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INTERNET FILTERS Marjorie
Heins & Christina Cho Fall, 2001 Copyright 2001 National Coalition Against Censorship Any part of this report may be reproduced without charge so long as acknowledgment is given to the Free Expression Policy Project. For additional copies, contact heins@ncac.org or go to www.ncac.org CONTENTS EXECUTIVE SUMMARY INTRODUCTION OVER- AND
UNDER-BLOCKING BY INTERNET FILTERS
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF TESTS AND STUDIES APPENDIX A: Blocked Sites by Subject: Artistic and Literary; Sexuality Education; Gay and Lesbian Information; Political Topics/Human Rights; Censorship APPENDIX B: Blocking Categories for Different Filters Defined In the spring and summer of 2001, the Free Expression Policy Project of the National Coalition Against Censorship surveyed all of the studies and tests that it was able to locate describing the actual operation of 19 products or software programs that are commonly used to filter out World Wide Web sites and other communications on the Internet. This report summarizes the results of that survey. Its purpose is to provide a resource for policymakers and the general public as they grapple with the difficult, often hotly contested issues raised by the now-widespread use of Internet filters. The existing studies and tests vary widely. They range from anecdotal accounts to extensive tests applying social-science methodologies. In some instances, we located only one or two test reports; in other cases—for example, Cyber Patrol, SmartFilter, and X-Stop—we found a great many. Most tests simply describe the actual sites that a particular product blocked when Web searches were conducted. Nearly every one, however, revealed massive over-blocking by filtering software. This problem stems from the very nature of filtering, which must, because of the sheer number of Internet sites, rely to a large extent on mindless mechanical blocking through identification of key words and phrases. Where human judgment does come into play, filtering decisions are based on different companies' broad and varying concepts of offensiveness, "inappropriateness," or disagreement with the political viewpoint of the manufacturer. A few examples of over-blocking from the more than 70 studies or tests summarized in this report are:
The still new, revolutionary medium of the Internet contains a wealth of information, images, and ideas—as the U.S. Supreme Court observed in 1997, "the content on the Internet is as diverse as human thought."1 Unsurprisingly, not all of this online expression is accurate, pleasant, or inoffensive. Virtually since the arrival of the Internet, concerns have been expressed about minors' access to online pornography, about the proliferation of Web sites advocating racial hatred, and about other online content deemed to be offensive or dangerous. Congress and the states responded in the late 1990s with censorship laws, but most of these have been struck down by the courts. Partly as a result, individual parents, employers, school districts, and other government entities have turned with increasing frequency to privately manufactured Internet rating and filtering programs. Early Internet filtering was based on either "self-rating" by those who published online communications; or "third-party rating" by filter manufacturers. Because of the Internet's explosive growth (now more than a billion Web sites, many of which change daily), and the consequent inability of filtering companies to review and evaluate even a fraction of it, third-party rating had to rely largely on mechanical blocking by key words or phrases such as "over 18," "breast," "sex," or "pussy." The results were not difficult to predict: large quantities of valuable information and literature, particularly about sexuality, feminism, gay and lesbian issues, civil rights, and other politically important subjects, were blocked. Even where company employees did review Web sites, there arose massive problems of subjectivity. The political attitudes of the different filter manufacturers were reflected in blocking decisions, particularly with respect to such subjects as homosexuality, human rights, and criticism of filtering software. The alternative, self-rating, did not suffer these disadvantages, but it proved impossible to persuade the great majority of online speakers to self-rate their sites. Online news organizations, for example, are among those that steadfastly refused to reduce their content to decontextualized, simplistic letters or codes through self-rating. Third-party rating and filtering systems have thus become the industry standard, at least in the United States. Private software companies actively market such products as SurfWatch and Cyber Patrol, which contain multiple categories of potentially offensive, "inappropriate," or "objectionable" material. Internet service providers such as America Online provide "parental control" options that block Web sites based on technological word or phrase identification, augmented by the company's—or its subcontractor's—judgments about age-appropriateness. Some manufacturers market products that essentially block all of the Internet, with only a few hundred or thousand preselected sites accessible (so-called whitelists). One company—later the subject of a First Amendment lawsuit—erroneously claimed that its "X-Stop" software was able to identify and block only "illegal" obscenity and child pornography: an impossible task, since legal judgments in both categories are subjective, and under the Supreme Court's three-part obscenity test, determinations of legality vary depending on different communities' standards of "prurience" and "patent offensiveness."2 The late 1990s saw political battles in many communities over the use of filtering products in public libraries. New groups such as Family Friendly Libraries attacked the American Library Association (ALA) for adhering to a no-censorship and no-filtering policy, even for minors. (The ALA and other champions of intellectual freedom objected to the over-blocking propensities of filtering software, and advocated noncensorial approaches such as privacy screens and "acceptable use" policies.) Online anti-censorship groups such as the Censorware Project and Peacefire began to publish reports documenting the blocking of numerous valuable, educational sites by different filters. In December 2000, Congress passed the Children's Internet Protection Act ("CIPA"), mandating filters in all schools and libraries that receive federal financial assistance through the E-rate or "universal service" program, or through the Library Services and Technology Act.3 This amounted to about 60% of the nation's libraries and public schools. Thus, although initially promoted as a voluntary alternative to coercive government censorship, Internet filtering is now embraced by government at both the federal and local levels. Reports of over-blocking, of vague and subjective standards, and of politically biased blocking decisions continue, while industry spokespersons assert that their methodologies are improving and that new software programs designed to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable material will soon be on the market. But no filtering technology, no matter how sophisticated, can make contextualized judgments about the value, offensiveness, or age-appropriateness of online expression. Internet filtering has thus become a major public policy issue, and is likely to remain so. In the interests of advancing informed debate on this important issue, the Free Expression Policy Project has collected and summarized all of the studies and tests that it has been able to locate on the actual operation of Internet filters. The report presents this information in one place and in readily accessible form, so that the ongoing policy debate will be better informed about what Internet filters actually do, and their ultimate impact on free expression. The report is organized by filtering product. Necessarily, there is some overlap, since many studies have sampled more than one product. A bibliography of all the studies is included, along with an appendix listing blocked sites according to subject: artistic and literary sites; sexuality education; gay and lesbian information; political topics; and sites relating to censorship itself. (Another appendix, describing the blocking categories used by different products, is available in the online version of this report.) Where the study gives Web addresses or URLs, we have included these and checked their accuracy whenever possible. (Some Web addresses are now obsolete.) If we have not given Web addresses, it is because they were not supplied in the underlying report. We hope that Internet Filters: A Public Policy Report will prove a useful resource for policymakers, parents, teachers, librarians, and all others concerned with the Internet, intellectual freedom, or the education of youth. Internet filtering is popular, despite its unreliability, because many parents, political leaders, and educators feel that the alternative—unfettered Internet access—is even worse. But to make these policy choices, it is necessary to have complete and accurate information about what filters actually do. Ultimately, less censorial approaches such as media literacy, sexuality education, and Internet acceptable-use training may be better policy choices than Internet filters in addressing concerns about young people's access to "inappropriate" content or disturbing ideas. OVER- AND UNDER-BLOCKING BY INTERNET FILTERS America Online Parental Controls AOL offers three levels of Parental Controls: "Kids Only," for children aged 12 and under, "Young Teen," for ages 13–15, and "Mature Teen," for ages 16–17, which allows access to "all content on AOL and the Internet, except certain sites deemed for an adult (18+) audience." At one time AOL employed Cyber Patrol's block list; at another point it stated it was using SurfWatch. While as of 2001 the Parental Controls information page provided no specific information as to its filtering categories or methodology other than its use of a user-recommended database of sites, on May 2, 2001, AOL announced that Parental Controls had integrated the RuleSpace Company's "Contexion Services," which identifies "objectionable" sites "by analyzing both the words on a page and the context in which they are used."4 Access
Denied, Version 2.0: The Continuing Threat Against Internet Access
and Privacy and its Impact on the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and
Transgender Community, Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against
Defamation (GLAAD), 1999. Brian
Livingston, "AOL's 'youth filters' protect kids from Democrats,"
CNet News.com, Apr. 24, 2000. "AOL Parental
Controls error rate for the first 1,000 .com domains," Peacefire,
Oct. 23, 2000. "Digital
Chaperones for Kids," Consumer Reports, Mar.
2001. Miscellaneous
Reports BESS, manufactured by N2H2, provides its Internet-filtering services in one of 2 ways: either as a proxy server, whereby each Web request is passed through a server located at N2H2 itself, or in the form of a dedicated server called the "Internet Filtering Manager," installed on a local computer or system. Dedicated-server administrators can enable or disable any of BESS's blocking categories, as well as BESS's keyword filtering features; users on BESS proxy servers cannot. In both scenarios, BESS provides 29 categories of blocked content under its "Typical School Filtering" setting, ranging from "Adults Only" and "Alcohol" to "Gambling," "Lingerie," "Personals," and "Tasteless/Gross." (See appendix B for a complete list.) N2H2 states that 4 of the 29 classifications—"History," "Medical," "Moderated," and "Text/Spoken Only"—are designed to distinguish between sites falling squarely into BESS's blocking categories and those that may contain sexually oriented, violent, or other question-able content but also some educational merit, such as the Starr report to Congress on President Clinton's sexual transgressions. Under the "Maximum Filtering" setting, all 29 categories, as well as employment sites, message and bulletin boards, investment-related sites, images of individuals wearing swimsuits, and all Web searches are blocked. Configured for "Minimal Filtering," N2H2's Internet Filtering Manager blocks sites falling into the categories of "Adults Only," "Hate/ Discrimination," "Illegal," "Pornography," "Sex," and "Violence." Karen
Schneider, A Practical Guide to Internet Filters,
1997. The researchers began by seeking answers to some 100 common research queries on the Web, on both unfiltered computers and ones equipped with BESS (and the various other filters) configured for maximum blocking, including keyword blocking. Each query fell into one of 11 categories: "sex and pornography," "anatomy," "drugs, alcohol, and tobacco," "gay issues," "crimes (including pedophilia and child pornography)," "obscene or ‘racy' language," "culture and religion," "women's issues," "gambling," "hate groups and intolerance," and "politics." The queries were purposely devised to gauge filters' handling of controversial issues—for instance, "I'd like some information on safe sex"; "I want to do some research on Robert Mapplethorpe"; "I want information on the legalization of marijuana"; "I want information on PFLAG" [Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays]; "Is the Aryan Nation the same thing as Nazis?"; and "Who are the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and what does it stand for?" In some cases, the queries contained potentially provocative terms "intended to trip up keyword-blocking mechanisms" such as "How do beavers make their dams?"; "Can you find me some pictures from Babes in Toyland?"; "I need some information and a picture of the Enola Gay"; "I'm a farmer and want to research rape—the plant used to make canola oil"; and "I'm trying to find out about the Paul Newman movie The Hustler." Schneider used Web sites, blocked and unblocked, that arose from these searches to construct her testing sample of 240 URLs. Researchers tested these URLs against a version of BESS configured for "Maximum Filtering," but with keyword filtering disabled. TIFAP found that "several" (Schnieder did not say how many) nonpornographic sites were blocked, including a page discussing X-rated videos but not containing any pornographic imagery, and an informational page on trichomaniasis, a vaginal disease. Upon notification and review, BESS later unblocked the trichomaniasis site. A Practical Guide included neither the names nor the Web addresses of the blocked sites. Passing
Porn, Banning the Bible: N2H2's Bess in Public Schools,
Censorware Project, 2000. The report noted that BESS does not (as is implied in its published filtering criteria) review home pages hosted by such free site providers as Angelfire, Geocities, and Tripod (owing, it seems, to their sheer number). Instead, users must configure the software to block none or all of these sites; some schools opt for the latter, thus prohibiting access to such sites as The Jefferson Bible (http://www.angelfire.com/co/JeffersonBible/), a com-pendium of Biblical passages selected by Thomas Jefferson, and the Web site of the Eustis Panthers (http://www.angelfire.com/fl/eustispanthers/), a high-school baseball team. Though each proxy was configured to filter out pornography to the highest degree, Censorware was able to access "hundreds" of pornographic Web sites, of which 46 are listed in Passing Porn. Of the total unblocked pornographic URLs, some 285 were listed on Yahoo.com, and of these, 28 were accessible through all 7 of the proxies in use in public schools. "'BESS, the
Internet Retriever' Examined," Peacefire, 2000. "Mandated
Mediocrity: Blocking Software Gets a Failing Grade," Peacefire &
Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), Oct.
2000. "BESS error
rate for 1,000 .com domains," Peacefire, Oct. 23, 2000. The filter was configured to block sites in the categories of "Adults Only," "Alcohol," "Chat," "Drugs," "Free Pages," "Gambling," "Hate/Discrimination," "Illegal," "Lingerie," "Nudity," "Personals," "Personal Information," "Porn Site," "Profanity," "School Cheating Info," "Sex," "Suicide/Murder," "Tasteless/Gross," "Tobacco," "Violence," and "Weapons." The program's keyword-blocking features were also enabled. The BESS proxy blocked 176 of the 1,000 domains; among these, 150 were "under construction." Of the remaining 26 sites, Peacefire deemed 7 wrongly blocked: a-celebrity.com, a-csecurite.com, a-desk.com, a-eda.com, a-gordon.com, a-h-e.com, and a-intec.com. The report said the resulting "error rate" of 27% was unreliable given how small a sample was examined; the true error rate "could be as low as 15%." Peacefire's Bennett Haselton also noted that the dot-com domains tested here were "more likely to contain commercial pornography than, say, .org domains. ... [W]e should expect the error rate to be even higher for .org sites" (Haselton's emphasis), and added that the results called into question N2H2 CEO Peter Nickerson's claim, in 1998 testimony before the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications, Trade, and Consumer Protection, that "[a]ll sites that are blocked are reviewed by N2H2 staff before being added to the block lists."7 "Blind
Ballots: Web Sites of U.S. Political Candidates Censored by
Censorware," Peacefire, Nov. 7, 2000. BESS's wholesale blocking of free Webpage hosting services caused the sites of one Democratic candidate, 5 Republicans, 6 Libertarians (as well as the entire Missouri Libertarian Party site), and 13 other third-party candidates to be blocked. Report coauthor Bennett Haselton commented that, as "many of our political candidates run their campaigns on a shoestring, and use free-hosting services to save money," BESS's barring of such hosts leads it to an inadvertent bias toward wealthy or established politicians' sites. Congressional incumbent Edward Markey (a Democrat from Massachusetts), also had his site (http://www.edmarkey.org/intro.html) blocked—unlike the others, it was not hosted by Geocities or Tripod, but was blocked because BESS categorized its content as "Hate, Illegal, Pornography, and/or Violence." "While blocking software com-panies often justify their errors by pointing out that they are quickly corrected," Haselton wrote, "this does not help any of the candidates listed above. . . . [C]orrections made after Election Day do not help them at all." "Amnesty
Intercepted: Global Human Rights Groups Blocked by Web Censoring
Software," Peacefire, Dec. 12, 2000. Miscellaneous
Reports Rather than relying on lists of objectionable URLs, ClickSafe is designed to review each requested page in real time. According to company cofounder Richard Schwartz's outline for testimony submitted to the commission created by the 1998 Child Online Protection Act (the COPA Commission) in 2000, ClickSafe "uses state-of-the-art, content-based filtering software that combines cutting edge graphic, word and phrase-recognition technology to achieve extra-ordinarily high rates of accuracy in filtering pornographic content," and "can precisely distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate sites." "Sites
blocked by ClickSafe," Peacefire, July 2000. As for groups with representatives on the commission, Peacefire found that ClickSafe blocked several organizations' and companies' sites, at least partially: Network Solutions (www.networksolutions.com/legal/service-agreement.html); the Internet Content Rating Association (www.icra.org/about.html); Security Software's information page on its signature filtering product, Cyber Sentinel (www.securitysoft.com/cyber-page.html); FamilyConnect (www.familyconnect.com/block.html), a brand of blocking software—the page blocked was one on which users could submit URLs to be reviewed as potential blocks or unblocks; the National Law Center for Children and Families (www.nationallawcenter.org/federal.htm); the Christian site Crosswalk.com; and the Center for Democracy and Technology (http://www.cdt.org/). In addition to the CDT, ClickSafe blocked the home pages of the ACLU (http://www.aclu.org/), the Electronic Frontier Foundation (http://www.eff.org/), and the American Family Association (www.afa.net), as well as part of the official site of Donna Rice Hughes's book, Kids Online: Protecting Your Children in Cyberspace (www.protectkids.com/app.a.html). Cyber Patrol, currently owned by Surf-Control, operates with 12 default blocking categories, including "Partial Nudity," "Intoler-ance," "Drugs/Drug Culture," and "Sex Education." (See appendix B.) According to the manufacturer's Web site, "Cyber Patrol employs a team of professional researchers at least 21 years of age including parents and teachers" to determine whether sites are to be blocked. Any page that "contains more than 3 instances in 100 messages or any easily accessible pages with graphics, text or audio that fall within the definition" of any of the 12 categories "will be considered sufficient to place the source in that category." As with most filtering products, Cyber Patrol's list of prohibited sites is not made public, but SurfControl offers the CyberNOT search engine, a feature on its Web site through which users can enter URLs and receive immediate responses as to whether or not those pages are on the filter's block list. SurfControl adds, "Internet sites that contain information or software programs designed to hack into filtering software, including Cyber Patrol, are added to the CyberNOT list in ALL categories as a measure of protection for the parents, educators and businesses that rely on Cyber Patrol to screen Internet content." Brock Meeks
and Declan McCullagh, "Jacking in from the ‘Keys to the Kingdom'
Port," CyberWire Dispatch, July 3, 1996. The authors also found that with all default categories enabled, Cyber Patrol barred multiple sites concerning cyberliberties—the Electronic Frontier Foundation's censorship archive, for example, and the home page of MIT's League for Programming Freedom. Also blocked were the Queer Resources Directory, which counts among its resources information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the AIDS Book Review Journal, and AIDS Treatment News. Cyber Patrol also blocked a number of newsgroups dealing with homosexuality and gender issues, such as alt.journalism.gay-press, soc.support.youth.gay-lesbian-bi, alt.feminism, and soc.feminism, as well as soc.support.fat-acceptance. Karen
Schneider, A Practical Guide to Internet Filters,
1997. "Cyber
Patrol: The Friendly Censor," Censorware Project, Nov. 22,
1997. Wallace reported that Cyber Patrol also blocked several sites featuring politically loaded content, such as the Flag Burning Page (formerly www.indirect.com/user/warren/flag.html; now http://www.esquilax.com/flag/), which examines the issue of flag burning from a constitutional perspective; Interactivism (www.interactivism.com), a site inviting users to engage in political activism by corresponding with politicians on issues such as campaign-finance reform and Tibetan independence; Newtwatch (no longer active; formerly www.cais.com/newtwatch), a Democratic Party-funded page that consisted of reports and satires on the former Speaker of the House; Dr. Bonzo, another now-inactive page (www.iglou.com/drbonzo/anathema .htm), which featured "satirical essays on religious matters"11; and the Web site of the Second Amendment Foundation (http://www.saf.org/)—though, as Wallace noted, Cyber Patrol did not block other gun-related sites, such as that of the National Rifle Association. "Gay sites
netted in Cyber Patrol sting," press release, GLAAD, Dec. 19,
1997. Microsystems CEO Dick Gorgens re-sponded to further inquiry with the admission that GLAAD was "absolutely correct in [its] assessment that the subdirectory block on WestHollywood is prejudicial to the Gay and Lesbian Geocities community. . . . Over the next week the problem will be corrected." Yet according to the press release, after a week had passed, the block on WestHollywood remained. Blacklisted by Cyber Patrol: From Ada to Yoyo,
Censorware Project, Dec. 22, 1997. Blacklisted also catalogued 4 nonpornographic sites "oriented toward alternative sexuality" that were blocked for "Full Nudity" and "Sexual Acts": Gay Daze (gaydaze.com), "a sort of online soap opera" centered around 6 homosexual characters; Gay Mart, an online catalog merchant selling such items as gay-themed baseball caps and cookie jars; the home page of a West Hollywood coffee dealer called Stonewall, Inc. (http://www.stonewallinc.com/); and, as was reported 3 days earlier by GLAAD, the WestHollywood subdirectory of Geocities. In addition, Blacklisted reported that every site hosted by the free Web page provider Tripod (members.tripod.com) was barred, not only for nudity or sexually explicit content, but also for "Violence/Profanity," "Gross Depictions," "Intolerance," "Satanic/Cult," "Drugs/Drug Culture," "Militant/Extreme," "Questionable/ Illegal & Gambling," and "Alcohol & Tobacco." Tripod was home, at the time of the report, to 1.4 million distinct pages, but smaller servers and service providers were also blocked in their entirety—Blacklisted lists 40 of them. Another section of the report lists hundreds of blocked newsgroups, including alt.atheism, alt.adoption, alt.censorship, alt.journalism, rec.games.bridge (for bridge enthusiasts), and support.soc.depression.misc (on depression and mood disorders). The day after Blacklisted was published, Microsystems Software unblocked 55 of the 67 URLs and domains the report had cited. Yet 8 of the remaining 12, according to the Censorware Project, were still wrongly blocked: Nike's Penny Hardaway site, the National Academy of Biochemistry sites, 4 Internet s ervice providers (phantom.datamg.com, http://www.dada.it/, http://www.ctsserver.com/, and thorgal.globalxs.nl), Tripod, and a site-in-progress for a software company (http://www.rotw.com/). This last site, at the time of Censorware's Dec. 25, 1997, update to Blacklisted, contained very little content, but did contain the words "HOT WEB LINKS"—which was "apparently enough for Cyber Patrol to continue to block it as pornography through a second review." Of the 4 other sites left blocked, 2, Censorware acknowledged, fell within the Microsystems Software's blocking criteria and "shouldn't have been listed as wrongful blocks originally." Christopher
Hunter, "Filtering the Future?: Software Filters, Porn, PICS, and
the Internet Content Conundrum," July 1999. Hunter intended half of his testing sample to approximate an average Internet user's surfing habits. Thus, the first 100 sites consisted of 50 "randomly generated" by Webcrawler's random links feature and 50 others Hunter compiled through Altavista searches for the 5 most frequently requested search terms as of April 1999: "yahoo," "warez" (commercial software products made obtainable for illegal download), "hotmail," "sex," and "MP3"12. Hunter gathered the first 10 matches from each of these 5 searches. For the other 100 sites, Hunter focused on material often identified as bases of controversial blocks. He therefore added to his testing sample the Web sites of the 36 plaintiff organizations in ACLU v. Reno and ACLU v. Reno II, the American Civil Liberties Union's challenges to the 1997 Communications Decency Act and the 1998 Child Online Protection Act, respectively. Hunter then conducted Yahoo searches for sites pertaining to Internet portals, political issues, feminism, hate speech, gambling, religion, gay pride and homosexuality, alcohol, tobacco, and drugs, pornography, news, violent computer games, safe sex, and abortion. From each of the first 12 of these 13 searches, Hunter chose 5 of the resulting matches for his sample, and then selected 4 abortion-related sites (2 pro- and 2 anti-) in order to arrive at a total of 100 URLs. Hunter evaluated the first page of each site using the Internet rating system devised by the Recreational Software Advisory Council (called RSACi). Under RSACi's 4 categories (violence, nudity, sex, and language) and 5 grades within each category, a site with a rating of zero in the "sex" category, for example, would contain no sexual content or else only "innocent kissing; romance," while a site with a "sex" rating of 4 might contain "explicit sexual acts or sex crimes." Using these categories, Hunter made his own judgments as to whether a filtering product erroneously blocked or failed to block a site, characterizing a site whose highest RSACi rating he thought would be zero or one as nonobjectionable, while determining that any site with a rating of 2, 3, or 4 in at least one RSACi category should have been blocked. Hunter concluded that Cyber Patrol blocked 20, or 55.6%, of the sites containing material he deemed objectionable according to RSACi standards, and 15, or 9.1%, of sites he deemed innocuous. Among these 15 sites were the feminist literary site RiotGrrl (http://www.riotgrrl.com/); the home page of Stop Prisoner Rape (http://www.igc.org/spr/); the Qworld contents page (www.qworld.org/TOC.html), a collection of links to online gay-interest resources; an article on "Promoting with Pride" on the Queer Living page (www.qmondo.com/queerliving); the Web site of the Coalition for Positive Sexuality, or CPS (www.positive.org/Home/index.html), which promotes "complete and honest sex education"; SIECUS, the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (http://www.siecus.org/); and Gay Wired Presents Wildcat Press (http://www.wildcatpress.com/), a page devoted to an award-winning independent press. Five of the other sites Hunter deemed over-blocked, however, were alcohol- and tobacco-related promotional sites, and thus did fall within Cyber Patrol's filtering criteria. On the other hand, similar alcohol and tobacco sites were left unblocked. In Feb. 2000, filtering advocate David Burt responded to Hunter's study with a press release citing potential sources of error.13 Burt argued that "200 sites is far too small to adequately represent the breadth of the entire world wide web" and charged that all but the 50 randomly generated URLs constituted a skewed sample, containing content "instantly recognizable as likely to trigger filters" and "not represented in the sample proportionately to the entire Internet," thus giving rise to "much higher-than-normal error rates." A more serious problem, however, is that in attempting to arrive at "scientific" estimates of percentages of wrongly blocked sites, Hunter relied on his own subjective judgments of appropriateness. Youth Access
to Alcohol and Tobacco Web Marketing: The Filtering and Rating
Debate, Center for Media Education, Oct. 1999. The CME also conducted Web searches on three popular search engines—Yahoo, Go/InfoSeek, and Excite—for the alcohol- and tobacco-related terms "beer," "Budweiser lizards," "cigarettes," "cigars," "drinking games," "home brewing," "Joe Camel," "liquor," and "mixed drinks." It then attempted to access the first 5 sites returned in each search. Cyber Patrol blocked 30% of the result pages, allowing, for example, cigarettes4u.com, tobaccotraders.com, and homebrewshop.com, which, according to the report, "not only promoted the use of alcohol and tobacco, but also sold products and accessories related to their consumption." To test blocking of educational and public-health information on alcohol and tobacco, the CME added to its sample 10 sites relating to alcohol consumption—www. alcoholismhelp.com, for instance, and the Mothers Against Drunk Driving (http://www.madd.org/madd/home/) and National Organization on Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (http://www.nofas.org/) sites—and 10 anti-smoking sites, including http://tobaccofreekids.org/, http://www.wholetruth.com/, and the site of the American Cancer Society (www3.cancer.org). Cyber Patrol did not block any of the sites in this group. Nor did it block most sites returned by the 3 search engines when terms like "alcohol," "alcoholism," "fetal alcohol syndrome," "lung cancer," or "substance abuse" were entered. Cyber Patrol allowed access to an average of 4.8 of the top 5 search results in each case; CME deemed an average of 4.1 of these contained important educational information. Eddy Jansson
and Matthew Skala, The Breaking of Cyber Patrol ® 4, Mar. 11,
2000. Also on the block list, for "Intolerance," were a personal home page on which the word "voodoo" appeared—in a mention of voodoo-cycles.com—and the Web archives of Declan McCullagh's Justice on Campus Project (joc.mit.edu/cornell), which worked "to preserve free expression and due process at universities." Blocked in the "Satanic/Cults" category were webdevils.com (a site of multimedia Net-art projects) and Mega's Metal Asylum, a page devoted to heavy metal; the latter site was also branded "Militant/Extremist." Also blocked as "Militant/Extremist," as well as "Violence/Profanity" and "Questionable/Illegal & Gambling," were a portion of the Nuclear Control Institute site; a personal page dedicated, in part, to raising awareness of neo-Nazi activity; multiple editorials opposing nuclear arms from Washington State's Tri-City Herald; part of the City of Hiroshima site; the former Web site of the American Airpower Heritage Museum in Midland, Texas; an Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy student's personal home page, which at the time of Jansson and Skala's report consisted only of the student's résumé; and the Web site of a sheet-music publisher. The "Marston Family Home Page," a personal site, was also blocked under the "Militant/Extremist" and "Questionable/Illegal & Gambling" categories—presumably, according to the report, because one of the children wrote, "[T]his new law the Communications Decency Act totally defys [sic] all that the Constitution was. Fight the system, take the power back. . . ." "Cyber Patrol
error rate for first 1,000 .com domains," Peacefire, Oct. 23,
2000. "Blind
Ballots: Web Sites of U.S. Political Candidates Censored by
Censorware," Peacefire, Nov. 7, 2000. "Amnesty
Intercepted: Global Human Rights Groups Blocked by Web Censoring
Software," Peacefire, Dec. 12, 2000. "Digital
Chaperones for Kids," Consumer Reports, Mar.
2001. Kieren
McCarthy, "Cyber Patrol bans The Register," The
Register, Mar. 5, 2001; Drew Cullen, "Cyber Patrol unblocks
The Register," The Register, Mar. 9,
2001. Miscellaneous
reports Rather than maintaining and updating a list of sites to be blocked, or designating forbidden categories, Cyber Sentinel scans each requested + for certain keywords and phrases in its various databases, or "libraries." Its "child predator library," for instance, contains such phrases and "do you have a pic" and "can I call you." Promotional text on Cyber Sentinel's Web site (http://www.securitysoft.com/) claims it is "the most advanced Internet filtering software package available today." Youth Access
to Alcohol and Tobacco Web Marketing: The Filtering and Rating
Debate, Center for Media Education, Oct. 1999. "Sites
blocked by Cyber Sentinel," Peacefire, Aug. 2,
2000. Cyber Sentinel also blocked sites associated with both sides of the civil liberties and Internet censorship debates: an ACLU press release, "Calls for Arrest of Openly Gay GOP Convention Speaker Reveal Danger of Sodomy Laws Nationwide" (http://www.aclu.org/news/2000/n073100b.html), because of the term "anal sex"; the home page of the American Family Association (http://www.afa.net/), because of the word "porn" ("The current administration and the Justice Department have been good to the porn industry"); on account of the word "cum," the biographies of COPA Commission members Stephen Balkam (www.copacommission.org/commission/balkam.shtml) and Donna Rice Hughes (www.copacommission.org/commission/hughes.shtml)—for both graduated magna cum laude; the COPA Commission's list of research papers (http://www.copacommission.org/papers/), because the word "porn" appeared in the title of filtering advocate David Burt's report, "Dangerous Access, 2000 Edition: Uncovering Internet Porn in America's Libraries"; and the home page for Donna Rice Hughes's book, Kids Online: Protecting Your Children in Cyberspace (http://www.protectkids.com/), an appendix of which is titled "Porn on the Net." Before 1999, CYBERsitter, in addition to blocking entire sites and searches for terms on its block list, would excise terms it deemed objectionable or leave blank spaces where they would otherwise appear. This procedure led to some early notoriety for the product, such as the instance in which it deleted the word "homosexual" from the sentence, "The Catholic Church opposes homosexual marriage"—and left Web users reading "The Catholic Church opposes marriage." In 1999, CYBERsitter modified its system and established 7 default settings, including "PICS Rating adult topics," which "[c]overs all topics not suitable for children under the age of 13," "sites promoting the gay and lesbian life style," and "[s]ites advocating illegal/ radical activities." Its total list of blocking categories grew to 22 (see appendix B). Users could, as they can with the most recent versions of the software, enable or disable any specific category.16 Brock N.
Meeks and Declan McCullagh, "Jacking in from the ‘Keys to the
Kingdom' Port," CyberWire Dispatch, July 3, 1996. "CYBERsitter:
Where do we not want you to go today?" Peacefire, Nov. 5–Dec. 11,
1996. "Cybersitter
Blocks The Ethical Spectacle," Ethical Spectacle, press
release, Jan. 19, 1997. Karen G.
Schneider, A Practical Guide to Internet Filters,
1997. Marie José
Klaver, What does Cybersitter block? June 23, 1998. Christopher
Hunter, "Filtering the Future," July 1999. CYBERsitter proved particularly likely to deny access to nonpornographic sites relating to homosexuality, blocking the QWorld contents page (www.qworld.org/TOC.html); the gay Internet communities Planet Out (http://www.planetout.com/pno/), PrideNet (http://www.pridenet.com/), and the Queer Zone (http://www.queerzone.com/); A Different Light Bookstore (http://www.adlbooks.com/), which specializes in gay and lesbian literature; Gay Wired Presents Wildcat Press (www.gaywired.com/wildcat/index); and Queer Living's "Promoting with Pride" page (www.qmondo.com/queerliving). (These sites, while not falling under RSAC's definition of unacceptability, do fall within CYBERsitter's default filtering category of "sites promoting the gay and lesbian life style.") Youth
Access to Alcohol and Tobacco Web Marketing, Center for Media
Education, Oct. 1999. "CYBERsitter
Examined," Peacefire, 2000. CYBERsitter blocked the Village Voice Web site (http://www.villagevoice.com/); Calweb, an Internet service provider (http://www.calweb.com/); Internex Online (www.io.org), another ISP, which hosts the Web site of the National Organization of People Attacking Sales of Tobacco to Youth (www.io.org/~pete/ccSmok3.html); and Pathfinder (pathfinder.com), which at one time published a search engine on which users could check URLs against CYBERsitter's block list. "Amnesty
Intercepted," Peacefire, Dec. 12, 2000. "Digital
Chaperones for Kids," Consumer Reports, Mar. 2001. Miscellaneous
reports FamilyClick (whose spokesperson is Donna Rice Hughes) allows users to choose from a variety of filtering configurations. Its least restrictive "Full FamilyClick access" setting, "recommended for ages 18+," blocks sites falling into any of 7 categories, including "Crime," "Gambling," and "Chat." Its "Teen access" setting, for ages 15–17, blocks the previous 7 categories as well as "Personals," "Illegal Drug Promotion," "Chat/Message Boards," and "Non-FamilyClick Email Services." "Pre-Teen access," for ages 12–14, bars 4 additional categories; these include "Advanced Sex Education" and "Weapons." "Kids access," geared toward ages 8–11, blocks "Basic Sex Education,"s defined as "[s]ites providing information at the elementary level about puberty and reproduction." Finally, the "Children's Playroom," for ages 7 and under, "is 100% safe. It contains activities, games and content that have been pre-selected and pre-approved by FamilyClick." (See appendix B.) "Sites
blocked by FamilyClick," Peacefire, Aug. 1, 2000. "Online
Oddities and Atrocities Museum," Online Policy Group,
n.d. I-Gear, manufactured by Symantec, operates by a combination of a set of predefined URL databases and a "Dynamic Document Review." The site databases are divided into 22 categories (see appendix B). Dynamic Document Review further reviews the content of a requested page: If the URL is not in any of the databases, I-Gear scans the page for trigger words from the corresponding "DDR Dictionaries." Each matching word on the site receives a numerical score; if the total score for the page exceeds 50 (which is the default maximum score; it can be adjusted to anywhere between one and 200), the site is blocked. According to the product literature, "In addition to unconditionally vulgar words, I-Gear looks for words that are conditionally appropriate. I-Gear reviews each word on a page and examines the surrounding words to determine the context" of such terms. The example given in I-Gear's manual is the word "sexual": While the string "hot sexual pictures" may be included in the "Sex/Acts" dictionary and thus earn a page a few points, the string "sexual harassment" will not. Karen
Schneider, A Practical Guide to Internet Filters,
1997. Anemona
Hartocollis, "Board Blocks Student Access to Web Sites: Computer
Filter Hobbles Internet Research Work," New York Times, Nov. 10,
1999. "Analysis of
first 50 URL's blocked by I-Gear in the .edu domain," Peacefire,
Mar. 2000. Other sites blocked for reasons unknown included "Semi-Automatic Morph Between Two Supermodels" (www.ai.mit.edu/people/spraxlo/R/superModels.htm), an animation sequence in which images of two models' faces morph into each other, written by an MIT student; a diagram of a milk pasteurization system (babcock.cals.wisc.edu/bab/des/lacs/lac4/machine.html); a site containing Book X, in Latin, of the Confessions of St. Augustine (ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~jod/latinconf/10.html)—possibly, as Haselton speculated later, because of the common appearance of the word "cum"17; two others, on the Wheaton College server, comprising sections of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (ccel.wheaton.edu/gibbon/decline4.txt and ccel.wheaton.edu/gibbon/decline6.txt); and lecture notes from a philosophy course at the University of Notre Dame (www.coins.nd.edu/~gklima/lectures.htm). "I-Gear
Examined," Peacefire, 2000. I-Gear also barred a United Nations report, "HIV/AIDS: The Global Epidemic" (www.us.unaids.org/highband/document/epidemio/situat96.html); the sites of the Albert Kennedy Trust (http://www.akt.org.uk/), which works on behalf of homeless gay teenagers; the Anti-Violence Project (http://www.avp.org/), which specifically opposes anti-gay violence; the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Committee (www.igc.org/beijing/ngo/iglhrc.html); the Human Rights Campaign (http://www.hrc.org/); and the Harvard Gay and Lesbian Caucus (http://www.hglc.org/hglc/index.shtml); two pages of the National Organization for Women site, one providing information on gay rights (www.now.org/issues/lgbi/), the other a press release on the legal status of gay marriage in Hawaii (www.now.org/nnt/08-95/hawaii.html); a statement on equal rights for homosexuals (and women) in the workplace from the Industrial Workers of the World (www.iww.org/oahu01/s8.html); a portion of GLAAD's site containing information for prospective volunteers (www.glaad.org/glaad/volunteer.html); "The Homosexual Movement: A Response" (episcopalnet.org/tractsforourtimes/ramsey.html), a statement by the Ramsey Colloquium, "a group of Jewish and Christian theologians, ethicists, philosophers, and scholars," sponsored by the Institute on Religion and Public Life; two Web sites relating to the Christian Coalition—that of the organization's legal arm, the American Center for Law and Justice (http://www.aclj.org/), and of the Pat Robertson-owned Christian Broadcasting Network (http://www.cbn.com/); and the home page of the British Conservative Party (http://www.conservatives.com/). Other blocked sites included a Cato Institute policy-analysis paper titled "Feminist Jurisprudence: Equal Rights or Neo-Paternalism?" (www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-256.html), a gender studies page on Carnegie Mellon University's English server (www.english-server.hss.cmu.edu/gender.html), Planned Parenthood (http://www.ppfa.org/), CyberNOTHING's commentary on the sensationalism and careless journalism of Phillip Elmer-Dewitt's 1995 Time magazine cover story, "On a Screen Near You: Cyberporn" (www.cybernothing.org/cno/reports/cyberporn.html), and the article "PETA and a Pornographic Culture" (http://animalconcerns.netforchange.com/), which protested the use of nude models in recent PETA advertising campaigns, and contained no images from them. Miscellaneous
reports Internet Guard Dog, manufactured by McAfee , announces that it "allows children to surf and chat safely" through "a comprehensive objectionable content database" which prevents "messages deemed inappropriate ... from reaching your child." "[O]ffensive words" as well as sites are blocked. A June 9, 2000 review in PC Magazine noted that |