Librarian Suspended over Patrons' Web Access

bsw149 writes "The head librarian of the Valparaiso Community Library in Florida was suspended after investigators found that users had viewed adult content on public computers. While the library has a policy against viewing adult material on library computers, the librarian is facing possible dismissal. Is the best enforcement policy to hold librarians personally responsible for the materials patrons' access?"

Comments

Re:So, what actually happened?

[cheaphomemadeacid]

from: http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/local/volusia/ orl-locporno13081305aug13,0,5165967.story?coll=orl -news-headlines-volusia (google news,librarian) VALPARAISO -- A Florida Panhandle librarian has been suspended and may be fired by officials upset that a registered sex offender and three boys allegedly used the city library's computers to access pornographic Internet sites. Sue Martin, head librarian at the Valparaiso Community Library, was suspended with pay and will receive a hearing within 60 days, City Attorney Doug Wyckoff said Thursday. City Commissioner Robert Billingsley said he would ask the commission to dismiss Martin. Hard drives have been removed from the computers, and the public has been prohibited from using them until further notice. Martin does not have a telephone listing under her name, but she wrote to Billingsley, who oversees library matters for the commission, after the sex offender allegedly viewed a pornographic site July 25. "We continually enforce our policy by monitoring all computers," she wrote. "Any suspicious use is immediately checked by accessing the history of the patrons' Web use." So... they're watching... and fireing anyone who doesn't play along?

Re:That's Stupid

[yar]

You're probably thinking filtering system, not firewall. ^^:

It depends on the library. A library doesn't always need to block adult content from adults. This is partly because a librarian shouldn't be in the position to determine what is or is not adult content for the library's patrons.

Re:My Rights Online???!!

[An Onerous Coward]

Read the article again. The article said the following things:

1) The patron was caught browsing adult material on library computers.
2) The patron was a registered sex offender.
3) The patron was caught a few days later with kiddie porn on his hard drive.

Nowhere in the article does it explicitly say (or even imply) that the material at the library was kiddie porn.

Re:Is it in their job description?

[MindStalker]

No public libraries are federally required to filter if they want federal money. And most do. Other the other hand most librarians themselfs strongly oppose filtering.

Re:That's Stupid

[Taladar]

One usually works on the Transport Level and the other on the Application Level of the ISO/OSI Model for Network Protocols.

Very Deliberate

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

These are the incremental steps being taken, to turn the citezenry into a "snoop force." This is slow and deliberate. Remember the boil-a-frog analogy?

Totalitarian control in the U.S. can't take place without turning the populace into its own jailers, a'la the GDR. DHS has had Yvgeny Primakov and Markus Wolf as consultants for creating "internal security measures."

Ten years from now, one-third of you will be reporting on the rest, just to keep your rare and valued job in the cafeteria. - That BTW, is the agenda behind ruining the dollar and the U.S> job markets: scarce jobs and government payrolls == social control.

Primakov said that this is one of the steps now being employed along with NICA and new identity upgrade features which are coming to your driver's license. It is being used to get the people used to new types of documentation and carrying new types of identity cards pursuant to the United States instituting a formal policy of internal passports. And he actually used the words "internal passports."

It's like he said and he was pretty knowledgeable. When the NICA (National Identity Card Act) gets passed, the Posse Comitatus Act gets overturned, a few other pieces of legislation yet to be proffered get passed, the White House will have more control over the American people than the Kremlin had over the Russian people when Stalin was alive. He said that and then he laughed.

What Primakov finds funny are what he calls these "right wing flag wavers" that were so anti-communist and now they're supporting a state policy of internal passports.

Primakov continued by saying that he had been hired as a consultant and he was consulting on other "security" matters, an ongoing policy in various agencies of government (some of these offices haven't even been created yet) to consistently narrow the rights of the American people and to expand the power of government. He professed not to know why, the reason for all this was, other than he admitted that "it doesn't have much to do with 'fighting terrorism.'"

Of the new jobs [created], 26,000 (about 13%) are tax-supported government jobs. That leaves 181,000 private sector jobs. Of these private sector jobs, 177,000, or 98%, are in the domestic service sector.

Here is the breakdown of the major categories:

30,000 food servers and bar tenders;
28,000 health care and social assistance:
12,000 real estate;
6,000 credit intermediation;
8,000 transit and ground passenger transportation;
50,000 retail trade; and
8,000 wholesale trade.

(There were 7,000 construction jobs, most of which were filled by Mexicans immigrants.)

Not a single one of these jobs produces a tradable good or service that can be exported or serve as an import substitute to help reduce the massive and growing US trade deficit. The US economy is employing people to sell things, to move people around, and to serve them fast food and alcoholic beverages. The items may have an American brand name, but they are mainly made off shore. For example, 70% of Wal-Mart's goods are made in China.

Where are the jobs for the 65,000 engineers the US graduates each year? Where are the jobs for the physics, chemistry, and math majors? Who needs a university degree to wait tables and serve drinks, to build houses, to work as hospital orderlies, bus drivers, and sales clerks?

The Fing Article

[TubeSteak]

Florida Librarian Suspended over Porn Incident

The director of the Valparaiso (Fla.) Community Library was suspended without pay in early August after city officials found that a registered sex offender had used library computers to access pornographic websites.
City Commissioner Robert Billingsley said in the August 12 Gainesville Sun that he would ask the commission to fire VCL Director Sue Martin, but he declined to explain why he thought she had not done enough to prevent the incident, which occurred July 25. Police charged Michael Bushee, 25, with possession of child pornography several days later. Billingsley said police also told him that three male minors had used the VCL computers to look at sites with adult content.

The Sun quoted a letter Martin had written to Billingsley in which she explained, "We continually enforce our policy by monitoring all computers. Any suspicious use is immediately checked by accessing the history of the patrons' Web use. In addition, the staff monitors the patrons' use by 'walkthroughs' of the computer areas."

City Attorney Doug Wyckoff said Martin would receive a hearing within 60 days.

Posted August 12, 2005.

Re:That's Stupid

[IdleTime]

I find it amusing and really sad that the world is about to end because a person looked at *gasp* porn! I'm sure if he had been looking for weapons, chemicals, nuclear devices etc nobody would have bothered him. USA - land of prudes!

Re:Damned if you do...

[realityfighter]

Librarians are not allowed by federal law to restrict what people view on the Internet.

Which federal law? As I recall, the federal government tried to pull the purse strings on libraries that didn't install internet filters.

(Luckily, they didn't put any clauses in the law requiring that the filter actually work to any standard. A content-neutral proxy would have counted as a "filter.")

This sounds like something a patron of The Gord might say.

I find that amazing...

[schon]

In Canada (or at least Alberta), libraries are not allowed (by law) to install filters of any kind, because doing so violates their charter (open access to public information.)

There are several rural schools that share network access with public libraries, and this is one of the things that we have to work around (computers belonging to the school must be filtered, but computers belonging to the library must not be.)

I find it amazing that libraries in the US are not only allowed to censor information, but that they are *expected* to.

Re:I find that amazing...

[sharp-bang]

US libraries are chartered as well, at the state or sometimes county or city level. The idea of providing open access to public information is essentially the same, driven by the 1st Amendment to the Constitution, but each state throws in their little tweaks based on definition of the public interest. In the US you also have the problem of preemption by federal laws, such as the infamous USA PATRIOT Act provisions, and the law mandating filtering for the library to receive federal money (drawn from a special tax on telecommunications, which some readers may recognize as a line in their mobile phone bill).

The problem with schools and libraries is also the same in the US, driven largely by the schools' mandate to act in loco parentis (in the place of the parent), which, in libraries, is usually trumped by the open access mandate.

The most common resolution to these sort of problems is for libraries to provide filtering on an opt-in or opt-out basis, and to have policies (as this library does) placing responsibility for misuse of Internet access on the user and treating violations as violations of the library's code of conduct.

Re:Is it in their job description?

[Alsee]

I don't know about other countries, but the US congress passed a law against virtual child porn and the Supreme Court threw it out as unconstitutional. In fact the damn idiots in congress have been passing an endless series of unconstitutional laws "to protect the children".
CDA: Comunication Decency Act
CPPA: Child Pornography Prevention Act
COPA: Children's Online Protection Act
CIPA: Children's Internet Protection Act

All struck down as unconstitutional. I think CPPA may have been the only one addressing virtual porn, the rest were mostly attempting to restrict the internet. The American Library Association has a good page covering these laws and the legal battles.

As for Slashdot, yes there have been several stories here addressing computer generated child porn.

-

Here y'all, do some good

[musicalmechanic1]

Hmmm....noticed a lot of people here are slightly peeved at this, and I agree that it isn't right she's taking the fall for this. A quick search through google pulled up some information which I think would be useful to share, so I figured I'd post it here.

If you don't like what is going on, maybe you should be responsible enough to let those elected officials know this. Have fun.

Robert Billingsley
465 Valparaiso Pkwy
Valparaiso, FL 32580
Email: rbillingsley@valp.org
Web: www.valp.org/
Phone: (850)729-5402