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ACLU Joins Fray Over Cyber Patrol Censorware

Posted by michael on from the riposte dept.

Brian Ristuccia writes, "It looks like the ACLU has decided to help Waldo L. Jaquith, Lindsay Haisley and Bennett Haselton, three folks who were running mirror sites of the recently released Cyber Patrol paper and decoding software, respond to the subpoena and confusing e-service messages that have been sent to them via e-mail by Cyber Patrol's law firm."

Links:

Text of the ACLU's Press Release:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Friday, March 24, 2000

NEW YORK -- The American Civil Liberties Union will enter a Boston court this Monday to argue that a ban on a program allowing users to decode the Internet blocking software Cyber Patrol constitutes a "classic prior restraint on speech" in violation of the U.S. Constitution.

The Cyber Patrol controversy is but the latest round in a heated debate over flaws in so-called filtering software that both "overblocks" non-pornographic Web sites on subjects like Super Bowl XXX and fails to block many sites parents may not deem appropriate for their children.

In legal papers filed with the court today, the ACLU said that Cyber Patrol's lawsuit is unnecessary because the company can easily block their customers from accessing any Web site or page on which the decoding program appears, whereas some of the Web sites may be out of the jurisdiction of the court.

Acting on behalf of three U.S. Web site operators who posted "mirror" copies of the decoding program, the ACLU said their free speech rights would be violated if the court granted the company's request for a preliminary injunction against the Swedish and Canadian creators of the program.

"Under Cyber Patrol's logic, I'd be breaking the law if I bought a Ford Mustang and looked under the hood," said Chris Hansen, a senior ACLU staff attorney and lead counsel in the case. "I don't think it is asking too much for Cyber Patrol and other software companies to tell the American public exactly what their software blocks, especially when Congress wants to force both children and adults to use it."

Last Friday, March 17, U.S. District Judge Edward F. Harrington granted a 10-day temporary restraining order against the creators of the program. Cyber Patrol then sent subpoenas to the ACLU's clients, suggesting that they would be bound by that order and any future court bans.

In addition, at least one American reporter has confirmed receipt of subpoena from Cyber Patrol ordering him to reveal the name of "each and every person who produced, received, viewed, downloaded or accessed" the decoding program from his site.

The Web site operators, Waldo L. Jaquith, Lindsay Haisley and Bennett Haselton, each said that they posted the decoding program as a form of political protest against Cyber Patrol's legal actions and against "censorware" in general. Their Web sites can be found at: www.peacefire.org (Haselton), www.fmp.com (Haisley) and www.waldo.net (Jasquith).

"We thought it would be educational for some politicians, who are recommending blocking software for use in every school in the country, to see the mistakes that the codebreakers found in Cyber Patrol's list," said Haselton, 21, operator of Peacefire.org, a Web site he founded specifically to defend the free-speech interests of people under 18 on the Internet.

Haselton said that Peacefire recently decrypted the lists of sites blocked by two other programs -- I-Gear and X-Stop -- and found that they had error rates between 68 and 76 percent for blocking pages in the educational ".edu" domain.

Haselton, Jasquith, and Haisley are represented as "nonparties" to the Cyber Patrol lawsuit by Hansen of the national ACLU, Sarah Wunsch, an attorney with the ACLU of Massachusetts, David Sobel, general counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center based in Washington, and Jessica Littman, a visiting professor of law at New York University.

In 1998, a federal district judge said that forcing adults to use blocking software like Cyber Patrol in public libraries "offends the guarantee of free speech." Last month, a proposal aimed at forcing a Michigan public library to install Web filtering software on computers was defeated by voters.

"With Congress renewing efforts to mandate use of such flawed software in public schools and libraries, the Cyber Patrol battle only serves to emphasize that information on what is blocked must be made available to consumers, let alone libraries and schools," Hansen said.

The hearing in Microsystems Software, Inc. V. Scandinavia Online, IslandNet.com, Eddy L.O. Jansson and Matthew Skala, Civil Action No.00-10488-EFH, will take place on Monday, March 27, at 2:00 p.m. in U.S. District Court in Boston.

The ACLU's opposition to motion for preliminary injunction in the case is online at http://www.aclu.org/court/cyberpatrol_motion.html. The motion to quash subpoenas is online at http://www.aclu.org/court/cyberpatrol_quash.html.

Cyber Patrol is a subsidiary of toy company giant Mattel Inc., which is publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

5 of 205 comments (clear)

  1. My Name On /. by waldoj · · Score: 4

    Holy shit, my name is on the front page of Slashdot.

    Yet my karma stays at 81. Quick, make like I'm Bruce Perens and make this a 5!

    :)

  2. An idea... by FarHat · · Score: 4
    No wonder Cyber Patrol doesn't want you to look "under the hood", given how broad the are about restricting things. To be fair, it is not easy at all to make any kind of filtering software. I experienced this at during my undergraduate when my univ tried to block inappropriate sites and failed miserably by blocking a lot of sites that shouldn't have been blocked or not blocking those that could have been. BTW, I am from India, so a lot of this civil liberties stuff doesn't wash there. Anyway, the idea that I have is, don't flame me if you don't like it ;), how about an open source blocking software. The banned urls or the criteria by which sites are blocked would be completely public. There could be a central server on which people could add url's they found offensive and others could have a look and there could be some sort of a slashdot style moderation to determine whether it really should be banned or not. Responsible adult sites might like to add themselves voluntarily to this database.

    I am not for censorship at all. But given the net and the fact that a parent cannot be expected to supervise all the time a kid is on the net some measures can be expected. The chance of accidently bumping into offensive stuff is not as low as most would like to beleive out here. Just my 2 cents. Farhat. ** Life is a sexually transmitted disease.

    --
    At the intersection of computation and biology.
  3. No wonder they want to censor the websites ... by P_Simm · · Score: 4
    Sure, the article points out that CyberPatrol could simply block out all access to the decoding software. This should keep their system just as secure as before, and little Timmy shouldn't be able to get at that porn.

    But whoops, it also says that CyberPatrol only has about a 67% success rate at correctly blocking offending sites ...

    Guess about 1/3 of the little cyberTimmies will be finding their way past CyberPatrol on the first try! DOH!

    --

    You know what to do with the HELLO.
    Help create an open-source world ...

  4. Common Sense by Magic+Snail · · Score: 4

    More argument about censorship... how much time have we officially wasted now?

    If everybody is really worried about censorship, protesting against CyberPatrol and SurfWatch is the wrong place to start. I suggest the FCC. After all, this is the same government agency that "filters" your TV -- indeed, they have placed restructions on almost the entire electromagnetic spectrum! I find it interesting that people (read: I am probably talking about you) believe that it is okay for libraries to "filter" (i.e., make unavailable, especially to minors) certain books and magazines, yet somehow these same libraries should be disallowed from blocking this exact same material on their computers. There is a double-standard here: you cannot keep libraries from filtering the internet without also telling them to make pornography (in the form of books and magazines) readily available to anyone and everyone.

    Right now, this entire campaign just smells like one big geekfest ("liberate our computers!") instead of a true free speech movement. If you're really worried about a perceived violation of your Constitutional rights, I suggest you get your priorities in line. Remember, however, that the Supreme Court has ruled that obscenity is not covered under the 1st Amendment. It has also ruled that government agencies such as the FCC are not unconstitutional either, even though the Constitution makes no mention of them. The reality is, pornography filtration is here to stay no matter what you try to do.

    Thus I say to you, Good luck trying to get the FCC to lift its restrictions. Better yet, try going to your average American suburb or small town and tell them they are wrong for having city zoning laws that keep adult bookstores away from the middle of their neighborhoods. This is just pure craziness.

    Part of the arguments I see here is that since software filters are not 100% effective, they shouldn't be used at all. Where is this logic coming from? This does not make sense. "People are trying to fix the problem, but are only human and are not 100% effective; therefore, we should eliminate all efforts to keep young children from being accidentally expose to pornography." That's the key: these libraries are not trying to keep every Joe Schmoe from being able to access pornography; they are only trying to keep kids from accidentally running across it (and don't give me that "you can't find pornography unless you go out and look for it" crap). Until a government agency does a study, we are not going to get true objective results as to the accuracy of the software filters, and even if/when one is completed, I'm still not certain that will matter; obviously the concensus up to this point has been, "something is better than nothing." Thus my prediction: pornography filters on library computers are here, and are going to be here, for a long time. Quit being puppets to liberalism and use a little common sense: software filtration is not illegal/unconstitutional, and if a community wants to have filters, let'em have'em, and go download your pr0n on the free computers at your nearest college library.

    Well, there goes my precious karma...

    Ryan Kirk

  5. The Court Hearing ... by Jim+Tyre · · Score: 5
    ... is this Monday, 3/27, 2:00 p.m., Federal Court in Boston, courtroom of Judge Edward Harrington. As always, court is open to the public, on the off chance that any slashdotters in the area feel like dropping in.

    Be polite if you do.