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

[Evan Leibovitch <evan telly org>]

On Fri, 27 Sep 2002, ekunin wrote:

> If you think back to your childhoods, resented rules were often imposed. You
> decided that when you got to be a parent you would be different. Sometimes,
> to our surprise, we find ourselves echoing our parents, but sometimes we
> lighten up. Perhaps we should ask the kids how they would feel about
> filtering were they parents. Be an interesting discussion and a step away
> from authoritarianism.
>
> Before you tell me adults who know more than kids are obliged to keep them
> on the straight and narrow, let me tell you I think that's baloney.
> Experience matters in primitive societies. In rapidly evolving technological
> societies, kids, being closer to the latest technology, know more about
> what's happening. That doesn't sit well, but it's the case.

I tend to agree with Ed, as a parent of two who have grown up through the
Internet age (my kids had email access practically from birth and my son
knew how to use 'vi' at age 3). I personally feel that CIPA and blocking
software is intended to, once again, usurp the parent's role by the state
and/or its technological surrogates.

Since this thread started I've been doing a little in the background. One
thing I was reminded of (I saw it some time ago) was the site www.peacefire.org
which comes reasonably close to providing the perspective of those being
censored. I strongly suggest, as a minimum, reading their rationale:
http://www.peacefire.org/info/why.shtml

The site, amongst other things, offers free-download software that, when
run on a desktop, disables any installed client-based filtering
(surfwatch, net nanny, etc.)

I have also had an interesting dialogue with an old friend who is now one
of the people behind the Censorware Project. He didn't want me to quote
him because his words have been twisted by the blocking-software industry
and used against him too many times. So he's asked me to paraphrase; what
follows is my distilling of his comments:

---

If you're only putting in filtering software because you're scared of CIPA
cutting off your funding, then don't bother. CIPA recently was overturned
in Federal Court and will likely get shot down at the Supreme Court as
well. My friend sees CIPA as a collaboration between a censorware industry
trying to justify flawed theories and implementation, together with
paranoid and/or ignorant lawmakers making political currency out of a
technical solution to an ethical problem. All that's at issue is how much
the blocking industry will milk out of the public purse before CIPA is
struck down for good.

---

The algorithms and pattern-matching of CyberSitter, Dan's Guardian, etc.
are simply incapable of applying the complex human factors necessary to
differentiate obscenity from, say, a review of the movie "Babe". The AI
capabilities to do this simply are nowhere near reality.

---

All the US legal definitions of obscenity have made it subject to
community standards -- ie, what is deemed obscene in Alabama might be more
tolerable in California. None of the currently available blocking systems
take this into account

---

Companies that want to filter because of fears of sexual harassment
lawsuits have more to fear from inter-office email and text messaging than
from the external Internet.

---

As far as the ethical issues are concerned:  the whole point of censorware
is that someone *else* is saying to *you*: you are not allowed to look at
X.  Presumably because you are not mature enough, not smart enough, not
religious enough, etc.  (Those who will block you from seeing it have seen
it themselves, of course, so they are worthy to see it, but *you* are
not.)

---

The open source blockers are less evil than the commercial ones, because
they generally have smaller lists and, of course, those lists are open to
criticism and review. But their basic premise is flawed; the net is simply
too big to patrol effectively, pretty well impossible without the use of
spiders which result in too many false positives to be useful.