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U.S. Gov Agency Blunders With Keyword Blacklist
Anonymous Submitter writes "There's an interesting CNet article which highlights a report released by the OpenNet Initiative. The report examines how "a U.S. government agency charged with fighting Iranian and Chinese Internet censorship is quietly censoring the Web itself". Among some of the sites this U.S. agency accidentally blocks are breastcancer.com, teens.drugabuse.gov, several gay rights websites, and even usembassy.state.gov. Some of the members of the group who prepared this report were responsible for a previous Slashdot discussion entitled "Academics Take On Government Net Censorship". The report raises questions about the potential inaccuracy of proprietary and other secretive filtering mechanisms: who should be responsible for ensuring their accuracy?"
And I dount they have much choice. Government agencies often have this stuff mandated on them to "protect" the workspace, avoid having citizens groups screaming about government employees surfing porn on the job, hostile workplace regulation, etc.
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
Any content-based restriction on what sites people can visit is improper. Not only does the government have no business playing censor, but it sends the wrong message to people elsewhere, namely that censorship is okay, as long as it is the right kind.
If they really didn't want to waste resources on anything other than pro-democracy web sites, they could provide access just to specific sites, or they could provide open access but limit bandwidth. The images from porn sites will generally use much more bandwidth than the text of a political discussion. As it stands, the keyword list the contractor used is really hopeless. It just goes to show that there aren't very many words that are likely only to be associated with porn cites. I bet that any number of Catholic sites, for example, are blocked by the "virgin" keyword. In any case, where foreign countries are concerned, keyword blocking should be easy to get around. Instead of putting the sexual terms in your domain name, you put them in meta tags and site text, and you put them there in Chinese and Persian and so forth. How halfway intelligent people with the serious mission of spreading freedom and democracy can waste their time on such a thing is beyond me.
If you make a filter that blocks everything with the word "gay" in it, it's can't really be an accident when a gay rights site gets blocked. Maybe it was an accident that they added gay to the list? Maybe they were all "hey, is this blacklist, like, a list of words the Chinese will be allowed to look at?" and then the other guy was like "whoa, I don't know" and then the third guy was like "probably, I guess" and then when they found out 365gay.com got blocked they were all "damn, it was an accident, man."