🚀 go-pugleaf

What are other business enterprises doing, if anything, about
filtering newsgroups from their USENET feed?

I have permission from one of our senior Info Systems heads to 
query the local net groups about filtering policies at other 
commercial enterprises. 

Due to a recent incident, our organization is looking at the 
potential need to filter out newsgroups from our USENET feed. 
The concerns are that there may be potential legal liability 
from carrying some newsgroups, as well as the desire to adhere 
to existing Company policies.

What we are currently explicitly filtering is the
alt.binaries.erotica.* groups. There are other alt.* groups being
filtered, but not on a named basis.

We have a policy which prohibits "possession, distribution, display,
or reproduction, of obscene or lewd literature or pictures on
Company property". We are exploring the need to make this policy 
congruent with our USENET feed and the resulting files stored on
our NNTP server. However, filtering of newsgroups to discourage 
non-business use is specifically *not* the intent here, just the
concern with potential legal liability and comsistency with the
policy. To this end we are potentially going to expand the number
of groups filtered out. We would like to formulate a policy for
doing so which is not worse than the problem. 

Again, this is a business, not a university or library setting.
So, what are you folks in the commercial arena doing with respect
to the newsgroups you store on your servers. Nothing? Anything? If
yes, what are the newsgroups you explicitly filter out?

Thanks for your time. I look forward to your email and/or 
posts on this subject. I hope I have some feedback by Nov. 29, when
our special interest group is meeting regarding this subject.

Mario Obejas
System Administrator & Internet Architecture Team member
GM Hughes Electronics