Ubiquity is a nice idea, a kind of open forum for new ideas, but a side effect of that openness is wide variation in the quality of the published submissions. This is a case where more editorial assistance was clearly called for, and Ubiquity clearly did not provide it.

This specific article addresses a number of serious issues, but it just addresses them by name, and without substantive treatment. The essence of an issue is that there are at least two defensible positions, but this article is basically a one-sided presentation. By failing to consider the issues more deeply or clearly, the author’s own positions are somewhat obscured. It seems the basic goal of this article is to suggest methods of corporate liability limitation based on examples.

The origin of the article was an assignment for a course titled “Management of Information Assurance.” The details of that external context are not included, and this reprint doesn’t tell us the grade, so we can’t even assess how well it accomplished its main purpose. As it stands, it appears the author visited a number of Web pages, mostly for university information policies, and cut-and-pasted bits of somewhat relevant material that agreed with the positions he wished to support. The underlying tactic was to survey such policies, but there is no attempt to analyze the results in any cohesive or quantitative fashion, and, as already noted, opposing ideas (that led to the actual problems) were ignored or overlooked. The citations actually include Google searches for “computing policy” and “acceptable usage policy,” and most of the other cited links probably came from these results. The two exceptions are a citation of an ema!il message, and citations for a “personal interview” with the chief information officer (CIO) of his university. Once the author had collected the required number of pages of undigested material, the assignment was evidently regarded as complete.

The paper touches on enough topics to fill a number of books, but there is no clear organizational structure, or even a justification for the sequencing. There is some evidence of a general philosophy of using a published information policy to reduce the liability exposure of your organization, but even that is not clearly stated.