Joke Issue: SPEC group spies on students

SPEC is spying on you. That’s why they got the Fling headliner right this year.

The “SPEC-Reconnaissance” subcommittee was created last year with the task of collecting information about students’ online lives and habits from numerous sources, documents provided to the Daily Pennsylvanian show.

The group targeted publicly available information on online student forums, such as Twitter, CollegiateACB, Penn Admirers and official and unofficial class Facebook pages, in order to compile a database of each student’s music and pop-culture preferences.

SPEC created the subcommittee in response to complaints over last year’s Spring Fling headliner, Girl Talk. Trying to avoid another let-down for this year’s Fling, SPEC turned to data mining to discover the most lusted-after artists on campus while avoiding students rigging its selection process.

The new student government agency was created by a unanimous vote of the Undergraduate Assembly last April in a closed door meeting.

But according to documents, released by “Edward,” one of several computer science students consulted by the 10-member committee overseeing the project, the primary mandates of SPEC-Reconnaissance and the database have shifted.

“The idea became that we would gather a list of all the ‘bad apples’ on campus — students who have violated the code of conduct, were part of unsavory or undesirable organizations or who SPEC members just had a bad feeling about — and use the database to identify their friends and classmates who might also be dangerous,” said Edward, who wished to remain anonymous because he didn’t pick up his Fling floor passes yet.

Since it’s inception, SPEC-Reconnaissance’s data gathering expedition has expanded far beyond its original scope. Instead of just knowing students’ top songs on Spotify, the group began to look into all types of data at Penn. It even knew that three students were squatting at Penn President Amy Gutmann’s house before Penn Police did.

Over time, however, committee members began consulting student data for more and more frivolous things. “The UA amended the committee’s charter to allow them to operate without oversight from the rest of SPEC,” Edward said. Instead they started reporting directly to UA President Abe Sutton, who reportedly rubber-stamped approval for any SPEC-Reconnaissance requests to come across his desk.

Sutton did not return multiple phone calls and email requests for interviews regarding SPEC-Reconnaissance or Penn Security Appendix — the official name for the database of student information, known internally as PennSA.

“We have to ask ourselves if it’s worth the [student] government spying on us if this is what it’s being used for,” Edward said.

When asked why he decided to blow the whistle on stud gov’s surveillance project, Edward said, “I was snowed in during one of the blizzards back in February when I got an email from the SPEC-Reconnaissance listserv asking to help analyze a new crop of data including grades and advisors’ personal evaluations of students.”

“That was where I drew the line — I realized that our student government was no longer working for freedom, but instead had become an instrument of tyranny,” said Edward, “They’re drunk on power.”

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