Higher Education And Higher Monitoring
Nico Perrino of campus free speech defenders theFIRE.org has a piece in the Guardian describing the mini surveillance states campuses have become and are increasingly becoming:

It monitors email and social media accounts, uses thousands of surveillance cameras to track behavior and movement, is funded by billions of dollars from the federal government, and has been called "the most authoritarian institution in America".

The National Security Agency? Nope. It's your average college or university.

Earlier this year, when Harvard University violated school policy by secretly searching deans' email accounts, the world glimpsed the intrusive measures one school took to monitor online activity of its staff. "We needed to act to protect our students," said then-dean of Harvard College Evelynn Hammonds, who authorized the search in response to leaked information about a high-profile cheating scandal at the Ivy League institution.

But at schools across the country, administrators use similarly invasive surveillance tools to monitor everything from students' off-campus behavior to their online speech. University lawyers and administrators claim such surveillance programs are necessary to "protect" their stakeholders. But in reality, these actions are often just heavy-handed strategies colleges use to control their public image - at students' expense.

As a former college athlete, I'm all too familiar with this phenomenon. Many athletic departments hire companies like UDiligence and Varsity Monitor to watch after the social media profiles of their student athletes. The services search for keywords in athletes' profiles and alert coaches or administrators when they are used. Words or phrases like "Benjamins", "Sam Adams", and, bizarrely, "Gazongas" are among those keywords flagged by the monitoring programs.

Although my particular school did not use one of these programs, my team's media relations official kept close tabs on the op-eds I wrote for the student newspaper and other outlets and pulled me aside when he didn't like the direction of one of the pieces. The practice is chilling, yes, but for some students, it can get much worse.

...a whole campus security industry has sprouted up that has caught the eye of civil libertarians. At a recent National Behavioral Intervention Team Association conference, the group organized sessions on "fostering a comprehensive reporting culture within the institution" (See something? Say something, one supposes) and "using mandated psychological assessments" ("using" for what, one might ask).

The controversy over government surveillance in the name of national security has naturally raised questions about how much monitoring is justified to protect the nation from the security challenges it faces. But as the discussion unfolds, we should not be led to believe that intrusions into our privacy are limited to just one government agency based in Maryland. On the contrary, on thousands of campuses across the country, college administrators engage in similar monitoring practices with similar justifications in mind. And often administrators' and universities' reputations, not anyone's safety, appear to be what's at stake.

There is a growing culture of surveillance in America. To roll it back, we must take into account its entire scope.