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Thursday, April 4, 2013

Harvard Dean Justifies Snooping on Faculty Email for the Children |

Harvard Dean Justifies Snooping on Faculty Email for the Children |:


Harvard Dean Justifies Snooping on Faculty Email for the Children

The Harvard email spying scandal got worse this week, with an admission that administrators had engaged in broader surveillance of faculty communications than had been previously disclosed.
The spying was prompted by public disclosure of an incident in which as many as half of the students in one Harvard class were accused of cheating on a take-home exam, and was intended to root out a faculty member believed to have leaked an internal memo to the press.
Harvard admitted in March that sixteen professors email headers’ had been surreptitiously snooped, but on Tuesday administrators told faculty that the spying had gone further. Specifically, they admitted that one professor’s faculty email account — not just his administrative account — was searched, in violation of college policy.
Harvard College dean Evelynn Hammonds, who authorized the searches, justified the snooping with an appeal to the assembled professors’ concern for their own children. “Many of you are parents,” she said, “and I ask you to