[LINK] NSW Govt porn audit

[Tom Worthington]

Roger Clarke wrote:
> At 16:10 +1000 2/9/10, Kim Holburn wrote:
>> The NSW Government porn audit has already claimed a minister ...
>> http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/1342957/Fred-Nile-denies-viewing-porn
> 
> ... what an employer needs to have done before they impose a 
> serious sanction on an employee: 
> http://www.rogerclarke.com/II/OffIm0511.html

Yes, this came up after I wrote the Defence Department's first policy on 
  "Use Of The Internet By Defence Personnel" in 1996:
<http://web.archive.org/web/19980221073757/http://www.adfa.oz.au/DOD/intuse.html>

Crafting such a policy was tricky. We could not simply ban people from 
looking at web pages about how to make bombs, for example, as that was a 
legitimate area for research for defence personnel. I ended up basing 
the policy on one about the use of long distance telephone calls.

The Military Police caught an officer looking at porn online and the 
question came up to HQ: "What do we do now?". The answer was the same as 
any breech of rules: the accused has the right to be told exactly what 
rule they are alleged to have breeched, to be presented with the 
evidence and to be able to respond.

In the case of members of parliament, and their staff, I expect the same
would apply. They have the right to know what it is they are accused of,
what evidence there is and to be able to respond to it.

There may be no case to answer, as thousands of "hits" on a porn web 
site could be from viewing a few sites for research purposes. Porn web 
sites have very large numbers of links on them (many more than
the average web page), so a few pages viewed would translate into a lot
of hits.

ps: Before someone asks how I know about porn web sites, I was once 
asked by a parliamentary committee about Internet porn and therefore had 
to research the topic.


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS CP HLM, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, School of Computer Science, The
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/