The temple-pounding pain comes with the fact that Google, as a US-based company,
has to subject itself to the Patriot Act. It means there is no true privacy
online when communicating, short of encrypting everything.
That has
Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario, in a fix. The Globe
and Mail said Canadian privacy laws and the Patriot Act don"t play nicely
together, and professors are not happy:
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.
Lakehead should
be further concerned with the revelations that the National Security Agency
apparently has Internet traffic tapped at switching points with major carriers
in the US. An ongoing lawsuit between the Electronic Frontier Foundation and
AT&T seeks more information on what details may be passing into government
hands on a regular basis.
Pehaps Lakehead should be worried about that
alleged espionage more than the idea of the feds heading to Google to read their
professors" email. It seems to be much more immediate.
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