The Fugue State

Picture this. You’re a University Student. Like me, when I took Macroeconomics, you’re taking a summer course, with online tests through WebCT. After a long walk home, you sit in your computer chair, and go through your books one last time; you have a quiz tonight.

You log in to your computer, and log on to the class website to do an online quiz for your class. You nod to your webcam; the webcam that was put there by your professor. The professor isn’t necessarily watching you, but your webcam tracks your every movement, so that when the quiz begins, you’re not caught looking at your textbook across the room, getting up to go the bathroom(and hence, obviously cheating, much like if you got up to go to the bathroom during a regular exam). There’s a microphone on your computer that’s listening to everything you say, and every rustle of paper. If it picks up any sound, it alerts your professor to pay attention to you—to make sure again that you’re not cheating.

But since this is mandatory, and since every class has this setup, there’s more—You accidentally think back to what lays across the room and remember you have a copy of 2600(a dissident magazine, the possession of which is liable to get you convicted on TERRORISM charges) laying in the open. You panic…you had gotten stoned last night and hung out with your secret hacker friends and had forgotten to put it away. You can’t look at it…the camera tracks your eye movement—you have to stay focused on the screen, focused on the test.

The camera detects something funny about your body movement, and the professor is alerted. She notices the magazine, and calls the cops. Before the test is done, the SWAT team kicks down your door, shooting your dog, and before you know what happened you’re unconscious in a black bag heading for a secret prison in cuba.

Sounds far fetched? Not really.

Check This out (at 18:15). It’s an Off the Hook episode which deals with a company selling the 1984-esque Mandatory Webcams. This is something you’ll probably have to see for yourself.

I have taken WebCT class, and I could probably have cheated, but didn’t. There was no point–WebCT tests are far easier than their paper counterparts, at least the ones I took. Actually in retrospect, it now makes more sense why the class average was so high.

I’ve got a webcam that I voluntarily put on my desk. It doesn’t work half the time, but still—-I’m probably on the ‘privacy is dead/useless’ side of most things, but even so, here in this case I don’t think it should be mandatory in order to go to university to subject yourself to this massive breach of privacy. Pretty much everything else in the above story has happened to someone, somewhere, there are no missing pieces of the puzzle anymore — if this system becomes commonly used(or worse, made mandatory by the government), it really will be the end of free society.