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Internet
Filtering: A battle of losing arguments
"Perhaps
the library should see if one of the local "adult"
book stores would donate some of their furnishings
to make the experience even more authentic."
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Ed
Lamaster |
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June 23rd, 2003 was the day the Supreme Court decided that libraries
and schools would need to comply with the Children's Internet
Protection Act, requiring filtering of Internet websites to receive
Universal Service Fund money. For several days after, radio talk
shows hailed the decision as the right thing to do while civil
libertarians felt they had lost another free speech battle.
What amazed me most about the discussion was just how partisan
it had become. Both sides put a stake in the ground on opposing
sides of the issue without really understanding the technology
or analyzing the root causes of the problem. They immediately
saw it as a Democrat vs. Republican issue where you were either
on the side of civil liberties or fascism. As usual, political
opportunism gets in the way of common sense.
I suggest that both sides were wrong in this debate. For several
weeks, I have hammered away on this topic on the Poppoff Radio
Program, and have found that most adults are not aware of the
true ramifications of the Internet filtering debate aside from
the rhetoric they hear bantered about in most of the mass media.
Unfortunately, the Sacramento Public Library did not feel that
they could supply someone to talk with me about this issue on
the air for a number of weeks. Perhaps after this article is published,
new opportunites will arise.
My interest in this subject comes from over ten years of combined
classroom teaching and practical technical experience in Internet
security, and two school-aged children who have technical abilities
that exceed those of many adults. Over the years I have watched
the Internet grow from a text-based, user unfriendly, novelty
to an overwhelming commercial playground. Interestingly, the same
debates were going on in the early days, but they were framed
differently.Even when I was a student teacher in college, debates
were going on at the California Technology Project in Seal Beach,
California. I had been recruited by the outgoing chairman of the
Technology Advisory Committee to represent the frequent users
of a statewide system called TRIE (Technology Resources in Education),
later being renamed to CORE and then GINA. One of the most interesting
issues we deal with on the advisory committee was how to deal
with Internet Newsgroups as part of the overall issues of acceptable
use and filtering. At the time, we decided that as a statewide
system we would need to exercise some form of control over what
resources ended up being in classrooms. We realized that we had
a duty to do something, but were reluctant to do anything that
looked like censorship of free expression.
What came out of those discussions was that as a partially state-funded
system, we did not feel comfortable with filtering technology
that was de-facto censorship by a quasi-government entity. What
we did feel comfortable with was making a choice in deciding what
information to publish, selecting those resources that we felt
were of the greatest benefit to teachers in the state while also
disclaiming responsibility for particular items of content that
were beyond our control.We realized that we were not going to
be able to prevent access entirely to something that could be
considered objectionable. But that fact did not deter us from
the realization that we had to perform some level of diligence
in order to minimize our liability. We realized that students
can and will find interesting and creative ways to get around
any type of control we could put in place. In fact, as the youngest
member of the advisory board, I had already demonstrated to the
system administrator just how easy it was to bypass some of their
security settings and gain full access to their system. It is
the realization that young people often do have a better grasp
of technology than adults that escapes many of the decision makers
in business and government.
The situation with filtering is not much different today than
it was then. Back then, the ability to filter out objectionable
content was limited. It's better today, but nowhere near 100%
effective. Decisions about what to filter out had to be based
on arbitrary standards, the same as it is today. In fact, while
Internet technology to both promote and to filter objectionable
material has improved, the basic underlying issue has remained
unchanged, except for the willingness to see what it is.You see,
the underlying issue here is "what should be made available" and
not "what should be filtered out". It is a subtle distinction
that I cannot stress strongly enough. As long as we talk about
filtering out "bad stuff", we will always end up with people taking
sides over freedom of speech vs. the need to protect children.
Arguing about filtering will always produce us vs. them arguments,
arguments about effectiveness, arguments about whose moral standards
will apply, arguments about certain sites being blacklisted, and
arguments about who contributed to which political campaign (Oh,
did I say that out loud?)…
Instead, how about a rational discussion about whitelisting? This
is the concept that is used in every public library when we talk
about books and magazines. On any given day, librarians make decisions
about what books to put on their shelves. They realize they have
limited funds and limited shelf space, and that certain topics
will have a greater utility than others. Librarians make decisions
about what to provide their patrons on a daily basis, and most
welcome requests from the community about additional resources.What
libraries do not do is put every book in the universe on their
shelves. In fact, try donating a box of books to your library
to see just how many of those books make it to the shelves. At
least in Sacramento, many of those books make it to the book sale
each year, never to be added to the collection.
Why access to the Internet should be different is beyond my comprehension.
Unfortunately, the American Library Association seems to think
that controls over Internet use in our public institutions is
an abridgement of freedom of speech, as if you have the right
to use public tax dollars to create private porn-viewing booths.
Our Sacramento Public Library, as of the time of this writing,
has disappointed me greatly. The library has provided privacy
screens for their computers so that you need to be nearly directly
behind a screen to be able to see what is being displayed. Several
months ago, before the Supreme Court's decision in June, I watched
a child, about age 12, walk up to an Internet terminal in the
library, punch in library card number that had been written on
a piece of paper, choose the "no filtering" option, and proceed
directly to surfing explicit adult material. My first reaction
was to look at the parent to see where they were-No parent was
visible in the library for this child. I took the direct route,
and stood directly behind the child-but this did not seem to make
him terribly uncomfortable. I was flabbergasted-both at the child's
brazenness, but also at the lack of safeguards built into the
system.
One would have thought that this week, about two weeks after the
Supreme Court confirmed that libraries receiving certain federal
money were required to comply with the Children's Internet Protection
Act (CIPA), that the Sacramento Public Library would have gotten
the clue, so I did an experiment of my own. Logging in on a regular
Internet terminal, I was hoping to see that the ridiculous "do
you want filtering" option had been removed. Whether or not the
law requires the library to filter, you would expect to find some
sort of protection mechanism in place, but nothing had changed.
I could still choose a fully-adult, no-holds-barred experience
with your tax dollars. Perhaps the library should see if one of
the local "adult" book stores would donate some of their
furnishings to make the experience even more authentic.
One more bit of fuel for the fire to make my point about filtering:
As I have said before, filters are not all that effective. So,
for the second part of my experiment, I chose to see what would
happened if I used the filtering option the library had in place
(CyberPatrol). I decided to first see if a well-known site that
promotes information about how to disable and circumvent filters
was blocked. While you may not know that such a site exists, a
very easy web seach will turn up the site at Peacefire.org. From
here you can find more than you want to know, and chances are
that our school-aged children already know much more about these
kinds of sites than most adults. This site was not blocked, so
you can rest easy that kids can go to the library to find out
how to disable the filters you may be using at home.
Moving forward with the experiment, I decided to see if the library's
filter would block an obvious, albeit relatively mild, website:
www.playboy.com. The filter was set to block this site. Next I
did a Google search for "anonymous web proxy", terms that will
be familiar to many readers of this publication. Google returned
an extensive list of these services, nearly all of them free,
that will allow you to surf the web with relative anonymity. These
services work as go-betweens that grab web pages for you-You ask
them for a page, and they display it within their own. They require
no browser or network changes, and there is nothing to install.
Testing out each of the links, I found that NONE of the anonymous
proxy services I checked were blocked by the library's filters,
including those that are very well known in the security community.
Now in defense of the library, and anticipating one of their arguments,
trying to identify and filter against every kind of objectionable
web site is an impossible task. At best, you might be able to
filter 90 percent reliably, and you will filter out perfectly
legitimate web sites with even the best filtering solutions available.
Filters can't really adjust well to community standards, and they
will always be able to be circumvented given enough creativity
on the part of the user. Of course, I've heard every one of these
arguments before, years before there was even a graphical Internet
and all we were worried about were dirty words in Internet newsgroups.
Instead, we should change this argument to deciding how to apply
long-established library principles to the Internet. Libraries
have a legitimate concern that filtering can be seen de-facto
censorship by a government entity. Why can't the library choose
what Internet resources it wants to offer its patrons, and avoid
the whole filtering argument altogether, using optional filters
as a backup to a whitelist system? The libraries have argued that
such a system is unworkable due to the millions of websites that
exist, but this is precisely what good kids' sites such as Yahooligans
do!
Envision a system in the library where you look for a resource
in a catalog. If you find the item you're looking for, you go
to that resource. If you don't find the resource, you submit a
request for it to be added to the collection, and a review committee
decides whether to add it or not based on their set of "purchasing"
criteria. This system I'm describing is how books, magazines,
audio and video are added to library collections every day. The
libraries don't scream "censorship" about their books, even though
they don't carry but a small fraction of what is available to
them. We know that there is always a source for the resource you
are looking for, but it might be that you will need to get it
somewhere other than the public library.
At one time in the past, parents could feel confident that their
children could visit the library without an adult and that the
worst thing that might happen is that their 16 year old would
get overly fascinated by pictures of bare-breasted natives in
the National Geographic. Vile materials on the Internet which
are readily available exceed what is legally permissible in every
state in the U.S., and trying to filter out over 4.2 million websites
with adult content is a losing battle. Some libraries, such as
the Sacramento Public Library, are even building a branch that
will be shared as a school library. NOW is the time to demand
of your libraries that a whitelist system be adopted, regardless
of what filtering is done, and that an effective mechanism for
identifying children using these systems be put in place to ensure
that greater levels of protection are implemented for these users.
I'd like to hear YOUR opinions about filtering, censorship, child
protection, and related issues. You can email me at: ed@connectedshow.com
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