Saturday, April 23, 2005

The New Zealand Herald

The New Zealand Herald

Police Porn

One must consider work place computers much the same as the walls of the lunch-room. Yes, it is possible to cut out pictures of Brad Pitt or Naomi Watts and reveal one's dark youthful secret crushes to the world, but one only has to turn 24 to realise it may not advance your cause in the world of the workplace. In a similar way, hijacking the work owned resource (known as "bandwidth") for one's own neferious purposes may seem like a blokish tradition and such theft harmless, but it is incriminating in that it is theft.

3000 police staff were caught with pornographic images. Images that were produced to elicit a "private" reaction, perhaps a physical response such as sexual arousal or even laughter, both arguably "unacceptable in the workplace".

That smoking is "unacceptable in the workplace" bears certain fruit when examined for human rights logic. I have a right to live and you do not have the right to poison me finally won out over the right to destroy ones own heath, that had been finally lost.

That any fool can obtain the most bizzare or obscene material and that some of it may be illegal is a failure of border control/customs (for example, China tries to ban any such internet access), and, until it causes someone to express themselves in harmful manner to another, the police probably have not wanted to know. Now the extremely socially reactive will have good reason to believe that the police can be cured of a reluctance to act in cases such as rape of a sex worker. Such reluctance is assertable because computer forensics turns up porn on the police computer system. That it is made public and by lowering the bar to punish a more managable number of officers and let the rest be warned by their own sense of guilt is an interesting attempt to silence critics. The police in NZ seem subject to extreme policitical scrutiny as the opposition attacks the police minister, Hon George Hawkins, he may be the only real chink in Helen Clark's armour.

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