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Big Brother Won't Watch Judges

Posted by jamie on from the blink-blink dept.

The good guys win! You may remember Tuesday's story about whether internet surveillance should extend to judges and their staff. Good news. As James Tyre writes in a detailed summary over on our website at censorware.net, "How can we be at the end when today is September 7, but the Judicial Conference does not meet until September 11? Because the AO [the Administrative Office of the Courts] blinked, caved, gave up, threw in the towel, that's how."

1 of 55 comments (clear)

  1. WebSENSE by mlknowle · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The software in question, WebSENSE, is used at my school. Basically, how it works is that the admin chooses which catagories to block (sex, violence, etc). There is one catacory called "tastless" which blocks everything related to anime, for some reason.

    In any case, there are certinly sites that are blocked that shouoldn't be. The school has the option of selectivly un-blocking sites, but its policy is to do so only if there is a valid academic intrest in the site - not if the site is simply used for recreation. This is done, suposidly, to save the IT staff's time.

    What is particularly distressing is that this is a boarding school (9-12th grades), and the school blocks phone accsess to all ISPs, so the only way to go online is with their network. Thus there are a large number of sites which few parents would object to that are blocked simply because they have no academic value. One example is ESPN, which is blocked in the "chat" catagory because of its message boards. The yahoo stocks site is blocked for similar reasons. Can't have those studentes exchanging views!