A New Hampshire court has ruled that an Exeter father of four has the right to review the Internet history logs tracking the site visits of students, faculty, and staff at the Exeter Region Cooperative and the Exeter school districts. The November 6 decision by Rockingham Superior Court Judge Gillian Abramson states that online history logs are indeed public information, and that all information that could identify specific users must be deleted beforehand at the expense of the person requesting the logs.
The decision is not without precedent: In 1998, the Utah Supreme Court granted anti-filtering activist Michael Sims of the Censorware Project the right to review the cache of the Utah Education Network, whose proxy server controls Internet access for 40 public-school districts and several public library systems through SmartFilter blocking software.
Plaintiff James M. Knight said in the November 7 Portsmouth Herald that the ruling proves that people should “become more proactive in their school systems.” Knight filed suit earlier this year after another parent discovered that 8th-graders were accessing a “Kiwi Brotherhood” gang site from a school computer despite the district’s reliance on adult supervision.
Posted November 13, 2000.