[liberationtech] Developer of Cell Phone Tool for Migrants Under Investigation by UCSD (fwd)

[Todd Davies]

Developer of Cell Phone Tool for Migrants Under Investigation by UCSD

http://www.voiceofsandiego.org/education/article_95fe775e-41f0-11df-a8f9-001cc4c03286.html
Developer of Cell Phone Tool for Migrants Under Investigation by UCSD

Posted: Tuesday, April 6, 2010 7:49 pm | Updated: 11:19 am, Mon Apr
12, 2010.

By ADRIAN FLORIDO

A University of California, San Diego professor whose cell phone tool
to help migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border made headlines four
months ago is being investigated by the university for that and
another project he developed as part of his research.
In December, UCSD visual arts professor Ricardo Dominguez was barraged
by media attention after he and several colleagues announced a cell
phone GPS tool designed to help migrants find water stations during
remote desert crossings.
The tool, Dominguez said, was developed as an art project with
practical applications. In the process, he said, it was intended to
stimulate conversation about death at the border.
And it did. Humanitarian activists praised it as a life-saving tool,
and some anti-immigration activists challenged its legality by
claiming it violated federal law that prohibits helping undocumented
immigrants enter the country. Politicians, including U.S. Rep. Duncan
D. Hunter, called for the university to pull funding for the
Transborder Immigrant Tool.
As recently as last month, Hunter was joined by Republican
representatives Brian Bilbray and Darrell Issa in asking university
Chancellor Marye Anne Fox to provide information on the tool's funding.
In a letter to the chancellor, the representatives said the project
appeared to be "a troubling use of taxpayer dollars" that were "being
used in an effort to actively help people subvert federal law."
University administrators have been investigating to determine,
Dominguez said in an interview, whether a $5,000 grant that funded the
project had been appropriately spent.
Last month, the university launched a second investigation focusing on
Dominguez's work in the field of electronic civil disobedience.
On March 4, Dominguez organized an online sit-in against the Office of
the President of the UC system, in solidarity with statewide student
protests that day against UC budget cuts.
By using a web browser and visiting a special URL students
participated in an online protest that redirected them to the
president's website, Dominguez said. By using the browser's refresh
button repeatedly, he said, the protesters "participated in the
equivalent of an offline sit in," immobilizing the site temporarily.
"It doesn't take down his office, but it is like making it very
difficult for the president to get to his desk."
During the protest, university administrators disabled the server
hosting Dominguez's sit-in. A few days later, he received an e-mail
from an assistant chancellor informing him of an investigation into
the protest to determine whether criminal charges were appropriate.
And last week, two university police officers questioned Dominguez at
his campus office, he said.
Dominguez is accused of using university servers to create a "denial
of service attack" against the Office of the President's computer
servers. Such attacks attempt to disable a targeted server by bogging
them down with request for information.
The March 4 sit-in, Dominguez said, did not access the office's
server, but redirected participants who entered the sit-in's webpage
to the university president's, using simple computing code to refresh
the internet browser multiple times and slow its ability to process
the requests.
Campus police and administration officials would not comment on the
investigations or say what possible criminal charges might be
considered, saying the investigations were ongoing.
A representative at the Office of the President said he could not
comment before consulting the handling attorney, who was unavailable
this week.
The investigations, Dominguez said, have slowed progress on the
Transborder Immigrant Tool and raised questions within his department
over the freedom of researchers at UCSD to conduct the work they were
hired to do.
The irony in the university's investigation against him, Dominguez
said, is that he is being scrutinized for the work that was cited in
the decision to grant him tenure there less than a year ago.
Dominguez, who was once a practicing artist in New York City, arrived
as an assistant professor at UCSD in 2005.
He had made his career researching what he calls "electronic civil
disobedience," which recreates in virtual spaces like the internet the
popular form of sit-in protests used by students and activists for
decades.
Dominguez organized online sit-ins that have allowed large numbers of
people to temporarily disrupt the websites of U.S. government agencies
by mobilizing all at once.
The work earned him recognition in academic circles, Dominguez said,
because of the way his work "created conversations that disturb the
social field."
At UCSD, he established the b.a.n.g. lab, a research collaborative
whose focuses include electronic civil disobedience and border
disturbance technologies like the GPS tool.
So the investigations of possible criminal misconduct, Dominguez and
his colleagues said, are puzzling.
"The question is why they are responding in this way now as opposed to
last year when they gave me awards and I earned tenure based on all
this research and practice," he said.
"It could be," Dominguez said, "that both the Transborder Immigrant
Tool and the artistic research of b.a.n.g. lab all came together in a
way that disturbed their measures of power."
That is a feeling the university has had to fend off with increasing
frequency. It has been bombarded by negative attention in recent
months that has shaken confidence in its administration. In February,
local and national media descended on the campus to report on events
targeting UCSD's black student community. Last month, students
mobilized on campus to protest university budget cuts.
The mobilizations around both of these events, Dominguez said, were
ripe for involvement of electronic forms of civil disobedience to
express student concerns over the direction students felt the
university was taking.
"Various forms of public provision across the state are under
assault," said Grant Kester, chair of the visual arts department. "In
that environment, Ricardo has become more attentive to the politics of
the university."
Kester said the university's investigations could have a chilling
effect on research university-wide, but that Dominguez's research
creating electronic public spaces is of special symbolic importance.
"A public university has a unique responsibility to engage and ask
questions about what the word 'public' means and what constitutes it,"
Kester said. "One of the things Ricardo does in his research is
explore some of those fault lines."
Please contact Adrian Florido directly at adrian.florido at voiceofsandiego.org
   and follow him on Twitter: twitter.com/adrianflorido.