Last week, campus police at Virginia Tech seized a professor's computer in order to search it for information about a vandalism incident. Someone has been painting anti-rape slogans around campus, and Martha McCaughey, Virginia Tech's Director of Women's Studies, had received an email that police believed could help them track down the vandal. But when campus officials contacted her about the email, she said she had deleted it. And when they approached her about recovering the deleted email from her hard drive, she put them off, saying they could not have her machine until she had backed up her files, which she could not do until after she returned from a trip. Unwilling to wait, campus police waited for her outside her office door last Thursday, and confiscated her machine in her presence. They searched the machine, and returned it the next day.

Now there is uproar about privacy and intellectual property. The police say they had a search warrant; McCaughey says she never saw one. They said they did everything by the book, citing the university's right to copy and examine files on university-owned machines. McCaughey says she was not allowed to back up her files, and that the university was wrong to search her machine without her consent. Others are loudly agreeing. Grad student Piyush Mathur called the university's behavior "whimsical, utterly intrusive, and truly disturbing," adding that "Going by the logic of those cops, the university can confiscate basically any documents stored in our offices (as we use office paper), confidential letters (on official letter pads) and e-mail messages (university software, again), and tap into our phone messages (on the phone machines) as well: without any specific formal legal mandate or explanation or prior notice or warrant." Laura Parisi, an assistant professor of Women's Studies, expressed additional concern that sensitive material on faculty hard drives could be taken out of context: "I do a lot of work on women's human-rights issues, and I look on a lot of Web sites for research on sex tourism," she said. "Someone could possibly interpret that as pornographic. ... I think that is troubling. [What] if I wasn't there to explain why this was important for my professional life?"

These are reasonable objections to raise in an era when privacy rights don't seem always to extend as automatically to the electronic environment as they should. But they are also, in a way, naive about both the climate of potential surveillance on campuses and the power of the individual user to protect her electronic privacy. Universities are often quite clear about the fact that when it comes to the electronic environment, they place their own need to know above the privacy of those who work on university machines and use university-run computing networks. They are quite clear about their right to search the hard drives they own, and even to read the email that zips between its servers. They usually pay lip service to privacy by saying something to the effect that they will only search machines and email records with cause. But they leave the definition of cause wide open (a particularly gruesome instance of dubious "cause" occurred last fall at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, when university officials responded to a student's false allegations of defamation by searching a professor's private email records).

In short, the surprising thing about events at Virginia Tech is not the behavior of the campus police, but the fact that this behavior truly seems to have surprised McCaughey and her colleagues. McCaughey played with fire when she did not cooperate promptly with requests to search her hard drive (I will not speculate on what originally moved her to delete an incriminating email rather than forward it to authorities). The shock expressed by McCaughey and her colleagues is the shock of ignorance bumping up against the cold reality of computing as it is presently handled on most campuses across the country. Its outrage is legitimate--universities don't take electronic privacy as seriously as they should. But as outrage goes, it is also impotent--meeting campus officials' blundering tactics vis a vis electronic privacy with words of helpless anger is far less effective than thwarting those tactics ahead of time.

How? First, know your university's policies on electronic privacy, and know who has access to your university account. You may discover some surprising things. Penn, for instance, promises that electronic privacy will be respected--just as much as office privacy will be respected: "Computer files, e-mail and voice mail created, stored, transmitted or received by faculty will be afforded the same level of privacy as the contents of their offices." Housekeeping and building administrators have master keys to faculty offices. So Penn's policy on electronic privacy is a policy that doesn't extend or guarantee all that much privacy. Likewise, in my home department of English, certain unique circumstances prevail vis a vis electronic privacy. The English department has its own server, and it employs grad students in English to do much of the work of maintaining that server and providing departmental computer support. This means that at any given time, a number of English grad students and affiliated faculty have access to all the information stored on the department's server--including "private" email accounts. No one to my knowledge has ever abused this privilege--but it's nonetheless a clear conflict of interest that compromises electronic privacy on this particular server. And it's worth knowing about if you care about your electronic privacy.

Once you know your university's policies and practices, and once you understand who has access to your hard drive and your account, you can take some very simple precautions to protect your electronic privacy. The best way to do this is to use encryption technology for sending and receiving email--that way no one who isn't supposed to be seeing your mail will see it. Encrypt the documents on your hard drive for the same reason. Encryption technology is strong, reliable stuff. If McCaughey had been using it, her hard drive could not have been searched without her permission. If encryption technology seems too complicated, there are simpler things you can do to protect your communications and your documents. First, if you use a university-owned machine, store nothing on your hard drive. Learn to use FTP and keep your email and your documents stored on a remote commercial server with no university affiliation. If you pay for dial-up service or DSL, you probably already have free storage space available to you. You can also store material for free on services like Yahoo! Briefcase. Second, do your emailing from a commercial account--your campus officials can't commandeer commercial providers. It's that simple.

McCaughey's experience with campus security has led her to question the viability of electronic pedagogy: "If I was a student, I'd be sitting there thinking about whether I should be taking an online course." But these are the concerns of one who knows more about how her institution can monitor her electronic conduct than about how she can keep them from monitoring it, and as such they substitute a blanket paranoia for educated opinion. Such technophobic reactions are all too common in the humanities sectors of American campuses. But as a former technophobe myself, I can sincerely say: when it comes to electronic privacy, the only thing academics have to fear is fear of technology itself.