To the Editor:
Thank you for your excellent reporting in last week’s Phillipian on the proposed one-card key system. Your articles reveal a lot to be excited about, and they also reveal some more troubling details. The new card, which will link all forms of student activity to a single electronic database and store these data indefinitely, has serious privacy ramifications. Although some data retention is unavoidable (and perhaps desirable), I am appalled to learn that the Phillips Academy administration has no qualms about using the new system to track student movement on campus. The one-card system is being portrayed as an all or nothing deal: if we want improved convenience, we’re going to have to accept degraded liberty. In truth, the retention of data from one-card door-scanners would be an avoidable and unjustifiable abuse of students’ fundamental right to privacy. Society as a whole moves closer and closer to the Orwellian ideal with each passing year. One of the principal causes of this terrifying transformation is students’ apathy towards surveillance in our schools. If schools track our every movement, thus inuring us to abuses of our privacy, who could blame us for failing to challenge our governments when they want to do the same? When the NSA taps Americans’ phones without warrants, no one is outraged. Why? Because we’ve been trained to believe it is acceptable. Phillips Academy, in converting its campus into a veritable surveillance-state, could indoctrinate its students into a cult of blind obedience: “You Love Big Brother.” If we hear it enough we’re going to start believing it. Then, at 18, we’re going to get to vote for president. That’s what is scary. As with NSA warrantless surveillance, the use of the one-card to track student movement is justified on the basis of security. As with NSA warrantless surveillance, that is an intellectually untenable position. Never mind that “those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety” (attributed to Benjamin Franklin), this particular abuse of liberty doesn’t even offer improvements to safety. Let’s be frank. The administration does not trust us, and they want to know where we are. As with drug testing and the lie-alyzer committee, the theory here is that PA students are a bunch of pathological liars who need to be forced to be honest for their own good. As with drug testing and the lie-alyzer committee, the administration is once again neglecting the fact that trust is a two-way street. If they want us to trust them and be honest then they need to stop treating us like convicted inmates in a correctional institute. Let us keep our privacy. Teach us to value our rights. It’ll be worth it. You’ll see. Sincerely, Christian Anderson ’09
