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From: jwp@chem.ucsd.edu (John Pierce)
Newsgroups: comp.admin.policy
Subject: Re: Possibly nefarious users
Message-ID: <1206@chem.ucsd.EDU>
Date: 6 Jun 91 19:08:45 GMT
References: <2D.-_.N@cs.widener.edu>
Reply-To: jwp@chem.ucsd.edu (John Pierce)
Organization: Chemistry Dept, UC San Diego
Lines: 28

brendan@cs.widener.edu (Brendan Kehoe) writes:
 > 
 >  Here's a question: how do other people deal with users that they *think*
 > are doing no-nos around the net?  One of our users ....  After a lil chat
 > with him, he calmed down....

Well, if talking to them about what you *think* they're doing is sufficient,
then there's no problem... If it turns out not to be....

One of the things one could do is hack things a little so one could turn
session recording on/off for uids/gids of one's choosing.  If one were to
turn recording on, one would probably also quit throwing away accounting
records... just save them someplace convenient.  If one got assurance that
one's suspicions had been correct, one might then go back through the
official accounting records.  One probably couldn't get *proof* from those,
but one could generally find enough stuff to strongly implicate that the
suspect was in fact being a bad guy.  That could possibly be used to convince
them to listen a little more closely to the word "stop".

Of course, if one did that, it probably be a violation of the offender's
right to Privacy and right to Due Process; and I personally would find such
action morally repugnant; and the leadership of the Chemistry Department
would certainly never condone such actions; and I strongly suspect that it
would violate University Policy; and it would clearly violate the God-Given
right of schmuck undergrads to break into and trash other people's accounts
without punishment; and it would seriously damage the well-known article of
the Constitution that allows jerk grad students to with impunity use a
computer to sexually harass new workers in their labs.