Comment by coldpie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by coldpie | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Mm, I don't think this really has anything to do with free speech. No one's speech is being restricted here. They're being prevented from doing off-hours activity on school grounds. Whether that helps or harms in a school's educational goals is an open question. But it's not a restriction of free speech in any meaningful way.

What's more concerning to me is school administrators who are so quick with the stick when they could be using a carrot instead. Give this kid a study hour to work on stuff with the IT guy. Probably he could do a lot of good work for the school, effectively for free, and he'd have no reason to keep up the circumvention game.

Which, to be clear, is what this is. It's fun to break the rules and feel you're speaking truth to power. I know I did that in high school, even taking apart a computer to remove the CMOS battery to reset the BIOS password to launch a different OS. No good reason for it, it's just fun. The trouble is it's a dangerous game this kid is playing. And it needn't be, they could turn this into a great learning opportunity.

But no, school administrators keep up their tiny dictatorship image, and this kid will get expelled or something. Oh well.

Free speech as in, doing investigation into what policies are and how they are setup. Read the article, they are restricting speech in the sense that they aren't sharing what they're doing in monitoring usage of the device, networks, etc.

Is it so hard to publish the, "Rules of the road?" In my day, we called them, "Terms of Service," for private companies and public institutions have laws, etc, that govern their operation. All of that is how the system, near as I've ever been able to figure out, should function.

Then this happens, when a kid can't actually find out what policies are or why, or who implemented them, or what rule was triggered to ban / block certain things, that run counter to the established curriculum...again, read the article.

My children have multiple passports and I know very well how restrictions work in multiple countries, having worked in three so far full time for long enough to need to know. The way the high school in the article is being run, as well as the opaque nature of the system administrators rules, is abhorrent.

Tax payer money being spent to...enshrine and embiggen the ego of some two bit hack who can't get a job in the private sector because their technical skills aren't up to par? From the sound of it, this may be the case. Sorry but regardless of public or private sector, a person needs to be qualified to hold the job they are hired to do.

Somebody, please, fire the webmaster and the director here. Then let's start implementing some transparent policies or dump the notion of, "Free speech."

> Then this happens, when a kid can't actually find out what policies are or why, or who implemented them, or what rule was triggered to ban / block certain things, that run counter to the established curriculum...again, read the article.

I did read the article, and there's no mention of what the student did to find any of this out. Did he ask anyone?

You seem to be jumping to conclusions based on a one-sided account.

My reading of this piece is that it's petulance, a child who doesn't get it that school internet access is not a right (hell, when I was in high school, there was one computer in the library that had access at all).

When you use a school's internet service, you're subject to the rules of such privileges, and the administrator (in this case the DoT) is the final rulemaker. Don't like it? Do what he's doing now, and get your own internet service.

The voters that elect the school board are the final rule makers. Not the bureaucrats charged with carrying out the policies set by the school board.

The actions of this student are easy to look at as activism designed to influence those voters.

We see that issue throughout this thread, voters don't get to make the final rules in most things. They elect the school board, or elect whomever chooses the school board, and they put their trust in the ideals which that candidate has sold so that they rules that end up being put in place are most like the ones the voter would have chosen themselves. If the voters candidate doesn't win, or their candidate does win but changes his or her tune, that voter has little to no recourse until the next voting cycle. Voters don't get to set the minutia.

Furthermore, for smaller government bodies, voters outside of the residential area for that government body don't have a vote at all! You have to go even higher to put your faith in a state or county school board candidate.

Yeah, this idea that democracy is a good thing all on its own (which at least seems to have gained strength in my lifetime, maybe I've started paying more attention) is quite dangerous.

It's an important part of our system, but I'm not sure we should celebrate when important and far reaching decisions are made on a 51/49 basis.

I think we just are talking about slightly different things. Of course mechanistically, voters, as you say, have to put up with what they get. But philosophically, their agents (the board and those the board hires) are meant to act in their interests.

Transparent policies are hard to find. I used to work at the hospital in my city, it's the second largest employer in this area. I was tasked with getting the policies and procedures, both administrative and medical, onto the intranet. Having these policies online was a requirement for their accreditation and, at first, everyone thought this was a great idea.

Actually getting it done, however, proved nearly impossible. The majority of departments (clinical departments included) literally had no documentation of their policies or procedures, the ones that did (i.e, human resources) insisted that they were out-of-date or not suitable for reading by employees. Eventually I was told to drop the issue entirely and simply post the few, out-of-date and known incorrect policies that I had on hand. The remainder of the policies posted to the intranet were purchased, en masse and without vetting, from the company that produced the document management software (that is, though they might appear legitamite no one had actually read them and it's unlikely they described what people were actually doing).

Perhaps I am just naive but the big surprise to me was how those in power understood that clear documentation placed bounds on the extent of their power and introduced accountability; providing a very clear dis-incentive for them to write such documentation. In fact, the organization as a whole appeared to agree with this position and willfully mis-represented their documentation to the accreditation organization, something that posed very real risks to the organization itself (dates were changed on existing documentation, the canned articles were presented as if they represented real policy and procedure).

TLDR: I am not surprised there isn't a clear internet policy at this school. I am surprised they spelled out the extent of their snooping in a contract that was passed out with the iPads. At least there's that.

They're being prevented from doing off-hours activity on school grounds.

The article clearly states that it's not just "off-hours" activities that are being blocked.

Our censorware, however, blocks material ranging from Twitter to comic books. Meanwhile, students are told to use Twitter as part of our Spanish classes and our school offers a course on comic books. Beyond blocking sites that are used in classes, there are also many false positives.

He was punished (denied a school-issued iPad intended to be given to every student, internet access cut off) merely for reading out loud a contract that everyone was being told to agree to. Sounds like a free speech issue to me.

> they could turn this into a great learning opportunity.

Unfortunately, in this day of NCLB, unless its a great "preparation for taking a standardized test" opportunity they're uninterested.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com