Re: [OS:N:] Re: School Filtering

[Eric Harrison <eharrison mail mesd k12 or us>]

On Tue, 24 Sep 2002, ekunin wrote:

>Filtering is censorship and censorship is never a good thing. We would be
>better advised to meet things head on. Talk about sex, pornography etc.
>etc., but this won't happen until many more of us become willing to take
>responsibility for what is done by government; to insist on being part of
>the decision making process. As it is we prefer to live the delusion that
>our kids don't know more about sex than we do.

We're now wondering well into off-topic territory here. Having spent a
couple years on the front line of this battle, I do find this to be a 
fascinating problem. I will do a lousy job of trying to justify this post
by claiming that I will illustrate the need for this controversial technology
despite the fact that it appears to contradict the fundamental philosophy of
open source.

I fully agree that censorship is bad, I've been known to say some pretty
harsh things about CIPA (fortunately google doesn't turn up any of my more
hot-headed rants). I, personally, could care less about a kid who seeks
out such material. As Ed notes, kids often do this sorta thing - long
before the internet was around to make the process more efficient ;-)

In practice, however, there are some sites that clearly SHOULD be blocked in
a school environment. There are a number of very sleazy sites that have URLs
intentionally similar to kid's sites. There are sites like whitehouse.com.
How many kids do you think type http://whitehouse.com when they are trying
to go to http://whitehouse.gov? Is it a bad thing to block whitehouse.com?

The original article posted by Jeremy noted that the Eugene school district
(here in Oregon, I have a strong relationship with them) opted not to filter
(not to pick on them, this just makes a good example). Want to learn more
about Eugene?  Take a peek at http://www.EugeneOregon.com

This site has a number of other examples:

	http://www.oii.org/html/porn-napping.html

Kids who are not trying to actively seek out porn, but accidentally run into it,
is what I worry about. The kids who ARE actively seeking out porn can be dealt
with as a disciplinary issue - a good filter will aid in detecting and proving
intent in these cases.


I always try to twist these type of technology issues back into the physical
world:

 If a kid was caught reading a Playboy magazine they had smuggled into class,
 would it be censorship if the teacher confiscated it and set the kid to the
 principal's office? What if the student checked out this Playboy up from the 
 magazine rack in the school's library?

 What if a kid was caught reading "Catcher in the Rye"?[1] Should that be 
 confiscated and the student sent to the principal?


When we work on open source filtering solutions, we need to focus on the 
smuggled Playboy, not the Catcher in the Rye. At the same time, it does
make quite a bit of sense that if we're not going to permit students to 
read Playboy, it shouldn't be freely available in the school's library
collection.

-Eric

[1] the only controversial book that comes to mind