The Campus Conservative

(Seal of The Federal Bureau of Investigation. Source: FBI.gov.) Two Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents met with faculty senate on January 19 in an effort to prevent intellectual property (IP) theft of U.S. government-funded research. The two agents, Mr. Donald Lichay of FBI’s Dallas office and Mr. Paul Zukas of FBI’s Houston office, told the senate that FBI wants to secure federally-funded research against theft by adversarial nations. “You should never hear from the FBI that we do not 100 percent support international collaboration because we do,” Lichay said. “We understand that it is the key to success to curing diseases and developing new technologies. We promote that and we just want to make sure that it is done in a safe and fair playing field.”  The New FBI   The agents said that rather than rely on arresting criminals as it did in days of old, today's FBI fights IP crime through information-sharing and collaboration. Lichay said, “There will never be a d...

(Chairman Kevin Eltife, Source: University of Texas at Tyler YouTube page.) At the medical school's groundbreaking ceremony last month, University of Texas Board of Regents Chairman and Tyler native Kevin Eltife gave a speech about the history behind the new medical school’s inception. Eltife told a story of local achievement. His tale (as I understood it) was that the new medical school’s founding was not a result of an administrator's decision in a far away bureaucracy, but rather the result of local initiative, of East Texans collaborating together and “giving back” to serve their community. In his speech, Eltife not only recounted local philanthropy’s contributions to the school's establishment, but also identified different local individuals, and revealed how a broad spectrum of local interest came together to realize this "dream", as Eltife called it: a medical school in East Texas.  Therefore, because I thought Eltife's speech was insightful, I transcr...

(Source: "Surveillance" by Jonathan McIntosh via Flickr) UT-Tyler Police Department (UTTPD) recently gave an update on campus security to student government on Oct. 13. In the meeting, UTTPD revealed that the department now has approximately 600 security cameras throughout campus and now also license plate readers at every entrance. Doubtless, these measures are good for security, but are they good for students’ privacy? Given the police department’s growing surveillance apparatus, student government must protect students’ privacy. To give an example from the meeting, Assistant Chief of Police Brandley Standerfer touted the license plate readers’ benefits by citing a case in which UTTPD used license plate reader information to identify the alleged perpetrator of the catalytic converter thefts that occurred last semester. (A catalytic converter is an automotive part that thieves remove from under the vehicle.) Standerfer said UTTPD used reader information to create a list of p...