#foi

From the book Flight of Icarus:

In terms of family, his mother was named Elizabeth, she loved the blues, and she was the person who made Eddie fall in love with music. She died of illness when her son was six. His father is Alan “Al” Munson, Wayne’s brother, a selfish man who goes in and out of prison.

His best friend is “Ronnie” Veronica Ecker. She also lives in the trailer park with her grandmother. She and Eddie go to school together, and he drives her in the van.

Eddie and Ronnie are the ones who kept Hellfire going, but unlike Eddie, Ronnie was not seen as a hopeless outcast and managed to get a scholarship to NYU, which is why Eddie is the only one who stays in Hawkins.

The other reason why Ronnie and him are not close anymore is that Eddie and Higgins, the principal, have more than simple mutual dislike. Higgins blames Eddie for the constant beatings, because the Tigers are “useful” as part of the sports team, while Eddie is just “a stain on the history of that school.” He often drags him into his office, threatens to expel him, which he can’t actually do because Eddie is always the only one who leaves covered in bruises, and gives him disgusting speeches about how he should just drop out since no Munson has ever graduated anyway, and about how he is a rotten apple that risks rotting all the others.

A very violent fight happens. Tommy H breaks Gareth’s wrist, and Ronnie steps in before Tommy can hit the boy again while he’s already on the ground. Gareth ends up in the hospital and needs surgery, Higgins pulls Eddie aside and tells him that this time it’s serious and that if he files a report Ronnie will lose all her chances. Eddie, not wanting to destroy his best friend’s future, drops out of school and lets the principal win.

This leads to the collapse of their relationship, because Eddie stops showing up without explaining anything to anyone. When Ronnie goes to ask for explanations, he snaps but doesn’t talk, because he knows she would cause trouble and he doesn’t want her to risk her future. They end up not speaking anymore.

Al is the reason Eddie knows how to steal a car. He’s also the reason Eddie has had a gun pointed at him a couple of times, and above all the reason Eddie could never be anything other than “the town fuckup.”

When Al gets out of prison yet again, he goes straight to Eddie and involves him in a plan to rob one of the major dealers who supplied several states.

Eddie doesn’t want to accept, because he has no intention of ending up as human trash like his father.

Paige should be introduced here, but I’ll keep all relationships for later. Eddie gets a chance to pursue music. Paige pays his first expenses, including studio recording costs, but he’s soon told that the opportunity only includes him and excludes Corroded Coffin, and that he would have to move to California or go back and forth. In short, money he doesn’t have.

He accepts to take part in the robbery to scrape together about five thousand dollars. He thinks his life might finally change direction, that he’ll be able to go somewhere where he’s actually a person and not just the shadow of his last name.

The robbery happens in two parts. He almost takes a bullet to the head in the first part. The second part seems to go smoothly, until it doesn’t.

It’s Al who introduces Eddie to Reefer Rick.

Reefer Rick is a friendly guy, lives in the woods, fairly tidy, very helpful. He’s also the one they plan to sell the stolen drugs to, to get the money.

Eddie has his own small, independent house, like the one Max and her mother have in season four.

In the second part of the plan, they manage to steal drugs from the container that transports them. But, the two men they stole the drugs from, Jack and CJ, quickly trace everything back to Al. They go to Eddie’s house, point a gun at him, and it comes out that Al went to Eddie because he was the only one stupid enough to trust him, and that the reason Eddie was the face of the plan, despite Al being more experienced, was that Al was robbing the man he worked for because he “thought his piece of cake was too small.”

CJ and Al recover part of the money and set Eddie’s house on fire, burning all of his mother’s memories with it. A police officer approaches them, armed. The two criminals shoot him and run. Al tells Eddie to be grateful they put the bullet in the cop and not in one of them, and tells him to get in the van and run to California like they had planned.

Eddie goes to press his hands on the officer’s wound and tries to convince his father to stay. His father tells him he’s out of his mind and leaves. The police arrive and, without much investigation, decide that Eddie shot the officer, so they throw him in jail.

End of the flight of Icarus, figuratively. He no longer has the money for California, he no longer has a house, he no longer has friends, he no longer has his van, he has nothing left. When the officer wakes up, he says Eddie wasn’t the one who shot him. Hopper goes to see Eddie, gives him water, and takes him to make a phone call. Eddie calls Paige and tells her he won’t be able to go to California.

Paige pays his bail and cuts ties with Eddie.

Eddie restarts his life by going to live with Wayne. He asks Reefer Rick for a job because Wayne can’t keep up with expenses, and he reenrolls in school by threatening Higgins with exposing his drug use, drugs Eddie discovered at Reefer Rick’s place.

Eddie as a character:

I loved seeing people complain that Eddie is badly written in FOI, because Caitlin Schneider is the author of the book, a staff writer and director’s assistant, she wrote a couple of episodes and helped write the entirety of season four in particular. Eddie’s authorship is completely hers. People just have a totally skewed image of Eddie that doesn’t line up with canon Eddie. So I’m adding this section on Eddie’s character.

Eddie is insufferable.

Every time someone tries to have a conversation with Eddie where they’re worried about him, trying to help him, or wanting to clear things up, Eddie takes it as a personal offense. He does it with Ronnie when she asks for explanations, he does it with Paige when she asks “what did you do?” after he calls her from jail, and he does it countless times with Wayne, who worries about him. He immediately jumps to “I’m not a child” and “I do what I think is right,” aggressively.

He always regrets it within ten minutes, but he never stops.

He calms down only after hitting rock bottom and watching his life fall apart, but overall Eddie is not a guy with good communication skills and he’s a bit emotionally constipated.

Eddie does not beg. He worked at the Hideout as a bartender and occasionally performed. When he needed money, he picked up extra shifts and did the math, but he never asked anyone for anything.

He does not use drugs. He drinks and smokes cigarettes, but the stuff he sells, he just sells it, he doesn’t consume it.

He comes in hot, expecting his last name to precede him. He starts from the assumption that everything will go wrong because he’s a Munson, that he’ll never be anything or anyone because of the family he comes from. Wayne is the one who shakes him out of that mindset.

Eddie and his relationships:

He was in love with Ronnie, but Ronnie rejected him and they stayed friends (he got over it).

After confessing to Ronnie, Eddie dated two other girls, Nicole Summers in tenth grade and Cass Finnigan between ’83 and ’84. In both cases, Eddie felt that they weren’t really interested in him or in getting to know him, but were more curious about what it was like to date the freak.

Paige (his girlfriend in ’84) was a ray of sunshine in his life. She went to school with him, then moved to California, and now works for WR, a music label. She gets him the recording session, convinces the studio guy, pays for the session, sends the record out, believes in him. They were deeply in love with each other. They were supposed to go live together in California.

Eddie tried to call Paige many times after getting out of jail, but she never answered. Not because Eddie had been locked up, especially since he was innocent, but because he gave no explanations for anything and snapped at her, abandoning her without a reason.

Chrissy Cunningham: the book expands on how they met. Eddie recognizes her while she’s trying to convince Tommy, Jason, and another guy not to beat up Gareth, but she doesn’t notice him. He never expected her to be a likeable person, neither when they were kids nor when they grew up. The book only mentions that, when they were younger, he sees her mother scolding her and listing all the things she messed up on stage, and he mouths “sorry” to her. Joseph Quinn has admitted several times that Eddie had a crush on her, and the Duffers said they regretted killing her because there was potential there, but nothing is explored in depth in FOI, where Chrissy was already with Jason.

Scenes from season four that FOI adds context to:

The satanic panic in Hawkins was already rampant. One family had pulled their son out of school and sent him to a religious camp after discovering he took part in Hellfire. People were already talking about a satanic cult in town. Eddie reading about it in the magazine, looking smug and amused, is because he knows that half of Hawkins’ satanic panic comes directly from him.

Eddie staring at Jason and Jason yelling “you want something, freak?” isn’t random. Jason had been part of the group of bullies who picked fights with the Hellfire kids for years, and they were always excused because they were important to the school’s reputation.

Eddie talking about how he’ll graduate and flipping off Higgins is his personal revenge against Higgins, who believes Eddie will never make it, both because he’s an outcast and because no Munson has ever succeeded. That moment is personal too.

“You are the future of Hellfire,” said to Mike and Dustin, is because Eddie and Ronnie inherited Hellfire from older kids who eventually graduated. And they will do the same.

Eddie and Chrissy knew each other from the talent show. Every year the school held a talent show, and at least once in three years students had to participate. The year Eddie takes part, he forms Corroded Coffin in a couple of days, they rehearse barely twice before going on stage. Eddie takes a catwalk to circle the school and look through the upper windows to see if his father came to watch him, but he doesn’t find him. A few seconds later he realizes he’s not alone. There’s a cute, well put together girl next to him who asks who he’s looking for. Eddie assumes she can’t really be talking to him, and when he realizes she is, he also realizes how approachable Chrissy is, and how much she hates her mother.

Eddie’s guitar was saved by Wayne from the house that was set on fire by the two criminals, along with very few other things.

Reefer Rick had already offered Eddie a place to stay after his house was burned down. Eddie knew where he lived and knew he could take refuge there.

What Eddie eats while he’s hiding out isn’t that different from what he eats with Wayne. Wayne basically lives on cereal and beer, but he tries to make sure Eddie eats properly after he moves in with him in the trailer. Still, it’s nothing new for Eddie.

Eddie learns how to hotwire cars around the age of ten. His father considered it a useful skill. He does it for the first time during the robbery they plan together, but he already feels disgust toward himself.

Worst: remote invigilation is grounded in the pedagogically bankrupt idea that learning is best (or even plausibly) assessed through high-stakes testing. The kind of person who wants to use these tools generally has no idea how learning works and thinks of students as presumptively guilty cheats. They monitor test-taking students in realtime, and have been known to jiggle test-takers' cursors impatiently when students think too long about their answers. Remote invigilation also captures the eye-movements of test-takers, flagging people who look away from the screen while thinking for potential cheating. No wonder that many students who sit exams under these conditions find themselves so anxious that they vomit or experience diarrhea, carefully staring directly into the camera as they shit themselves or vomit down their shirts, lest they be penalized for looking away or visiting the toilet.

Linkletter quickly realized that Proctorio is a worst-in-class example of a dreadful category. The public-facing materials the company provided about its products were flatly contradicted by the materials they provided to educators, where all the really nasty stuff was buried. The company – whose business exploded during the covid lockdowns – is helmed by CEO Mike Olsen, a nasty piece of work who once doxed a child who criticized him in an online forum:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/01/bossware/#moral-exemplar

Proctorio's products are shrouded in secrecy. In 2020, for reasons never explained, all the (terrible, outraged) reviews of its browser plugin disappeared from the Chrome store:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/04/hypervigilance/#radical-transparency

Linkletter tweeted his alarming findings, publishing links to the unlisted, but publicly available Youtube videos where Proctorio explained how its products really worked. Proctorio then sued Linkletter, for copyright infringement.

Proctorio's argument is that by linking to materials that they published on Youtube with permissions that let anyone with the link see them, Linkletter infringed upon their copyright. When Linkletter discovered that these videos already had publicly available links, indexed by Google, in the documentation produced by other Proctorio customers for students and teachers, Proctorio doubled down and argued that by collecting these publicly available links to publicly available videos, Linkletter had still somehow infringed on their copyright.

Luckily for Linkletter, BC has an anti-SLAPP law that is supposed to protect whistleblowers facing legal retaliation for publishing protected speech related to matters of public interest (like whether BC's flagship university has bought a defective and harmful product that its students will be forced to use). Unluckily for Linkletter, the law is brand new, lacks jurisprudence, and the courts have decided that he can't use a SLAPP defense and his case must go to trial:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/20/links-arent-performances/#free-ian-linkletter

Linkletter could have let that experience frighten him away from the kind of principled advocacy that riles up deep-pocketed, thin-skinned bullies. Instead, he doubled down, founding the Canadian Privacy Library, with the goal of using Freedom of Information requests to catalog all of Canada's post-secondary institutions' privacy assessments. Given how many bodies he found buried in Proctorio's back yard, this feels like the kind of thing that should be made more visible to Canadians.

There are 25 public universities in BC, and Linkletter FOI'ed them all. Eleven provided their PIAs. Eight sent him an estimate of what it would cost them (and thus what they would charge) to assemble these docs for him. Six requested extensions.

One of them threatened to sue.

Langara College is a 19,000-student spinout of Vancouver Community College whose motto is Eruditio Libertas Est ("Knowledge is Freedom"). Linkletter got their 2019 PIA for Microsoft's Office 365 when he FOI'ed the Nicola Valley Institute of Technology (universities often recycle one another's privacy impact assessments, which is fine).

That's where the trouble started. In June, Langara sent Linkletter a letter demanding that he remove their Office 365 PIA; the letter CC'ed two partners in a law firm, and accused Linkletter of copyright infringement. But that's not how copyright – or public records – work. As Linkletter writes, the PIA is "a public record lawfully obtained through an FOI request" – it is neither exempted from disclosure, nor is it confidential:

https://www.privacylibrary.ca/legal-threat/

Langara claims that in making their mandatory Privacy Impact Assessment for Office 365 available, Linkletter has exposed them to "heightened risks of data breaches and privacy incidents," they provided no evidence to support this assertion.

I think they're full of shit, but you don't have to take my word for it. After initially removing the PIA, Linkletter restored it, and you can read it for yourself:

https://www.privacylibrary.ca/langara-college-privacy-impact-assessments/

I read it. It is pretty goddamned anodyne – about as exciting as looking at the roof of Barbra Streisand's mansion.

Sometimes, where there's smoke, there's only Streisand – a person who has foolishly decided to use the law to bully a weaker stranger out of disclosing some innocuous and publicly available fact about themselves. But sometimes, where there's smoke, there's fire. A lot of people who read my work are much more familiar with ed-tech, privacy, and pedagogy than I am. If that's you, maybe you want to peruse the Langara PIA to see if they are hiding something because they're exposing their students to privacy risks and don't want that fact to get out.

There are plenty of potential privacy risks in Office 365! The cloud version of Microsoft Office contains a "bossware" mode that allows bosses to monitor their workers' keystrokes for spelling, content, and accuracy, and produce neat charts of which employees are least "productive." The joke's on the boss, though: Office 365 also has a tool that lets you compare your department's usage of Office 365 to your competitors, which is another way of saying that Microsoft is gathering your trade secrets and handing it out to your direct competitors:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware

So, yeah, there are lots of "features" in Office 365 that could give rise to privacy threats when it is used at a university. One hopes that Langara correctly assessed these risks and accounted for them in its PIA, which would mean that they are bullying Linkletter out of reflex, rather than to cover up wrongdoing. But there's only one way to find out: go through the doc that Linkletter has restored to public view.

Linkletter has excellent pro bono representation from Norton Rose Fulbright, a large and powerful law-firm that is handling his Proctorio case. Linkletter writes, "they have put this public college on notice that any proceeding is liable to be dismissed pursuant to the Protection of Public Participation Act, BC’s anti-SLAPP legislation."

Langara has now found themselves at the bottom of a hole, and if they're smart, they'll stop digging.

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/01/eruditio-libertas-est/#streisand-v-linkletter

Image: Copyright (C) 2002 Kenneth & Gabrielle Adelman, California Coastal Records Project, www.californiacoastline.org (modified) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Streisand_Estate.jpgbr>

CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

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Langara College (modified) https://langara.ca/

Fair use (parody) https://scholarship.law.ufl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1104