At 13:16 23/03/00 +0000, P.R.Brady wrote:
>Ian, Tim,
>The dilemma that universities face here is that if you do ANY monitoring
>but miss some pornography then it could be argued that you were failing in
>your duties. With our traffic volumes of tens of thousands of messages per
>week and dozens of systems on campus we could not realistically monotor
>anyway.
Phil,
I'm confused. Which duties are you referring to? As far as I recall, the
ISPs which got in trouble for failing to filter everything were those which
had contracted with their customers to provide a "family service". Unless
you have that sort of committment to anyone, I can't think why doing some
monitoring for pornography is worse than none. The posession offence
requires knowledge of the existence of the material, and the policeman I
spoke to about this (who had been involved in some cases) thought it quite
unreasonable to expect an institution to "know" all the content of its
disks and networks, whatever degree of monitoring was being performed.
On protecting personal data there probably is a stricter requirement, but I
can't see how monitoring fits in there, other than possibly *creating*
personal data itself.
Andrew
--------------------------------------------------------------
Andrew Cormack
Head of CERT
UKERNA, Atlas Centre, Chilton, Didcot, Oxon. OX11 0QS
Phone: 01235 822 302 E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Fax: 01235 822 398
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|