Maybe stopping college students from getting their hands on cyberporn isn't easy, but the woman who chairs a powerful Arizona state legislature committee won't let that stop her from trying.
State House Republican Jean McGrath has introduced two bills saying, in effect, that collegians shouldn't be playing with porn online. The first bill requires Arizona state universities to restrict Internet access to educational purposes alone; the second would require universities to install filtering software. That bill's language says the university "shall equip and maintain programs on those computer terminals that block access to sexually graphic material."
The bills do not apply to personal computers attached to the college network in dormitory rooms, however, according to Wired.
McGrath tells the University of Arizona's student newspaper, the Arizona Daily Wildcat, that she's "trying to get at the porn problem", but her proposals have outraged students, Wired says, by also proposing to ban opposite-sex guests in dorm rooms.
The Wildcat, in fact, took a poll on whether McGrath was that much in touch with reality. The results as of Tuesday - 89 percent of 229 respondents saying "no".
Meanwhile, an expert on student rights tells Wired that the bill limiting Net access to educational purposes might pass constitutional muster but the second bill might not. "I think the state would be upheld in arguing that hardware provided to an educational institution be limited to educational purposes," Boston attorney Harvey Silverglate tells the magazine.
But Silvergate says the filtering bill is flat unconstitutional. "They've made a viewpoint discrimination and it's not reasonably related to the educational mission," he tells Wired.
