George:

Certainly we educate students on the use of University computers for their intended purposes, but the central computing organization (ITC) doesn't monitor their use in any way. One illustration of the approach we take is in our policy on the use of shared computing resources:

http://www.itc.virginia.edu/policy/Policies/pcr.html

The most important section is this one:

"Inappropriate activity therefore may include (but is not limited to) non-mission-related use of games, electronic mail, "chat," USENET news groups, as well as other activities that consume capacity, including network bandwidth. To ensure maximum privacy for users, the responsibility to demonstrate mission-relatedness of activity is the user's when questioned. If the user chooses not to do so, he or she must relinquish use of the resource."

Faculty and staff are treated differently because they are subject to state law on this subject:

http://www.itc.virginia.edu/policy/Policies/moreobscene.html

However, those things noted, the central computing organization does not monitor usage using any tool like eSnif, and we have no interest in doing so. eSnif might be a reasonable alternative to entities that determine they must control access by their constituencies to the Internet, but ITC's guiding principle is a much different, perhaps best expressed by another of the University's overall policies:

http://www.itc.virginia.edu/policy/Policies/info-net-access.html

I have edited that policy today to remove references to network environments that are no longer relevant to University usage, but the edits did nothing to the substance of the policy.

Hope these notions are helpful.

Chip German (electronic mail, May 23, 2001).