A recent thread regarding a popular network management, monitoring & user safety tool has prompted me to scribble another blog post rather than dilute the thread in question. Nothing more needs saying on that, certainly not from my part; I have a habit of putting my foot in it and don't wish to keep doing so

Whilst reading up about who these people "reporting" the security issues are and what they do, I stumbled across an odd mentality. It seems to form around "free speech" and many believe nothing should be withheld, monitored, watched, tracked or have any other sort of restriction imposed on them in school. That's something I can't understand in my boolean mind, it doesn't quite compute. Notions such as "death to all RATs" (Remote Access Trojan/Tool) certainly amused, as they're not seen as a tool, they're seen as an orwellian surveillance system. The fact that these tools can help large schools with low numbers of technical staff diagnose faults and help users without having to trek across the site, usually to remove a space from someone's username, seems to go unnoticed; the good points are typically ignored in favour of the "evil bits".

So why is the restriction and monitoring of staff and students seen as evil? In some contexts, absolutely. If our Head insisted on having control of such software and spent the majority of their time watching how staff are teaching and what the students are doing then they're clearly the wrong sort of person. Yes, of course this can be the case and I have no doubt has happened. That's not the fault of the software, that's the fault of the human beings using it.

The idea that students should be free to do as they please on school ICT systems seems ridiculous to most. Let's say by example that students have unrestricted access to everything on the network with the exception of confidential files, MIS data etc. The mind boggles at just how much harm could be done, particularly by the clever ones, the ones wanting to learn more about things by breaking, hacking, working around things. Those users need nurturing and need to have their skills pushed. However as a teenager, the majority don't think that way. Just like the boy that's intent on flushing John Smith's head down the toilet daily regardless of how many warnings he gets, there's always someone who want's to cause havoc just because they can.

Filtering is similarly frowned upon by many groups; teach responsibility they say. Most would naturally agree, but they should go hand in hand, not one or the other. It's shocking how many fully mature adults struggle to get through a working day without spending 4 or 5 hours glued to Facebook - teenagers (and indeed younger children) are worse. Keeping them on task to better their education is, in my opinion, every bit as important as teaching them to use the Internet and other resources responsibly.

It seems to boil down to the fact that these "hackers" or "security researchers" believing these things are rather like the hippies chaining themselves to a 400 year old diseased tree to stop it being cut down. Idealism; ideally the tree wouldn't be diseased, therefore it wouldn't need removing. That isn't the case. Ideally, children would all wake up in the morning, happily wander to school, sit and learn all day long without breaking concentration once or feeling the need to draw mustaches on the sperms on page 54 of their biology book. They wouldn't have overactive hormones and rowdy pals urging them to search for boobs on the internet or see how one would sign up to fight for some extremists in Madeupistan. They also wouldn't have parents who would be going to the media like a shot should a school not be helping to protect their children from these things.

Idealism shouldn't be the driving force of the world. It'd be nice, but whilst human beings exist, it will never work. Realism however....