, outside the aviation industry, that receive regular funding from the government? The university network belongs to the people and, although that doesn't give people the right to do whatever they want on the network, it does mean that university IT has a responsibility to ensure civil liberties are not trampled. If they don't like that, then they shouldn't have taken government funding.

Re:the ivory tower

[stratjakt]

No, it's not his network, and they aren't his rules, even if he did "co-chair the comittee to decide what color to keep the folder that the proposed amendments to the original proposal were in and they kept it grey".

Good for him, he had a reasonable chat with the detectives and they dropped it. I just cant stand the rhetoric about "rights" and "academic freedoms".

If the police visited him at home, because of his use of tor on his own connection that he paid for - then you got a story. But this guys a guest on someone elses network.

If I let you connect to my AP, then I reserve every right to tell you I don't want you using tor, or kazaa, or bittorrent, or playing WoW, or what the hell ever.

As for police telling him what to teach? He just threw that in there for drama and FUD. Since when the fuck do campus police go around telling professors what they can and cant teach? I don't believe that part of the story is even true. I don't believe the police asked him not to teach his students about it.

I hate empty rhetoric, I hate embellishments, I hate academic dishonesty, and I especially hate it from professors. It made my time at university infuriating. I was there to study math and computers, and instead, I'm constantly bombarded with lefty bullshit propoganda (not that I'd prefer righty bullshit - I just wanted to learn calculus, chemistry, comp sci, and other subjects that deal in facts)

So whatever, this guy talked himself out of trouble. Big whoop. He can get off the fucking cross now, all that happened was a cop came to talk to him about some suspicious behaviour he was engaged in.

Once I was hanging around at night, waiting for a buddy, and a cop stopped to talk to me to ask what I was doing. STOP THE PRESSES MY STORY MUST BE TOLD.

Re:Bowling Green State University

[thesupermikey]

it might also be noted the BGSU, along with other state universities in ohio force graduate students on assistantships to sign forms saying that they are not members, or have not supported terrorist groups.

Since these are stored in university archives, and not checked, new graduate studies are (more or less) required by the state to sign loyalty oaths.

University IT

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

What is it about university IT departments that attracts such incompetent people?

Hint: If you're pouncing on people as often as a small frisky dog does, you're the problem.

Re:Bravo

[nomadic]

I wish I had "tenure" at my day to day job.

This incident illustrates the precise reason tenure exists.

Re:question

[xenocide2]

I think the bigger problem is that they still figured out it was him!

Re:Campus Intelligence Agency...

[IthnkImParanoid]

I know it was a joke, but...
Many campuses have their own PD and FD. Why?
10,000 staff.
25,000 students.
A couple square miles
It's basically a small, densely populated town...only with higher rates of rape, assault, drug use, theft, and copyright infringement.
You know, the big 5 :)

Re:But...

[baptiste]

It's not overblown at all. Just like the earlier article about the RIAA sending cease and desist just because you were in a swarm, not actually up or downloading. This professor was doing something completely legal and as asked by law enforcement to stop - it is inferred because they could not monitor his activities. This has a chilling effect. Notice that it wasn't just an IT person requesting he stop - he showed up with two detectives - who probably instigated the entire thing.

Common sense would dictate that the detectives, doing their jobs and trying to investigate an online scam, ask the professor some questions to determine if he was involved. But instead they asked him to stop doing something legal, tried to get him to NOT share something with his students, and used some vague provisions of an IT policy to back it up. This is a direct attack on academic freedom - 'Thou shalt not tell your students about this' and even worse, telling him not to use Tor himself - obviously because they couldn't track what he was doing.

Overblown? Hardly - we are losing our rights bit by bit by bit and people who think something like this is 'overblown' are part of the reason. By the time you all realize you've lost most of your rights it'll be too late.

We Already Have a Problem.

[twitter]

Widespread use of Tor could be a huge headache for network-security administrators, particularly in higher education. My university alone has more than 21,000 students. Imagine what would happen if even a tenth of them and a similar percentage of faculty and staff members started using Tor regularly. With all the spam scams, phishing scams, identity theft, and related criminal enterprises going on around the world many of which involve remotely hijacking university-owned computers we could approach technological anarchy on the campus.

With 25% of Windoze PCs already part of a botnet, I imagine more than 1/10 of those computers are already using some form of TOR. What will thwarting my privacy achieve again?

Re:Bravo

[neomunk]

Child porn like everybody else?

Fuck you.

I have had tor installed for many moons now, and have a severe reaction to child porn (or any type of sexual abuse, especially of children) due to the fact that an overwhelming majority of women I've gotten close enough to to talk about such things have been molested at some point in their life.

How about people who use it just because the country they are in has an abusive civil rights regime, or because they don't trust their ISP to keep their browsing habits secret? (Maybe they REALLY like the old cartoon Gem and are embarrassed about it) Maybe, just maybe, the person thinks that they are under surveillance for legal activities (like planning anti-war demonstrations).

Forget all that, the only thing you need know about it is that it's none of your fucking business what these people are doing. The old "they wouldn't care if they aren't doing anything wrong" bit is so played out, so proven stupid, and so indicative of 'fucktardation' that if you hadn't sent a damn shiver down my spine by calling me a supporter of child porn I'd have completely ignored you.

I couldn't though. Idiots are only dangerous when allowed to say such misinformed and ignorant things and are not called on it.

P.S.

Fuck you once more for implying that I'm some type of child molester (even a passive one) you freedom hating punk.

Re:Bravo

[calice]

I've never understood why people consider this kind of action by a university or other group to be so terrible. He is using the school's computer, in the school's building, with the school's internet connection. If the school sends someone to ask him not to do something specific with those things, then his reaction should be, "Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't realize. I'll stop now." The school has every right to do so. They also have the right to ask him not to cover the topic in the class. These are the people paying his salary, and if they don't want this going on, they can tell him to stop.

This isn't a major issue. It's not like the government is passing laws banning the use of the software for use in the US. That would be absolutely wrong. All he is standing up for is his right to be insubordinate to his superiors.

I believe we should be allowed to use the TOR software. But using it in my home, with my connection, on my computer (all of which _I_ paid for) is a completely different story than using it at work.

Just to expand on that

[benhocking]

He likely has several students in his class from countries, such as China, that have such censorship. If he can reach out to a few of these and give them the tools to combat that censorship, then he will have helped them make a difference when they return to China, if they are so inclined.

Re:ill prepared?

[Kadin2048]

Well, we can't say for sure now, because it's not like TFA included a copy of the relevant policy (although, if someone wanted to, they could probably figure out where the guy in the article works, and find the policy from there), but he admits that it's vaguely written, and was written back before Tor existed. So there are two immediate issues:

1) The policy may be so vague, as written, so as to make it unclear whether Tor is legitimate or not. For instance, it could simply have a blanket prohibition of doing things that are detrimental to the network, but not specify exactly what's prohibited and allowed. This is fairly common in most AUPs that I've read, particularly academic ones; rather than attempting to specifically outline what you can't do, they basically say "anything that's bad, don't do it." (Usually in a more verbose fashion, but that's the general idea.) Sometimes they're clear about who decides what is 'bad,' other times less so. It all depends on how bright a person wrote the policy.

2) The policy, as written, may actually prohibit Tor, but the faculty member, who said he was part of the committee that wrote the policy, believes that owing to the age of the policy and his knowledge of the writers intentions, that it was never intended to prohibit something like Tor. Thus, his usage, while technically in violation, he believes is OK because -- to put it bluntly -- he knows what behaviors the policy was supposed to prohibit better than the sysadmin does. (This seems like it could be a dangerous position for him to take, but I guess if you've got tenure, you might as well use it.)

Re:Campus Intelligence Agency...

[Surt]

Large universities commonly have their own police force. Try to find a city in this country with a population over 25,000 without one. We have a number of universities with populations higher than that, even twice that.

Re:Bravo

[MightyYar]

Yes, because two things that government is known for are low costs and high quality.

Re:Bravo

[miskatonic alumnus]

Right on. Why should I have to pay for a police force, judges, politicians, schools, military, highways, or anything else the public uses? I can educate my own kids, do some gardening, walk to town, and take care of myself.

Re:Bravo

[ceoyoyo]

Your job is to go to work and perform some task for the company that hired you. HIS job is to know about things like Tor, think about what they mean, and educate his students. See the difference? Knowing about Tor is part of his job.

Re:the ivory tower

[xenocide2]

"The university does have an absolute right to dictate how their network is used. That doesn't mean that nothing they do is ignorant or boneheaded."

That's not quite true. As a university, their mission is furthering educational development. They can argue over how such and such use does or doesn't advance educational goals, but there should be no dispute that education is the goal. The campus IT department then, as an administrative branch, is in a unique position of trying to accommodate all party's interests, rather than dictate the limited uses of "their" infrastructure. They're supposed to make it happen, not "enforce the AUP".

Government funding

[sjbe]

how many businesses do you know, outside the aviation industry, that receive regular funding from the government?

Oil, farming, auto (roads), space (NASA), rail (AMTRAK), the defense industry, telecom, utilities, ... Do I need to go on? The government subsidizes most industries to some extent and some (defense and farming among others) to a very large extent. Sometimes it's grants, sometimes it's in the form of tax relief, sometimes its as a customer but the government funds a huge variety of industries.

Re:Bravo

[Maxo-Texas]

Not sure how you got that out of what I said.

What I was saying is that I face large bills if I lose my insurance so I do not feel free to "fight the man".

Answering your question however:

1) Every american should be able to pay the negotiated rate for items. If all blue cross pays the hospital is $1,375 for a gall bladder operation- why should an uninsured person have to pay $18,325 for the same exact operation? If you can show that the hospital is charging anyone a certain price, you should be able to pay that same price for the same service.

2) Every american should have basic (and I do mean *BASIC*) health care covered socially. This includes random things like broken legs and car wreck injuries and not things like chemo therapy (and I say that as a cancer survivor). The larger the pool, the lower the costs. Right now, cherry picking is getting so extreme that you can't get insurance unless you are well. If I were grand high poohbah, I would set this at $1,000 * the minimum wage with a 20% co-pay but 0% on annual physicals. Everything over $1,000 would be your cost. If you used no benefits except the free physicals, I'd give you back 5% ($350) as a tax credit.

Why I say this is that we are competing against countries where this is true and it puts our companies at a competative disadvantage.

Re:When you know so little about TOR...

[Kiaser Wilhelm II]

What if I replace the word TOR with the word "internet". Do you see why your post doesn't make sense?

Bit torrent gets throttled because it is a bandwidth hog, not because its often used for copyright infringement. If that was the issue, it would be blocked totally in the places where it is throttled instead.

What exactly is your point? Shit gets abused all the time.

Poor excuse

[adambha]

From the article:

Of course, anonymous Web surfing can be used to conceal fraud and other forms of electronic malfeasance. That was why the police had come to see me.

Sure, that logic is like saying, "Of course, steak knives can be used to commit murderous crimes. That was why the police had began questioning all of the patrons at a local Outback Steakhouse..."

Re:the ivory tower

[PitaBred]

Because, you know, academic freedom is bullshit. Why be allowed to think and teach freely without fear of reprisal? It's much easier to just teach what is government approved goodthink.

Re:Bravo

[flithm]

Even executing my "academic freedom" would result in instant unemployment in the private sector.

This is not necessarily true. I've actually put myself into a position where I was SURE I'd be fired for refusing to go along with a company policy that I felt to be morally (and ethically) wrong. When you have righteousness on your side you'd be amazed at what can actually happen. (I wasn't fired, and I didn't follow policy).

I'm not saying you're lying or anything, because I don't know your situation. But I do know how scary it is to put yourself out there like that, and I know that it's a lot easier to say "Ohh pfft, he's in academia so he can get away with that... I could never do that." But really that's nothing more than an excuse.

There's plenty of situations where someone in the private sector could get away with a lot more than someone in academia, and vice versa. Making an insinuation that somehow life is easier in academia is not only wrong, but it's also a little insulting to what he decided to put himself through.

I'm not suggesting that you start using Tor even if it's against company policy (that would be something entirely different than what he did), but executing your basic rights as an individual will not result in instant unemployment.

Stand up for what you believe in! If it gets your fired, you're working in the wrong place. If you worked somewhere that wasn't going to immediately fire you for doing something you feel to be just, then maybe your blood pressure wouldn't be so high!

Why not?

[TWX]

It's not really surprising to have Detectives on a campus police force. There are rapes, burglaries, drug deals, prostitutes, assaults, and even the occasional murder on large college campuses, and the cities that the colleges are located in usually don't have the resources to direct that much attention to that area. Also since much of the in-residence populace is temporary the city's funding wouldn't be as stable for covering that segment of the population. The campus police force is paid for ultimately by tuition and/or state money based on enrollment and need.

Also, campus-exclusive cops would have a much better feel for what's going on around them and would probably also know where to look when there's a problem due to experience. While a Constable on Patrol would be able to address most of what's going on, higher-profile cases would require detectives just like a normal municipal police force, and if a particular kind of crime (rape, assault, and the like) is reasonably common then an internal investigator would remove the need for an outside inspector to attempt to conduct an investigation in a microcosm that is unfamiliar. Obviously crimes like murder would use the municipality's law enforcement, but that kind of crime is also reasonably rare.

I will agree that Campus Traffic Police suck though.

Nice Straw Man

[zippthorne]

He doesn't mind sharing the costs for essential services with his peers in good faith. The jobless waifs he's referring to are benefiting from those services in bad faith: they have no intention of bearing any of the burden. Not all of the jobless are waifs of course, but he wasn't talking about them either.

you don't understand organizations

[idlake]

The university does have an absolute right to dictate how their network is used.

The university does, but the IT department and the campus police don't. Their function is merely to implement university policies, they ultimately don't have a right to make them.

Re:Bravo

[neomunk]

Are you shitting me? So by that logic everyone in Florida who's paid any taxes, or even anyone who's bought anything IN Florida and paid state sales tax on it was funding ole' cyber-fondle Foley's (attempted?, completed?) trysts with underage boys?

Or even better, everyone in the U.S. who has in any way paid for any road construction, well they've supported every criminal who tried to get away by car.

C'mon now, who's next in line for trying to tell me that the desire of privacy is indicative of criminal behavior.

Re:Bravo

[san]

In the case of health care, governments are known for low costs and high quality. Total medical expenditure per capita in western countries with universal healthcare tends to be around a quarter of what it is in the US, and people live longer and healthier lives.

These are fairly well established facts (I'm not going to dig up references now, but for example, there was a Nature article last year on how Brits live longer than Americans -- even if you account for any conceivable cultural/economical/whatever difference, and Brits have a lower life expectancy than other European countries. That should get you started). You can also easily look up medical expenditure per capita.

Whether you want universal healthcare should mainly be a political question: it does, undeniably, take away freedom (you're going to be taxed and you don't have a very direct say on how that money gets spent --- you're still free to go to any doctor you want if you're willing to pay more for it).

In many countries, people think it's worth the trade-off.

Re:the ivory tower

[NMerriam]

After all, he works for them. The fact that he is a professor does not eliminate the fact that he has a superior he is supposed to listen to. This isn't government censorship, this is simply a case of a man wanting to disobey his boss.

Somehow I suspect that this university's professors do not report to the IT or security staff. They certainly don't at any of the universities I attended or worked at

Having an IT guy show up with campus police and telling you what you are not allowed to teach in class is the sort of thing I'd expect to make interesting conversation at the next faculty meeting. It is not the professor who would be reprimanded in such a situation.

If the CS department chair decides to remove all discussion of anonymizing networks from the class' curriculum, then the professor will certainly have to choose whether to stay or leave.

Re:But...

[sBox]

If it was about rights, he could run it on his own private connection. It's about responsibility. The university is ultimately responsible for the use and content on its network.

Chastising him for teaching it is ridiculous in the modern age though. It's the equivalent of a chastising a professor in the 60's for mentioning J. Edgar Hoover's files.

Re:Campus Intelligence Agency...

[ChaosDiscord]

_Detectives_ of the campus police force.

Yes, detectives. Note that he's talking about "police," not "security guards." Large enough campuses can benefit from having a focused police force. These aren't thugs in the employ of the university, these are just a real police just like the city-wide force, they just have a more specialized focus. They have the same powers and restrictions. As such it's only logical that they would have detectives, just like the city-wide force. By being specialized they can focus on the more specialized problems of a campus, including the complications of having a large population that moves in and out each year, frequently rotating. They've existed at a number of universities for decades. There is no evil conspiracy here.

Re:Nice Straw Man

[miskatonic alumnus]

He doesn't mind sharing the costs for essential services with his peers ...

You know, health care is pretty goddamn essential.

... in good faith.

In good faith or otherwise, it is in the public interest for people to have basic health care. The fewer sick people there are, the less likely you are to contract something. Furthermore, his point of view is predicated on the false assumption that if he doesn't contribute to public health care through taxes, that he won't end up paying anyway through insurers who will charge higher rates in response to higher hospitalization fees due to the poor being unable to pay for their health care.

The jobless waifs he's referring to are benefiting from those services in bad faith: they have no intention of bearing any of the burden.

Can you prove that? Or are you just parroting what you've heard from the well-to-do?

Re:Bravo

[joh6nn]

yeah, and by owning a car, i'm leaving myself wide open for when someone steals it and uses it in a bank robbery. if that's the best you can come up with, shut up and sit back down. criminals and assholes are always gonna find some way to make things suck. that absolutely can not be a reason for us not to try and make things better.

Re:question

[Katmando911]

"For all we know, he really was using Tor for something nefarious."

What ever happened to innocent until proven guilty?

Re:When you know so little about TOR...

[ceoyoyo]

You know, 100% of the spam, much of it criminal, that reaches my mail server is from the SMTP protocol. In fact, the majority of traffic on that protocol is spam, and I believe that's true in general. Better block it and send cops after anyone who uses it.

Re:Bravo

[miskatonic alumnus]

Jesus fucking Christ. People here speak of health care like it's just another commodity to be bought and sold. Will we never advance as a species above this exploitive outlook on life?

Re:How did they find out?

[Anonymous Coward]

The point of tor isn't to hide that your using Tor, the point of Tor is to hide what you did WHILE you were using it. Sure they know he used tor, there is no way to stop that but the thing that irked them and the thing that tor was designed for was the fact they had no idea what he did while using tor. Without Tor its real easy to ger a nice easy printout of every web page, or ftp server any user on a network has accessed.

Re:Bravo

[jacksonj04]

Yes, but you can't use that as reasoning. Buying in bulk of most goods and services is cheaper because of reduced production costs (You only need to configure machines once per run, staff get more efficient etc) and reduced admin costs (Instead of 2 minutes of paperwork per each item, there is 5 minutes of paperwork for 20,000 items). This is highly simplified, but roughly the idea.

Every operation is different, and often performed by specialist surgeons. Each one involves exactly the same amount of paperwork, excepting a near insignificant difference for payment methods. Additionally, the time and complexity of each operation is dependant on the patient and not who pays for the operation. Therefore, there is no good argument for applying bulk discount to operations other than if you charge 'bulk' at just above cost then you can charge individual purchases far more and make more profit.

Re:the ivory tower

[GameMaster]

Actually, he says "could be a huge headache for network-security administrators" and "could approach technological anarchy". Notice the use of the work "could" as opposed to the more definite "will".

Furthermore, just because something "could be a huge headache" for IT doesn't, necessarily, mean it isn't, still, part of their job responsibilities. Giving students/faculty at a university access to the Internet in the first place will, inevitably, produce headaches for IT. That said, it's also the only reason they have a job. It would be just as absurd for the IT department to attempt to strong-arm all the students/faculty into not using the Internet at all as a method of decreasing the IT workload.

The fact is, there are ways to deal with it in the event it ever, actually, became a problem such as announcing a ban on the software for student PCs and banning systems from the network as soon as Tor use is detected. It's not difficult to do and means that Tor would only cause the network to dissolve into "technological anarchy" if the IT people sat around and did nothing. If they were even more reasonable and even handed about it, they could ban or traffic shape Tor users that were found to be using an obscene amount of bandwidth (most likely to have had their system injected). This, probably, wouldn't even require a re-write of their network use policies.

"He has the RIGHT to use it, of course, nobody else should. It's a tool only for the gifted."

While I'm assuming you meant this to be sarcastic, YES HE DOES HAVE THAT RIGHT! Its called academic freedom and was, clearly, mentioned in the article. It allows him and other professors to do their job. There are plenty of times that professors research/teach about controversial topics or topics that could cause problems if they were abused. He was teaching a class directly related to Tor and was using it as a way to become more familiar with the software. He never suggests that the general student body, or even the rest of the university employees should, necessarily, be allowed to use the software. You and I may not have the right to use Tor on out employer's networks but, then again, we aren't college professors (unless you happen to be). They represent a, very specific, special case when it comes to thing like this.

As an example, I went to school for computer science. In one of my classes, on how operating systems work, our professor explained how a programmer could, very easily, take down almost any flavor of Unix system no matter how well secured the system was (thus causing headaches for anyone else using that system at the same time as was common in our CS computer labs). This was a fundamental flaw in the design of operating systems that, for Unix systems at least, was pretty universal. He also informed us, very clearly, that we were, in no uncertain terms, banned from using this technique on any of the lab systems (which ran Sun Unix). Furthermore, he informed us that, should we decide to try, they would, very easily, find out who did it and deal with them accordingly. This was an issue directly related to the subject of the class. Knowing it meant that we, as students, could avoid it in our own future software. There is a good chance that, at least one time, my professor had to write a program like this himself (or one of his colleagues did) and test it on one of the lab systems just to prove that it did, in fact, work that way.

The story is that an IT guy and two Campus Security goons came to his door and tried to strong-arm him into not using the software or teaching about it. It's like a bad scene from a melodramatic police drama. They tried to feed him some nebulous garbage about it being against "policy" (a policy he actually helped edit and probably knows better than they do) and use it to threaten his job. The story is about a professor having his job threatened for researching a topic they don't like which flys against the very essence of acade

And yet...

[spun]

Everyone says the free market leads to freedom. It seems to lead to people having to shut the hell up or not eat, to me. Wage slavery is still slavery. No matter that you are free to pick your master, if you can't speak your mind or do what you want with your time and resources, you are a slave.

Re:Bravo

[Anonymous Coward]

As a grad student at a giant public university, I also sit on various IT committees. The biggest problems I see stem from the IT department thinking that the university is a business, and the faculty thinking the university is a university. When the IT folks want to implement any changes (or attempt to restrict access to certain sites/services), the faculty will often resist. And, in the end, if the IT staff wants something, and the faculty disagree (even if just a few faculty disagree), the faculty will always win.

On one occasion, a fellow grad student was capturing faces from amateur porn sites for some research. He got a stern warning from the IT department, and, in return, the IT department got a stern warning from the Provost's office about disturbing researchers.

Re:Nice Straw Man

[I_Love_Pocky!]

I find it unlikely that in the event of a major pandemic folks would be denied medical assistance due to lack of insurance coverage. Besides, I'd suspect that medical bills would be the least of our concerns were that to happen.

Re:Bravo

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, duh, it was missing something.

All you United States Postal Service dudes, chew on this for a bit.

You may not be sending or receiving child porn. BUT i GUARANTEE THAT SOMEONE IS SENDING OR RECEIVING CHILD PORN USING YOUR MAILBOX IF YOU ARE SET UP TO USE THE UNITED STATES POSTAL SERVICE. In this situation, you are enabling and promoting child abuse.

Or, a cop could see a request for child porn spew out of your mailbox, followed by your order for viagra that you were so ashamed about. Have fun talking your way out of that.

Vista sucks! M$ M$ M$ M$ M$ Linux Rules!!!!

There, +5 insightful. This is Slashdot, after all.

Re:Bravo

[I_Love_Pocky!]

Well we certainly wouldn't want to encourage innovation in heath care with a competitive market would we? Heavens, we might accidentally develop something helpful for the species. Money is such a terrible motivator.

Re:Nice Straw Man

[Anonymous Coward]

I find it unlikely that in the event of a major pandemic folks would be denied medical assistance due to lack of insurance coverage.

Haha thats a laugh, next thing you'll tell me is that all the folks from Katrina are just homeless bums and that the government didn't run out of its budget for the flood insurance it had sold them before it could pay for all the rotten lumps of wood so they could buy new lumps of wood.

Trust me, if there was a crisis, the only way it'd be done for free is if the government's lapdogs could skim $10 billion off the top like they have in Iraq.

Re:Bravo

[MightyYar]

I don't want to talk past each other with statistics, because that's been done to death, and frankly neither side ever seems to trounce the other. All I know is that I keep seeing wealthy Canadians and even Europeans coming to the States for their elective procedures. You can live a long time and still be miserable because you can't get the knee surgery that you need.

The other problem is that the US market is currently subsidizing drug and equipment development (even in other countries). If you make the US market like France or Germany, either everyone's costs will rise or the rate of drug/device/procedure development will slow. It's not rocket science - if money flow goes down, the research dollars will flow elsewhere.

Do I like subsidizing the entire world when I buy my Nexium? No. Am I glad it is available, even if at an inflated cost? Yes.

There is the other issue, too. The model countries for socialized health care are Germany and France. These countries have horrible economic problems as a result of their social spending. I don't like the thought of 50% unemployment for those under 25. The last thing we need is more government spending.

I do support reform, however. The current system is not great. Specifically, our "universal health care" is the emergency room. We need to offer free or cheap clinics that will keep people out of the very expensive emergency rooms. I have no problem with government spending or social programs, but I believe that they should have as small a scope as is possible while still attacking the problem. Government is inefficient (by design) and usually inept (not by design, but in practice).

Duh ... its a network security risk!

[Anonymous Coward]

Academic freedom, my ass. Supporting whatever the flavor-of-the-week professor wants, my ass.

University IT, just like a business, is there to keep the IT functions running to complete the mission objectives. In most cases, it means making sure people can get their mail, do their homework, get journals, and all that jazz. It also includes billing, grades, transcripts, payroll and all that other backroom stuff that keeps the lights on.

It may include various research areas, but in order to be able to conduct research safely and not violate the other business areas/be violated by them, they should be isolated.

So, we'll go back to the article.

So, he installed a Tor client.

This serves to render a lot of firewalling and intrusion detection COMPLETELY useless.

If his endpoint was compromised over tor, they would not be able to detect it until maybe after it started attacking/compromising other university systems.

If his endpoint was compromised, it could attack other systems over tor.

If he was acting as a router, rather than an endpoint, the situation gets just that much worse.

So, he did something that broke firewalling, intrusion detection, and/or auditing -- all of which could have compromised everyone ELSE doing their work.

Believe me, if he got his ass owned, and it took down backroom servers or another flavor-of-the-week professor's favorite toy, there would be MOBS outside IT's door -- complete with pitchforks and torches.

Re:Nice Straw Man

[I_Love_Pocky!]

While the government's response to Katrina was slow and poorly executed, it was not contingent upon ability to pay. If there was a pandemic illness sweeping the nation, a national emergency would be declared, and people would get the immediate attention they required. If I can count on my government for anything, I can count on it to blow through money in a panic.

university administration is full of thugs

[Goldsmith]

Having been in a few meetings where administrators quoted policy to the people who wrote it and then went on to bash faculty and students over the head with illogical interpretations of that policy, I don't find this surprising at all.

These people have hard jobs, but so do we. Should someone teaching computer security not be able to use or talk about things which are important in doing computer security? I know my University administrators think they shouldn't.

Many people come to academia to get away from the frustration of petty, ineffective management only to find it just as entrenched here.

Re:Bravo

[I_Love_Pocky!]

Why would it be a right? It is nice to have, I'll grant you that, but no one owes me anything. Rights should be limited to those things which can not be taken away from me, not those things which must be given to me.

Health care is a luxury that some wealthy nations have decided to share amongst all of their citizens. That is a fair choice, and one which I don't particularly disagree with. In making such a choice, that nation must understand that as with socializing anything, they are introducing a bureaucracy that has no real incentive to do a good job. There is a danger that such a system will be less effective than a market driven system, but I will admit that it doesn't guarantee that.

I oppose socializing anything that doesn't have to be, because every socialized institution I've been exposed to has been severely flawed. If your nation has been successful in socializing medicine, then more power to you.

But please do explain to me how something others provide to you can be your right?

Re:Bravo

[Anonymous Coward]

What's needed is for America to grow a spine and quit being such a batch of hypocrites.

Health care is not a right? Fine, then repeat after me: "If a person is too sick to work, then he or she should crawl into a gutter and die." If you can't swallow that, don't make the claim. Don't try to force people to keep brain dead women alive (or any terminal illness). Don't demand that women go through an expensive high-risk pregnancy to have a baby because the baby's life is somehow worth it. Don't charge people with crimes for not getting medical care for themselves or their dependents.

What would be ideal would be for company-based insurance plans to be outlawed. If I knew then what I know about insurance now, I'd have signed up for insurance fresh out of college and NEVER joined a group plan. Now, I've been diagnosed with MS, and if I ever want to change jobs, I'll have to have a $20k payraise just to cover the cost of the drugs which if I change insurance companies would just not be covered. Could you imagine buying car insurance, getting into a wreck, then getting only half of the claim paid because you changed jobs? I'm willing to bet that group health plans are NOT the result of companies "buying in bulk" but the result of insurers selling cheap plans knowing that they have an escape should they sell a policy to someone like me. Fortunately for me, our current rates are locked in by contract. Unfortunately for our company, the next person we hire will have to pay five times as much. Oh, but I'm sure there's no pressure to have me gotten rid of. All of the profit, none of the risk, group health insurance is such a joke.

Re:Bravo

[miskatonic alumnus]

But please do explain to me how something others provide to you can be your right?

Well, there is no absolute reason carved on a stone somewhere. Likewise, why should life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness be rights? Why should you have a right to physical property? Why should you have a right to move as you please, go where you want, under your own free will? In many times and places, people didn't have these rights. Hell, some people don't have them now. Therefore, they are not universal, but only what we agree upon. These "rights" are part of a social contract. I enumerate health care among them.

Re:Bravo

[TheCarp]

> On one occasion, a fellow grad student was capturing faces from amateur porn sites for some
> research. He got a stern warning from the IT department, and, in return, the IT department got a
> stern warning from the Provost's office about disturbing researchers.

And well they should!

As someone who worked in University IT, we were often reminded of where we worked and what our purposes was. I think it was a good thing. IT exists to provide infrastructure for things to be done, not for its own ends.

Restricting porn in your house or in your buisness is one thing, but a university exists to promote knowledge and discover new knowledge. These sorts of restrictions and policing run directly against the very mission of the institution.

I think people tend to forget that there are reasons to block porn. Parents block porn in a misguided attempt to protect their children from some imagined harm (which is a very common thing for parents to do). Or to protect a company from potential legal liability from overly sensative workers. (I mean really... it has nothing to do with productivity. There are plenty of ways to be unproductive, thats like rotating the tires to see if it fixes that loud exhaust sound) .

A university has a completly different mission. Its good to see that the school has an intelligent provost.

-Steve

Re:And yet...

[BoberFett]

The free market does take care of itself. The problem is that we haven't had a truly free market since the government started choosing economic winners and losers through tax laws and business subsidies.

Re:Bravo

[TeraCo]

The thing is.. the US is really the only first world country where this viewpoint exists. Most of the other first world countries do have national healthcare. In Australia, our healthcare system is far from perfect, but it's still there and that's important.

Re:Bravo

[ichandarin]

Professors pay a good deal of money for their tenure. The opportunity cost of a tenured job at a university can be measured as the difference in salary between this IT professor's job and a job with the same requirements in the private sector. Professors also pay a premium for the independence and flexible work hours of life in the academic world. The extra salary you get over the salary of a potential professiorship is the cost of tenure (which includes the cost of getting a Phd if you don't have one, etc.)

I'm sure that there's an economist who can correct me on this - but it is basically correct.

Re:Bravo

[miskatonic alumnus]

Health care is a service delivered by extensively educated people. Medicine is a product created by educated people with an expensive development process and a risky investment.

And your point is??? Police officers, judges, soldiers also require training and financing. Why don't we leave their services to the free market?

Face it --- You have no good argument. As a society, what we choose to finance through taxes and what we choose to finance directly from our own pocketbook is COMPLETELY arbitrary. However, some people, such as yourself apparently, value money above human life. That speaks volumes about your character.

Re:Bravo

[anthony_dipierro]

First: please stop using Tor on our network. Not very objectionable, they do own it and can request that sort of thing. Kind of like saying "please don't seed torrents of 20 Linux CD images on our network."

The IT staff doesn't own the network. Bowling Green State University owns the network. Most likely the University is a non-profit organization (if not government run), and most likely its mission is to educate its students. So if the professor's use of Tor helps him educate his students, and he isn't using a lot of bandwidth during peak times, then no, no one has a right to tell him to stop.

Seeding torrents of 20 Linux CD images is somewhat different, as it more likely uses a lot of bandwidth, but still I think the educational benefits outweigh the costs (especially if the bandwidth is kept limited).

Must be an American thing

[sn00ker]

I'm at the largest university in New Zealand [auckland.ac.nz], and all we have are campus security. The concept of "campus police" is entirely foreign to me, and to both my fellow students and my colleagues (I work for the Computer Science department [auckland.ac.nz] as well as studying). Hell we don't even see uniformed cops on campus routinely.

Other than a lot of theft of bicycles (I lost two in six months), there's not all that much crime on campus. Lots of drugs, I'm sure, but bad things happening to people are pretty rare. We're more than adequately served by the same police stations that protect the rest of Auckland City.

Of course, we are a country that doesn't even have permanently-armed police officers. Quite why we would devolve policing functions to employees of some private institution is completely beyond me. I suspect, though, that not even the likes of Cambridge or Oxford would have their own police forces. The notion of letting non-state employees enforce the law seems to be quite uniquely American, witness their gun-toting security guards who patrol gated communities.

Re:Duh ... its a network security risk!

[anthony_dipierro]

Believe me, if he got his ass owned, and it took down backroom servers or another flavor-of-the-week professor's favorite toy, there would be MOBS outside IT's door -- complete with pitchforks and torches.

If breaking into a single professor's computer can take down a backroom server, then the IT staff deserves the pitchforks and torches. By your rationale Tor should be banned completely from every network in existence, because hey, my laptop might get owned and take down all of Verizon.

A university network is not a typical business environment. You can't control every computer that gets connected to the network, and you can't shut off encrypted traffic. So by your rationale, "a lot of firewalling and intrusion detection" is already COMPLETELY useless.

Re:How did they find out?

[anthony_dipierro]

The point of tor isn't to hide that your using Tor, the point of Tor is to hide what you did WHILE you were using it. Sure they know he used tor, there is no way to stop that [...]

An important lesson which should be made very clear when the professor suggests to his students that Chinese citizens can use Tor. The fact that the use of Tor can't be (easily or perfectly) hidden severely limits its usefulness when dealing with a government like that in China.

Re:Bravo

[StikyPad]

I don't see how Tor would be a tool in an oppressive society. Quite the opposite: Its use, as was your experience, would be a beacon to "suspicious" activity.

Bravo-At all $$$

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually last year a popular news program came to the conclusion that a lot of the cost of medical care can be traced to the "save me at all costs" mentality. An undertsandable mentality (who doesn't want everything humanly possible to be done when they're sick?). However it's not a sustainable mentality. Some hard decisions are going to have to be made. Also IMHO I think that a lot of the publics approach to health care is reactive, instead of proactive. We wait till we are ill before doing something, instead of living a good clean life, and then dealing with the much smaller number of situations were any form of health care would be effective. In other words the system is being overwelmed, and it doesn't matter what kind of system you have. e.g. socialism, capitalism, etc.*

*I lean more towards a blend of minimum socialism with a layer of free market were I can shop for my medical care, and pay for it out of my pretax dollars, with catastrophic (shared risk) for the most extreme medical conditions. e.g. insurance. This does put a burden on me to manage my affairs properly, but then that's the way all things should be, unless I want to pay someone else to manage. e.g. a funds manager, pensions, etc. Freedom will always have a price. That's mine.

Re:Bravo

[san]

I don't want to talk past each other with statistics, because that's been done to death, and frankly neither side ever seems to trounce the other. All I know is that I keep seeing wealthy Canadians and even Europeans coming to the States for their elective procedures. You can live a long time and still be miserable because you can't get the knee surgery that you need.

You're right, that's indeed one of the trade-offs. Although on average people do get more and easier access to decent healthcare, that doesn't mean that specific cases are better off -- quite the opposite for some people. If you have a rare disease, you might be out of luck.

The other problem is that the US market is currently subsidizing drug and equipment development (even in other countries). If you make the US market like France or Germany, either everyone's costs will rise or the rate of drug/device/procedure development will slow. It's not rocket science - if money flow goes down, the research dollars will flow elsewhere.

I don't see how this is an argument against universal healthare in the US. If anything, it would force more equitable prices. There's still a lot of money to be made on sick and unhealthy people, no matter who pays.

There is the other issue, too. The model countries for socialized health care are Germany and France. These countries have horrible economic problems as a result of their social spending. I don't like the thought of 50% unemployment for those under 25. The last thing we need is more government spending.

That argument keeps coming up, but people fail to realize that Germany had jumped in population but not in GDP when it unified; East Germany (1/3 of current Germany) really was bankrupt. Other countries are doing just fine with their socialized care (the Netherlands, Sweden, etc.). The UK (with its uber-socialized NHS) is doing fine, but it's true that France has been a basket-case for quite a while.

I do support reform, however. The current system is not great. Specifically, our "universal health care" is the emergency room. We need to offer free or cheap clinics that will keep people out of the very expensive emergency rooms. I have no problem with government spending or social programs, but I believe that they should have as small a scope as is possible while still attacking the problem. Government is inefficient (by design) and usually inept (not by design, but in practice).

I was in for quite a shock when I had an accident and ended up in an emergency room for the first time in the US. Those places really epitomize the failure of a system where free markets collide with basic ethics (like not turning away people without insurance).

Another shock upon coming here was the inefficiency of government: bureaucracy and slowness are more like what I'd seen in communist countries than like what I've experienced in Northwestern Europe. I think it has to do with the fact that working for government in the US has such low status and that many government agencies are chronically underfunded.

You get what you pay for, also in government :-)

Re:Bravo

[jmv]

The school has every right to do so. They also have the right to ask him not to cover the topic in the class. These are the people paying his salary, and if they don't want this going on, they can tell him to stop.

Sure, just like they have the right to tell all biology professors to only teach creat^H^H^H^H^H intelligent design, right? It's their money after all.

peeve: "vast" majority

[David Gould]

I can't stand how the word "majority" has in recent years disappeared from our language and been replaced by the phrase " vast majority" (at least in any context that's even remotely political).

This may sound like mere linguistic pedantry, but it really isn't -- this usage both feeds, and is part of, the trend toward polarization and "extremification" (yes, afaik, I just made up that word) of political discourse. When you claim not just a majority but a vast majority, you're doing more than just adding emphasis: you're actively marginalizing the other side (by implying that they're not just a minority but a tiny, insignificant minority).

And it's self-escalating: it creates a sort of "linguistic arms race", where "everyone else does it", so people feel compelled to tack on the "vast", lest it sound like their side is only a mere "majority". But that just leads to linguistic inflation: when (almost) everyone says "vast", it loses its meaning, sending everyone scrambling to find ever-more-emphatic (and more insulting) modifiers, like "overwhelming".

It may seem to make your argument sound a bit stronger, but the constant minor insults don't help us get anywhere closer to building true consenus. After all, wouldn't the overwhelming majority prefer to see a political arena with more true communication and less poo-flinging?

Re:Bravo

[jonadab]

> I would question this statement. WHY should every American get the same price?

Because the current system is essentially a price-fixing conspiracy and is only even legal due to weird technical loopholes.

When the insurance company forces health care providers to provide discounts for its customers that are not provided to anyone else, the end result is that the health care providers, in order to cover their real costs (including their own not insignificant insurance against litigation) and make a profit, raise their rates for everyone, so that the price for the insurance company's customers is enough to cover expenses.

So the rest of us are actually paying *more* than we otherwise would be, because of the demands of an insurance company we *don't* do business with.

Imagine if one of the banks in town negotiates a deal with all the grocery stores, wherein customers of that bank get a 50% discount on all groceries, versus the marked price that everyone else pays. The grocery stores then raises their prices, so now anyone who doesn't use Eighteenth Street Bank is now paying significantly more for groceries than they're really worth.

There are basically five ways to respond. You can pay the higher prices, switch your banking to Eighteenth Street Bank, ship groceries in from out of town where the deal is not in effect, stop buying groceries altogether and grow your own food, or resort to criminal actions of one sort or another to address the situation. None of these are very good options, but the *worst* one, as far as I'm concerned, is to switch your banking to Eighteenth Street Bank, because that makes you an assessory to what they're doing. (Yes, the fifth option, resorting to crime, is potentially worse, depending on the exact nature of the crime you resort to.) When the class action suit is finally filed, I would hope that anyone who chose the switch-banks option would be named as a defendant.

The big problem with the health insurance price fixing scam is that it's absurd to name that many defendants. We're going to have to let the insurance customers totally off the hook on the assessory charge, simply because there are so many of them.

Re:Bravo

[Ancil]

it is crucial that we as a society have high-profile people that can question and critique the status-quo of governments, companies and other powerful groups without great fear of reprisals.

Not sure where you're from, but here in the United States we call those people "citizens".

Re:Bravo

[wall0159]

I agree with you 100%.

Furthermore, while sexual exploitation (especially involving children) is terrible, awful, and shouldn't be condoned by any civilised society it is not the Greatest Evil In The World.

Imagine if a law was passed that said all houses must have glass walls and no curtains, because we want to find child molestors. You shouldn't mind if you've nothing to hide, right?
If we start unravelling our society to catch the tiny minority of assholes - throwing away all the great things that our ancestors have faught for over the centuries - then we've wasted all that effort, and we _still_ wouldn't stop child porn.

I wish those dickheads would get a sense of perspective!

Re:Nice Straw Man

[shaitand]

'If there was a pandemic illness sweeping the nation, a national emergency would be declared, and people would get the immediate attention they required.'

Most illnesses of this sort, including the black plague; could have been stopped if appropriate care were provided BEFORE the pandemic was a pandemic. Bum A slips off a ship carrying the new plague. He feels sick but can't afford healthcare and doubts he'll receive the treatment he needs if he shows up at the ER claiming a heart attack again. So he hangs out with other bums on the street. They in turn ask you for change outside the subway. 48hrs later thousands of people are infected and starting to feel sick. But they don't go to the doctor either. After all, you only go to the doctor if you are really sick in this country because it is expensive. So they wait and thousands more contract the illness. Some of the first were on their way to the airport so they spread it from city to city. And so on and so forth it goes from there. With free healthcare you go to the doctor when you feel sick and everytime you feel sick. The doctor doesn't prescribe anti-biotics if you have a cold because he no longer feels like he has to do something to justify your $75. Anti-biotics remain effective and plagues have a much higher probability of being caught in the first place.

Oh yeah. Plus nobody dies sick, alone, and unable to chew their food because you are rich, cheap, and have principles. Healthcare (including the sub-aspects like Dental, Vision, etc) is a basic fundemental human need. This is the wealthiest nation in the world; this nation is so wealthy that our definition of lower income bracket has a lifestyle that exceeds the wealthy of other nations in many respects. It is just fucking pathetic that a wealthy nation like this can't afford to provide the essentials to its citizens.

It might hurt your work ethic but the secret is that working hard does NOT bring success or a guarantee of making your way in life. The only ones who claim that are the ones that worked hard and succeeded.

Re:Bravo

[rm999]

I don't know of any University where the IT department holds more sway than the professors, regardless of their tenure situation.

Re:Bravo

[Vulturejoe]

That's because that is what it is. It is a paid service. By socializing medicine, you aren't making the costs dissapear -- you're just having taxpayers foot the bill.

Re:Nice Straw Man

[Maxo-Texas]

In part is from our examples of welfare in america. when it was relaxed and easy to get we developed large populations of people that never worked nor did they intend to work. Read about the hippy communes and so on in california. Part of the reasons they did so well were welfare checks.

Welfare and unemployment is a wonderful thing to give to people in need. It is a horrible and corrosive thing to give to people too tho and can absolutely destroy them. Any drive they may have had to create, to learn, to thrive is instead destroyed and they just get by.

It finally got bad enough here that a democratic president ended it for the most part.

The fact that large numbers of people were on welfare and had no intention of getting off it is just embedded in any discussion about the subject now.

It can be really heartless to not help someone who is permanently disabled. When you do tho, you get 4 other people pretending to be permanently disabled (hell they may even believe it themselves). You'd have people "too sick to work" out doing yardwork, gardening, mowing, etc. Bit of a travesty.

In the end- if you want to help people without money- give them yours. That's what I do-- habitat humanity, the food bank, and red cross of the tsunami. But it's MY money to do that with.

Related to Network Neutrality

[yintercept]

The relation university's have with there network is somewhat amusing in light of the network neutrality debate. American Universities have this massive government funded network with bandwidth up the wazoo that fills all of us in the private sector with envy.

The administrators of these networks share a single minded passion. They do not want commercial activities taking place on their precious little taxpayer funded socialized network heaven. Widespread use of Tor might make avenues where commericial traffic gets in sullies the university backbone with commercial traffic.

It is really funny because professors will come out and spit venom about the idea of a telephone company breaking net neutrality, but will turn a strange shade of blue if you were to suggest that university servers should be neutral and allow commerce on the internet meant exclusively for university traffic.

Re:Bravo

[Anonymous Coward]

It's "obvious"? I'm not sure you know what this word means. I wouldn't even know how to begin assessing what proportion of Tor traffic consists of any particular thing, or what proportion of Tor users use it for any particular thing. It certainly isn't easily perceived or understood that the majority of Tor users are using it for child porn. What leads you to make this statement?

Re:Bravo

[bitt3n]

Right on. Why should I have to pay for a police force, judges, politicians, schools, military, highways, or anything else the public uses?

whatever one thinks of the feasability of public healthcare, this argument is facetious. it is not possible for each individual to have his own road system, nor his own military, judiciary or legislature, on account of the fact that we live on the same piece of land, and, for example, having multiple judiciaries and legislatures that each has hegemony over this land is impossible.

It is however quite possible to make each person responsible for paying the cost his own health insurance, whether or not one thinks this is a good idea. This type of condescending and simplistic rhetoric merely cheapens legitimate arguments for government-sponsored health insurance.

Re:Bravo

[HuguesT]

Hello, for a start, ask around people who are not young adults with few brushes with serious illness if they think healh care is a luxury.

Second, this makes no sense :

Rights should be limited to those things which can not be taken away from me, not those things which must be given to me.

Everything can be taken away from you, including life and liberty. Are these not rights ?

This also does not compute :

But please do explain to me how something others provide to you can be your right?

Do you consider voting a right ? Pretty much everything you have is provided to you by society. Precious democracy is still a novel thing not available everywhere on the planet, yet that you may enjoy (I don't know your particulars). Do you consider that you provide yourself unaided the right to vote ? I think not. What about the rest of what you consider your rights ?

If anything, your health is something that is an essential part of you. It should be your right, and in many countries it is, for it to be maintained to an acceptable degree by society. Sure a doctor must care for you, but in what way is it different than a politician or a journalist fighting for your right to freedom of speech ?

Personal health insurance is not enough. I personnally know people who contacted serious enough, however curable a disease that their insurance refused to pay for under some weird excuse. They had to fight this throught the courts. How can that be an effective way to run a society?

You don't trust your current government to run health care, fine. Why don't you use your society-maintained voting rights to put someone in place you think you will trust for this task, assuming you find it worthwhile ?

Re:Bravo

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

The other problem is that the US market is currently subsidizing drug and equipment development (even in other countries). If you make the US market like France or Germany, either everyone's costs will rise or the rate of drug/device/procedure development will slow.

Or the drug companies will simply make less money.

It's not rocket science - if money flow goes down, the research dollars will flow elsewhere.

Except that there's nowhere else for the drug companies to spend their money. Big Pharma is probably the most lucrative commercial R&D area since forever. Even with significantly lower prices, the companies would still be very profitable. They're not stupid, and not likely to back out of a good deal just because an obscenely good deal is no longer an option.

Re:Bravo

[rearden]

There are three major and important facts that proponents of Universal Heathcare ignore when pointing to Germany, Sweden, etc...

1. The US is both population wise and land wise considerably larger- at last estimate over 300 million people. This means the logistical and administrative demands of any such system would be orders of magnitude larger than anything Germany (82m ppl), England (60m ppl), or Sweden (9m ppl) have thus making the program harder to manage and much more expensive.

2. Germany, England and Sweden are central government countries. They have a strong national government with mutiple parties working in coalitions and the Prime Minister is selected from this. This allows for things to work "all in one direction". However, the US is fragmented with a weakened federal government (though stronger over the last 50 years) and many fragmented states with no single direction or goal- and often opposit goals. This would make it both politically and socially difficult to implement a single Universal Heathcare without it being very regonal, complex, and beholden to local politics thus negating many of the advantages of "national heathcare".

3. The US has no National will. It is far easier to geta majority of 80, 60 or especially 9 million people to have a single set of goals or objectives. Especially when that social structure has been in existance for over a thousand years, they all speak the same language and they share common cultural and social norms. The US is to use a cliche a melting pot only 200 years old- getting five random people in a room that have anything in common is nearly impossible in a big city. Trying to find commonality beyond Nation & Citizenship for 300 million in this country is pipe dream.

Antoher issue is Univeral Healthcare does not solve the litigation issue in this country, but that is a whole nother topic.

So, that said what do I think the solution is? Univeral Healthcare laws. Too many of our basic healthcare laws are done state by state thus making it an administrative and paperwork nightmare. Meeting the laws in each state, region and area drive the cost of Healthcare and Insurance up. We need to allow people to pool their insurance- without requiring the involvment of their employer, and we need to standardize the laws across the nation thus lowering the adminstrative and legal cost for both insurers and providers. Once this is done the free market competition in insurance will help drive down cost as each insurer demands lower prices for drugs, medical equipment, and even procedures.

My 2 cents