Harvard Takes Down Controversial Web Site

University officials pulled the plug on Packet Storm Security, a controversial Web site Harvard had been hosting, after discovering that the site contained an off-color parody, administrators said this week.

The decision drew fire from the Web site's owner, Ken Williamson, who said he had not been contacted by University officials about the decision, which he said was an overreaction to a harmless joke.

The decision ended an unusual exception to University policy. Harvard does not ordinarily host outside sites, but bent the rules to accommodate the computer security site, which the University said was serving a public good.

Harvard officials said they pulled the site offline because it contained sexually related material, including a high school yearbook mug shot of the sister of a rival Web site's founder.

"What caused me to write Harvard officials was [the site owner] got a yearbook picture of my sister, who was 17 years old at the time, all sorts of suggestive, derogatory remarks about her and the address of my parents," said John Vranesvich, who ran the rival site, AntiOnline.com.

"That goes far beyond free speech," Vranesvich added.

After locating the material on the site, Harvard administrators agreed to take it offline.

"It was controversial and basically it came down to a question of appropriateness," said Mark Van Baalen, a University Information Services official. "Harvard wanted to do the right thing, and then other people didn't like the way that turned out."

Williamson--who has not yet found another host for the site--said he felt Harvard's response was inappropriate.

"There was no pornography on there," he said. "There was no sexually explicit material."

Even if University officials felt the site was inappropriate, he said, he deserved to be notified beforehand.

"Nobody bothered to contact me," he said. "It's really funny that the Harvard administration never...got my side of the story, my opinion."

"They could have just removed that directory or changed access," Williamson added. "The standard nettiquette for something like that is for an individual to contact the webmaster or system administrator of the server."

Although the University usually hosts only Harvard-affiliated sites, officials said they made an exception for Williamson's site as a service to the Internet community.

"It was an exception to our normal policies, because it was not something that was directly related to our part of the University," Van Baalen said.

The site, Packet Storm Security, had drawn hundreds of hits a day, and Williamson said he was having difficulty finding someone else with the technical capacity to host the site.

"It seems that nobody has the bandwidth or the hardware," Williamson said.