Elisabeth Beardsey, writing for the Louisville Courier Journal, reports that the State began limiting state workers’ Internet access yesterday. Governor Daniels supports the decision to filter what had previously been unfettered Internet access.
Blogs have not yet been banned, but listening to Internet radio at work and watching videos unrelated to work will be blocked. Obviously pornography is not permitted and some employees have been fired or disciplined after evidence was found that child pornography was viewed from work computers.
Update TPM Muckraker has been covering Kentucky’s implementation of Internet access restrictions and was alerted to Indiana’s implementation of filtering technology.
During my conversation with the guy from Kentucky’s state tech office, he mentioned that the state of Indiana had just implemented their own filtering technology up there.
Hmm. So have they chosen to block state employees from viewing blogs? I called up Mark Cotterill, General Counsel of Indiana’s Office of Technology.
No. “I don’t see us going there.” Why? “We treat our state employees as professionals.”
So what have they chosen to block? Two categories: general pornography and child pornography.
“Our process is just different,” he said. Yep.
Wow. That is almost criminal that they have had unfiltered access at work for so long. Leaving out the moral issue of porn, many of those sites contain a large amount of spyware. That must have been a burden on the state IT dept.
As to blocking blogs and non-work related activity: Being a network admin, I’ve struggled with this issue. I can totally agree with blocking video that isn’t work related. There is no reason to waste the bandwidth for that. Audio can be prioritized so that it is the first to get dropped if the Internet connection is saturated. If you allow radios, why not Internet radio?
As to other non-work sites, I have personally done both. For example, there is no reason for a cashier to be using that register for anything but transactions. I wouldn’t want to wait for someone to finish reading a blog before they ring me up. OTOH, blocking people from doing things like checking headlines, weather and sports scores it very bad for morale. Welcome to 1984.
Oddly enough, I just had a manager call IT while writing this wanting to restrict her employees from going ANYWHERE except work-related sites. Here we go…
It’s a balancing act and depends on what the job is. Some jobs lend themselves to a nonstop stream of productivity. Other jobs don’t. And some jobs are performed better by employees who are well informed by sites that are, at best, tangential to the employee’s actual job.
For my employees, my philosophy is that if they’re getting the work done, I don’t really care if they swap e-mails, take a look at non-work websites, or whatever. I feel like I’m paying for the work, not the time.
Obviously porn would be going too far. I think our ISP has some pretty low bandwidth limits that maybe I should look into, but would subject us to extra costs for Internet Radio. (I’m the only one guilty of this so far — this December, I spent a lot of time listening to the XM Blues Channel and apparently exceeded our bandwidth limits, leading to a hundred dollars or so extra on the bill. Lesson learned.)
Prior to this, at the State level, I suspect it was within the discretion of the various agencies to limit their employees’ computer use, tailored to the needs of the agency.
I don’t know that the new State policies apply to legislative employees. But, when I worked at Legislative Services, I know that during session, I was expected to be available to work crazy long hours on limited notice. I received comp time which could not reasonably be fully reclaimed. I’m not sure what the official policy was, but I thought it reasonable to check the news and whatnot during downtime on the principle that if work is going to creep into personal time then it’s reasonable that personal life creep into work time.
when I worked for the state, they were very serious about the no-browsing, all-monitoring of your internet usage. Also, of email. I myself thought it was overkill, but there’s no arguing that state computers are public assets and state web usage is largely discoverable with a FOIA request.
I do remember more than one person getting booted for pornography though. I mean, how dense do you have to be to download porn – at work – in a state agency?