Email (and Filters) for all Australian schools

Tom Davies writes: "Every student and teacher in the state of New South Wales will have an email address and web access by March. And porn filtering to go with it, according to this article in the Sydney Morning Herald."

Comments

How Wasteful

[RMSIsAnIdiot]

And porn filtering to go with it That means approximately 74.6 % of those in the NSW school district have to get a second email address and ISP anyway...

Show me the...

[Phibz]

Since when was it a right to receive what ever you want on a freely provided information channel. For example when you walk in to your public library you don't expect to go to the magazine section and pick up a copy of the lastest Swank. Prehaps i'm oversimplifing the matter, but I'm of the opinion that if you don't like it and its free go elsewhere.

T

Property rights. It's the schools server.

[Bob_Robertson]

It's the schools server, it's their email address, if they want to filter go right ahead.

Just like complaining about censorship in China, look at the property ownership. Since all "utilities" in China are owned by the government, they get to filter all they want.

The abuse is if you are not allowed to choose an alternative. If the school attempted to censor what the kids do/see when not on the schools dime, for instance.

...or the fact that private ISP service is "illegal" in China.

Bob-

Right to Censor?

[cybermage]

If the government provides you with free access, does that give them the right to censor it? I couldn't begin to speak to the Australian constitutionality of this, but I've always wondered about the American constitutionality of similar schemes.

I would think that requiring schools to censor content in order to receive funding pretty clearly infringes upon the first amendment rights of the site operators.

I have seen it argued that if the service is provided "free," you have no right to complain. However, the service is not free. Citizens and corporations pay taxes to the government and expect services in return. If the government provides one of those services at no charge, that doesn't make it free.

The real question, I think, is why these schemes aren't being challenged. I suspect the answer lies in one or more of the following:

• Bandwidth cost money and school kids aren't going to pull out their credit card.
  
• Free speech advocates are picking their battles. It's hard to argue that kids should have access to porn.
  
• Site operators know that filtering doesn't work anyway.
  

A little perspective

[danamania]

I've worked at the NSW Department of Education, and it's well-known that no, we cannot block every site out there that may be 'unsuitable' for whatever definition you want to put on that word, but it's not the only reason to go blocking. For starters the NSW state school system is a massive network - over 2200 schools across a state the size of texas and a half - network connections vary from satellite, isdn, dialup, adsl - all depending on what's available.

It's not a tiny network, and it's all publicly funded - wherever there can be a cent saved it will be, and stopping a few million children from all jumping online to check out the newest site-of-the-week from a school connection is one priority. The political motivations are obvious - no government is going to want to hear of children coming home to parents talking about the crap that can be found online - it is a school environment and isn't designed to accomodate checking out the newest recipes from manbeef.com. This doesn't mean everything "icky" is banned - having been a part of this banning process, it's rather moderate in practice.

Don't let the debate make you imagine this is the only method the department is focusing on to keep proper-use of school resources. More than anything else, schools have been urged to put in place their own systems for tracking the net use in their schools, and supervising their classes/resources properly.