UA defends student privacy

The terror alert is yellow and national security has been taken up a notch. But recently, the Undergraduate Assembly has begun to take measures to alert peer institutions and media resources to protest the newly-developed Student Exchange and Visitor Information System on a legislative level. Sunday, the UA voted to examine if national security is worth the trials that international students now undergo to comply with SEVIS. UA's University Council steering representative Jason Levy and UA treasurer Gautam Mashettiwar presented the proposal, which was passed by UA chairman Seth Schreiberg's tie-breaking vote -- the second time in his term in which he was forced to break his impartiality to determine the outcome of a vote. But he said he is confident he accurately represented the UA's constituency of international students. "It is a breakdown of the right to privacy versus security," Schreiberg said. "It is hard for people to sympathize with an issue that doesn't affect them directly." Levy and Mashettiwar agreed that their reservations about SEVIS were not so much related to the tracking of students as to the violation of privacy and the harshness of consequences. "We should find a way to accomplish security without trampling on students' rights," Mashettiwar said. Levy concurred that "being at the University of Pennsylvania, you should have the opportunity to study and not have to worry about being deported. "I think it is terrible that some intrinsic factor... should prevent you from having a full education." In 1974, the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act was legislated to ensure the privacy of student information. However, after the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, it was alleged that one of the conspirators was in the U.S. on a student visa, which led the Immigration and Naturalization Services to buckle down on student tracking methods. After Sept. 11, the system was reformed yet again, after some of the hijackers were thought to have entered the country on student visas and instead of enrolling in their expected institutions, undertook an alternate academic agenda focusing on aviation training. Conor Daly, a UA representative and Daily Pennsylvanian columnist, said that it is because of this precedent of abused visas that he did not vote to pass the proposal. "The inconvenience of the few is outweighed by the security of the whole," Daly said. UA Vice-Chairman Ethan Kay, however, voted against the proposal because he said the policy is less invasive than some people perceive it to be, partly because of the checks that Penn has in place. The University "will go to court... if the government mandates more information than the University is willing to give," Kay said. In 2001, FERPA was reformed to include the USA PATRIOT Act, which called for SEVIS, requiring every international student to report personal and educational information to the INS via an electronic database. SEVIS was enforced in January, but schools have until Aug. 1 to submit information. Shalini Bhutani, the director of International and Student Services at Penn's Office of International Programs said that "it is much too early to see what problems will arise out of SEVIS." Bhutani said that she hoped international students could continue to count on the OIP for protection. "What really concerns us is that we try very hard to be advocates for students," Bhutani said "This sort of changes our rules a bit." She also said she doubts the effectiveness of SEVIS as a preventative measure. "If the INS is looking to fight the bigger issues, SEVIS is probably not going to give them the information they are looking for."