Legal Actions of School Against a Proxy's Host?

WakefieldHS-students asks: "I attend a public school, Wakefield High School in Raleigh, North Carolina. A friend of mine recently created a site that hosted a web proxy browser. It ran for a few months, and others at our school found out about it. The original domain was blocked by the censorship software the school uses, and it was changed a few times to get around this. Recently, he was forced to take down the proxy, with the threat of not graduating and the taking of legal action by the school. What legal rights, if any, can the school use to ban someone from hosting a website? Furthermore, what rights does the U.S. Government have to censor such websites?"

Comments

Re:Ok, now tell us the rest of it

[techfury90]

I go to WHS, so I know about this story. Basically he was running a proxy to allow people to visit banned sites such as MySpace from there, which was its typical use. Every time someone was in the computer lab, you'd see MySpace up via this website.

Re:Ok, now tell us the rest of it

[martinultima]

This actually sounds just like my school district vs. me. This (last) year I had to do a personal project for the IB program, which in my case happened to be maintaining a Linux distribution. And I figured that since I was in the computer lab as a student helper one of the class periods, I'd just borrow one of their machines and create an SSH tunnel to get to my machine at home, then use x0vncserver to forward the desktop so I could tweak stuff and come back right where I left off. [Not the most efficient way, I know...]

Anyway, long story short, they don't really notice until I start checking things on my homepage as well; nothing bad or anything, and not even personal stuff, just the Linux-related parts of it that I'd need for the project. So they block it. So I e-mail them, politely asking to unblock it – and just to be sure, I check their censorware program's homepage, and since they've also got it blocked, I e-mail them.

Couple days later, no response from my own school district – but the censorware people were more than happy to unblock my site.

Few months later, the district people call a bunch of parent-teacher conferences about the whole thing, saying that I was bypassing their proxy server and "compromising system security" – the ironic part was, I was actually safer doing an SSH tunnel, because it was one-way only and the only machine that would be affected by the fatal typo of doom or whatever would be my own at home. But either way, they don't get their way, so a few days later they actually send their people down to personally yell at me. (Talk about wasting taxpayer dollars – these people apparently have enough free time that they can just drop everything else to come yell at a single student in a school of over 1500. And this is a fairly big school district, so there's other schools, too – but no, they have more of a threat coming from some kid using an SSH tunnel than from all the other would-be hackers visiting porn sites, installing spyware, and posting to MySpace.com. I still don't understand their logic...)

But, either way, those school district people, even if their intentions are good – you just have to watch out for those guys. They're kind of like the BOFH, really, only they use expulsion and no graduation rather than killing people – they consider it their job to keep the network running smoothly, and if it means kicking people off and expelling them / denying graduation / etc., they'll do it – because they only need to worry about the network, not the people.

Just a tip from someone who'd know...