Friday, February 7, 2003

To Guard 3 Students' Privacy, Georgetown U. Expunges Thousands of E-Mail Messages By SCOTT CARLSON Administrators at Georgetown University shut down the university's e-mail system and altered the accounts of thousands of students on Tuesday night to erase a mass e-mail message from the university that contained private student information. The message, which had been inadvertently sent out in a crime report by the university's public-safety department, detailed various incidents on campus and named three students. Juan C. Gonzalez, the university's vice president of student affairs, said that "failures at many levels" let the private information go out in the crime report around 3 p.m. on Tuesday. He says that the university's department of public safety did not edit the document or get approval before it sent the message out. He would not provide further details about the message. Once the error was discovered, around 5 p.m., administrators held an emergency meeting with legal counsel and technical staff, and resolved to immediately shut down the system and erase the message, account by account. The system was down for about 14 hours, as Georgetown's technical staff members worked overnight on the problem. "It was extraordinarily complicated," Mr. Gonzalez said. "This was not a decision made lightly." Mass electronic mailings go out gradually in batches, not all at once. University administrators were able to stop the message from going to undergraduate students. However, they estimate that the message was delivered to about 3,000 graduate-student accounts before the system shut down. The technical staff used an automated program to find the message in each account and replace it with a blank message. Ardoth A. Hassler, associate vice president for university information services, says that some students have set up their university accounts to automatically forward e-mail messages to private accounts. Those messages in private accounts could not be deleted, she said. On Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Gonzalez and John Q. Pierce, the university registrar, sent a message to students, staff members, and faculty members, telling them that the message had been deleted. "We want to reassure you that email messages and accounts are otherwise undisturbed and that no one read any email in this process," the message said. Mr. Gonzalez and Mr. Pierce also urged those who received the message to "please be respectful of each other and do not share its contents." Mr. Gonzalez said that after the error was discovered, the university immediately contacted the three students who were named in the e-mail and told them what happened. "They have been very reasonable," he said. Few faculty members responded to calls from The Chronicle for comment on the issue. In an e-mail message, Wayne A. Davis, a professor of philosophy and president of the Faculty Senate, said the university's action "was an appropriate response to an urgent problem." Other faculty members said the incident was an unsettling reminder of the university's power over their e-mail accounts. "Just the reminder that the administrators have the capacity to read everything in our mailboxes is unnerving," said one professor, who asked not to be named. "The potential for them to rewrite the messages is pretty disturbing." However, Nicholas J. Quinonez, a senior and the vice chairman of the Assembly of the Georgetown University Student Association, was far less worried. "I now know that the university can get into your e-mail and pull e-mail messages," he said. "But it's so much trouble for the university to do that, I'm not fearful of it happening. I would venture to say that it will never happen again, and if it does I would think that the university would have a good reason for it." Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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