American colleges – wired to the top of their ivory towers – gave birth to Napster and thrive on 24/7 instant messaging. But over the past few years, even as many schools have pushed for freedom and privacy, some have clamped down on cyber liberties. Just in time for those acceptance letters, Wired analyzed computer network policies at the nation's top 50 research universities and graded the best and the worst.
| The Best| The Worst
| 1. MIT Grants root access to anyone who asks. Runs an anonymous remailer and PGP key server.| 1. Columbia Monitors Internet use and kicks students off the network if they download more than 1 Mbit per second for 10 minutes or longer. [CORRECTION: Rants & Raves, UNDO]
| 2. Cornell Has a strong anticensorship policy. If the school receives a copyright-violation complaint, it will only cut students� connections if they are proven guilty.| 2. Tulane Regards logging onto the network as a student�s consent to look at any file, including email.
| 3. Vanderbilt University Offers PGP and SSL. Liberal bandwidth usage policy.| 3. Tufts Surveils campus Internet traffic at all times. Wi-Fi is forbidden.
| 4. University of Michigan Is known for great crypto research and rigorous privacy protection.| 4. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Places students in a "penalty box" and publishes their IP and MAC addresses on the Web if they use too much bandwidth.
| 5. Carnegie Mellon University Promises, in an explicit and clear policy, that student data is private property and will be protected as such.| 5. UC Berkeley Runs a program called Bro that keeps logs of every URL visited.
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Nathan Fox
| START
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