Drawing the Line

The famous (or infamous, depending on your point of view) anti-pornography crusader and U.S. Postal Inspector Anthony Comstock was, at one point, asked to give a practical definition of pornography, so that other people (notably including local Postmasters) could be on the lookout for mailings that would violate the anti-pornography law that bore his name. Comstock replied that he couldn’t define porn, but he knew it when he saw it. This attitude led not only the anti-censorship groups of the time but most liberal thinkers in general to denounce Comstock and his namesake law, and launched the feud between free-speech advocates and decency advocates that continues today. One can only imagine what Comstock would have made of the Internet, and the vast oceans of pornography it makes available to anyone who cares to log on and view them…

Anyone thinking (or hoping) that the issues are clearer or the lines are easier to draw a century later will probably have their hopes dashed when they learn of a case that came up in Hopkinton, MA this week. According to the story in the Metrowest Daily News online site, the town’s manager was forced to resign after a town employee claimed that his viewing of pornography on a town-owned laptop constituted sexual harassment. This would appear to be a relatively simple matter, except for two points: First, no one on either side of the matter has made any claim that the town manager showed the questionable web pages to the employee raising the sexual harassment issue or anyone else; and Second, the town manager was actually at home when the web viewings in question occurred…

Now, no one, least of all me, is going to argue that free speech extends to the right to view pornographic materials while at work or while using a computer or network system owned by one’s employer. One must wonder why the town’s manager could not afford his own laptop (and his own high-speed network connection) if he wanted to engage in this particular leisure activity, and why he failed to realize that anything viewed over the town’s network would be tracked (and probably visible) by the town’s IT personnel. By the same token, however, it’s really difficult to understand why, exactly, catching a municipal employee making improper use of a town computer and the high-speed network constitutes a crime as personal as sexual harassment. Particularly when he was doing so in the privacy of his own home...

As a miscarriage of justice it hardly compares to the case last year where a town employee (in a different state) was hit with a virus that hackers use to stash porn on an unsuspecting user’s hard drive, and never even knew he’d been hacked until a city employee removed the virus and found the porn files, whereupon he was fired. This is more of a tragic case of someone lacking the tech-savvy to understand that he was leaving himself open to detection, or the common sense to realize that he needed to keep his questionable leisure activities off his employers’ computer network. Still, it begs a few questions from those of us who are reading about the case…

At what point does it stop being invasion of privacy and start becoming sexual harassment? If the employee claiming harassment is someone the “offender” has never met, never spoken to, and does not know the identity of, can we really consider these actions to be “harassment?” If an employer has failed to inform its employees that using company equipment for recreational purposes (e.g. surfing for Internet porn) is a termination offense, can they reasonably terminate an employee for such conduct? If the employer has such a policy and HAS informed all personnel of that policy, why can’t they just fire anyone who engages in such activities for violating the organization’s computer use policies, without bringing sexual harassment into it?

It’s worth thinking about…