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Our readers from a year ago may remember the series we did examining the attempt to force censorware into Holland's libraries. (Holland, Michigan is the home of the Slashdot Geek Compound, such as it is.) In February, voters rejected that attempt. But to quote Poltergeist II, "they're ba-ack." Thanks to a new Michigan law, all of our libraries have to address the question of minors and the internet -- and blocking software is, to many, the natural solution. I went to the Holland library's open board meeting on Tuesday night; here's what's up.

By the way, if you're wondering why you should care about Holland, Michigan: this is going to happen at your local library -- and other public institutions -- soon. It probably has already happened at your local schools. The Holland area is fairly conservative, so it's been at the forefront, but the issue will work its way around the country (and in fact the world) in due time.

Before I describe what happened at the board meeting Tuesday evening, I should put the meeting itself into context.

A small but vocal minority has been pushing for library filters since late last year. At that time, the effort was begun by the American Family Association, with the Family Research Council and a local group stepping in to do the heavy lifting.

The FRC is still playing the dominant role. In fact, Tuesday night, the AFA representative actively distanced the organization from the issue, probably because it has earned its reputation as an extremist group.

Since February, the push has been for communication with the library board: "community input" has been big. Since all board meetings legally must be open to the public anyway, it's never been entirely clear to me what the problem was. The board did form a committee, which met on several occasions with filtering supporters -- the few who showed up -- and educated themselves about their options.

But the pro-filter crowd and the media have been attacking the library for not doing more to engage the community in dialogue. In one recent headline, the city's Mayor, formerly anti-filter, was described as "ripping [the library board's lack of] public input." Ouch.

In fact, the FRC representative Tuesday night apologized at length for the pressure tactics -- even though, in most of the media reports I've seen, her comments were relatively mild.

Just a week ago, she was quoted as saying she:

"...doesn't think a Sept. 12 forum will be sufficient to solicit public input, with attendance limited to 200 people and less than two hours set aside for public comment.

"She said those restrictions will limit the amount of input the board can receive."

That's been the concern all these months; that's what's been keeping the library board awake worrying. Every board meeting has been completely open to the public, and the only issue was how many people the fire marshal would allow in, and how long the community would be allowed to outpour its concerns.

In fact, when the meeting started -- the one and only meeting that's been publicized as a forum for the airing of Holland's views -- fewer than 45 people showed.

Some more trickled in, some trickled back out later after less than two hours of public comment. A total of just over 60 people showed up, about half of whom spoke (excluding the boardmembers and the media, including the toddlers, not that the toddlers did much of the speaking).

The Family Research Council's representative saved her statements for late in the meeting, telling her group's supporters how important it was that they came out, and to hang in there because they were only at the halfway point. Her closing comments were encouragement to those supporters: "we're getting closer and closer, glory God, we will not quit until we get this thing right ... c'mon you people, there's two more hours, get up here and talk for yourselves."

As if that was the signal to wind things down, only a few more people stood to speak. There was a period of questions, which took a while because the lawyer fielded most of them, and then the meeting adjourned almost an hour ahead of schedule.

Three thousand people in the Holland area get the FRC's newsletters; roughly 1% bothered to come.

Why the lack of interest?

Part of the reason, to be sure, is that Holland is sick of the issue; they went through a long campaign early this year.

But another part is that blocking software is not nearly as popular as the vocal minority would have us believe. An AP article "Most parents shun net filters" suggests that just one parent in three uses censorware.

And even that seems large, to some. The latest issue of the American Family Association Journal has an article titled "Low percentage of Christians using Internet filtering shows ignorance of the dangers." They claim that "Seven out of 10 Christians have Internet access -- but only one out of 10 has filtered Internet access."

(Keep in mind, too, that when the AFA says "Christians," they mean conservative Christians, presumably more likely to use censorware.)

Parents simply have better choices when it comes to protecting their children. Education and communication are the most effective tools (the only effective ones, I would argue, in many cases). And they're cheaper too: at least, a library in Hudsonville, near Holland, recently spent $20,000 on card-based censorware (not including maintenance fees) for four computers. The city of Grand Rapids, Michigan, just voted to spend $85,000.

And it takes a sneaky kid about ten seconds to completely bypass the $20,000 system. I know; I did it myself, and spent a while browsing a completely unfiltered internet.

But it's political pressure that installs such systems, not necessarily actual demand. Holland's library has taken a great deal of heat for not holding meetings which only a tiny fraction of the community seems interested in. Of course it's easy to use hindsight, but it's my guess that holding the meetings earlier and more often would have taken the lid off the child-size pressure cooker; everyone would have felt better. That's something to consider for the next community faced with this issue.

And speaking of demand, only about 100 patrons at Hudsonville have signed up for the internet cards. The system was installed under pressure from local conservative organizations; others, like that in Grand Rapids, will be installed thanks to a new Michigan law.

That law, Public Act 212, takes effect in our fair state on October1 and in effect, according to the Holland library's lawyer, makes it illegal for minors to use the internet. It demands that terminals for those 17 and under be "restricted from receiving" material "harmful to minors" (that's the underage equivalent of illegal obscenity). No software can guarantee such a restriction, of course, unless it executes the shutdown command.

In fact, it was recommended that the adults' terminals be not only shielded for privacy, but placed so that no minor might walk by and catch a glimpse of something harmful.

So the line seems pretty clearly drawn. How it will play out in reality remains to be seen.

You've probably figured out by now that I'm opposed to blocking software. Before the end of the month, I'll look at what alternatives a library might adopt -- too late for Michigan libraries, but perhaps not too late for yours. There are many choices to be made between the simplistic extremes of "filters" and "nofilters," some of which protect our right to free expression more than others.

Unfortunately, you won't see such alternatives in the traditional media. When filter supporter Tish Fackler pulled out her air filters, she gave a little laugh and said "looks like I'm going to be on TV tonight." Then she held up her meaningless props and delivered the soundbite that was on TV that night. I'll try to keep it a little more real than that.

At 11:30 AM PDT today, Bennett Haselton of Peacefire is scheduled to begin speaking to the COPA Commission. The occasion is their third and final hearing on the subject of blocking software, aka censorware. Our highly hilarious report on the second hearing may still be fresh in your memory; this time around, Bennett takes on the products FamilyClick, CyberSentinel, and SurfWatch.

The reports themselves make for the most interesting reading; I'll just summarize them here:

FamilyClick

The following sites were blocked on the "18 or older" setting, in other words, the software thinks they were too violent, pornographic, hateful, etc. to be seen even by adults:

• AIDS Day 1997: China Responds to AIDS;
• Diccionario del VIH/SIDA (a dictionary of AIDS-related terms, in Spanish);
• Camp Sussex (a summer camp for low-income children);
• Triangles and Tribulations, an essay on the persecution of gay men and woman in Nazi Germany;
• "Homosexuality: Fact and Fiction", from the Christian Research Journal;
• genealogy of Alice Ficken (her last name means "fuck" in German).

and sodomy laws, pro-family protests of pornography, a defense of Wicca, etc.

Cyber Sentinel

The software's PR blurb says: "At the core of the technology is an advanced recognition engine developed by Security Software Systems engineers (patent pending). This proprietary engine is very fast, very low overhead, and is very accurate."

Blocked sites include:

• CNN.com homepage (because of the story headline "Naples museum exposes public to ancient erotica");
• searches for the term "COPA" on CNet, Wired, Time, and USAToday (because each results page had at least one filthy headline, such as "Back to court for Net porn law");
• The American Family Association (the right-wing group pushing for censorware in libraries and schools, including those surrounding the Slashdot Geek Compound);
• biographies of COPA Commission members Stephen Balkam and Donna Rice Hughes - because they both graduated "magna cum laude" (think about it);
• and, my favorite, the list of papers presented at the COPA Commission!

SurfWatch

This was a more interesting test; Peacefire took a sampling of 1,000 domains from the beginning of the .com zone file, and tested which ones that SurfWatch blocked. (Yours truly wrote the one-liner perl script to find sites that respond to ping; for that, Bennett almost named me co-author before I talked him down from his caffeine high.)

SurfWatch claims that it "adds over 400 new sites to the database every day, while also removing sites that no longer exist on the Internet or that have changed content. Our site database is the most accurate and reliable filtering you can find."

Of the 147 domains blocked, most (96) were clearly "under construction" and were ignored for the test. Of the remaining 51 blocked domains, 42 of them, or 82%, were erroneous blocks.

The 42 supposedly pornographic sites include:

• A-1 Dog Grooming and Kennels;
• American Builders;
• Waterbeds Online;
• A-1 Diamond Limousine;
• Poxy Coat;
• A-Antiques.com.

SurfWatch, for the record, is the software that the American Family Association (see above) and Family Research Council tried to force the Geek Compound's local library to install, earlier this year.

At 11:30 AM PDT today, Bennett Haselton of Peacefire is scheduled to begin speaking to the COPA Commission. The occasion is their third and final hearing on the subject of blocking software, aka censorware. Our highly hilarious report on the second hearing may still be fresh in your memory; this time around, Bennett takes on the products FamilyClick, CyberSentinel, and SurfWatch.

The reports themselves make for the most interesting reading; I'll just summarize them here:

FamilyClick

The following sites were blocked on the "18 or older" setting, in other words, the software thinks they were too violent, pornographic, hateful, etc. to be seen even by adults:

• AIDS Day 1997: China Responds to AIDS;
• Diccionario del VIH/SIDA (a dictionary of AIDS-related terms, in Spanish);
• Camp Sussex (a summer camp for low-income children);
• Triangles and Tribulations, an essay on the persecution of gay men and woman in Nazi Germany;
• "Homosexuality: Fact and Fiction", from the Christian Research Journal;
• genealogy of Alice Ficken (her last name means "fuck" in German).

and sodomy laws, pro-family protests of pornography, a defense of Wicca, etc.

Cyber Sentinel

The software's PR blurb says: "At the core of the technology is an advanced recognition engine developed by Security Software Systems engineers (patent pending). This proprietary engine is very fast, very low overhead, and is very accurate."

Blocked sites include:

• CNN.com homepage (because of the story headline "Naples museum exposes public to ancient erotica");
• searches for the term "COPA" on CNet, Wired, Time, and USAToday (because each results page had at least one filthy headline, such as "Back to court for Net porn law");
• The American Family Association (the right-wing group pushing for censorware in libraries and schools, including those surrounding the Slashdot Geek Compound);
• biographies of COPA Commission members Stephen Balkam and Donna Rice Hughes - because they both graduated "magna cum laude" (think about it);
• and, my favorite, the list of papers presented at the COPA Commission!

SurfWatch

This was a more interesting test; Peacefire took a sampling of 1,000 domains from the beginning of the .com zone file, and tested which ones that SurfWatch blocked. (Yours truly wrote the one-liner perl script to find sites that respond to ping; for that, Bennett almost named me co-author before I talked him down from his caffeine high.)

SurfWatch claims that it "adds over 400 new sites to the database every day, while also removing sites that no longer exist on the Internet or that have changed content. Our site database is the most accurate and reliable filtering you can find."

Of the 147 domains blocked, most (96) were clearly "under construction" and were ignored for the test. Of the remaining 51 blocked domains, 42 of them, or 82%, were erroneous blocks.

The 42 supposedly pornographic sites include:

• A-1 Dog Grooming and Kennels;
• American Builders;
• Waterbeds Online;
• A-1 Diamond Limousine;
• Poxy Coat;
• A-Antiques.com.

SurfWatch, for the record, is the software that the American Family Association (see above) and Family Research Council tried to force the Geek Compound's local library to install, earlier this year.

There's a boatload of censorware news today, enough for two or three Slashdot stories -- but to conserve electrons, we're bringing it to you all in one easy-to-download package. First, Peacefire has a report on the accuracy of intelligent skin-tone-scanning software, one month after its company said they'd have it working in a month. And since the CEO of ClickSafe spoke at the COPA Commission meeting yesterday, Peacefire ran a check to see how many COPA-related sites its AI blocks. Finally, Waldo Jaquith has a report from the meeting itself which should be sobering but cracked me up anyway. Pay attention, everyone, these are the folks who are going to censor your Internet.

The Child Online Protection Act, passed late last year and then struck down early this year, is still under appeal. Colloquially it's known as "CDAII." Part of what the Act does is establish a Commission that meets every so often -- the Commission's website has details on its mandate and so on.

(Update, a few minutes later: make that "injunctified," or whatever one says for a law against which an injunction has been applied, instead of "struck down." Sorry; IANAL.)

Speaking at the Commission meeting yesterday and today were the CEOs of several major censorware companies. Among them was Michael Stephani, whose company Exotrope makes a product called BAIR.

BAIR

BAIR checks images as they download onto your computer, and claims to be able to tell the difference between pornography and other types of images. The "AI" in its acronym stands for artificial intelligence, running on supercomputers.

When the Wired story on BAIR came out last month (a story "borrowed" from Peacefire -- I'm not going to get into it), Wired quoted the company as saying "they plan to fix the errors within the next month." What errors?

"BAIR incorrectly blocked photographs of Yellowstone, the Baltimore waterfront, Snoopy, boats, sunsets, dogs, vegetables and even a Wired News staff meeting.

"It rated as acceptable for minors -- even on the most restrictive setting -- explicit images of oral sex, anal sex, group sex, masturbation, and ejaculation."

That was one month ago. How's BAIR doing now?

Peacefire retested the same 50 pornographic images that they'd used last month (which presumably BAIR's programmers would have paid extra-special attention to). Their new report finds that, instead of zero, the number of blocked images is now: 34. I've got a great slogan for them: "now your children can only see 32% of the web's oral sex, anal sex, group sex, masturbation, and ejaculation."

One's respect for these programmers is dampened a little, though, because there's more to Peacefire's report. It seems, in a random sample of 50 photos of people's faces, BAIR blocked ... how many? ... 34.

Maybe that slogan should be: "now your children can only see 32% of the web," period.

It's wonderful to live in a world where artificial intelligence offers limitless possibilities. Its website suggests that "Because Artificial Intelligence can be taught to recognize a variety of patterns," -- oh, OK -- "our BAIR can be taught to evaluate other categories such as violence or illegal activities. The BAIR is currently undergoing training in these areas to provide additional filtration selections."

ClickSafe

Richard Schwartz, CEO of ClickSafe, also spoke yesterday at the COPA Commission meeting. Just for kicks, Peacefire decided to try out their spiffy AI software too.

Insert marketblurb here: "...by combining cutting-edge graphic, word and phrase-recognition technology, ClickSafe has achieved accuracy rates of over 99% (according to recent sample tests). ClickSafe can precisely distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate sites (e.g. sites related to issues such as breast cancer will not be blocked)."

What Peacefire did was test this software against the website of the COPA Commission itself, and related sites such as those of speakers or Commission members. They found that blocked pages included:

• The Child Online Protection Act itself, in original and amended form;
• The COPA Commission FAQ;
• Biographies of Commission members Stephen Balkam and John Bastian;
• Bio of Commission member and famed anti-porn crusader Donna Rice Hughes, as well as AppendixA from her book Kids Online: Protecting Your Children in Cyberspace;
• A list of technologies the Commission examines;
• The scope of what the Commission is called upon to do;
• A service agreement from a little company called Network Solutions, whose rep chairs COPA's meetings;
• "About the ICRA" (the makers of RSACi, "a simple, yet effective rating system for web sites which both protected children and protected the rights of free speech");
• Bible study tools: "We hope these free resources foster a desire for Christians to learn more about the Bible, deepening their relationship with God" unless they're using censorware;
• The American Family Association (a conservative Christian group that is trying to force censorware into public libraries, including those surrounding the Slashdot Geek Compound);
• The ACLU, the EFF, and the Center for Democracy and Technology;

and so on.

When I spoke with Bennett about this, he commented that the strange thing was that these flaws are so easy to find; you'd think someone would have run these simple tests already. If anyone reading wants to get their name in Slashdot (and other news media too), censorware is a gold mine of untested misinformation. Buy a product, design a solid unbiased test for it, run the test, and send us what you find. Repeat until the whole world has a clue.

The COPA Commission Meeting

The following is an account of yesterday's COPA Commission meeting, by Waldo Jaquith. Keep in mind that this meeting's purpose, according to the Scope & Timeline Proposal which is blocked by ClickSafe, is to study filtering and blocking software to learn what to recommend in its report to Congress late this year.

Folks,

For more information on the COPA Commission, see http://www.copacommission.org/. (Unless your network has ClickSafe installed, in which case you shouldn't bother.) There is an agenda for this meeting, and there are bios for most people, as well as the prepared speeches for many of the below folks. I've tried to be objective.

Oh, screw that. There's nothing objective about it. But I've tried to give useful facts, quote accurately, etc.

The whole affair, which was scheduled to start at 9:30am, didn't actually start until 10:15am. Which was good, because I didn't get there until 9:45. Although the event was being held at the University of Richmond's Jepson Alumni Center, the room felt like your basic hotel meeting room. Bad carpet, ugly chairs, poor lighting. There were enough chairs to seat about 100 people, but only 35 people were in attendance. Directly in front of the two columns of chairs was a table with chairs, facing away from the audience. This table was for people asked to testify before the COPA Commission. On the other side of that table was a long table, at which was seated the commission, all sixteen members. The result was that the people testifying, who did most of the talking, could only be recognized by the backs of their heads by the audience.

Chairman Donald Telage called the meeting to order and introduced the first panel, who was to speak for approximately 45 minutes on the topic of client-side filters. This panel included Gordon Ross, the President and CEO of Net Nanny, Mark Smith, the President of BrowseSafe, Susan Getgood, the VP and General Manager of Cyber Patrol, and Richard Schwartz, the CEO of Opportunity-America (ClickSafe.com).

Gordon Ross kicked things off with a tremendously boring ten minute speech about how client-side filters work. The only interesting comment that he made was his belief that "consumers should have the ability to analyze each and every site in the database..." [...because his product Net Nanny is the only one of the 150 censorware packages on the market that allows oversight of its blacklist. -ed] He also kicked off the First Amendment references, which nearly every speaker throughout the day would spend some time talking about, but not really saying very much.

Mark Smith from BrowseSafe occupied the next few minutes, giving a rambling speech in which he discussed censorware as if it were some far-off and idyllic concept.

"Most products focus on either client-side- or server-side-based technology. What would happen if the benefits of each could be brought together to provide the user with a new, more flexible and powerful way of surfing the web? What if every sub domain of every site had been categorized and classified by its content? Wouldn't you agree that everyone could benefit from that combination of technology? Of course you would? Now let's walk across the street to the front porch of the family of the home and try to view it from the parent's perspective. What if parents were able to determine what the child sees? What would it be like if e-mail, instant messaging, chat and other computer tools could be also controlled?"

Then, although the topic was client-side filters, he rambled on for several minutes about PlanetGood, a website that was probably unfamiliar to many in the room. He used the site's name in every single sentence for several minutes. And, naturally, he closed talking about "our forefathers" and "these inalienable rights that our forefathers entrusted to us and many of them died for."

Susan Getgood from Cyber Patrol kept things short and sweet, and took the "I'm a new mother and want to protect my children" approach. She muddled the definition of censorship somewhat, saying that "[s]ome critics confuse censorship, which is imposed by the government, with technology that a family or school can choose to use and then set to implement an individual policy." Our school system isn't a part of the government?

Richard Schwartz of ClickSafe.com touted his product nearly as much as Mark Smith promoted the mysterious "PlanetGood." He also described a system that his company has developed that sounds very much like Exotrope's BAIR. "Fleshtone has a very unique set of features [...] Through a combination?of a set of sophisticated algorithms it can establish if something is pornographic. [...] Justice Potter Stewart lives within our system, because he knows it when he sees it. It works, it's been tested out, it's over 99% effective." "We can distinguish between chicken breast and sexy breast." "A consortium of Portuguese and Australian pornographers had been hijacking people off of different sites, including the Harvard Law Review site into their pornographic sites. And then you have to reboot your computer in order to get out."

After the four had testified, we moved into the commission Q&A session. (No questions would be allowed from the audience.) A few interesting questions, answers, and comments cropped up during this portion.

Richard Schwartz, only half kidding, proposed a tax on Internet pornography.

Commissioner Gregory L. Rohde asked Richard Schwartz if his image filter could tell the difference between art and pornography. Astoundingly, Schwartz replied that it could.

Commissioner Jerry Berman asked if there were any plans to create an organization that could provide objective reviews of censorware products to help parents decide what to buy. Gordon Ross said that this had been tried a few years back with SIFT (?), and that it didn't work out.

After a short break, we began the second panel, which addressed server side filtering. Testifying was Kevin Fink, N2H2's CTO; Sunil Paul, Chairman of Brightmail; Stephen Boyles of Library Guardian (Swifteye); Michael Stephani, President and CEO of Exotrope; Ginny Wydler, Director of Standards and Policy at AOL; and Tim Robertson, CEO of FamilyClick.

The first person to say anything interesting was Michael Stephani, who made some fairly interesting claims. He said that their blacklist of sites included four million sites, and that their image-recognition software, BAIR, is 99.8% percent effective. Stephani bragged that it blocked 1 out of 6 general images and 96 out of 100 pornographic images. He pointed out (perhaps rightly) that image filtering is the only real way to filter out pornography, and also that client-side filtering would so go the way of the dodo, given the proliferation of Internet appliances. It wasn't long before he got all 'God bless America' and 'think of the children,' and eyeballs could be heard rolling throughout the room.

As Commissioners asked questions of the panel, Chairman Donald Telage admitted that he wasn't aware that client-side filters were able to use a blacklist. He was under the impression that they could only filter. I had flashbacks from the Napster hearings last week ("Can't you track their intellectual property address?")

Out of the blue, Karen Talbert asked the panel for a show of hands regarding their respective products' ability to work with high-speed connections. Obviously, everybody's hands went up.

How do these people get on the commission?

When given half a chance, Stephani got all "think of the children, my god, won't somebody think of the children?" again. He also bragged that Exotrope has a new, not-yet-released product that filters IM [AOL Instant Messaging -ed.] and even detects innuendo. Stephani said that they just got a contract to install this program on 30,000 school servers. Continuing his spectacular Old Faithful of shit, he cheerfully envisioned a time in the future when there would be "photonic switches" that would maintain a complete blueprint of everything that every user had ever done on-line. Christ, that's frightening. Stephani said that they'd spent $6.5MUS developing BAIR, and went on to point out the coincidence that Peacefire released the report showing that BAIR was 0% effective on the same day that their servers went down. Perhaps he was implying that Peacefire members hacked the server, perhaps that we were taking advantage of them, or perhaps he was just laughing at the circumstances.

There was no promised audience Q&A. That's probably because the whole event ran well over when it was supposed to end. Lacking a better approach, I rushed up to the ebullient Stephani with a copy of the newest BAIR report in hand. Although he was already talking to a reporter, he stopped when he saw my nametag ("Waldo L. Jaquith, Peacefire") and looked a little surprised. He, as well as his sidekick PR guy, enthusiastically introduced themselves. We talked for a few minutes, during which time I said that BAIR appears to suck less than many other censorware programs. But I was still fundamentally opposed to all of them. Between this and the revised report, Stephani was my new best friend. Several other people came forward to read nametags and shake hands, but I continued to talk to Stephani and the reporter, Drew Clark from Technology Daily.

Ten minutes later, when I walked out, I felt a little baffled. Stephani behaved towards me as if Peacefire had just given him the most glowing review that BAIR had ever gotten. This, despite my repeatedly pointing out that Peacefire is fundamentally opposed to filters, always will be, and BAIR is simply rather effective at performing the task that we hate.

I was disappointed that a few major points were never brought up during the discussions:

• Server-side censorware (especially that which is housed with each website) will always be a severe privacy violation, because it needs data on the user in order to establish what information to provide.
• Client-side censorware is doomed to fail because children know more about computers than their parents. The parent has to trust that little Suzy won't uninstall Cyber Patrol. But if Suzy can be trusted, why bother with Cyber Patrol?
• Internet censorship is impossible. The Internet is so large that it's a waste of time, so let's all stop. Gated community models, like AOL, Compuserve and such, are a far better way to provide a "safe" experience for kids.
• The concerns about children's wellbeing presented during the meeting mirror those that parents, since the beginning of time, have always had for their children. How can I keep my child safe when I'm not watching him? How do I know what my child is doing if I'm not around? How do I keep my children from hearing / seeing / saying bad things? Censorware makes no more sense than installing a v-chip in little Suzy's head. Get over it.

In a nutshell, I'm not sure what, if anything, was established at this meeting. It's clear that most of the Commissioners knew every little to start off with, and their opinions are being formed on what amounts to a series of sales pitch sprinkled with god-and-country references, a la mega blowout carpet sales around Independence Day. I'm glad COPA was struck down. Let's get on with our lives.

Best,
Waldo

thelonius writes "According to this press release, Google is traipsing down that questionable path of content filtering. They are partnering with SurfWatch, anyone know their track record for overzealous or politically skewed blocking? Let's hope Google deploys this as an option which can be turned off..." I expect they will. SurfWatch is one of the few censorware packages that blocks by keyword-match on URL; e.g. this anti-pornography page is blindly blocked because of its URL.

The mandatory library filtering ballot in Holland, Mich., home of the Slashdot Geek Compound, has been defeated. With heavy voter turnout of 41% (compared to 12% in 1996), the proposal was rejected by a pretty wide margin: 55% to 45%. The Holland library will remain unfiltered - or, more accurately, will now have the right to make up its own mind about whether blocking software is appropriate. See the local press coverage (or national or international), or read on for more.

I think it was my friend Lizard on the fight-censorship mailing list who said: "You can't compromise with book-burners. When someone asks you to burn 1,000 books, you cannot agree to burn only 500." He's exactly right. Any middle ground is a step backwards, and hard to recover.

It's important to keep in mind how tough the battle was. Holland was chosen to be a testbed by national groups like the American Family Association and Family Research Council, and they spent a lot of money. Why? Because the AFA and FRC stood to make a lot of money by using Holland as an example for nationwide campaigning. They have been hyping up this ballot as the first big step in a nationwide campaign.

And they figured Holland would be a slam-dunk. It's one of the most conservative communities in American. And the measure was well-timed: the ballot was on the same night as the Republican primary. (Michigan is not a closed primary, though, and many Democrats did vote.)

Some Slashdot posters have commented that I've seemed pessimistic in my reports on the campaign. They've been right. I couldn't read the city's mood very well, not being a native, and based on the coverage and talks I'd seen, I didn't think the chances were very good.

While the AFA and FRC together contributed over $40,000, the anti-filter side raised - locally - $2,000.

The AFA sponsored a "pushpoll," in which a Florida firm made phone calls to hundreds of likely voters, asking them "questions" designed to leave the impression that the library is inviting to pedophiles. Local anti-filter volunteers went door-to-door.

The pro-filter organizations ran radio, newspaper, and cable TV advertisements, they sent out at least three direct mailings, and they spent thousands on slick presentations to local groups.

And when it came down to the vote, they lost.

This isn't the end, though. It's just the beginning. The heads of the various pro-filtering groups are all hinting that the battle is not over. Presumably that means it will become another ballot issue, perhaps later this year, perhaps next year. And it will certainly be happening elsewhere in America at the same time. (Write me when it gets to your community.)

In some cases, the unaccountable censorship of secretive blocking software will be turned down at the voting booth. I'm guessing that, in the next five years, we'll see a definitive statement on the relevance of the First Amendment, one way or the other, in the courts.

But for now ... well, I'll close by congratulating everyone in Holland who worked to defeat this measure, and by quoting from one of the direct mailings funded by the AFA. You'll have to imagine this text as it appears, in 30-point headlines, with yellow highlights:

"America's watching, Holland. The debate over Internet filters on library computers is a national issue. Now, the focus is on Holland, Michigan.

"Tuesday, February 22nd, Holland citizens will decide the first ballot vote on filtering in the nation. How we vote will affect this issue nationwide.

"On February 22, send a clear message to America. Tell America we must protect our children from Internet pornography and drugs."

Last week, I gave a presentation on SurfWatch, and blocking software in general, in downtown Holland, Mich. Preparing for it was an interesting experience, mostly in annoyance, hard work, and dealing with getting seriously sick two days before. Read on for the story of recovering, preparing, talking, giving away $100, a bolt of lightning, and why nothing anyone does is going to stop fundamentalists from bringing issues like this to America's ballots.

I'm not a public speaker, and I hadn't stood before an audience in quite a while. The feedback I'd gotten from my first presentation on SurfWatch was that I talked too fast and too much. At the time, I'd wanted to communicate as much as possible of what the Censorware Project had learned over the last two years, in a half hour. An impossible task, and I shouldn't have tried.

But I felt I could do better, so I wanted to try again. That's the effort that ended up becoming Thursday's presentation.

My main problem is that the subject is complicated. Many computer professionals have this problem when trying to communicate computer-related ideas to nonprofessionals. If these things were simple, we wouldn't need computers. But trying to get across too much information in a half hour didn't work.

The other thing I'd tried that didn't work was borrowing the computers of the Family Research Council. The FRC had two computers set up, one filtered and one not, run by two volunteers. I'd thought it would be a clever coup to use their own computers to show their software failing.

But it wasn't impressive for one reason: when I showed an innocent Web site blocked, all that showed up was the "Blocked by SurfWatch" screen. I was using the FRC's filtered computer and their other one was turned off. Nobody had any idea that valuable information was being blocked, except me.

Kind of the way the censorship works in the library. But not an effective demo.

For my second go at it, I rented a ballroom in downtown Holland, advertised it in the paper, and brought my own computers. I purchased SurfWatch and installed it on one of them. And I spent some time thinking over which issues were important enough to hit and which were just too technical to mention.

Setting up was great fun, if by "fun" I mean wrestling with a network under a deadline. The 10baseT jack didn't seem to be connected, one of the extension cords didn't work, a projector wouldn't turn on, and finally I was faced with Windows' endless dialog boxes of options just to use DHCP. But it all worked out with time to spare.

I began my talk by explaining out why I was there and why blocking software was wrong. Currently, Holland's opposition to the software is being waged largely on political issues: chiefly, the fact that three-fourths of library taxpayers cannot vote on the ballot. To many, what the blocking software actually does is a non-issue.

But these are mere procedural concerns. Every community is going to have to face the core problem squarely, sooner or later; it might as well be now. So I began my talk by laying out, from the beginning, my belief that blocking software inherently violates the First Amendment.

After talking about some of the myths put forth in the community's debate, my next step was to display some pornography on the big screens. The local Family Research Council has been trotting out a presentation that focuses on some of the most graphic stuff available on the web: bestiality, fisting, etc. I'd decided to try not offending my audience quite as much. I chose some milder Web pages, mostly softcore, though several of the sites I chose also contained harder material.

And, of course, unlike the Family Research Council's, my demonstration showed the pornography appearing on both screens: filtered and un-.

I think I'll not reveal here which porn sites I showed. I want to see how long SurfWatch goes without finding them. So far it's been about two weeks, but of course revealing them here would get them blocked immediately for PR purposes.

I will say that I chose six sites that all begin with the letter "A". This was to make the point that there is plenty of unblocked pornography - there being 25 other letters in the alphabet. As if to make my point, a Tennessee paper ran that same day a story about a schoolteacher who was fired for accessing over a hundred porn sites - right through the school's "filter."

After all, if the software fails only a tiny fraction of the time, it still allows through - dozens? hundreds? thousands? - of porn sites. How many porn sites does the average person need? What's the point in blocking 99% of it, if the remaining sites are more than enough to keep anyone busy?

The next step in my talk was the flip side: showing protected Web pages unfairly blocked. Finding a plethora of wrongly-blocked pages was easy. SurfWatch uses URL keyword blocking, so, for example, the complete text of the classic book Of Human Bondage is blocked because of "bondage" in the URL. The hard part was narrowing the list down to 10 to demonstrate.

(If you're interested, here are the ten blocked pages I used: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.)

Next, I pointed out that these sorts of errors were not often corrected. What data there is suggests that most errors go unfixed. In our analysis of Web logs in the State of Utah, we found about 300 wrongly blocked sites, of which only six were overridden. Also, in the Family Research Council's $7,000 canned demo, they tried to show how easy it was to fix errors by unblocking The Onion. Since they couldn't even do their prepared site correctly (they left graphics.theonion.com blocked), how could the staff be expected to do the job on real sites, in a busy library?

I explained that the errors I'd found were intrinsic to blocking software, because of the growth of the Web. In my first talk, I spent 10 minutes talking about exponential growth; this time, I just gave the impressive figure that, during just the course of my talk, a million Web pages were created or changed. Much quicker and I'm sure it made the same point.

There seemed to be concern, in Holland, that pornography just "popsup" at any time, for no reason. I debunked that myth by pointing out that typos almost never lead to offensive Web sites. I read this quote from the Supreme Court's ruling on the Communications Decency Act, where they affirmed a lower court's conclusions:

"Communications over the Internet do not 'invade' an individual's home or appear on one's computer screen unbidden. Users seldom encounter content 'by accident.' ... Almost all sexually explicit images are preceded by warnings as to the content. Even the Government's witness ... testified that the 'odds are slim' that a user would come across a sexually explicit site by accident."

All the incidents of "verified pornography" in the Holland press seem to boil down to the same two cases over and over. In the first, a woman was reading Hotmail and, when she was done, closed the browser window. Behind it was porn that another user had left up as a prank.

There are programs that can be run between users' sessions to shut down Netscape and clear its history - my local library is using one with much success - so blocking software isn't necessary to solve this problem. I've explained this to the woman, but she continues to use her incident as an argument for blocking software.

The second incident involved a teenage girl. It seems she was at the library computer and stumbled across naked women purely by accident while doing an innocent search for chocolate chip cookie recipes. Interestingly, she didn't report this to her mother, apparently out of embarrassment, until weeks later. I'd like to speak with her as well but the local pro-filtering groups refuse to put her in touch with me.

I haven't been able to replicate this event, and neither have other people who have tried. And I know a lot about search engines. Now, I'm not saying it didn't happen. Maybe it was a misunderstanding.

What I did in my speech was hold up a $100 bill and offer it to the first person who could show me how it was done. I'll make the same offer to Slashdot readers. Let's see whether this is an urban legend or not. See the bottom of this story for the rules.

I spoke briefly about the legal issues. The Holland area has been hearing suggestions that it will be legally safer to use blocking software. In fact, though the case law is by no means definitive, the experiences of Livermore and Loudoun point toward the opposite conclusion.

Next was the fun part, where I brought up some quotes from the two organizations pushing filters in Holland to illustrate the folly of relying on unaccountable third parties for censorship. In a 1996 legal brief, the Family Research Council had mentioned Cyber Patrol by name as a product that families and libraries "should make use of." But just two years later, in a bulletin called "Filtering Out Decency," they were warning parents away from using the same software.

Why? Because Cyber Patrol had stuck to its guidelines for what constituted hate speech. They had reviewed the American Family Association, the other organization pushing filters in Holland, and found them to be espousing intolerance of homosexuals. The entire AFA site now found itself censored, by the same type of software it had been pushing. In a bulletin called "Filtering Out Morality," the AFA warned parents to think twice before using any blocking software:

"In a secularist culture, both filtering software and federal regulations may well be used to filter out Christianity along with other undesirable elements.

"Another kind of software simply informs parents what sites their children have visited. Instead of making it impossible for children to see certain sites, this approach puts parental discipline at the center. Children, realizing that their parents are looking over their shoulders, are thus taught to internalize the restraints and to develop a conscience of their own.

"As Christians get involved in these debates - before they get filtered altogether - they should keep in mind the warning of the great Puritan poet John Milton ... 'If it come to prohibiting, there is not aught more likely to be prohibited than truth itself.'"

Teaching children to develop a moral conscience of their own? There's a radical idea. Why did it take censorship backfiring before anyone thought of that?

I wrapped things up by talking for a bit about the importance of teaching these moral lessons to children. The children of today are growing up in the 21st century. The Internet will be available to them on every street corner and desk, and mostly unfiltered. What they need is not a temporary and leaky set of blinders strapped on. They need to be given an ethical foundation and the self-reliance to make good decisions about their own lives.

Somewhere in there I called up the AFA's Web site and showed that their discussion about pornography was blocked by SurfWatch as if it were pornography. That got a chuckle from the audience and made the point: it isn't just one product that backfires. The very product that has been pushed in their community blocks the very organization that has spent $35,000 pushing it.

As I wrote in an earlier article, I'm not sure any of this will make any difference to most people. For most, the issue is and will always be pornography: to be against pornography is to support filters.

And the opposition to sexually explicit material is, at heart, an emotional one. It's a primal one. Sex and fear are two of the gut instincts that we humans carry with us from our earliest days.

The day after my talk, the Holland Sentinel carried a powerfulinterview with the man who is behind the city's ballot initiative. IrvBos is the head of the Holland Area Family Association, a branch of the American Family Association.

It seems his aversion to pornography began when he was a boy, in a dramatic incident. At the age of 12, he found a book by the side of the road - a book with stories about "pretty graphic things," a book that the young boy secreted away in his parents' barn.

When "lightning struck the barn, burning it to the ground," it must have been a frightening demonstration of God's power to the guilty child, the child who associated that barn with sneaking behind his parents' back to do evil things, to read evil words.

I think I put together a pretty good presentation Thursday night, but it couldn't have compared to a bolt from the sky striking down a house of evil - like "Sodom and Gomorra," according to Mr.Bos's recollections.

That's hard to top. I can talk about the Internet equivalents of electrons and lightning rods all I want. But I don't think anyone can get through to people who believe this battle to be an epic one, a battle of good and evil. There is something primal there.

We'll see Tuesday night how the vote comes out.

Rules for the $100 offer are as follows. Find a search result URL that shows naked people, for a search on "chocolate chip cookies" or "chocolate chip cookie recipes." I'll accept any variant that an inexperienced Web-surfer might search for. Your result must appear on one of the first five pages of results returned (typically the first 50 results). I'll accept any major search engine. Send me the exact query you used; I will only accept queries I can verify to work as claimed. You aren't allowed to put up a cookie page, submit it, then change its content; to prevent this, you have until 11:59PMEST, Wednesday the 23rd. Only the first person gets the money; order is determined by timestamp of Received: headers at my server. I'll mail you a check or donate it to your favorite charity. This offer is made by me personally, not Slashdot, Andover.net, or VALinux. Notify me at jamie@mccarthy.org.

Update: 02/22 9:30 PM EST by J : I'm getting a lot of submissions that underscore the importance of properly spelling queries. Since I said I'd allow variants, I'll allow these and pick the most reasonable-sounding to give the $100 to. Some of the better ones so far: "chocchipcooky," "chocolateecipe," and the amusing "chocolatecoochie." If you can't beat those, don't bother emailing me.

But what I'm really looking for is a search engine result that looks innocent - that a 16-year-old girl might click on without suspecting pornography at the other end. See the CNN story:

"She typed in 'Chocolate Chip Cookies,' hit the search button and immediately there appeared before her eyes a picture of a nude woman."

The issue is whether pornography appears unexpectedly, from clicking on an innocent-looking link. If no one finds one of those, the other Slashdot authors and I will just decide on the most reasonable-sounding of the other submissions (first entries win ties).

Last week, I gave a presentation on SurfWatch, and blocking software in general, in downtown Holland, Mich. Preparing for it was an interesting experience, mostly in annoyance, hard work, and dealing with getting seriously sick two days before. Read on for the story of recovering, preparing, talking, giving away $100, a bolt of lightning, and why nothing anyone does is going to stop fundamentalists from bringing issues like this to America's ballots.

I'm not a public speaker, and I hadn't stood before an audience in quite a while. The feedback I'd gotten from my first presentation on SurfWatch was that I talked too fast and too much. At the time, I'd wanted to communicate as much as possible of what the Censorware Project had learned over the last two years, in a half hour. An impossible task, and I shouldn't have tried.

But I felt I could do better, so I wanted to try again. That's the effort that ended up becoming Thursday's presentation.

My main problem is that the subject is complicated. Many computer professionals have this problem when trying to communicate computer-related ideas to nonprofessionals. If these things were simple, we wouldn't need computers. But trying to get across too much information in a half hour didn't work.

The other thing I'd tried that didn't work was borrowing the computers of the Family Research Council. The FRC had two computers set up, one filtered and one not, run by two volunteers. I'd thought it would be a clever coup to use their own computers to show their software failing.

But it wasn't impressive for one reason: when I showed an innocent Web site blocked, all that showed up was the "Blocked by SurfWatch" screen. I was using the FRC's filtered computer and their other one was turned off. Nobody had any idea that valuable information was being blocked, except me.

Kind of the way the censorship works in the library. But not an effective demo.

For my second go at it, I rented a ballroom in downtown Holland, advertised it in the paper, and brought my own computers. I purchased SurfWatch and installed it on one of them. And I spent some time thinking over which issues were important enough to hit and which were just too technical to mention.

Setting up was great fun, if by "fun" I mean wrestling with a network under a deadline. The 10baseT jack didn't seem to be connected, one of the extension cords didn't work, a projector wouldn't turn on, and finally I was faced with Windows' endless dialog boxes of options just to use DHCP. But it all worked out with time to spare.

I began my talk by explaining out why I was there and why blocking software was wrong. Currently, Holland's opposition to the software is being waged largely on political issues: chiefly, the fact that three-fourths of library taxpayers cannot vote on the ballot. To many, what the blocking software actually does is a non-issue.

But these are mere procedural concerns. Every community is going to have to face the core problem squarely, sooner or later; it might as well be now. So I began my talk by laying out, from the beginning, my belief that blocking software inherently violates the First Amendment.

After talking about some of the myths put forth in the community's debate, my next step was to display some pornography on the big screens. The local Family Research Council has been trotting out a presentation that focuses on some of the most graphic stuff available on the web: bestiality, fisting, etc. I'd decided to try not offending my audience quite as much. I chose some milder Web pages, mostly softcore, though several of the sites I chose also contained harder material.

And, of course, unlike the Family Research Council's, my demonstration showed the pornography appearing on both screens: filtered and un-.

I think I'll not reveal here which porn sites I showed. I want to see how long SurfWatch goes without finding them. So far it's been about two weeks, but of course revealing them here would get them blocked immediately for PR purposes.

I will say that I chose six sites that all begin with the letter "A". This was to make the point that there is plenty of unblocked pornography - there being 25 other letters in the alphabet. As if to make my point, a Tennessee paper ran that same day a story about a schoolteacher who was fired for accessing over a hundred porn sites - right through the school's "filter."

After all, if the software fails only a tiny fraction of the time, it still allows through - dozens? hundreds? thousands? - of porn sites. How many porn sites does the average person need? What's the point in blocking 99% of it, if the remaining sites are more than enough to keep anyone busy?

The next step in my talk was the flip side: showing protected Web pages unfairly blocked. Finding a plethora of wrongly-blocked pages was easy. SurfWatch uses URL keyword blocking, so, for example, the complete text of the classic book Of Human Bondage is blocked because of "bondage" in the URL. The hard part was narrowing the list down to 10 to demonstrate.

(If you're interested, here are the ten blocked pages I used: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.)

Next, I pointed out that these sorts of errors were not often corrected. What data there is suggests that most errors go unfixed. In our analysis of Web logs in the State of Utah, we found about 300 wrongly blocked sites, of which only six were overridden. Also, in the Family Research Council's $7,000 canned demo, they tried to show how easy it was to fix errors by unblocking The Onion. Since they couldn't even do their prepared site correctly (they left graphics.theonion.com blocked), how could the staff be expected to do the job on real sites, in a busy library?

I explained that the errors I'd found were intrinsic to blocking software, because of the growth of the Web. In my first talk, I spent 10 minutes talking about exponential growth; this time, I just gave the impressive figure that, during just the course of my talk, a million Web pages were created or changed. Much quicker and I'm sure it made the same point.

There seemed to be concern, in Holland, that pornography just "popsup" at any time, for no reason. I debunked that myth by pointing out that typos almost never lead to offensive Web sites. I read this quote from the Supreme Court's ruling on the Communications Decency Act, where they affirmed a lower court's conclusions:

"Communications over the Internet do not 'invade' an individual's home or appear on one's computer screen unbidden. Users seldom encounter content 'by accident.' ... Almost all sexually explicit images are preceded by warnings as to the content. Even the Government's witness ... testified that the 'odds are slim' that a user would come across a sexually explicit site by accident."

All the incidents of "verified pornography" in the Holland press seem to boil down to the same two cases over and over. In the first, a woman was reading Hotmail and, when she was done, closed the browser window. Behind it was porn that another user had left up as a prank.

There are programs that can be run between users' sessions to shut down Netscape and clear its history - my local library is using one with much success - so blocking software isn't necessary to solve this problem. I've explained this to the woman, but she continues to use her incident as an argument for blocking software.

The second incident involved a teenage girl. It seems she was at the library computer and stumbled across naked women purely by accident while doing an innocent search for chocolate chip cookie recipes. Interestingly, she didn't report this to her mother, apparently out of embarrassment, until weeks later. I'd like to speak with her as well but the local pro-filtering groups refuse to put her in touch with me.

I haven't been able to replicate this event, and neither have other people who have tried. And I know a lot about search engines. Now, I'm not saying it didn't happen. Maybe it was a misunderstanding.

What I did in my speech was hold up a $100 bill and offer it to the first person who could show me how it was done. I'll make the same offer to Slashdot readers. Let's see whether this is an urban legend or not. See the bottom of this story for the rules.

I spoke briefly about the legal issues. The Holland area has been hearing suggestions that it will be legally safer to use blocking software. In fact, though the case law is by no means definitive, the experiences of Livermore and Loudoun point toward the opposite conclusion.

Next was the fun part, where I brought up some quotes from the two organizations pushing filters in Holland to illustrate the folly of relying on unaccountable third parties for censorship. In a 1996 legal brief, the Family Research Council had mentioned Cyber Patrol by name as a product that families and libraries "should make use of." But just two years later, in a bulletin called "Filtering Out Decency," they were warning parents away from using the same software.

Why? Because Cyber Patrol had stuck to its guidelines for what constituted hate speech. They had reviewed the American Family Association, the other organization pushing filters in Holland, and found them to be espousing intolerance of homosexuals. The entire AFA site now found itself censored, by the same type of software it had been pushing. In a bulletin called "Filtering Out Morality," the AFA warned parents to think twice before using any blocking software:

"In a secularist culture, both filtering software and federal regulations may well be used to filter out Christianity along with other undesirable elements.

"Another kind of software simply informs parents what sites their children have visited. Instead of making it impossible for children to see certain sites, this approach puts parental discipline at the center. Children, realizing that their parents are looking over their shoulders, are thus taught to internalize the restraints and to develop a conscience of their own.

"As Christians get involved in these debates - before they get filtered altogether - they should keep in mind the warning of the great Puritan poet John Milton ... 'If it come to prohibiting, there is not aught more likely to be prohibited than truth itself.'"

Teaching children to develop a moral conscience of their own? There's a radical idea. Why did it take censorship backfiring before anyone thought of that?

I wrapped things up by talking for a bit about the importance of teaching these moral lessons to children. The children of today are growing up in the 21st century. The Internet will be available to them on every street corner and desk, and mostly unfiltered. What they need is not a temporary and leaky set of blinders strapped on. They need to be given an ethical foundation and the self-reliance to make good decisions about their own lives.

Somewhere in there I called up the AFA's Web site and showed that their discussion about pornography was blocked by SurfWatch as if it were pornography. That got a chuckle from the audience and made the point: it isn't just one product that backfires. The very product that has been pushed in their community blocks the very organization that has spent $35,000 pushing it.

As I wrote in an earlier article, I'm not sure any of this will make any difference to most people. For most, the issue is and will always be pornography: to be against pornography is to support filters.

And the opposition to sexually explicit material is, at heart, an emotional one. It's a primal one. Sex and fear are two of the gut instincts that we humans carry with us from our earliest days.

The day after my talk, the Holland Sentinel carried a powerfulinterview with the man who is behind the city's ballot initiative. IrvBos is the head of the Holland Area Family Association, a branch of the American Family Association.

It seems his aversion to pornography began when he was a boy, in a dramatic incident. At the age of 12, he found a book by the side of the road - a book with stories about "pretty graphic things," a book that the young boy secreted away in his parents' barn.

When "lightning struck the barn, burning it to the ground," it must have been a frightening demonstration of God's power to the guilty child, the child who associated that barn with sneaking behind his parents' back to do evil things, to read evil words.

I think I put together a pretty good presentation Thursday night, but it couldn't have compared to a bolt from the sky striking down a house of evil - like "Sodom and Gomorra," according to Mr.Bos's recollections.

That's hard to top. I can talk about the Internet equivalents of electrons and lightning rods all I want. But I don't think anyone can get through to people who believe this battle to be an epic one, a battle of good and evil. There is something primal there.

We'll see Tuesday night how the vote comes out.

Rules for the $100 offer are as follows. Find a search result URL that shows naked people, for a search on "chocolate chip cookies" or "chocolate chip cookie recipes." I'll accept any variant that an inexperienced Web-surfer might search for. Your result must appear on one of the first five pages of results returned (typically the first 50 results). I'll accept any major search engine. Send me the exact query you used; I will only accept queries I can verify to work as claimed. You aren't allowed to put up a cookie page, submit it, then change its content; to prevent this, you have until 11:59PMEST, Wednesday the 23rd. Only the first person gets the money; order is determined by timestamp of Received: headers at my server. I'll mail you a check or donate it to your favorite charity. This offer is made by me personally, not Slashdot, Andover.net, or VALinux. Notify me at jamie@mccarthy.org.

Update: 02/22 9:30 PM EST by J : I'm getting a lot of submissions that underscore the importance of properly spelling queries. Since I said I'd allow variants, I'll allow these and pick the most reasonable-sounding to give the $100 to. Some of the better ones so far: "chocchipcooky," "chocolateecipe," and the amusing "chocolatecoochie." If you can't beat those, don't bother emailing me.

But what I'm really looking for is a search engine result that looks innocent - that a 16-year-old girl might click on without suspecting pornography at the other end. See the CNN story:

"She typed in 'Chocolate Chip Cookies,' hit the search button and immediately there appeared before her eyes a picture of a nude woman."

The issue is whether pornography appears unexpectedly, from clicking on an innocent-looking link. If no one finds one of those, the other Slashdot authors and I will just decide on the most reasonable-sounding of the other submissions (first entries win ties).

Last week, I gave a presentation on SurfWatch, and blocking software in general, in downtown Holland, Mich. Preparing for it was an interesting experience, mostly in annoyance, hard work, and dealing with getting seriously sick two days before. Read on for the story of recovering, preparing, talking, giving away $100, a bolt of lightning, and why nothing anyone does is going to stop fundamentalists from bringing issues like this to America's ballots.

I'm not a public speaker, and I hadn't stood before an audience in quite a while. The feedback I'd gotten from my first presentation on SurfWatch was that I talked too fast and too much. At the time, I'd wanted to communicate as much as possible of what the Censorware Project had learned over the last two years, in a half hour. An impossible task, and I shouldn't have tried.

But I felt I could do better, so I wanted to try again. That's the effort that ended up becoming Thursday's presentation.

My main problem is that the subject is complicated. Many computer professionals have this problem when trying to communicate computer-related ideas to nonprofessionals. If these things were simple, we wouldn't need computers. But trying to get across too much information in a half hour didn't work.

The other thing I'd tried that didn't work was borrowing the computers of the Family Research Council. The FRC had two computers set up, one filtered and one not, run by two volunteers. I'd thought it would be a clever coup to use their own computers to show their software failing.

But it wasn't impressive for one reason: when I showed an innocent Web site blocked, all that showed up was the "Blocked by SurfWatch" screen. I was using the FRC's filtered computer and their other one was turned off. Nobody had any idea that valuable information was being blocked, except me.

Kind of the way the censorship works in the library. But not an effective demo.

For my second go at it, I rented a ballroom in downtown Holland, advertised it in the paper, and brought my own computers. I purchased SurfWatch and installed it on one of them. And I spent some time thinking over which issues were important enough to hit and which were just too technical to mention.

Setting up was great fun, if by "fun" I mean wrestling with a network under a deadline. The 10baseT jack didn't seem to be connected, one of the extension cords didn't work, a projector wouldn't turn on, and finally I was faced with Windows' endless dialog boxes of options just to use DHCP. But it all worked out with time to spare.

I began my talk by explaining out why I was there and why blocking software was wrong. Currently, Holland's opposition to the software is being waged largely on political issues: chiefly, the fact that three-fourths of library taxpayers cannot vote on the ballot. To many, what the blocking software actually does is a non-issue.

But these are mere procedural concerns. Every community is going to have to face the core problem squarely, sooner or later; it might as well be now. So I began my talk by laying out, from the beginning, my belief that blocking software inherently violates the First Amendment.

After talking about some of the myths put forth in the community's debate, my next step was to display some pornography on the big screens. The local Family Research Council has been trotting out a presentation that focuses on some of the most graphic stuff available on the web: bestiality, fisting, etc. I'd decided to try not offending my audience quite as much. I chose some milder Web pages, mostly softcore, though several of the sites I chose also contained harder material.

And, of course, unlike the Family Research Council's, my demonstration showed the pornography appearing on both screens: filtered and un-.

I think I'll not reveal here which porn sites I showed. I want to see how long SurfWatch goes without finding them. So far it's been about two weeks, but of course revealing them here would get them blocked immediately for PR purposes.

I will say that I chose six sites that all begin with the letter "A". This was to make the point that there is plenty of unblocked pornography - there being 25 other letters in the alphabet. As if to make my point, a Tennessee paper ran that same day a story about a schoolteacher who was fired for accessing over a hundred porn sites - right through the school's "filter."

After all, if the software fails only a tiny fraction of the time, it still allows through - dozens? hundreds? thousands? - of porn sites. How many porn sites does the average person need? What's the point in blocking 99% of it, if the remaining sites are more than enough to keep anyone busy?

The next step in my talk was the flip side: showing protected Web pages unfairly blocked. Finding a plethora of wrongly-blocked pages was easy. SurfWatch uses URL keyword blocking, so, for example, the complete text of the classic book Of Human Bondage is blocked because of "bondage" in the URL. The hard part was narrowing the list down to 10 to demonstrate.

(If you're interested, here are the ten blocked pages I used: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.)

Next, I pointed out that these sorts of errors were not often corrected. What data there is suggests that most errors go unfixed. In our analysis of Web logs in the State of Utah, we found about 300 wrongly blocked sites, of which only six were overridden. Also, in the Family Research Council's $7,000 canned demo, they tried to show how easy it was to fix errors by unblocking The Onion. Since they couldn't even do their prepared site correctly (they left graphics.theonion.com blocked), how could the staff be expected to do the job on real sites, in a busy library?

I explained that the errors I'd found were intrinsic to blocking software, because of the growth of the Web. In my first talk, I spent 10 minutes talking about exponential growth; this time, I just gave the impressive figure that, during just the course of my talk, a million Web pages were created or changed. Much quicker and I'm sure it made the same point.

There seemed to be concern, in Holland, that pornography just "popsup" at any time, for no reason. I debunked that myth by pointing out that typos almost never lead to offensive Web sites. I read this quote from the Supreme Court's ruling on the Communications Decency Act, where they affirmed a lower court's conclusions:

"Communications over the Internet do not 'invade' an individual's home or appear on one's computer screen unbidden. Users seldom encounter content 'by accident.' ... Almost all sexually explicit images are preceded by warnings as to the content. Even the Government's witness ... testified that the 'odds are slim' that a user would come across a sexually explicit site by accident."

All the incidents of "verified pornography" in the Holland press seem to boil down to the same two cases over and over. In the first, a woman was reading Hotmail and, when she was done, closed the browser window. Behind it was porn that another user had left up as a prank.

There are programs that can be run between users' sessions to shut down Netscape and clear its history - my local library is using one with much success - so blocking software isn't necessary to solve this problem. I've explained this to the woman, but she continues to use her incident as an argument for blocking software.

The second incident involved a teenage girl. It seems she was at the library computer and stumbled across naked women purely by accident while doing an innocent search for chocolate chip cookie recipes. Interestingly, she didn't report this to her mother, apparently out of embarrassment, until weeks later. I'd like to speak with her as well but the local pro-filtering groups refuse to put her in touch with me.

I haven't been able to replicate this event, and neither have other people who have tried. And I know a lot about search engines. Now, I'm not saying it didn't happen. Maybe it was a misunderstanding.

What I did in my speech was hold up a $100 bill and offer it to the first person who could show me how it was done. I'll make the same offer to Slashdot readers. Let's see whether this is an urban legend or not. See the bottom of this story for the rules.

I spoke briefly about the legal issues. The Holland area has been hearing suggestions that it will be legally safer to use blocking software. In fact, though the case law is by no means definitive, the experiences of Livermore and Loudoun point toward the opposite conclusion.

Next was the fun part, where I brought up some quotes from the two organizations pushing filters in Holland to illustrate the folly of relying on unaccountable third parties for censorship. In a 1996 legal brief, the Family Research Council had mentioned Cyber Patrol by name as a product that families and libraries "should make use of." But just two years later, in a bulletin called "Filtering Out Decency," they were warning parents away from using the same software.

Why? Because Cyber Patrol had stuck to its guidelines for what constituted hate speech. They had reviewed the American Family Association, the other organization pushing filters in Holland, and found them to be espousing intolerance of homosexuals. The entire AFA site now found itself censored, by the same type of software it had been pushing. In a bulletin called "Filtering Out Morality," the AFA warned parents to think twice before using any blocking software:

"In a secularist culture, both filtering software and federal regulations may well be used to filter out Christianity along with other undesirable elements.

"Another kind of software simply informs parents what sites their children have visited. Instead of making it impossible for children to see certain sites, this approach puts parental discipline at the center. Children, realizing that their parents are looking over their shoulders, are thus taught to internalize the restraints and to develop a conscience of their own.

"As Christians get involved in these debates - before they get filtered altogether - they should keep in mind the warning of the great Puritan poet John Milton ... 'If it come to prohibiting, there is not aught more likely to be prohibited than truth itself.'"

Teaching children to develop a moral conscience of their own? There's a radical idea. Why did it take censorship backfiring before anyone thought of that?

I wrapped things up by talking for a bit about the importance of teaching these moral lessons to children. The children of today are growing up in the 21st century. The Internet will be available to them on every street corner and desk, and mostly unfiltered. What they need is not a temporary and leaky set of blinders strapped on. They need to be given an ethical foundation and the self-reliance to make good decisions about their own lives.

Somewhere in there I called up the AFA's Web site and showed that their discussion about pornography was blocked by SurfWatch as if it were pornography. That got a chuckle from the audience and made the point: it isn't just one product that backfires. The very product that has been pushed in their community blocks the very organization that has spent $35,000 pushing it.

As I wrote in an earlier article, I'm not sure any of this will make any difference to most people. For most, the issue is and will always be pornography: to be against pornography is to support filters.

And the opposition to sexually explicit material is, at heart, an emotional one. It's a primal one. Sex and fear are two of the gut instincts that we humans carry with us from our earliest days.

The day after my talk, the Holland Sentinel carried a powerfulinterview with the man who is behind the city's ballot initiative. IrvBos is the head of the Holland Area Family Association, a branch of the American Family Association.

It seems his aversion to pornography began when he was a boy, in a dramatic incident. At the age of 12, he found a book by the side of the road - a book with stories about "pretty graphic things," a book that the young boy secreted away in his parents' barn.

When "lightning struck the barn, burning it to the ground," it must have been a frightening demonstration of God's power to the guilty child, the child who associated that barn with sneaking behind his parents' back to do evil things, to read evil words.

I think I put together a pretty good presentation Thursday night, but it couldn't have compared to a bolt from the sky striking down a house of evil - like "Sodom and Gomorra," according to Mr.Bos's recollections.

That's hard to top. I can talk about the Internet equivalents of electrons and lightning rods all I want. But I don't think anyone can get through to people who believe this battle to be an epic one, a battle of good and evil. There is something primal there.

We'll see Tuesday night how the vote comes out.

Rules for the $100 offer are as follows. Find a search result URL that shows naked people, for a search on "chocolate chip cookies" or "chocolate chip cookie recipes." I'll accept any variant that an inexperienced Web-surfer might search for. Your result must appear on one of the first five pages of results returned (typically the first 50 results). I'll accept any major search engine. Send me the exact query you used; I will only accept queries I can verify to work as claimed. You aren't allowed to put up a cookie page, submit it, then change its content; to prevent this, you have until 11:59PMEST, Wednesday the 23rd. Only the first person gets the money; order is determined by timestamp of Received: headers at my server. I'll mail you a check or donate it to your favorite charity. This offer is made by me personally, not Slashdot, Andover.net, or VALinux. Notify me at jamie@mccarthy.org.

Update: 02/22 9:30 PM EST by J : I'm getting a lot of submissions that underscore the importance of properly spelling queries. Since I said I'd allow variants, I'll allow these and pick the most reasonable-sounding to give the $100 to. Some of the better ones so far: "chocchipcooky," "chocolateecipe," and the amusing "chocolatecoochie." If you can't beat those, don't bother emailing me.

But what I'm really looking for is a search engine result that looks innocent - that a 16-year-old girl might click on without suspecting pornography at the other end. See the CNN story:

"She typed in 'Chocolate Chip Cookies,' hit the search button and immediately there appeared before her eyes a picture of a nude woman."

The issue is whether pornography appears unexpectedly, from clicking on an innocent-looking link. If no one finds one of those, the other Slashdot authors and I will just decide on the most reasonable-sounding of the other submissions (first entries win ties).

Last month I shared with you some news about the pressure to install blocking software on the Holland library's Internet terminals. I promised to dive into the trenches of the struggle, and report occasionally to Slashdot on what was happening. There's been a lot to report, but more to do. Over the next two weeks I'll catch you up on what's been happening. Today, a peek into the heart of the matter: an open letter to the local Family Research Council, on the flaws of their favorite software. Click for more.

Last Wednesday, the library board opened up its auditorium for two and a half hours for three presentations on blocking software. The local branch of the FRC went first and put SurfWatch through its paces. They showed an unfiltered Internet on the left, SurfWatch on the right, and demonstrated how a search on "breast cancer" was successfully not blocked. Then they put child pornography on the wall of the library auditorium, demonstrating what SurfWatch would block.

For my presentation, I had brought a computer, but asked them if they would mind my demonstrating the software's flaws on their own laptop, to show I had not misconfigured anything. They agreed.

I spent much of my presentation talking about the size of the Internet and why most blocking was done by robots. Then I spent several minutes just listing some of the sites found blocked in some of our earlier studies at the Censorware Project.

Then I turned to the keyboard to illustrate some bad blocks. I ran out of time before getting to most of them. Some I did show but so quickly that many of those watching may not have realized what was going on.

Afterwards, Kimberley Fraser, who gave the Family Research Council presentation, asked me about some of what I'd said. I ended up asking her if I could respond to her in the form of an open letter. She agreed.

Below is that letter.

Dear Ms. Fraser,

As you know, at Herrick District Library last Wednesday night, your group gave a demonstration of SurfWatch's successes and then I showed some of its failures. I went through these failures rather quickly and didn't give the audience much of a chance to see the details of what I was doing.

You asked afterwards if I could provide verification of some of these points of failure, and I am delighted to do so.

First of all, regarding the colossal list of wrongly-blocked sites that I spent so much of my presentation reading, please consult our Web site. These wrong blocks were found in our reports on five other popular blocking packages: X-Stop, Cyber Patrol, WebSENSE, X-Stop again, SmartFilter, and Bess. You will find these reports at http://censorware.org/reports/.

There was some confusion in the question-and-answer period about whether these wrongly-blocked sites were also blocked by SurfWatch. Surely not all, and I have no reason to believe very many of them, are still blocked by SurfWatch or any other software. As I explained, when wrong blocks are publicized, they are usually unblocked quickly to minimize bad press.

Now, regarding the errors of SurfWatch itself. Note that some of its past errors are cataloged at http://peacefire.org/censorware/SurfWatch/. I am not sure whether I found time to describe those erroneous blocks or not.

In any case, here is information that hadn't been reported before. The following are all sites which I had prepared for Wednesday night, not all of which I was able to demonstrate. Please consult with your technical staff and confirm that each of these URLs and searches is wrongly blocked using the same category ("Sex") that you use in your tests and that you would recommend for public libraries.

http://www.gaydaze.com/sstory/curfantasy.html
"Daisies for my Wife," by Harold Roppers, a science fiction short story.

http://censorware.org/essays/sex_lies_jt.html
"Sex, Lies, and Censorware," an essay by my colleague Jim Tyre that is critical of SurfWatch.

http://intertain.com/store/browse.html
The bookstore at Intertain.com. Starting from that Web page, click "Browse," then "Love, Sex and Marriage." All categories of books on that page, 600 books total, are blocked, including books on domestic violence, natural childbirth, and African-American families.

http://www.wap.org/ifaq/sex/marriage.html
"Marriage." A humorous look at marriage through the eyes of children.

http://netdetours.com/archive/sex.html
"Sex and Politics: A historical look at affairs of state." A comparison of the Clinton sex scandal to scandals of other historical figures.

http://www.wwf.org/galapagos/booby.htm
The World Wildlife Foundation maintains information about the animals found on the Galapagos islands. SurfWatch refuses to let us read about the Blue-Footed Booby.

Searches on the following phrases are blocked, on (almost) any search engine:

safe oral sex
testicle cancer
sexually abstain
abstain from sex
sexual abstinence
no sex
Sex, Laws and Cyberspace (book title)
Smart Sex (book title, safe sex guide)
Voyeurism in the French Novel (book title)
Save Sex (title of both book and FRC poster campaign)

http://www.nytimes.com/library/arts/013000tv-voyeurism.html
"Television's New Voyeurism Pictures Real-Life Intimacy." The New York Times looks at shows like "Who Wants To Be a Millionaire." (In the question-and-answer period, one gentleman suggested that this page was blocked for a suggestive photo that appeared in the print edition of the Times. Please confirm that the Web page has no photo.)

http://www.rainbow.ch/chribru/chris/odonnell.htm
A Chris O'Donnell fan page.

http://www.geocities.com/HotSprings/Spa/6834/
"Alternative Healing Resources: A Reference Guide for Balancing Your Mind, Body, and Spirit."

http://www.lesbigay.com/equal_rights/equality.html
"The Equality Project: Dedicated to promoting education and acceptance of all genders, sexualities, races, and religions."

http://www.magiccarpet.com/%7ecgrafe/diamondgallery/
"Diamond Gallery Sports Cards." Baseball and football cards for sale or trade.

http://dir.yahoo.com/Society_and_Culture/Crime/Crimes/Sex_Crimes/Child_Pornography/
Four of the thirteen anti-child pornography sites listed on Yahoo are blocked. "All Against Child Pornography," "Anti Pedophile Network", "Adult Sites Against Child Pornography," and "Defence for Children International."

http://cnn.com/starr.report/
The Starr Report, in every place it appears on the Internet (this URL is just one example).

http://afa.net/Pornography/pornography.html
And finally, the American Family Association, which launched the pro-blocking-software initiative in Holland, is blocked.

I believe your technical staff will confirm what I have found to be true: that all of these are blocked as pornography by your software. Please let me know what your team says. Thank you.

Jamie McCarthy
jamie@slashdot.org

You think your community is conservative? Holland, Michigan, home of the Slashdot Geek Compound, is a conservative community. "Y2K," according to yard signs on my way to last night's library meeting, stands for "Yes 2 King Jesus." Supposedly the city has gone to every Republican presidential candidate but one (Abraham Lincoln). Now the American Family Association has brought mandatory library censorware to a vote on Feb.22, and the measure's opponents have a tough six weeks ahead of them. This is the first time the battle over library filters has come near my community, and my first close look at the grass roots of a First Amendment struggle. Click for more.

The conservative community isn't the only reason that the AFA has chosen the Holland area, in my home state, to be one of its important fronts in the library blocking-software war.

There is an unusual law in the city of Holland that allows any measure to be brought to a ballot vote by petition. This is good in that it brings democracy directly to the people. Unfortunately, if a couple thousand people signed a petition demanding that the mayor must part Lake Michigan or forfeit his salary, that issue would go on the ballot. Democracy doesn't always make sense.

You may have seen press about the Republication presidential candidates campaigning in our fair state. This is because our governor pushed the primary ahead this year, so that we are now one of the first states to cast a ballot for the nominees. Registered Republicans will be going to the polls on Feb.22 to decide which candidate they like best.

Registered Democrats don't get to vote on GOP candidates and largely don't care. But in the city of Holland, thanks to a last-minute petition drive spearheaded by the AFA, there will be one additional issue on the ballot: mandatory blocking software in the city library.

Ironically, the surrounding townships help pay for the same library, but because the petition-to-ballot law applies only in the city, they won't be voting on how their money will be spent.

Holland Republicans, already at the polls to nominate a candidate, will merely have to check one more box. Holland Democrats, assuming for the sake of argument that they exist, will first have to learn that they can vote on Feb.22, and then take the trouble to drive down to the polls for the sole purpose of, as the AFA will surely characterize it, forcing children to look at pornography.

Not that it's quite that simple - the issue surely doesn't break precisely across party lines - but: Ouch! Putting the issue on the ballot on the same day as the Republican primary was a brilliant strategic move. If this is what local politics are all about, maybe I'm glad I haven't gotten involved before.

But if last night's meeting at the library is any indicator, it's not over yet.

The meeting was sponsored by Families for Internet Access, a small Holland group working to oppose library blocking software. Roughly 200 people showed up in the basement of the library to discuss the issue, including at least three Slashdot readers. The large majority were clearly opposed to filters. Luckily, the minority was vocal enough that at least some of their views could be heard, so it wasn't too one-sided.

Don Wildmon, president of the Tupelo, Mississippi-based AFA, says "a community's taxpayers own the local library," and it's going to be interesting to see if that's true. The Holland library has had few problems with inappropriate material to date. The computers in the children's section are not on the net. The internet terminals in the adult section are clustered closely in a well-lit area; patron sessions are limited to 30minutes once per day, and library staff walk through the area frequently to enforce this rule. Even with access restricted to brief sessions, there is almost always a line waiting to use the next computer.

In the four years they've offered internet access, there have been a total of six incidents where a patron had to be removed for causing a disturbance. Of these, only one involved viewing of inappropriate material (it was unclear whether or not this was pornography). To put this in perspective, there were 26,000 patrons who used the internet last year alone.

It seems a bustling, crowded public area in a public library, in front of a big window facing a busy street, is not an environment where people commonly go to look at porn. Imagine that. As one of last night's presenters said, "there is an effective filter in place already, and that is the good people of Holland." It seems clear that censorware is a solution in search of a problem - at least in this community.

But the AFA knows how to look for a problem. The pamphlet that they circulate on library "safety" suggests some ways to determine whether a library has "come under the influence of the American Library Association." The "citizen activist" is urged to "use these helps to learn if your library is a community friend or foe":

"Inquire if your library ... celebrates ALA's 'Banned Books Week.'"

"Search for classic scholarly books. A healthy selection should be available. Suggested titles... Principia Mathematica by Sir Issac Newton." [sic]

"On your library's computer, go to www.yahoo.com or any of the popular Internet search engines. In the search field enter the following: XXX,hardcore,nude"

Are those really the best ways to determine whether a library has a problem with pornography?

Incidentally, I've not gotten confirmation, but the rumor is that the local AFA will be recommending SurfWatch as their filter of choice. In which case, that last suggestion is an interesting one. I purchased and installed SurfWatch on my home computer this weekend, and it blocks me from accessing Yahoo. I still can't figure that out, considering the company that sells it partners with Yahoo.

The AFA has also been claiming support from Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). But at Monday night's meeting, he said he can't specifically support the local initiative because he doesn't know what it's all about. In fact, when the AFA's position was described to him, he interrupted to ask what "AFA" stood for.

In the end, it may not matter whether the problem of inappropriate library material exists or is manufactured. The AFA also recommends that its activists "take [their] concerns through the library chain of command," but in Holland, they refused to meet with the library and went straight to the ballot instead. The voters will decide whether censorware gets installed, and the public's chance to learn about the issues may be limited at best.

In the next six weeks I hope to get a "view from the trenches" of Holland's First Amendment struggle, and to bring it to Slashdot. I'll make no bones about the position I take on the issue. I'll try to focus less on why blocking software is a bad idea in libraries - I'll leave it to other websites to explain that - and more on how the memeticwarfare ^[*] is being conducted. I'll be reading all your comments. Check the YRO section, too, for updates not quite important enough for the Slashdot homepage.

Because this month, mandatory library censorware is a hot topic in Holland. Next month, it may be in my home town. And the month after that - yours.

You think your community is conservative? Holland, Michigan, home of the Slashdot Geek Compound, is a conservative community. "Y2K," according to yard signs on my way to last night's library meeting, stands for "Yes 2 King Jesus." Supposedly the city has gone to every Republican presidential candidate but one (Abraham Lincoln). Now the American Family Association has brought mandatory library censorware to a vote on Feb.22, and the measure's opponents have a tough six weeks ahead of them. This is the first time the battle over library filters has come near my community, and my first close look at the grass roots of a First Amendment struggle. Click for more.

The conservative community isn't the only reason that the AFA has chosen the Holland area, in my home state, to be one of its important fronts in the library blocking-software war.

There is an unusual law in the city of Holland that allows any measure to be brought to a ballot vote by petition. This is good in that it brings democracy directly to the people. Unfortunately, if a couple thousand people signed a petition demanding that the mayor must part Lake Michigan or forfeit his salary, that issue would go on the ballot. Democracy doesn't always make sense.

You may have seen press about the Republication presidential candidates campaigning in our fair state. This is because our governor pushed the primary ahead this year, so that we are now one of the first states to cast a ballot for the nominees. Registered Republicans will be going to the polls on Feb.22 to decide which candidate they like best.

Registered Democrats don't get to vote on GOP candidates and largely don't care. But in the city of Holland, thanks to a last-minute petition drive spearheaded by the AFA, there will be one additional issue on the ballot: mandatory blocking software in the city library.

Ironically, the surrounding townships help pay for the same library, but because the petition-to-ballot law applies only in the city, they won't be voting on how their money will be spent.

Holland Republicans, already at the polls to nominate a candidate, will merely have to check one more box. Holland Democrats, assuming for the sake of argument that they exist, will first have to learn that they can vote on Feb.22, and then take the trouble to drive down to the polls for the sole purpose of, as the AFA will surely characterize it, forcing children to look at pornography.

Not that it's quite that simple - the issue surely doesn't break precisely across party lines - but: Ouch! Putting the issue on the ballot on the same day as the Republican primary was a brilliant strategic move. If this is what local politics are all about, maybe I'm glad I haven't gotten involved before.

But if last night's meeting at the library is any indicator, it's not over yet.

The meeting was sponsored by Families for Internet Access, a small Holland group working to oppose library blocking software. Roughly 200 people showed up in the basement of the library to discuss the issue, including at least three Slashdot readers. The large majority were clearly opposed to filters. Luckily, the minority was vocal enough that at least some of their views could be heard, so it wasn't too one-sided.

Don Wildmon, president of the Tupelo, Mississippi-based AFA, says "a community's taxpayers own the local library," and it's going to be interesting to see if that's true. The Holland library has had few problems with inappropriate material to date. The computers in the children's section are not on the net. The internet terminals in the adult section are clustered closely in a well-lit area; patron sessions are limited to 30minutes once per day, and library staff walk through the area frequently to enforce this rule. Even with access restricted to brief sessions, there is almost always a line waiting to use the next computer.

In the four years they've offered internet access, there have been a total of six incidents where a patron had to be removed for causing a disturbance. Of these, only one involved viewing of inappropriate material (it was unclear whether or not this was pornography). To put this in perspective, there were 26,000 patrons who used the internet last year alone.

It seems a bustling, crowded public area in a public library, in front of a big window facing a busy street, is not an environment where people commonly go to look at porn. Imagine that. As one of last night's presenters said, "there is an effective filter in place already, and that is the good people of Holland." It seems clear that censorware is a solution in search of a problem - at least in this community.

But the AFA knows how to look for a problem. The pamphlet that they circulate on library "safety" suggests some ways to determine whether a library has "come under the influence of the American Library Association." The "citizen activist" is urged to "use these helps to learn if your library is a community friend or foe":

"Inquire if your library ... celebrates ALA's 'Banned Books Week.'"

"Search for classic scholarly books. A healthy selection should be available. Suggested titles... Principia Mathematica by Sir Issac Newton." [sic]

"On your library's computer, go to www.yahoo.com or any of the popular Internet search engines. In the search field enter the following: XXX,hardcore,nude"

Are those really the best ways to determine whether a library has a problem with pornography?

Incidentally, I've not gotten confirmation, but the rumor is that the local AFA will be recommending SurfWatch as their filter of choice. In which case, that last suggestion is an interesting one. I purchased and installed SurfWatch on my home computer this weekend, and it blocks me from accessing Yahoo. I still can't figure that out, considering the company that sells it partners with Yahoo.

The AFA has also been claiming support from Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). But at Monday night's meeting, he said he can't specifically support the local initiative because he doesn't know what it's all about. In fact, when the AFA's position was described to him, he interrupted to ask what "AFA" stood for.

In the end, it may not matter whether the problem of inappropriate library material exists or is manufactured. The AFA also recommends that its activists "take [their] concerns through the library chain of command," but in Holland, they refused to meet with the library and went straight to the ballot instead. The voters will decide whether censorware gets installed, and the public's chance to learn about the issues may be limited at best.

In the next six weeks I hope to get a "view from the trenches" of Holland's First Amendment struggle, and to bring it to Slashdot. I'll make no bones about the position I take on the issue. I'll try to focus less on why blocking software is a bad idea in libraries - I'll leave it to other websites to explain that - and more on how the memeticwarfare ^[*] is being conducted. I'll be reading all your comments. Check the YRO section, too, for updates not quite important enough for the Slashdot homepage.

Because this month, mandatory library censorware is a hot topic in Holland. Next month, it may be in my home town. And the month after that - yours.

You think your community is conservative? Holland, Michigan, home of the Slashdot Geek Compound, is a conservative community. "Y2K," according to yard signs on my way to last night's library meeting, stands for "Yes 2 King Jesus." Supposedly the city has gone to every Republican presidential candidate but one (Abraham Lincoln). Now the American Family Association has brought mandatory library censorware to a vote on Feb.22, and the measure's opponents have a tough six weeks ahead of them. This is the first time the battle over library filters has come near my community, and my first close look at the grass roots of a First Amendment struggle. Click for more.

The conservative community isn't the only reason that the AFA has chosen the Holland area, in my home state, to be one of its important fronts in the library blocking-software war.

There is an unusual law in the city of Holland that allows any measure to be brought to a ballot vote by petition. This is good in that it brings democracy directly to the people. Unfortunately, if a couple thousand people signed a petition demanding that the mayor must part Lake Michigan or forfeit his salary, that issue would go on the ballot. Democracy doesn't always make sense.

You may have seen press about the Republication presidential candidates campaigning in our fair state. This is because our governor pushed the primary ahead this year, so that we are now one of the first states to cast a ballot for the nominees. Registered Republicans will be going to the polls on Feb.22 to decide which candidate they like best.

Registered Democrats don't get to vote on GOP candidates and largely don't care. But in the city of Holland, thanks to a last-minute petition drive spearheaded by the AFA, there will be one additional issue on the ballot: mandatory blocking software in the city library.

Ironically, the surrounding townships help pay for the same library, but because the petition-to-ballot law applies only in the city, they won't be voting on how their money will be spent.

Holland Republicans, already at the polls to nominate a candidate, will merely have to check one more box. Holland Democrats, assuming for the sake of argument that they exist, will first have to learn that they can vote on Feb.22, and then take the trouble to drive down to the polls for the sole purpose of, as the AFA will surely characterize it, forcing children to look at pornography.

Not that it's quite that simple - the issue surely doesn't break precisely across party lines - but: Ouch! Putting the issue on the ballot on the same day as the Republican primary was a brilliant strategic move. If this is what local politics are all about, maybe I'm glad I haven't gotten involved before.

But if last night's meeting at the library is any indicator, it's not over yet.

The meeting was sponsored by Families for Internet Access, a small Holland group working to oppose library blocking software. Roughly 200 people showed up in the basement of the library to discuss the issue, including at least three Slashdot readers. The large majority were clearly opposed to filters. Luckily, the minority was vocal enough that at least some of their views could be heard, so it wasn't too one-sided.

Don Wildmon, president of the Tupelo, Mississippi-based AFA, says "a community's taxpayers own the local library," and it's going to be interesting to see if that's true. The Holland library has had few problems with inappropriate material to date. The computers in the children's section are not on the net. The internet terminals in the adult section are clustered closely in a well-lit area; patron sessions are limited to 30minutes once per day, and library staff walk through the area frequently to enforce this rule. Even with access restricted to brief sessions, there is almost always a line waiting to use the next computer.

In the four years they've offered internet access, there have been a total of six incidents where a patron had to be removed for causing a disturbance. Of these, only one involved viewing of inappropriate material (it was unclear whether or not this was pornography). To put this in perspective, there were 26,000 patrons who used the internet last year alone.

It seems a bustling, crowded public area in a public library, in front of a big window facing a busy street, is not an environment where people commonly go to look at porn. Imagine that. As one of last night's presenters said, "there is an effective filter in place already, and that is the good people of Holland." It seems clear that censorware is a solution in search of a problem - at least in this community.

But the AFA knows how to look for a problem. The pamphlet that they circulate on library "safety" suggests some ways to determine whether a library has "come under the influence of the American Library Association." The "citizen activist" is urged to "use these helps to learn if your library is a community friend or foe":

"Inquire if your library ... celebrates ALA's 'Banned Books Week.'"

"Search for classic scholarly books. A healthy selection should be available. Suggested titles... Principia Mathematica by Sir Issac Newton." [sic]

"On your library's computer, go to www.yahoo.com or any of the popular Internet search engines. In the search field enter the following: XXX,hardcore,nude"

Are those really the best ways to determine whether a library has a problem with pornography?

Incidentally, I've not gotten confirmation, but the rumor is that the local AFA will be recommending SurfWatch as their filter of choice. In which case, that last suggestion is an interesting one. I purchased and installed SurfWatch on my home computer this weekend, and it blocks me from accessing Yahoo. I still can't figure that out, considering the company that sells it partners with Yahoo.

The AFA has also been claiming support from Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). But at Monday night's meeting, he said he can't specifically support the local initiative because he doesn't know what it's all about. In fact, when the AFA's position was described to him, he interrupted to ask what "AFA" stood for.

In the end, it may not matter whether the problem of inappropriate library material exists or is manufactured. The AFA also recommends that its activists "take [their] concerns through the library chain of command," but in Holland, they refused to meet with the library and went straight to the ballot instead. The voters will decide whether censorware gets installed, and the public's chance to learn about the issues may be limited at best.

In the next six weeks I hope to get a "view from the trenches" of Holland's First Amendment struggle, and to bring it to Slashdot. I'll make no bones about the position I take on the issue. I'll try to focus less on why blocking software is a bad idea in libraries - I'll leave it to other websites to explain that - and more on how the memeticwarfare ^[*] is being conducted. I'll be reading all your comments. Check the YRO section, too, for updates not quite important enough for the Slashdot homepage.

Because this month, mandatory library censorware is a hot topic in Holland. Next month, it may be in my home town. And the month after that - yours.

Senator and GOP presidential frontrunner of the week John McCain (R-Ariz.) gave a little talk this afternoon practically in the Geek Compound's back yard. Billed by a local group as a town meeting on censorware, with handouts on "Internet porn filters" passed around beforehand, this roving reporter was dying to find out what would be said. Click for more...

"The internet is going to provide knowledge, information and freedom to people all over the world." - Sen. John McCain

The world-famous Geek Compound is located in Ottawa County, Michigan, not exactly known as a hotbed of controversy and intrigue. But for whatever reason, we are now one of the areas whose libraries are being targeted by would-be censors. Uncaring of a federal court decision declaring censorware in public libraries unconstitutional, the American Family Association and other "pro-family" groups have declared the area a battleground. A small library in a small nearby town has become the first in our fair state to install mandatory censorware on all its internet terminals. And now, the home of Slashdot itself, Holland, is being pressured to do the same at its public library.

Politics is of course a war of ideas, and in any war there is the inevitable arms race. Sen. McCain was possibly the first to bring the issue directly to the Congress, with his S.97 introduced a year ago. But Elizabeth Dole was the first to make the subject a campaign issue, as is illustrated by the pro-censorware pamphlet:

"...libraries should install computer software that blocks access to pornographic sites on the Internet...the measure also should apply to computers used by adults." - ABC NEWS, June 28, 1999

After Dole dropped out, the issue languished for a while until, in a campaign hard-pressed for issues of substance, it was revived. Steve Forbes is quoted:

"I proudly support AFA-Michigan and the citizens of Holland in seeking a reasonable, common sense standard to what children have the opportunity to view in a public library." - Dec. 20, 1999

And McCain's latest quote came while stumping in South Carolina:

"Every school and library should be required to buy filters...to keep out materials that are not suitable for children the same way in which the library board filters printed materials for the library." - Dec. 22, 1999

It's a no-lose issue for politicians. In the race to see who can come out more in favor of children, facts get left by the side of the road.

Here's the strange thing: this open forum meeting, which the AFA hoped would be about internet porn, ended up being about everything except internet porn. McCain spoke briefly, and only for a few minutes did he discuss blocking technology. In the lengthy question-and-answer period, there were only two questions about censorware. One of them was mine, and neither was in support of his position.

My question was about blocking software and openness. I stopped short of grabbing the mike and shouting "open-source the censors!" but that was the general idea.

One of the major concerns that free-speech advocates have about censorware is that its blacklists, or blocking lists, are hidden. The list of URLs and such that are actually blocked by their software is protected by copyright law and by encryption.

It's an end-run around the First Amendment. The government could never step into a library and censor information from the National Academy of Clinical Biochemistry. Or GayDaze, a non-pornographic online soap opera about gay men and a lesbian. Or any of the thousands of unfairly blocked sites that have been uncovered.

The end-run is to allow an unaccountable third party to put these blocks in place - hidden - and then for the government to mandate their use.

I briefly set up this paradox for Sen. McCain and then asked: "Do you believe that software installed in public schools and libraries should be open to public scrutiny?"

I didn't set it up quite as well as I just have; I figured that since he was the sponsor of S.97, "a bill to require the installation and use by schools and libraries of a technology for filtering or blocking," he might quickly grasp my point. But he didn't appear to be familiar with the fact that the blacklists are encrypted, and answered a different question.

But when I rephrased the question, his answer was that he "would strongly advocate full disclosure."

If the Senator - or anyone else in a policymaking position - is reading this, I would follow that up by saying:

Great!

But the software we're talking about doesn't do this. There is only one commercial package on the market that has an open blacklist. It is not popular and is almost never given as a preferred option for libraries and schools. The software that the AFA wants to install in Holland's libraries has a carefully-encrypted blacklist.

It's only because of the (arguably illegal) efforts of muckrakers that we know anything at all about this software. The AFA, Filtering Facts, and other pro-censorware groups endorsed a product called X-Stop in August 1997. Family Friendly Libraries called it "technology that will block ALL porn sights and ONLY porn sights" [sic], and rejoiced that a technology had "achieved 100% success." But their encrypted blacklist was decrypted and exposed shortly thereafter. Unsurprisingly, the product did not live up to its marketing hyperbole. In October 1997, the endorsements shriveled and disappeared as quickly as they'd come.

The product was the same. Only our knowledge about it had changed.

McCain calls for "community standards" to be applied to each public library. But no censorware offers checkboxes for "rural Kansas" vs. "New York City" blocking. They are all one-size-fits-all. And because we can't look under the hood, nobody has any idea what size that is.

If we're going to use third parties to censor our public libraries, let's make sure they let us see what they're doing.

That's what I would have said to the Senator if I'd had a microphone of my own.

Finally, I have to say that I was impressed by the student in the balcony, a high-school student at my guess, who - after listening to the standard recap of Columbine and the standard attack on the media for giving the murderers Doom and the internet - stood up to state his case. He said that he looked at how the Columbine murderers were being described by the media and by McCain, and the description sounded a lot like himself. He played violent video games and spent time on the internet and he wasn't afraid to say so. That took guts.

McCain's plan for kids like this is twofold: first, to fund a study of "very intelligent people" to determine once and for all whether there is a link between media violence and real violence. And second, to protect parents' rights: "your parents need to know what you're doing on the internet," he told the high-school student, so that they could all sit down as a family and discuss whether it was appropriate.

I hope that kid knows about Peacefire.

Tonight, there will be a meeting on censorware at the Holland library which we hope will include both sides of this issue. Watch for a report tomorrow.

[An unfinished version of this story was accidentally posted Monday evening, and several Slashdot reader comments were lost. I apologize for the mistake. -Jamie]

Our interview guests this week are American Jim Tyre and Australian Irene Graham. Both are long-time, well-known online free speech and anti-censorware activists; links from Monday's call for questions can tell you all about them. Anyway, here are their answers to your questions. They'll tell you everything you ever wanted to know about censorware and why it's not a good thing. There are also a lot of good tips about online and political activism in general contained in their answers; you may want to read this to pick up on those even if censorware and free speech aren't your personal "hot button" issues. (mucho more below)

1) Censorship: problem or symptom?
by Signal 11
I believe censorship is a result of various groups / countries wanting to protect their cultural identity (which includes their social taboos). The second thing I want to put forward is the fact that the internet is a culture-neutral medium - it breaks down the traditional geographical barriers that seperate us from other countries. Witness cultural exchange programs, founded under the premise that communication == exchange of ideas. That generally promotes a "blending effect" (for lack of a better description) between cultures.

My question is simple: in light of this, attacking censorware is only attacking the symptom, not the cause. What solutions do you believe are reasonable for accomodating the concerns of these groups? Going one step further, should they be accomodated?

Jim:
You're correct that censorware is only a symptom there is a reason why, for example, every year librarians and others "celebrate" Banned Books Week but I'm not certain that I agree with the premise that the Internet is a culture-neutral medium, particularly in the context of a censorship discussion.

To some cultures, whether national or here in the U.S., every advance in technology has been a threat. Planes, trains and automobiles have changed many cultures, and so has or will the Internet. In many nations, the Internet itself is a threat, which is why some try to keep it out completely, or to allow it only under highly controlled circumstances. A content-free Internet would be culturally neutral, but an Internet which includes hundreds of sites about The Satanic Verses can hardly be considered neutral to many in Tehran or Islamabad.

In the context of the Internet, any attempt to accommodate a particular group is fraught with danger. (Some) parents were concerned with what their kids might be exposed to, so censorware was developed for home use. But the moralists were not satisfied, so laws like the CDA were enacted. When it was struck down, in part because censorware was touted as a less restrictive alternative, legislators pounced and introduced legislation (still pending) requiring the use of censorware in certain schools and libraries, not just for children, but for adults as well. And of course, as discussed in YRO, there are renewed multinational efforts to revitalize and impose PICS.

History has shown that it is a fundamental mistake to believe that censors can be accommodated. If one wants to preserve a cultural identity, the way to do it is to inculcate the positive values of that identity, not to pretend that other cultures do not exist.

2) What can we do?
by Ex-NT-User
It seems the majority of governments that are instituting censorship legislation are doing this "behind their populations backs". And certainly without majority support of the people they govern over. Mailing/calling our representatives doesn't seem to help much since they just blow us off for special interest groups.

So what can we as individuals do prevent this? What other avenues can we take?

Irene:
I think one of the problems is that many politicians see the people on the Net as being a special interest group, so which special interest group should they listen to? Some politicians, for example, claim that people on the Net don't care about protecting children - you'd think no-one on the Net had kids if you didn't know better.

The problem of changing such perceptions is exacerbated by the tendency of people on the Net to do anything they can by email and not being willing to devote a little time to understanding the political processes involved.

So there's not just a question of what individuals can do, but what they shouldn't do. Here's some examples to explain what I mean from the recent anti-censorship campaign in Australia...

Some people set up email lists to automatically send the same message to all Australian politicians - it sounded like a great idea and heaps of well-intentioned people used these. The problem was, apparently, that many people sent rude, abusive emails. This is not the way to get one's point across and encourages the view that people on the Net are different from "ordinary" people. At the same time, the politicians who were already opposing the Bill received messages abusing them. Unfortunately, this encourages them to say "why bother?" - why shouldn't they support the pro-censorship lobby who quite likely aren't rude and say thank you?

During the campaign here, I rang the offices of my "representatives" who happened to be members of the opposition party just to say thanks for opposing the Bill. The staffers who answered the phone practically fell over themselves thanking me for bothering to call - they were so, so tired of the abusive emails and calls from people who hadn't even bothered to check what their policy was.

At one stage in the campaign here, it was reported that filter rules had been added to the Parliamentary email system, to give politicians the option of filtering anything about the Net censorship Bill into a separate folder. They were receiving too much email, which was interfering, apparently, with their ability to find email on other topics.

Another issue is that computers make it arguably too easy to just copy and paste texts that the cyber-liberties groups issue as suggestions, or that someone else has written. Standard texts are generally given little credence by politicians - they see it as just part of a campaign, too easy, from someone who doesn't care enough to bother writing their own views.

As well, there's the problem that many people don't even know what's going on. They don't read the newspapers regularly, certainly not the IT sections, and in Australia the TV news didn't mention the Bill until -after- the Senate approved it. Talk to people "in the streets" and you're likely to find even though they're not on the Net yet, they comprehend well enough to know the proposed legislation is silly, but hadn't heard about it. The spam problem has also made it quite difficult to get alerts out to a large portion of the Net community - those who don't subscribe to anti-censorshiop news/mail lists but who would be horrified to know what's happening in the halls of Parliaments.

So I think there's probably more don'ts than dos:

• discourage people from bulk emailing politicians,
• Discourage use of standard texts - and spend time writing in your own words,
• write snail mail or send faxes or phone up - in that order - don't email,
• ask for an opportunity to meet to discuss the matter - you've more chance of succeeding with this if your letter makes clear that you can provide useful information and are capable of rational, not emotional, discussion,
• find out what your representatives' views are before you contact them, or ask, or say something like "if you believe .... then....", don't assume what they know or think,
  
• respond to government inquiries, Senate Committee inquiries and the like. Don't leave this just to organisations and don't just write saying basically "I agree with [insert cyber-liberties group name]'s submission". Regrettably, this immediately marks you as just part of a "special interest" group,
• send thank you letters, or call to say thanks, when appropriate,
• talk to people off the Net about the Net - this is really important in terms of offsetting the power of the traditional media and the scare stories they love to distribute,
• write to newspaper/magazine editors etc when you see Net scare stories, and also write to them about why sensible stories are relegated to IT section (this happens in Australia more often than not, where they're mostly only seen by the already converted),
• read up on how to lobby politicians - there are books about this as well as Net resources such as:

Aust: http://www.zeta.org.au/~aldis/lobby.html
USA: http://www.neosoft.com/vtw/cda-lobby.html

Another idea is the "Adopt a Politician" efforts that have been undertaken in some areas. Individuals offer to help a politician learn about a particular Net issue - or the Net in general - before the next round of silly legislation hits their desk. Of course, not all politicians want to learn, but some do.

And:

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." - Margaret Mead.

3) Free speech in other countries
by /
As more countries' citizens get exposed to the internet and to the ideas of unbridled free expression, do you see further local pushes to enshrine free-speech protections in their charters or constitutions? Or do you see technology being harnessed to keep the masses in check as it has or millennia?

Irene:
I'd like to think the former, but I fear the latter's more likely.

Speaking from an Australian perspective, I think mere access to the Net has changed a lot of peoples' views about the supposed merits of censorship. When people see the potential for being jailed for saying something on a mailing list that they can say without fear off-line, what censorship is suddenly looks entirely different. No longer is it something that only applies to film distributors, publishers and the like.

Knowledge that people in other countries aren't subject to the same level of censorship can certainly encourage and bolster opposition to it. We had a case, http://rene.efa.org.au/censor/rabelais.html, in Australia recently where the student editors of a university journal were prosecuted for publishing an article called "The Art of Shoplifting". The judge said something like "nowhere in the world" would they be allowed to publish it. Someone on the Net knew that wasn't correct and drew relevant information to the defence team's attention which helped in their decision to appeal. Although they lost the appeal, a lot of attention was drawn to the case, surprisingly even in the traditional media - it seemed everyone was opposed to the prosecution. Eventually the prosecution dropped the charges. The law's still in place, but maybe the politicians etc who called for the students' scalps so to speak will think twice in future. I think the Net made a difference in this case in several ways - easier access to relevant information and knowledgeable people overseas and as a medium for communicating what was happening.

In short, it's becoming much more difficult for governments to justify their policies by saying "nowhere in the world" etc because ordinary individuals can more easily find out it isn't true. Not only that, they can read about, and discuss, why other countries have different policies and make up their own minds about what's best.

That is, of course, frightening to governments, so there's undoubtedly a severe risk of "technology being harnessed to keep the masses in check as it has for millennia". Many people saying no to censorship is the only thing that's even likely to stop it happening.

The question is, who'll win the race? Censorware developers claiming to have the "perfect" censorware seeking government contracts and/or industry contracts "encouraged" by government? Or increasing numbers of people on the Net getting informed and deciding to make their views known to politicians?

The "Internet industry's" reaction to government demands for censorship can also present problems as we're seeing in Australia right now. Government enacts legislation saying ISPs must block sites on government demand or face large fines. The Internet Industry Association (IIA) comes up with a way around the technical problems for them, that will make their life easier. IIA represents 60 of the some 700 ISPs in Australia but their recently approved Code of Practice for ISPs is now effectively law applicable to all ISPs.

The IIA Code requires that ISPs "provide for use, at a charge determined by the ISP, an Approved Filter" to each customer. So we're going to have users paying for censorware whether they want it or not. The IIA says that some ISPs will provide it for free, but the censorware vendors obviously won't give it to ISPs free. Even if the ISPs don't charge for it separately, they'll include the cost in Net access fees. There's no requirement for ISPs to offer users their choice of censorware, or provide any warnings as to the shortcomings of the filter, yet IIA claims this forced provision of censorware "empowers" the user.

Although users don't have to install or use the censorware, there's several potential censorship problems and I'll mention just one here.

ISPs complain about "clueless" requests for technical help from users. I've no doubt they do get such calls and that they take up a lot of their time. But what will happen when they start getting calls from those people who want to install the censorware (I assume there'll be some) but who have problems doing so? It will be an extremely undesirable outcome of the law if the ISPs incorporate censorware in their registration process/disk so it's automatically installed on a user's computers with the defaults set to block=on. Many people won't want to use censorware and a lot of these programs are very difficult to uninstall. Will ISPs themselves know how to do that, or give any sort of priority to customers trying to get rid of something the government requires the ISPs to provide? Will the censorware block access to the few (if any) web pages around that explain how to remove it? This scenario may not happen, but it's certainly possible some ISPs could do this. As it is, many people don't know the questions they should ask before opening an account with an ISP and this Code seems likely to make the problem worse for unknowledgeable people.

The Australian government has, for the moment anyway, dropped its requirement that ISPs block overseas content at the server level, probably because of a combination of massive public opposition and the industry etc pointing out that it's not "technically and commercially feasible" at present. Some of the censorware vendors tell the government it is and/or soon will be. Government mandated provision of censorware to every Australian Internet user will certainly place a great deal of extra money in the pockets of censorware suppliers - money that may well be used for developing censorware more suitable for installation on ISPs servers or backbones. I don't think the threat of censorship facilitated by technology is over in Australia yet, it may just be on hold. The Code of Practice ISPs have to comply with by law can be changed quite easily.

So, looking at the Australian experience for example, it's difficult to say whether access to the Net will lead to further local pushes to enshrine free-speech protections in law, or whether technology will be harnessed to keep the masses in check. There are numerous governments far more repressive than Australia's and technology being harnessed is obviously more of a threat in countries that don't claim to be democratic. One thing I am sure of is that anyone who promotes the development of censorware as a means of staving of government censorship either has rocks in their head, or doesn't know how repressive some governments can be. If you build tools that facilitate censorship, some governments will use them.

4) A proposal
by dclydew
It is obvious that "censorware" is a fatally flawed tool. Using technical solutions for social issues doesn't work. However, it's also clear that many parents don't want a T-1 full of porn available to their child every Monday through Friday. So I'd like feedback on the following proposal:

In areas where minors have access to public internet services (school/libraries), they would be given an account. This account would be accessible via a smart "library" card. The account is identified by account# only. These account#'s are logged along with sites that are visited by minor. At the request of a parent/gaurdian, a report can be generated so that they can determine if their child is acting within the acceptable boundaries set by the family unit. No one else would be permitted to use this reporting tool. This takes censorship out of the hands of everyone except the people legally responsible for the minor.

I belive that this approach removes all unnecessary layers of argument and leaves us with one question:

Should anyone (parents/gaurdians included) have the right to control what their child sees/hears/views for entertainment/etc. ?

This question obviously has a precedence: Children under 18 are not permitted to purchase pornography, tobacco, etc. However, a parent could permit their child to have such things. Perhaps by purchasing the items for the minor.

Please give me your thoughts....

Jim:
To be honest, my first thought is Orwell's 1984, or perhaps even some of David Brin's writings. You've just made it legal for the government to keep tabs on every Internet site visited by every minor, so long as the minor is using a government machine (public schools and libraries are a part of the government). Those who know me know that I'm not ultra-paranoid about government, but giving this much data to the government frightens me. I recognize that your intent is that the data only be made available to the parent or legal guardian, but can you think of a meaningful guarantee that it can't be misused? As I write this, I can't. (I suppose a script could be written which would automatically encrypt the data only to the parent's PGP public key or similar, but I'm thinking in terms of what would work for the vast majority, not just a fairly small minority.)

Now suppose, hypothetically, that rock-solid guarantees could be made. Where, and how, do you draw the age line? The actual age of majority differs somewhat among the states, but let's assume it is 18. Should a 17 year old be scrutinized as closely as a 9 year old? What if the 9 year old is particularly mature, the 17 year old particularly immature? And by the way, some states grant far more independent rights to minors than do most states or the federal government. For example, in California and Florida, a first trimester pregnant 14 year old has exactly the same right to an abortion as does a first trimester pregnant 30 year old no parental consent or judicial approval is required. (The U.S. Constitution sets minimum standards for individual rights; the states can not drop below the federal minimums, but they can, and some do, recognize more rights as a matter of independent state law.) If a 14 year old California girl has a right to an abortion without parental consent, would you give the parent access to the log of abortion-related web sites the girl has visited?

Then one gets to discrimination based on medium. In most public libraries, an unattended 15 year old can pull any book he or she wants off the shelves and read it cover to cover without the parent ever knowing. Should the rules be different if the text of that same book happens to be on the Internet?

Parents have the right, perhaps even the duty, to raise their children as best they can, to try to instill in them a moral code, whatever that code might be. If the parents choose to home school, that is their right, but if the parents let their children go out into the world, as most do, they do so knowing full well that their children will see/hear/read/do things which the parents will never know about, hoping that the children's upbringing will serve them well. Why should exposure to the Internet be different from everything else to which the minor is exposed?

Incidentally, proposals like yours have been considered and rejected both by pro-censorship types and by anti-censorship types. The pros don't want anyone, and particularly not minors, to have access to certain kinds of information. The antis don't want government assisting restrictive parents. What the so-called silent majority would say is anyone's guess.

5) Rhetoric of anti-censorship
by H3lldr0p
What arguments have you used to try and persuade people that censorware is not an acceptable answer to whatever problem they are currently having with the world at large?

I ask for two reasons. I have been a fan of Bradbury for some time and will always suggest that everybody needs to read _Fahrenheit 451_, but I have also recently read Ken Burke's "Rhetoric of Hitler's 'Battle.'" He argues therein that _Mein Kamf_ should not be censored on the grounds that history might repeat itself if we are unaware of what has gone on before.

Jim:
As a preliminary note, I am not familiar with Burke's work, but absolutely I oppose censoring Mein Kampf, or any other work I find extremely distasteful. And I say this as a Jewish person who had a number of ancestors exterminated in the Holocaust.

What works? One thing I've learned in more than twenty years as a lawyer is that you have to tailor your approach, consistent with that which is verifiably true, to your intended audience, while (hopefully) adding in something new and unexpected. For example, in our early reports, we at The Censorware Project stressed what we sometimes call collateral damage or overblocking -- wrongful bans of innocuous and valuable sites. This emphasis worked fabulously in our early reports, such as our first report on X-Stop in October 1997. Not only did the usual suspects take notice, but groups such as Filtering Facts and Family Friendly Libraries, which previously had specifically endorsed X-Stop, abandoned it like rats fleeing a sinking ship.

But while the point remains as valid today as it was then, more people have heard it before and say, in effect, "tell me something new." So in our most recent report on Bess, done about five months ago, we did exactly that, in part because a major focus of Bess is schools instead of public libraries.

In K-12 schools, you would think that the primary focus would be on blocking hard core sex sites, so we opened some eyes when we reported, based on our tests of real proxies actually in use in a number of schools, that Bess did not block HardCoreSex.com, as well as lots of other porn sites, most of which were not new - and we did not spend a great deal of time searching extensively for unblocked porn sites. In other words, while showing plenty of examples of the usual overblocking, we added in the new (for our reports) element of meaningful underblocking, a more attention-getting point to those who don't care about overblocking, because "It's for the children."

Not coincidentally, our Bess report was released on the day of the IPO of N2H2, Inc., the company which makes Bess. The stock price plummeted on the first day, and continued to do so for a good long while after, though it has since rallied. Whether there was a cause and effect is an exercise I will leave to market analysts and Slashdot readers.

One point which has to be emphasized, particularly if addressing a new product: there is no magic bullet, nor will there be absent a quantum leap in artificial intelligence technology. Each new product, and even each new release of an existing product, comes to the market with an almost teflon-like quality, magically cleansed of the foibles of its predecessors, because so many want to believe that censorware can do what the vendors claim it can do. It isn't so.

6) How much is too much?
by zantispam
I for one dislike censorship in all of it's forms. However, does government demand it?

Let me explain a bit...

Ok, here in the US, we have a right to free speech. Conversely, we have no right to be heard. What this means is that it's theoretically ok for me to say "I think that Clinton is a green donkey!". It also means that no one has to hear what I just said. Whether it be a function of censorship, or just because most people think I'm nuts, my view has not been heard. Nowhere am I guaranteed this right.

The problem with this is that it makes censorchip `legal', in a way. The [insert favorite agency to pick on here] can choose not to grant my right to be heard, and that's (unjustly, IMHO) ok.

My question is: Does government, in any form, require censorship to function? Put another way, do we necessarily have to give up our right to be heard by choosing to live in any type of society? Put a third way, is the right to be heard equal to the right to privacy (unlawful search and siezure).

Jim:
An important distinction needs to be made here, and that is where you want to be heard. If you want me to hear you while I am in my private home, you can't barge into my home, uninvited, in order to make sure that I hear you. Similarly, if a parent chooses to use censorware on their home computer in an attempt to protect or isolate a child, you can't force your Internet speech onto that home computer.

But while "censorship" can be used with a broader meaning, your reference to a favorite agency leads me to believe that you are talking about censorship by the government. If that is the case, then your premise is largely incorrect. There is a substantial body of case law dealing with so-called public forums, and their offshoot, limited public forums. There are exceptions to every rule (I did say that I'm a lawyer, didn't I?), but generally speaking, if the government makes available a public forum, it can not deny your right to be heard based on the content of your speech, so long as the speech itself is not unlawful (shouting "fire" in a crowded theater is the usual example). A public library is not constitutionally required to offer any Internet connections at all, but if it does provide access, it cannot discriminate based on the desirability of the speech, particularly with adult listeners. As a private citizen, I can decide that I only want to "hear" comments on slashdot which are scored 3 or better, but the government cannot decide that for me.

Of course, while I may have a right to have my lawful Internet speech heard in a wired library, this does not mean that I have a right to equal time with cnn.com. If their site gets more views than mine, c'est la vie.

You might be able to tell that I've been struggling a bit with your question, and it just occurred why - you really aren't talking about censorship at all if, at long last, I'm getting the question. In the narrow sense, it is censorship if the government prevents or deters me from speaking or you from hearing me. In a broader sense, it is censorship if any third person (or software imposed by a third person) prevents or deters me from speaking or you from hearing me. But it is not censorship at all, using any common meaning of the word, if I decide, of my own volition, that I simply do not want to hear what you have to say. Contrary to what at least one person has written, censorware opponents do not want to force anyone to read that which they do not want to read. Sorting information, deciding what is important to us, what is not, is something we do constantly, on and off of the Internet.

That is entirely different from someone else, and particularly the government, blocking you from information which you do want to read.

7) censorship, apathy, and the general population
by Requiem
How can we attempt to show the general population that censorship is not a good thing? It seems that people accept the spoonfed excuse of "it's for your own good"; how can we get people to think critically about the situation and come to their own conclusions?

Irene:
I'm not at all sure that people do accept "it's for your own good". In my experience, people in favour of censorship are usually worried about the effect seeing or knowing something will have on _other_ people. They're usually quite confident of their own ability to critically analyse information and decide for themselves whether or not it's a good idea to act on it, and of their own ability to control their own children (usually anyway). It's what other people, or other people's children, will do that worries them.

Try reversing that - saying to such people that _other_ people approve of censorship because they're worried about that person's inability to cope with information and you could have quite an interesting conversation. This won't work with everyone, but it will make some people start to think about their assumptions.

The American Library Association's site contains some useful information about motivations for censorship and tactics.

One thing that can make people start to question the merits of censorship is to make them aware of what's censored. The problem with censorship is most people have no idea - they never see what's censored - so they assume it's really really bad stuff (whatever that is in their view).

The banning of the shoplifting article I mentioned earlier was quite useful in this regard in Australia. Although it was banned in print, someone put it on the Web. A lot of people who read it couldn't believe there were laws that could put people in jail for distributing it - they saw it as intended humour, satire (not the best literary work but all the same). The law was made to look more ridiculous when one of the judges included the whole article in his decision upholding the ban on it. The Court decision, including the article, was published on the Web.

The Net's very helpful in this regard. When, say, a film's banned or cut, one can usually find a detailed review of it, or people overseas talking about in newsgroups or wherever. Governments' claims that banning is necessary to protect society etc. sound very silly when it's known that the film was released uncut in numerous other countries and there's no reports of any harm being caused.

It only takes a few examples of what's banned outright, or cut from films, to make some people start questioning their previous certainty that "government knows best."

With regard to the people who believe studies have proven that viewing something causes violence or whatever, about the only thing you can do is to learn about the research and studies for yourself so you can speak knowledgeably and argue about it if necessary. A section of my web site contains useful information and links in this regard.

8) Legal question.
by Weezul
Frequently censorware seems to target anti-censorship (sites/people) as much as they target porn (this was especially a problem in Australia). What can be done about this?

Are there laws in the U.S. or Australia that would allow people who censor anti-censorship sites to be sued?

Irene:
I don't know of any Australian anti-censorship sites targeted by censorware. If you have details I'd be interested in hearing about it.

In Australia, it's doubtful such sites/people would have much redress other than defamation, and proof of damage would be difficult. Same applies to ordinary user sites. A business blocked by censorware could consider an action for defamation, or deceptive business practices under the Trade Practices Act.

Jim:
Targeting anti-censorship sites is a problem here in the U.S. as well (Irene has answered about Australia). The Censorware Project, Peacefire and The Ethical Spectacle are among many anti-censorship sites which have been banned at various times by the censorware makers. (Interestingly, pro-censorware/censorship sites such as Filtering Facts and The American Family Association have been blacklisted as well.)

There is no specific law which would allow the owner of a blocked anti-censorship site to sue the censorware maker. Censorship, in the legal sense, involves state action, but there is no state action involved in the mere fact that a censorware vendor has added an anti-censorship site to its blacklist. However, there are at least three instances in which the owner of a wrongfully blocked site might be able to sue a censorware vendor or user.

First, if the censorware is being used in a public institution such as a public library, the site owner may well have standing to sue the institution for blocking the constitutionally protected speech at the site. In the Loudoun County, Virginia Public Library lawsuit, the action was commenced by library patrons, but the ACLU intervened on behalf of content providers whose sites were blocked in the library. The Library Board tried to argue that the providers had no standing to intervene, but the Court disagreed.

Second, one needs to look at the blocking category being used to block the site. The ACLU, for example, has been blocked by some vendors under the category "activist" or similar. Certainly I don't condone such blacklisting, but the categorization is factually correct. On the other hand, suppose that the site is miscategorized by the censorware vendor as a porn site instead of an activist one. (If you think that is ludicrous, read a mini-essay I wrote earlier this year.) Some have posited that the censorware vendor might be liable for libel. I would not bring such an action I defend those sued for libel, regardless of whether I agree with their particular speech but I do expect that the owner of some site wrongfully blocked as a porn site will test the waters.

Third, under either federal law or the laws of various states, there may be a claim for consumer fraud or false and misleading advertising if the vendor bans sites under incorrect categories. Most of the vendors have wonderful sounding statements on their sites about how carefully they make their lists and check them twice, but virtually every serious investigation of censorware has shown such statements to be utterly false. In some states, a remedy under this theory may be available only to customers who purchased the censorware in reliance on the false representations, but in other states, such as mine (California), virtually any member of the public could bring such an action.

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Next week we have *two* interviews to celebrate the year's end: First, L0pht Heavy Industries, with answers Friday. And in a separate "bonus" interview post Monday we'll be collecting questions for Jon "Maddog" Hall about Linux in the next century; Jon's answers will run Saturday (for obvious symbolic reasons). Enjoy!