Slashdot Mirror
Censorware to be Mandatory in Schools, Libraries
The massive spending bill has been passed by the House and Senate, and President Clinton is expected to sign it soon. Despite some noises from the Clinton administration mildly protesting censorware, the small amendment making it mandatory is not considered to be an important enough issue to veto an entire appropriations bill.
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a longtime proponent of censorware, introduced the amendment.
As the ACLU says,
Earlier this year, an 18-member commission appointed by Congress rejected the idea of mandating the use of blocking software, which is notoriously clumsy and inevitably restricts access to valuable, protected speech. A wide spectrum of organizations have opposed blocking software mandates, including the American Library Association, the Society of Professional Journalists, the conservative Free Congress Foundation and state chapters of the Eagle Forum and the American Family Association.
"There was an Alice in Wonderland quality to this debate," said Marvin Johnson, a Legislative Counsel with the ACLU's Washington National Office. "With its vote, Congress rejected the advice it asked for from the panel it appointed."
The "wide spectrum of organizations" extends from educators to The New York Times to strongly conservative political/religious groups. For more on the COPA Commission and its recommendations, see our stories from July and August.
Essentially it says that any school or library which receives federal funds to build its network must install censorware. Since these funds are the chief way that poor and middle-income areas bring the internet into public institutions, effectively this means that only rich counties will have the option of an uncensored internet.
The text of the self-declared "Children's Internet Protection Act" is available from CDT. It uses the term "technology protection measure" to describe the software.
In related news, Peacefire, an advocacy group for youth free-speech rights, released a tool to provide one-click disabling of some popular censorware programs.
Meanwhile, the ACLU will be suing to stop this bill from taking effect. This is not a slam-dunk like the CDA was. They're in for a tough fight. Here are three reasons why:
1. The CDA's language was very broad. This bill targets its material precisely: obscenity, child pornography, and "harmful to minors" material. Of course there is no "technology protection measure" in existence which can censor only this material, or even claim to censor only this material.
2. The CDA covered speech. This bill addresses the right to read that speech in a public institution.
3. This bill regulates institutions which are taking public money and how they may use it. Legally, and also in many people's minds, it is more permissable to enact regulations which go against the grain of the Constitution if they are tied to acceptance of public funds.
(The classic example is that the Fourth Amendment protects our homes from unreasonable search and seizure, but when the government provides public housing, it sometimes tries to say that the 4th Amendment does not apply. Same situation, different Amendment.)
Brock Meeks is more optimistic, saying the bill is "doomed." The key issue, I think, will be whether censorware can work. If it does not work, if it cannot work, then the language of the bill is irrelevant; our Congress might as well have demanded a "technology protection measure" to give all our kids 200 IQs and an lifetime supply of free donuts.
When I get in the mood to be optimistic, I think about all the stories we hear from students who are already forced to use this software. It seems like everyone has an anecdote about how they were blocked from doing legitimate research for school.
So maybe if this legislation survives, in ten years, all the kids who grew up with first-hand experience with censorware will start to vote. That's about the only bright side I can see.
For now, Brown v. Board of Education is the example I'm keeping in mind. The Supreme Court, after a half-century of segregated schools, decided that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal" -- the theory might be OK, but it had failed in practice.
The courts should evaluate the "technology protection measures" by what they do, not by what the law demands they do. The theory might be OK, but in practice, all the technology that I've looked at blocks much more than it should. I'll be hoping for a verdict that reads: "technology protection measures are inherently censorship."
And, hopefully, now -- not after a half-century.
Some (though hardly all) feminists have muddied the water by suggesting that pornography denigrates women. There is much truth to this argument, but they are incorrect in their estimate of the underlying cause. Pornography denigrates women not because it treats women as objects -- though obviously it does -- but because the pseudo-religious opposition to pornography treats women as toxins from which society must be protected. To a lesser degree than in Islamic society, but for much the same reasons, the more stringent standards for female body coverings rest on the premise that women are a corrupting influence on men, and that they cannot be trusted to control their instinctual imperatives, and at the same time insisting that they must yield to the instinctual imperatives of dominant males.
Our society is choked with people who -- and I don't care what pious excuses are offered for this -- are deeply afraid of sexuality, and more often than not full of fear and loathing for female sexuality. (Before anyone flames, please don't think that I'm arguing that male-oriented porn is either a realistic or healthy representation of female sexuality. But it wouldn't matter if it were.)
The contest between censorship and anti-censorship in America has got squat to do with civil liberties. It is a battle against an entrenched, institutionalized form of mental illness, a phobia of sexuality that manifests itself in the form of political oppression on the grand scale and domestic terror on the personal scale. Those who oppose censorship can shout all day long about free speech and they will utterly fail of effect because they are not addressing the real hidden agenda. We must take a stand in favor of sex and sexuality as a healthy, normal, and necessary part of human existence and refuse to knuckle under to this morbid anti-sex psychopathology no matter what political or religious mask it uses to hide its shame.
--
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
So Congress has just allocated a ton of money so that the teachers who can't get the VCR to stop blinking 12:00 can use software to control the students who help them program the VCR for class movies.
Oh, you bet.
If I were in high school right now I'd have the octal version of goatse.cx memorized.
Suckers.
--
What happens when you outlaw guns
I believe, given what Michael Sims (yes, that Michael Sims, Slashdot/YRO editor) did against Censorware Project, this information is important to this discussion. And I'll take any karma hit for it.
The http://censorware.org site has been taken down since the following was posted, more than a month now.
Date: Sat, 04 Nov 2000 16:49:46 EST
To: CYBERIA-L@LISTSERV.AOL.COM
From: Jonathan Wallace <jw@BWAY.NET>
Subject: The Censorware Project
I've been trying hard to avoid washing dirty laundry in public, but a couple of recent posts have raised the issue and I'd like to give an account of what happened to the Censorware Project (the site at http://censorware.org is now offline). What we have here is the spectacle of a group member who volunteered to act as webmaster effectively closing a group which wants to continue, because the domain happened to be registered in his name.
The Censorware Project was originally an informal collective of six people who collaborated online to fight censorware: Seth Finkelstein, Bennett Haselton, Jamie McCarthy, Mike Sims, Jim Tyre and myself. After Seth left the group, the remaining five continued. Several of us had never met or even spoken on the phone, yet for some time--around two years as I recall--we had a remarkably easy collaboration. There was no funding, no hierarchy, no titles, not even project managers. Someone would suggest a project and take the responsibility for a part of it, others would sign up for other elements, and proceeding this way we got a remarkable amount of work done, including reports on X-Stop, Cyberpatrol, Bess and other products.
Even though two of us were attorneys--Jim and myself--we never incorporated the group or wrote a charter or any contracts among ourselves. Mike Sims was obliging enough to register the domain, just as other members paid for press releases and the other incidental expenses which came along.
Robert Frost said that "nothing gold can stay," and the Censorware Project was no exception. Over the summer, Mike Sims' reaction to a perceived slight was to take the site down for a week, exactly as Seth says in his mail. He sent us mail at the time saying something like "The Censorware Project is over." I replied to him that, given that the group was a collective and we all had an interest in its work product, the domain, and the goodwill it had achieved, the decision was not his to make. Sims did not reply.
Mike put the site back up a week later without explaining, let alone apologizing for, his actions. Given his continuing failure to answer any email from me (and I think from others) and the overall signs that Sims thought the group was exclusively his, I wrote him several emails requesting that he turn the domain over to Jamie or Bennett, as I felt we could no longer trust him to administer it. We also found out during that time that important email from people trying to contact us, including members of the press, was not being answered by Sims, nor being forwarded to other members.
I ultimately became exasperated that my name was listed as a principal on what had now become a "rogue" site I had no control over. Over about a five week period, I wrote Sims several more emails asking him to delete my name from the site if he wasn't going to transfer the domain. Again, I received no reply.
Today, Sims took the Censorware Project site offline again, with a message which says "Due to demands from some of the people who contributed, in however minor a fashion, to this site, it has been taken down." Judging from some email I received from him today, this means me.
Its a sad thing, both because we got some good work done and because some of the other members of the group were eager to continue and in fact have continued working, while deprived of the Censorware Project site, name, email aliases and public recognition. These further efforts are appearing on Bennett Haselton's Peacefire site, www.peacefire.org. (I applaud the work but take no credit as I have not been involved in some time.)
On the page currently at www.censorware.org Sims makes the following request: "If you are interested in volunteering to fight censorware, please contact me." One of the reasons I made this post was so that anyone considering working with Mike can make an informed decision.
Now, if I recall correctly, there was a Supreme Court ruling that indicated that content-based censorship was unconstitutional. The argument was that "you can't go through books and mark out or cut out the offensive passages."
It was accepted that libraries could choose not to carry particular books based on the concept of limited resources - "We can't afford to subscribe to every single magazine or buy every book on the market, so we have to make decisions based on that." However, once the library holdings were acquired, the library staff could not go through and start marking out the "naughty bits."
Well, guess what - the Internet is a magazine. The library pays regularly for access, and receives the information from the providers through its network link, rather than throught the U.S. Mail. That is the simplest way to look at Internet access at the library, and if we do that, then it's plain that Internet filtering would come under the heading of content-based censorship.
Now, how much public money will get spent defending this viewpoint is anyone's guess, but nobody said that democracy was cheap.
Strike while the irony is hot! -- The Freethinker
I can't help feel that what the this will really do is ensure that we have another generation of hackers and crackers. Think about it, now every American schoolkid will join forces to ensure that every piece of censorware has a nice big hole in it that everyone knows about, maybe if the censorware companies are good enough we may even see some work to match the demos scene of the 80s (the best programming ever IMHO). Who do you think is more intelligent, the firms writing the software or the kids......I know where my money goes
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
My children and Grandchildren won't understand filters, because I sure as hell won't filter their home access.
And I'll go through the process of having their sites signed off at libraries and schools. Most schools provide a "authorization" policy if the child requests a questionable policy.
I'll make it as difficult as possible for the schools and the libraries.
I encourage others to do the same. The first amandment guarantees this.
fslg503-985-8686503-985-8686503-985-8686503-985-8
as i recall, there used to be a number of problems.
kids can't get info on (potentially lifesaving) condoms or sexual behavior;
women can't look for info on brest cancer;
problems finding chicken recipes (the alarm in the library goes off cuz you typed "chicken breast" into a search field);
Historical issues (searching for info on "the gay nineties", "Cock and Bull", "pussywillows", "The Owl and the Pussycat", "Wild Ass Images")
It's rather fascinating to watch our government doing so much to validate the all the concerns voiced in books like 1984. Things they said "would never happen here".
Technology Shift A) results in less employees needed. Employees are then terminated, since "America is not a social experiment".
Technology Shift B) results in the obsolescence of CD and DVD technology, and record/video companies are against the wall. Solution : pass protectionist legislation and villify the technology, because "The business of America is Business"
This reminds me of that old SNL skit where the moralists are removing the breasts/penises from marble and brass statues.
What a horribly sick society. Body parts are not bad, the horrid myths handed down through generations have made them bad.
Once again, America's Government is failing to think/consider its behavior. The larger issues will have negative ramifications for decades to come.
Unbeleivable that we have at least four more years of increasingly stupid legislation coming up as the right wingers crank up their religious propaganga/profit machines.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
The federal government has a number of restrictions placed on its power. Certain powers (or domains of regulation) are reserved for the states.
The federal government is bypassing those restrictions.
They aren't even hiding it. The two "main" presidential candidates debated over how, exactly, each of them will bypass the restrictions. They have such wonderful plans based on skirting around the Constitution. And, I must admit, that some good has been accomplished by federal meddling in state business. However, I see a shift in power and in form of government that I want to call people's attention to. Personally, I usually feel that federal government is too powerful, but it is better that you disagree with me fully informed than agree with me blindly.
The federal government taxes states' citizens, then threatens to withold funding for "state run" programs from state which do not pass certain laws or meet certain requirements. They do this, in part, in order to bypass those restrictions on their authority.
Recently, president Clinton signed a law stating that any state which did not set a 0.08 blood alchohol level standard for DUI would lose (some) federal funding for highways. The DUI laws (and standards) are entirely in the states' authority, not the federal. In effect, the federal government has usurped a power reserved for the states.
"Usurped" may be too strong a word; each state can, after all, simply decline to meet that standard. They will lose federal funding, but they can simply fund the roads themselves.
Federal funding my ass. The fed will tax the citizens of the states who choose not to comply, then send that money out of that state and into another. They state cannot "make up for" the lost revenue; they can, at best, tax the citizens even more to fund the highway projects. But they still pay, either way.
The federal government is, in effect, saying "We want to have something happen, but we don't have the authority to pass a law to make it happen. So we are going to tax you to fund programs that you like, then later threaten to withold your own money from you unless you do what we want to you. Yeah, we know we're aren't supposed to be involved in this sort of thing, but the program is 'state run' and simply 'federally funded'."
My mom is not a Karma whore!
Schools have always been about indoctrination. They teach useful skills, but they are also about instilling the values of the nation that they are in. If you cannot control the content of what is taught to some extent, they do not work as well as they should.
As in, "we're perfectly willing to obey the law, and just as soon as suitable software is released, we'll get right onto installing it."
Are you having a bad day?
Like most public places, the people that are noisiest are usually the most illiterate, idiotic and moronic of the bunch. Slashdot is just an extension of that. If you read at -1 you would assume that nobody seems to be able to read beyond a comprehension level of the average kindegartener.
But, something that gets ignored way, way too often nowadays is that it isn't the Internet that makes people stupid. It isn't any one thing. It is the way they are raised, the way they are taught, and the type of family they are brought up in. These things, along with the type of person they are (their genetic make-up if you will) are the only things that determine whether or not someone is stupid, or a misfit.
Misfits are not made by the Internet. Much like Heavy Metal back when I was in school, it is the misfits that are attracted to the Internet (just like they were attracted to Heavy Metal back in the day). And just because a large number of very, very vocal people display some tendency to be one way or another, you cannot assume that the root cause of that is whatever their favorite pass-time is. The cause lies elsewhere. It is the fact that they display these traits that they are attracted to this place as a pass-time. The trolls seek the other trolls, and the place where they can get the biggest rise out of the most people. Slashdot is an example of that.
But to assume that closing people off from that is going to improve the mental prowess of our youth is a grave mistake. You cannot teach by removing negative stimuli. If the Internet is a negative stimuli at all (and that is very questionable) you must teach children to use the appropriate areas of the Internet and avoid the negatives.
I see a frightening trend in this day and age when it comes to child rearing. It is the "protect until raised" mentality that has already caused a number of problems for people of my generation (and younger). People that believe this are raising children that have no idea that there even are negative things out there. And they really think that this is a good thing to teach. They don't understand that you cannot just cut children off from any possible negative stimulous. You have to teach them how to deal with that stimulous and how to avoid getting sucked into "bad situations". If not, we end up with children that cannot cope with reality when they are adults. They get out in the real world on their own and they just aren't able to cope with the problems that they are faced with.
Sure, mothers and fathers wish that they could protect their children from everything they ever could have to face. But all you will do if you raise your child to believe that the world is a safe and happy place, with absolutely nothing to worry about, is create a situation where the child either never leaves home, or never develops the ability to cope with reality at all.
I'm sorry if this sounds harsh, but we must not succumb to this "let the government protect us" any more than we must raise our children to believe that mommy and daddy will always make sure that anything that comes near you will be filtered, sanitized and made safe. Asking the government to make rules that "protect the children" is doubly stupid in that it assumes that the parents themselves (the ones that subscribe to this idiotic "protect at all costs" mentality) are not capable of raising their own children the way they see fit. And not all people want to be told how they will raise their children.
I say it's high time that people stop being so lazy about parenting and just accept that it isn't going to be easy. You teach your children and show them what life is about. You had better not expect the government to do it for you. If you do, you will eventually end up with a generation of people that absolutely are incapable of thinking for themselves. While the big-business and government driven parts of society would absolutely love this, there is a point in time when people (at least, the ones with a few brain cells left) will get tired of being told what to do. And if you think that revolution is out of the question, then it is time for you to go study some of your history lessons.
Too many rules, too little tought. It seems to be the motto of the day anymore. I wish that there was some way to collectively slap the face of humanity and make them see how ridiculous it is. But, all I can do is bitch on slashdot. More's the pity.
------------