Over the objections of officials at the Utah Education Network, Censorware Project cofounder Michael Sims has won the right to examine the Smartfilter logs Utah public-school students automatically create whenever they venture onto the Internet at school.
The June 24 ruling by the State Records Committee, which instructs network officials to remove identifying information before releasing the data, comes several months after Sims appealed UEN's denial of his freedom-of-information request to study the logs. UEN officials will weigh whether to take the case to district court after consulting with their 40 school district members because "It's their data," UEN executive director Stephen Hess told the Salt Lake Tribune June 26.
Interested in reverse-engineering the log to determine whether the filter's blocking breadth is overly broad, Sims professed incredulity at UEN officials' resistance. "Where else can you get someone to do a hundred or more man-hours of work for you, for free?"
Posted July 6, 1998.