*******************************************************************************
Please note: This is part of an on-line ASCII text version of the task
force report.

A full text and print-ready PostScript version is available via
anonymous ftp from ftp.ucs.ubc.ca in /pub/info/ubc/reports/appropriate-use.ps.
UNIXG account holders will find it on unixg.ubc.ca in the same file.
*******************************************************************************

BACKGROUND MATERIAL

* History

In April/May of 1992 the availability of pornographic material on 
university computers became a very controversial topic with widespread 
media interest.  UBC Associate Vice-President Bernard Sheehan and his 
computing staff worked on the issue for several weeks, collecting 
background information from other institutions worldwide.  A package 
containing some of the most extreme material was made available to 
senior administrators at most Canadian universities through activities of 
the Women's Centre at the University of Winnipeg.  Several members of 
faculty, staff and the student body at UBC, including the Advisor on 
Women and Gender Relations, the President of the AMS, and the 
Director of the Centre for Research in Women's Studies and Gender 
Relations, wrote to President Strangway protesting the availability of 
pornographic material on UBC's computers.

On July 30, 1992, President Strangway issued a letter (Appendix B) 
informing the University community that all pornographic material 
would be removed from the computer files belonging to University 
Computing Services and requesting that all UBC units be very vigilant 
that University property not be used to access, create or store 
pornographic material on University computing equipment. He 
announced that AVP Sheehan had taken steps to remove the newsgroups 
and would establish a Task Force on the Appropriate Use of Information 
Technology. On September 14, 1992 AVP Sheehan published the Terms 
of Reference (Appendix A) of the Task Force, instructing the Task Force 
that it should advise the President's Office on appropriate use of 
information technology in the context of the campus Sexual Harassment 
Policy.

* The Sexual Harassment Policy

UBC's Sexual Harassment Policy (Appendix F) came into effect in 
February 1988.  The critical provision of that policy for present purposes 
is section 1.01, which reads as follows:

     1.01  "Sexual Harassment" includes comment or conduct of a sexual 
nature,  including sexual advances, requests for sexual favours, 
suggestive comments or gestures, or physical contact when any one or 
more of the following conditions are satisfied:

       (1)  the conduct is engaged in or the comment is made by a person 
           who knows or who ought reasonably to know that the conduct or 
           comment is unwanted or unwelcome;
        ...
      (5)  the conduct or the comment is intended to, or has the effect of, 
           creating an intimidating, hostile or offensive environment.

In the university context sexual harassment often occurs between 
individuals of unequal status. However, sexual harassment can and does 
occur between individuals of equal status.

In practice, this policy has been applied to a  single incident or a series of 
incidents.  Clearly individuals who receive unwanted material of a 
sexual nature or are exposed to this material by means of information 
technology can seek the assistance of the Sexual Harassment Policy 
Advisors or any University administrator in order to remedy their 
situation.

* The Underlying Technology: The Internet

In understanding the issues, it is important to understand the underlying 
technology and how it is used. The Internet, a recent and rapidly 
growing phenomenon of high technology, consists of approximately one 
million computers, each being used by one or more people and 
connected to each other by telephone lines or their higher-speed 
equivalents.  This computer network spans the globe. It is used to 
generate, communicate, and store information.  In particular, the Internet 
serves as an alternative to the post office and a library, and permits its 
users to send messages and receive them from others connected to the 
network. It also permits, via newsgroups and bulletin boards, group 
discussions on, at last count, over 1500 separate topics.

The benefit of the Internet to those who use it regularly, of whom 
academics are a large percentage, is the quick and easy exchange of ideas 
and information.  Many academic research communities rely almost 
entirely on the Internet for the communication of information 
(announcement of research results, conferences, job openings, etc.), and 
groups of researchers often use the Internet as the primary vehicle for 
collaborative research.  Canada's Networks of Centres of Excellence, for 
instance, are centres in name only; without the Internet, the joint work 
done by the Centres would be impossible, as the researchers are spread 
across Canada.

Once a site is connected to the Internet, it is virtually impossible 
effectively to control or censor the information that can be accessed from 
that site. The volume of new material received by a site each day is so 
high that monitoring each item is simply not practical. The high degree 
of connectivity in the network and the ability to log on to remote sites 
ensures that users have many routes by which they can access material 
banned from their local site.  For example, when a university removes 
some newsgroups, users can continue to access these newsgroups by 
connecting to other sites, as is currently the case at UBC. The only 
effective form of control would be to cut off all access to the Internet.  
Like cutting off our telephone system from the rest of the world, the 
benefit to UBC of doing this would be far outweighed by the drawbacks.

* Offensive Material: Nature and Impact

Computer communication is subject to many, if not all, of the problems 
of other media.  It can be, and on occasion is, used to communicate 
material and information that objectifies and effectively dehumanizes 
both individuals and groups.  Abuses range from the use of sexual 
imagery as computer background screens in labs and other shared 
computing environments, to widely disseminated messages containing 
hate material.  Offensive background screens create work environments 
which are extremely unpleasant for many individuals, while hate 
material implicitly and sometimes explicitly justifies and advocates 
actions and policies, including violence, which limit the freedom and 
opportunity of targeted individuals.  UBC is not exempt from such 
abuses. During the month of November 1992 alone, there were episodes 
of pornographic background screens appearing in UBC undergraduate 
computing labs, and UBC users posting newsgroup messages which 
were both inappropriate to the newsgroup topic and highly offensive.

Offensive materials range widely in their nature and preoccupation.  
Jokes and off-hand dismissals of legitimacy and authority exist at one 
end of the continuum, advocacy of rape, lynching, and genocide at the 
other.  While most material is of the milder variety, at its core, too often, 
lie assumptions about the inferiority of others and the superiority of the 
messenger.  Women, children and all groups perceived as "the other" (in 
the West these are usually non-Christians, people of colour, persons 
with disabilities, and lesbian and gay individuals) have always been 
favourite, sometimes interchangeable and often overlapping, targets for 
media overwhelmingly controlled by white men.  Much of the material is 
merely silly and unpleasant but there also exist regular examples of 
extreme misogyny, racism, and homophobia.  Whether voiced publicly 
or privately, such hate material, whether in the form of pornography 
which links violence and degradation with sexuality, or approval of 
Hitler's "final solution," threatens and disempowers its targets.  The 
result compromises any free society.

Substantial debates rage about the impact of material along this 
continuum.  Free speech advocates and censors exist simultaneously 
among conservative and progressive, including feminist, groups.  Efforts 
at solution also vary by jurisdiction.  Canada, for example, has taken a 
much more proactive legislative role than the United States.  The 
problem of how to identify and deal with "hate material" distributed 
through computer systems now confronts the UBC community, and has 
been the major focus of our Task Force.

* Actions by Other Universities

Universities have responded to the situation in which pornographic and 
other offensive materials might be accessed from the Internet through 
their computing facilities in a variety of ways. Some institutions have 
decided to retain access to all newsgroups because they view censorship 
as ineffective and inappropriate.  Some have always carried only an 
approved subset of available newsgroups, and others have deleted 
access to specific newsgroups in response to the recent controversy and 
complaints.

Those institutions which have deliberately chosen not to censor 
newsgroups include the University of Toronto, Stanford University and 
the University of Waterloo. In fact, both Stanford University and the 
University of Waterloo reversed earlier decisions to remove the 
newsgroups as the result of community feedback and reports from ad 
hoc committees. The Waterloo report recommended that "the University 
adopt and widely publicize the principle that it is the user, not the 
University, who is responsible for his or her decision to read a mail 
message or an article posted to an electronic newsgroup ... and in 
sending E-mail or in posting an article to a newsgroup... assumes 
responsibility for its contents."  It also recommended appointing a person 
to help users deal with objectionable electronic news or mail.

Of those who have censored newsgroups some, including Simon Fraser 
University and the Universities of Alberta and Victoria, acted 
unilaterally on the advice of computing centre management. Others, 
such as the University of Manitoba and Queen's University, referred the 
matter to committees similar to UBC's Campus Advisory Board on 
Computing for a review of their decision to delete the newsgroups. Most 
of these universities made an attempt to block whatever material they 
had received complaints on, as opposed to actively censoring the 
relevant newsgroups, and made allowances for private feeds of the 
material if requested in writing. Common reasons given for censoring 
included "inappropriate use of University resources for material that is 
not in support of the University's mission of teaching and research," lack 
of computing resources and disk space, and liability issues concerning 
illegal material and accessibility by minors.  

In researching policies on the appropriate use of computing resources at 
other universities, we found very few which described effective 
procedures for dealing with offensive material. Most institutions are still 
studying how to modify their existing policies, which usually cover 
topics such as confidentiality, copyright, privacy, and unauthorized 
access. Excerpts from some of the relevant policies which express 
sentiments with which the Task Force generally agrees include:

     -- "Unmannerly conduct, including mailing obscene or abusive
         material is unacceptable behaviour." (University of Waterloo)

     -- "Respect the rights of other users; for example you shall comply
         with all University policies regarding sexual, racial and other forms
         of harassment."    (University of Michigan)

     -- "Sending rude, obscene or harassing material via any electronic mail 
         or bulletin board is strictly forbidden." (Iowa University)

In addition to appropriate use policies, many institutions are 
investigating procedures which can be used to deal with incidents of 
offensive material or harassment. Again, there are very few models of 
established working procedures.

* The Canadian Context

A number of people who made submissions to the Task Force invoked, 
in support of the positions they took, arguments grounded in either the 
experience or the socio-political traditions of other countries.  Prominent 
amongst these were arguments grounded in the American free speech 
tradition.

Grateful as the Task Force was to be told about the approaches taken in 
other jurisdictions to the problem with which it has been asked to deal, 
and important as it is to examine that problem from a broad range of 
perspectives, the Task Force is strongly of the view that the best 
approach to take to this problem at UBC is one which reflects the 
Canadian context, including our socio-political traditions.  These 
traditions, which are finding clear expression in the judgments of the 
Supreme Court of Canada under the Canadian Charter of Rights and 
Freedoms, include a greater willingness than exists in the United States 
to acknowledge that the abuse of private power can be as much a threat 
to freedom in a modern liberal democracy as the abuse of state power; a 
greater sensitivity to the harmful effects of pornographic and racist 
messages and images; and a greater emphasis on the need to attend, not 
merely to freedom and equality in their formal senses, but to freedom 
and equality in their substantive senses as well -- that is, to recognize 
that, in a society in which real inequalities exist between individuals and 
groups, a policy of inaction is not always going to promote the cause 
either of freedom or of equality for society as a whole.

To insist upon an approach which is sensitive to these socio-political 
traditions is neither to denigrate the importance of freedom of expression 
nor to ignore the dangers of heavy-handed action on the part of the 
University in this area.  It is simply to say that, in the Task Force's view, 
it is not enough if one is arguing for a hands off approach to wave the 
flag of "free speech".  At least in Canada, the issue is more complicated 
than that.

* The Legal Context

Resolution of the issue of how the University can best deal with the 
problem of pornographic and other offensive messages being 
communicated on the Internet and through other information technology 
media on campus necessarily requires that account be taken of the 
broader legal context within which the University and those who work 
and study here function.  There are three aspects of that broader legal 
context which are especially relevant to this task.

Criminal Code of CanadaThe first is the Criminal Code of Canada, which 
contains prohibitions against both obscenity and hate propaganda.  The 
prohibition against obscenity makes it an offence inter alia "[to print, 
publish, distribute, circulate, or have in one's possession] for the purpose 
of publication, distribution or circulation any obscene written matter, 
picture... or other thing whatever," with the term "obscene" being defined 
in terms of a publication "a dominant characteristic of which is the undue 
exploitation of sex, or of sex and...crime, horror, cruelty and violence."  
There can be little doubt that individuals who send obscene messages 
and images through the Internet are vulnerable to prosecution under this 
provision of the Code.  It is possible that individuals who store obscene 
messages and images in their computers with the intention of showing 
them on their screens or otherwise communicating them to others would 
be vulnerable to prosecution.  It is even conceivable that the University 
itself would be vulnerable to prosecution if it stored such messages and 
images and made them freely available to users of its systems.

The Supreme Court of Canada has recently revisited the question of how 
the definition of "obscene" should be understood.  It indicated that (a) the 
combination of sex and violence will almost always be considered 
obscene; (b) explicit sex which is degrading and dehumanizing may be 
so considered; and (c) explicit sex which is not combined with violence 
and is neither degrading nor dehumanizing will generally not be so 
considered unless children are involved.  However, it went on to add 
that, if the portrayal of sex is essential to a wider artistic, literary or other 
similar purpose, then even if, absent such a purpose, it would be 
obscene, a court should not hold it to be obscene.  Integral to this 
approach to obscenity was a willingness on the Court's part to attribute 
harm to at least some pornographic messages, with harm being 
understood in terms of encouraging or predisposing people to act in 
socially harmful ways.  But the Court also recognized that sometimes 
society must be prepared to endure such harm in the interest of freedom 
of expression.

The Code provision dealing with hate propaganda makes it an offence 
for anyone, "by communicating statements, other than in private 
conversation, wilfully [to promote] hatred against any identifiable 
group," with "identifiable group" being defined to mean "any section of 
the public distinguished by colour, race, religion or ethnic origin."  
Persons charged with this offence have available to them a number of 
affirmative defences, including truth and "[relevance] to any subject of 
public interest, the discussion of which was for the public benefit... if on 
reasonable grounds [they] believed [the statements] to be true."  Because 
of the way in which this offence is worded, very few people have been 
charged with it and even fewer convicted.  However, it clearly has the 
potential to be relevant to the communication through systems such as 
the Internet of messages designed to promote hatred against racial and 
religious minorities.

It is worth noting that both the obscenity and the hate propaganda 
provisions of the Criminal Code have recently been held by the Supreme 
Court of Canada to be "reasonable limits" on the freedom of expression 
protected by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.  Hence both 
provisions remain intact even though they have been challenged under 
the Charter.

Civil Rights Protection ActThe second relevant aspect of the larger legal 
context is the Civil Rights Protection Act.  This statute, which appears to 
be unique to the province of British Columbia, creates a civil cause of 
action for the targets of "conduct or communication... that has as its 
purpose interference with the civil rights of a person or class of persons 
by promoting (a) hatred or contempt of a person or class of persons, or 
(b) the superiority or inferiority of a person or class or persons in 
comparison with another or others, on the basis of colour, race, religion, 
ethnic origin or place of origin."  The Act explicitly authorizes the courts 
to award punitive damages in cases brought under it, and to grant 
injunctions prohibiting the continuation of the offensive conduct or 
communication.  Again, the language of this legislation is such as to 
make it difficult for those who would use it to succeed in bringing 
claims.  Again, however, the potential is clearly there for it to be used to 
deal with at least some of the problematic messages and images which 
can be communicated through information technology.

B.C. Human Rights ActThe third and final aspect of the broader legal 
context which has special relevance to this Task Force is human rights 
legislation, specifically the B.C. Human Rights Act.  Human rights 
legislation, which exists within the federal sphere and within each 
province and territory, is designed to eliminate discrimination on a range 
of different grounds in a range of different contexts.  One of those 
contexts invariably is employment, and sex is one of the prohibited 
grounds within that context.  The Supreme Court of Canada has recently 
made it clear that sexual harassment directed at persons of the opposite 
sex is to be considered a form of sex discrimination.  Hence, any female 
employee who can satisfy the B.C. Human Rights Council that she has 
been a victim of sexual harassment at the hands of a male employee is 
entitled to a remedy of some sort, including damages, from that 
employee.  Moreover, and this is particularly important insofar as the 
University in its capacity as employer is concerned, such a female 
employee will also, as a rule, be entitled to relief from the employer.  
While the law relating to the employer's liability in such circumstances 
has yet to be firmly settled, indications are that the nature and scope of 
that liability will be a function of the efforts taken by the employer to 
deal with the problem of sexual harassment in that particular workplace.  
An employer who is aware of a problem of sexual harassment and does 
nothing to remedy it can expect to pay a heavy price for its failure to act.  
Similar rules are applicable in cases in which the harassment is based on 
race, religion, disability or any other prohibited ground of 
discrimination.

Another context in which human rights legislation prohibits 
discrimination is housing.  Here again, sex is one of the prohibited 
grounds, and it is safe to assume that in this context, too, sexual 
harassment will be considered to be a form of sex discrimination.  
Although the potential for information technology to be a source of 
sexual harassment in the housing context would seem to be remote, it is 
conceivable that a problem could arise through the use of personal 
computers in university residences.  Again, similar rules would be 
applicable in cases in which the harassment is based on another 
prohibited ground.

Yet another context in which discrimination is prohibited by human 
rights legislation is in the delivery of "services, facilities and 
accommodation customarily available to the public."  As the law stands 
at present in British Columbia, the educational services and facilities 
provided by the University to persons who have been accepted as 
students are NOT considered to be services and facilities "customarily 
available to the public."  Hence, students on this campus cannot now 
avail themselves of the B.C. Human Rights Act to seek relief from the 
University in the event that they are victims of sex discrimination or any 
of the other forms of discrimination prohibited by the relevant provision.  
It should be noted, however, that the decision in which this ruling was 
made is currently on appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada.  If that 
decision is overturned, then students as well as employees will be able to 
make use of human rights legislation to deal with complaints of sexual 
and other forms of harassment arising from the misuse of information 
technology.  In this context, too, the University might find itself being 
held to account if it were found not to have taken appropriate steps to 
deal with the problem on its own.

* Input Received from the UBC Community

After the July 30, 1992 letter from Dr. Strangway and the removal of the 
newsgroups, he and AVP Sheehan received a variety of responses, both 
positive and negative, to these actions.  The Task Force on Appropriate 
Use of Information Technology began its meetings in September.  During 
October, the Task Force advertised electronically and in print, seeking 
input from the campus community.

Approximately twenty submissions were received. Of these, only one 
was supportive of the University's decision to remove the newsgroups. 
Of the remaining submissions, almost all objected to the decision based 
on an opposition to censorship.  Many others included additional 
reasons for their opposition.  Several cited the usefulness of the Internet 
and the necessity for a university to respect the concept and tradition of 
academic freedom and the free flow of information.  Others pointed out 
the difficulty of defining offensive material and the impossibility of 
totally removing offensive material from UBC's computers. The self-
policing nature of the newsgroups was mentioned frequently as a reason 
why no action should be necessary, as was the observation that 
individual users had to take specific steps to view offending material. 
Solutions other than removing newsgroups -- such as educating people 
on responsible and ethical use, encouraging more widespread use of 
electronic news, and instituting procedures to deal with incidents of 
inappropriate use -- were mentioned in a few submissions.

It is worth noting that the majority of the submissions did not perceive 
any major problems. We received no input from individuals who felt 
they had been victimized.  Rather, the submissions were from people 
who feel empowered by the existing system. 

In addition to these submissions, the Task Force requested presentations 
from the following people to aid them in their deliberations:

    -- Dr. Peter Danielson, Centre for Applied Ethics   
    -- Dr. Richard Rosenberg, Computer Science Department

The Task Force is grateful to all members of the University community 
who took the time to express their views.