Brown University Reportedly Has One Surveillance Camera for Every Nine Undergrads
“Students don’t ‘agree’ to being surveilled; they aren’t even aware they’re being surveilled! How could they possibly consent?”
It sounds like Big Brother is watching at Brown University and most students don’t even know it.
GoLocalProv reports:
Brown Has One Surveillance Camera for Every 9 Undergrads – Student Raises Concerns
Brown University has a surveillance camera for every nine undergraduate students, based on the analysis of a doctoral candidate.
According to PhD candidate Jack Wrenn, Brown has 816 cameras across campus, which is roughly the amount of full-time faculty. Brown enrolls approximately 7,160 undergraduate students.“Since 2017, my friends and I have marked the locations of approximately 150 surveillance cameras on College Hill. While this is only a fraction of Brown University’s more than 800 cameras, the scope of the surveillance is staggering: It is impossible to cross (or even approach) Brown University without being surveilled,” wrote Wrenn in the Brown Daily Herald.
Wrenn has been raising the issue of what he says is “seemingly limitless surveillance” at the Ivy League institution — and he voiced his most recent concerns just as the university came under a suspected cyberattack this past week.
“My impression is that students are concerned about the University’s pervasive surveillance of their daily lives,” Wrenn told GoLocalProv.com.
Wrenn said then to set out to attempt to write a technical-but-accessible guide to how system administrators can track people’s locations — that garnered coverage on the front pages of both Hacker News and Reddit.
“Sure, students know that there are security cameras, but do they know there are more cameras than full-time faculty!? Of course not,” said Wrenn. “Students don’t ‘agree’ to being surveilled; they aren’t even aware they’re being surveilled! How could they possibly consent?”
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Comments
We need more students like Wrenn speaking up on this and other subjects.
For Brown, one-to-one sounds about perfect.
But the statistic itself is meaningless. How many of these surveillance cameras are in non-student areas? Physical plant garages and warehouses, dining hall kitchens, utility tunnels, roof surfaces, emergency exits, and the like?
The amazing thing about Portland is that for the last year we have had a plane that flies around the east side for about 6 hrs every evening at 1000 ft doing god knows what, and no one seems to notice or care. Plane, fuel, pilot run about $250/hr so someone is dropping $10K/wk and that is before the data analysis even starts.
Here’s your laugh of the day: Brown owns the only surviving manuscript copy of 1984.