School officials in Pasadena, California, have yanked remote Internet access for staffers after it was discovered that some of them had been surfing Web porn sites while working at home. David Banis, deputy superintendent of the local school district, said that routine monitoring of server logs showed several visits to pornographic sites, although he said the records did not show which staff had called the pages up.
"There are some cases of 'unintended' use by school-district staff who are authorized to work at home," Banis said. "School-district business is pretty broad, I realize, and some were using [the Internet] for something other than that."
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French Net-ped sweep: French police have arrested more than 50 people suspected of using the Internet to distribute kiddie porn. Five of the people detained after an eight-month investigation have been placed under formal investigation, a step preliminary to bringing suspects to trial, a law-enforcement official told Reuters.
The official said only French residents were targeted in the sweep, but added that information on the suspects' links to other countries was also gathered and would soon be transmitted to other governments. (10.Dec.97)
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Senate smut hearing: Senator John McCain (R-Arizona) has scheduled a February hearing for his Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee on Net porn and what, if anything, Congress should do about it. Sources told Variety that McCain is not particularly enamored of a new bill by Senator Dan Coats (R-Indiana) that would require Net porn sites to erect tangible barriers to minors who try to access their sites.
Although McCain has not established a position on Internet porn, he is concerned that some of the proposed remedies would violate the First Amendment. Coats was a co-author of the Communications Decency Act, key provisions of which were struck down earlier this year as unconstitutional interference with adult free speech. (10.Dec.97)
