PATRIOT Act frells US web service vendors

Keen.  A Canadian university is saving money and improving service by tossing its old legacy email and collaboration system in exchange for Google Aps But there’s a problem …

Eighteen months ago, Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ont., had an outdated computer system that was crashing daily and in desperate need of an overhaul. A new installation would have cost more than $1-million and taken months to implement. Google’s service, however, took just 30 days to set up, didn’t cost the university a penny and gave nearly 8,000 students and faculty leading-edge software, said Michael Pawlowski, Lakehead’s vice-president of administration and finance.

U.S.-based Google spotlighted the university as one of the first to adopt its software model of the future, and today Mr. Pawlowski boasts the move was the right thing for Lakehead, saving it hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual operating costs. But he notes one trade-off: The faculty was told not to transmit any private data over the system, including student marks.

It’s not some sort of anti-Americanism at work, but a well-founded fear by the faculty that, under the PATRIOT Act and similar legislation, US law enforcement / anti-terror / homeland security types can willy-nilly sift through all their correspondence and research. Not to mention student academic records and grades.

At Lakehead, the deal with Google sparked a backlash. “The [university] did this on the cheap. By getting this free from Google, they gave away our rights,” said Tom Puk, past president of Lakehead’s faculty association, which filed a grievance against Lakehead administration that’s still in arbitration. Professors say the Google deal broke terms of their collective agreement that guarantees members the right to private communications. Mr. Puk says teachers want an in-house system that doesn’t let third parties see their e-mails.

Some other organizations are banning Google’s innovative tools outright to avoid the prospect of U.S. spooks combing through their data. Security experts say many firms are only just starting to realize the risks they assume by embracing Web-based collaborative tools hosted by a U.S. company, a problem even more acute in Canada where federal privacy rules are at odds with U.S. security measures.

Using their new powers under the Patriot Act, U.S. intelligence officials can scan documents, pick out certain words and create profiles of the authors – a frightening challenge to academic freedom, Mr. Puk said.

For instance, a Lakehead researcher with a Middle Eastern name, researching anthrax or nuclear energy, might find himself denied entry to the United States without ever knowing why. “You would have no idea what they are up to with your information until, perhaps, it is too late,” Mr. Puk said. “We don’t want to be subject to laws of the Patriot Act.”

Seems quite reasonable to me. And, once again, an example of how much US reputation — and business — has been damaged by self-inflicted wounds in the “War on Terror.”