COMMENTARY--This morning's revelations in the Daily Telegraph that up to 50 managers at Australia Post have been caught sending pornographic e-mail is doubtless to spark off yet another bout of anti-Internet hysteria, as it was surely calculated to do.

There's nothing the popular press loves more than a nice meaty conservative moral stance on an issue that many of its audience don't properly understand. How long before someone will start calling for stricter controls on Internet porn and harsher penalties for those caught e-mailing it?

Most companies already include in their employment contracts an Internet usage policy. If you take the trouble to read it, the idea is that if you use your e-mail for anything other than work purposes, you can get the sack. Most employers wouldn't bother firing you for the occasional e-mail to friends or family, and most turn a blind eye to the fairly ubiquitous practice of sharing the odd pornographic image or movie around the office -- that is, unless the media gets wind of something, and then you can say hello to the dole queue.

The sensible reaction for the porn consumer would be to restrict your downloading and viewing activities to home and your distributing activities to a non-work e-mail account. Sure, it might be tempting to use up the office's free broadband connection, but the potential consequences in the current environment are already dire. If the new IT minister decides there's political advantage in stirring up some more "Internet=porn" sentiment in the community, it could get a whole lot worse.

The thing I don't really understand is: porn is legal. Some people find it offensive; most probably don't. You will note how the Daily Telegraph slings about unproven allegations that child pornography was involved. If this is true, then those involved have committed a crime and can be dealt with by the law. But if it's just your regular garden-variety porn, they haven't done anything illegal. In this case, one employee is alleged to have distributed porn to all the people in his or her department, which is quite likely to have offended people. Again, these breaches can be dealt with by existing rules against sexual harassment and the like.

Presuming the remaining employees kept their porn to themselves, the worst their employer could throw at them is that they've inappropriately used work resources and bandwidth. But people inappropriately use work resources and bandwidth every day for all sorts of things so why does porn get singled out for this over-the-top reaction?

We know why. Because in the minds of many people, the Internet, porn, child porn and paedophilia are all part of the same deal. No prizes for guessing where they might have got that impression -- from the commercial media.

The Telegraph has also reported that Australia Post operated a dragnet, searching through e-mail and hard disk contents of all staff. In the case of serious criminal matters, perhaps this invasion of privacy is justified. For a witch-hunt of regular old porn users who have not broken any laws, the legality of this search has to be questionable, particularly under privacy laws. But what are the chances some Post employee is going to take a test case to court for being caught with porn?

Perhaps the worst part of all this is that some porn filtering software company will try to piggyback off the publicity this event receives, try to scare the pants of prospective customers, get themselves some uncritical free coverage in the non-tech media, and sell some more snake oil products that are of marginal use and often block more useful sites than pornographic ones.

All this wasted money and media-political frenzy to try and stop a bunch of adults doing something they're legally allowed to do, however foolish and inappropriate it may be of them to do it.

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