The FCC, utilizing a 1994 wire-tapping law, is demanding that libraries, universities, airports, and commercial Internet providers all make their systems easy to monitor by spring 2007. This would cost universities alone over $7 BILLION and would edge us ever closer to that Orwellian vision the Neocons love so well.
"This is the mother of all unfunded mandates," Mr. Hartle said.
Even the lowest estimates of compliance costs would, on average, increase annual tuition at most American universities by some $450, at a time when rising education costs are already a sore point with parents and members of Congress, Mr. Hartle said.
At New York University, for instance, the order would require the installation of thousands of new devices in more than 100 buildings around Manhattan, be they small switches in a wiring closet or large aggregation routers that pull data together from many sites and send it over the Internet, said Doug Carlson, the university's executive director of communications and computing services.
"Back of the envelope, this would cost us many millions of dollars," Mr. Carlson said.
