Arviat (Dec 17/03) - A Government of Nunavut (GN) employee is tired of being asked if he'd like to increase the size of his penis while he's at work.

Media specialist George Lessard says he's fed up with the pornographic e-mail he has to deal with at his Arviat work station.

Lessard says he's been taking his complaints to the government for the past year, without much success.

"An employer is responsible when its best efforts are not being given to control a situation like this," says Lessard.

"An elder here in our office also complained about the same thing and has never received a reply for the GN's help desk for informatics."

Lessard claims being exposed to pornographic e-mails is a form of sexual harassment.

He says he understands the e-mails aren't coming from within the GN's structure, but it still has to do its best to stop them.

"There's another aspect of this lurking in the background.

"Let's say an e-mail comes in that looks legitimate to me and I open it up.

"Suddenly, there's this lurid message and/or graphic image on my computer screen just as somebody comes by my work station and sees it.

"I could be held responsible for sexually harassing that person."

Onus on employer

Lessard says he uses the Internet a lot and claims he was told by the government's director of informatics services, Peter Baril, that the unwanted porn was his fault for being on the Internet so much.

"Apparently, if I didn't use the Internet, I wouldn't get any of this junk.

"So, his solution to this problem is for me to stop using the Web.

"The onus is on the employer, in this case the GN, to keep the workplace free of pornographic material."

Government battling problem

Baril denies placing blame at the keyboard of any individual for unwanted e-mail, and says his department is doing everything it can to combat the problem.

He says while he can't speak to contentions of the spam being a form of sexual harassment, he can talk about what the government is doing to address the situation.

"As a government, because we provide public services, we couldn't jump on the filter bandwagon immediately because the early versions had too many false positives," says Baril.

"In the attempt to filter out the inappropriate stuff, we might have knocked off legitimate messages from citizens who needed services."

Baril says the government has purchased, and now has in place, a more mature version of the filters which produce far fewer false positives.

He says the filters have led to a drastic reduction in the number of unwanted e-mails getting through.

"There's still a little bit of stuff that gets through, of course.

"The people sending this junk are very creative and skilful in bypassing the filters.

"But, by and large, we have the problem very much in-hand right now."

Baril says he fully understands Lessard's worries about co-workers seeing inappropriate material on his computer.

However, he quickly adds, his department would never accuse an employee of improper behaviour based on spam that pops up unavoidably at their work station.

"The people who look after this stuff are knowledgeable enough to know the difference between a repeated and deliberate attempt to go after inappropriate material, as opposed to the passive stuff that happens to get past the filters.

"We're, quite frankly, a little stymied by the suggestion that we'd go after somebody over material of this nature."

Privacy protected

Baril says people in the informatics division would never eavesdrop on the content of someone's e-mail at work.

He says the only element monitored is network performance.

"If the network bogs down, our telecommunications people have permission to look at the type of traffic occurring -- not content, but Web traffic.

"If Web traffic looks to be causing the problem, they try to ascertain where it's coming from and which communities it's going to.

"They don't even have the right to look at a particular machine without deputy ministerial approval.

"There are many cheques and balances in place to protect the privacy of the individual."