BY HANK REICHMAN

If you weren’t familiar with Zoom before the COVID-19 pandemic, you must be now.  Everyone is using it — for faculty and staff meetings, seminar talks and panels, political and union organizing, socializing with friends and family, holding remote weddings and Bar Mitzvahs, and, of course, teaching online classes.  And, yes, we’re all getting sick of it.  What’s more, it now seems that Zoom can threaten academic freedom, as recent experience at San Francisco State University reveals (see on this blog here and here.)

I’m far, far from expert on Internet technologies — heck, on Zoom calls, for some reason I still can’t figure out, I keep losing my Internet connection, even though it’s working fine for my wife on her laptop in the next room.  But Eben Moglen, professor of law at Columbia University and founder of the Software Freedom Law Center, does know what he is talking about on this topic.  A lot.  And he is skeptical about the use of videoconferencing for teaching the law.  In a recent blog post, “Why Not Video Conferencing?” he outlines his objections.  But he has a special bone to pick with Zoom.  His comments on it are worth quoting:

The architectural disadvantages of commodity video-conferencing for law teaching are incurable; no implementation can eliminate them.  But to these insurmountable objections, Zoom adds a series of disqualifications all its own.  As everyone has now learned, its absence of security is risible; its privacy invasions are central to its data-mining and advertising-based business model; and it pushes its data flows through servers territorially under the control of a government hostile to academic freedom, rule of law, democracy, and human rights.  The government of the PRC now claims extra-territorial jurisdiction under the national security law intended to eliminate civil liberties in Hong Kong over expressions of opinion it regards as a threat wherever in the world they are uttered.  The use of any communications medium deliberately complicit in PRC listening should be prohibited in US universities, let alone in a law school admitting Hong Kongers and other Chinese students.

Here too the existing policies and practices are improvisations, based implicitly on the incorrect belief that there is no preferable technological alternative.  Even if video-conferencing were a good way to teach law school, Zoom would be the worst possible technological choice.

The free software community created and maintains a video-conferencing system intended specifically for educational use.  BigBlueButton does everything that the centralized data-mining platform built by Zoom can be creakily adapted to do, and much more.  BigBlueButton is a “federated” service platform: anyone can run a server and integrate its communications technologies with common course-delivery systems, like the proprietary Canvas system—a student-surveillance system with a side-hustle in curricular delivery—on which Columbia Courseworks is presently based.  If we were the Indian Institutes of Technology, the MITs and Caltechs of India, we would be using BigBlueButton.  But of course, we’re not.

Although I have no direct need in these courses for video-conferencing, it is important for the Zoom illusion to be punctured.  So in late fall 2020 I will put a BigBlueButton server up at the law school that can run video-conference classes in every way cleaner than Zoom.  I will build the physical server with my own hands from cheap loose parts, which is how I like to work; install and configure every byte of software from the kernel up; and run everything myself.  I will make somewhat better lousy video-conferencing available in the law school, using free software that doesn’t invade your privacy, spy on your ideas, cost money for the University to use, or pretend to be better than it is.  Freedom begins by knowing that another world is possible.

I’m not certain that BigBlueButton is the answer either.  Apparently, some people I know say it just isn’t really ready for the kind of widespread use that we in higher ed are demanding of Zoom and similar products.  But I’ll leave that to more knowledgeable colleagues.  I will say, however, that the growing and corrosive practice of colleges and universities — established to serve the common good — outsourcing themselves to private for-profit entities is hardly limited to use of Zoom and other commercial software.  That troubling phenomenon, however, has been called into focus by the pandemic and higher education’s response to it.  Unfortunately, our use of Zoom may be another case of responding to problems by (intentionally or unintentionally) exacerbating them rather than solving them.