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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?"
Is this the improper setup of a filter? I know that a lot of filters have settings for say, blocking explicit sites (pr0n), but it is possible to tell them to also allow them to visit medical related sites (breast cancer). Did someone not configure it?
I wish they'd use common sense...
In school environments, we've always set the Squid filters to allow pages containing health, medical, rights, etc - words likely to give context to what may or may not be blocked
"We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over." - Aneurin Bevan
So, we want the Iranians to visit websites, but instead of allowing their government to censor what they can see, we'll make their choices for them.
Brilliant. Now I've heard it all. So, when do we start "conserving bandwidth" in the US?
Later . . . . . . WebBug
Among people over 30 I've found that most military personnel are heterosexual upstanding citizens. Among people under 30 I've found that a significant portion of military personnel that I've met are homosexual men or lesbians who couldn't figure out what else to do with their life.
:)
My observation pool is skewed, though. The pool for the >30 section comes from people I've met throughout life. The pool 30 comes from people that I've had contact with while looking for a roommate in a geographical area that is saturated with military personnel (ie. within 20 mile radius of a military installation). Still, though, all bigotry aside, this indicates to me that the general mood in Washington is,"If they're willing to die in the desert..."
Oh wait. I guess that's about the same as what you said.
+++ATHZ 99:5:80
The report raises questions about the potential inaccuracy of proprietary and other secretive filtering mechanisms: who should be responsible for ensuring their accuracy?
Nobody needs to ensure their accuracy if no one will use them.
I think they should quit trying to filter out pr0n and drugs etc, and instead focus on scam and advertizing cites. Then maybe I might use their filter.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
I remember by father's inability to access the Middlesex county government page from work because of the string "sex" in the URL. This was 12 years ago. They switched to a different filter system a few months afterwards.
Why does America have so much control over the 'net these days? It's not a research experiment anymore. It is a way of life. Gotta let it grow even if it's not in all the best interests...
MY SECRET DIARIES
Bingo. This is part of my job. I'm handed a list of keywords to block, and we have the majority of the filters turned on. Anybody complains, I check the site, and unblock it if it's okay. The reasoning that is used to allow this is that the network is 'for official use only'. You want to do some recreational surfing, you can do it at home. Totally different issue from a library/public school.
Otherwise, we'd have problems with people screaming about us not blocking it the first time somebody was surfing porn and an 'objector' came across it and said they're harrassed.
It's sad, but the current policy is that 'harrasment is defined by the harrassee'.
I don't read AC A human right
You all seem to have missed the point of why this filter was put into place.
The US government is trying to help the people of China bypass the censorship that their country has put into place. Why? Simple, to defend the human rights of the people of China. Quite obviously, the US Government has no fear of any possible backlash from the Chinese government in doing this.
However, the squeals from the many church organizations that would be offended by the US Government giving unrestricted access to p0rn and gay rights websites would be unbearable!
Fear the church! Fear it more than you fear the largest communist country in the world!
Something I've been thinking of lately is how come no one seems to have applied a bayes filter to a web proxy? I would think you could train it on a huge amount of "blacklist" sites and then simply correct it when something legit gets filtered, since passing through to a legit site usually involves the admin it could probably be automatic as well.
Free Online Woodworking Resources Directory
Agreed that this is a poor implementation of an internet filter, but... Calling this censorship is not quite right: the service opens up big chunks of the internet for people who never had it before, and that is a fact. It's like a complaining that someone didn't hand over the keys to their car instead of just giving you a ride. Calling it prudery is also unfair. There are several arguments for a (properly done) filter, some of them mentioned in the article. 1. US Taxpayers don't want to fund porn surfing. 2. The propaganda value within the restrictive countries is reduced somewhat if the authorities there can claim that it's just used to surf porn. 3. Likewise, people within that country that could be forces for democratic reform may be turned away by the idea that it's used for "unwholesome" purposes.
So, I may be missing something obvious here, but can someone tell me why China and Iran don't just block anonymizer.com?
From: http://www.eeoc.gov/types/sexual_harassment.html
"Unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature constitute sexual harassment when this conduct explicitly or implicitly affects an individual's employment, unreasonably interferes with an individual's work performance, or creates an intimidating, hostile, or offensive work environment."
The "offensive work environment" has been defined to include porn. See this on Harris v. Forklift Sys., Inc http://www.eeoc.gov/policy/docs/harris.html
"Even though CP had not been offended by her co- workers' bawdy remarks, she believed that the posting of pornographic pictures demeaned women. She complained to her supervisor who refused to ask the employees to remove the pictures. Shortly thereafter, more pictures were posted. After again receiving no response to her complaint, CP filed a charge.
Based on these facts, an investigator should find that the conduct was unwelcome, i.e., that CP subjectively considered the pornographic pictures to be abusive. Her willingness to engage in sexual banter is not material to assessing her perception of the pictures."
IANAL, but at this point it is a completely reasonable argument that employers should install anti-porn software by default and that failure to do so constitutes neglect. And I'm sorry, but these issues about sexual harrassment were brought up far before Bush. And mostly by left-wing feminists (see Tailgate, Clarance Thomas, et al). If the government didn't install these filters and someone was viewing porn and it offended someone else then there would be a big scandal about it and Bush would be portrayed as the anti-feminist woman hating porno president.
And the poster forgot the obvious difference here between Iran and the US is that you can go home to your own computer if you want porn! You do not have the right to view porn on government (ie tax payer owned) computers. Heck, technically you don't have the right to view breastcancer.com unless it pertains to your work! So if you don't like the government's filters, tough. If you need the site to do your work email the admin. Otherwise, don't view the site on the taxpayer's dime.
Brian Ellenberger
Could you still view blocked sites through the IBB service if you enter the IP address instead of the domain name?
Some of the keywords, like "anime", "chat", "tv" seem to be aimed at non-pornographic entertainment sites. They also block "proxy". Maybe they don't want people to use a proxy to bypass their proxy (if that's at all possible). I still don't get "my" and "you". I also don't get why they blocked "anime" but not "hentai".
After all, keyword blacklisting worked for "hierbal v!aggra" and "peenes emlargermint" so it should work for terrorists and drug dealers as well... Seriously though, the fact that keyword blacklisting is totally useless should be obvious to anyone who ever watched a gangster movie. The question is which keywords do you blacklist? Should there be words like "bomb" or "heroine"? No, because gangsters don't use them. Does it mean we should blacklist "object" and "good shit"? No? So I ask you, which exactly keywords should we blacklist? Only then, when we have this question answered, we can discuss whether blacklisting or censorship is a good idea. Because I, for one, don't want Project Gutenberg be foolishly forced by some fucking illiterate imbeciles to remove the literature of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Franz Kafka!
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
China's attitudes to homosexuality are interesting. For much of China's history, homosexuality was treated fairly leniently. One vast difference with the West is that homosexuality has *never* been considered a religious sin. The major forces of Confucianism, Taoism, Legalism and Buddhism have never said in any terms that homosexuality was wrong. Note, this is *male* homosexuality as the vast majority of Chinese history and literature focuses on guys. This passed onto Japan as well, well I think in the 17th century, a Japanese samurai wrote a book basically saying "It must be good. The Chinese do it!" The attitude was more to do with "As long as you marry a good girl and get children to carry on the family line, who cares what you do?" Also male homosexuality was strongly connected with the whole brotherhood concept so beloved of Chinese. Male/male friendships were considered the ultimate in human relationships. There is a saying that to lose a wife is like losing a piece of clothing. To lose a brother/friend is like losing a limb. For example in one Chinese province there were gay "marriages" where the "older brother" is obliged to protect the younger one and later on, help him find a wife. Buddhist temples in China and Japan also were bastions of homosexual relations and Japanese samurai had a common sort of homosexual "mentor and student" relationship. Starting during the Manchurian rule (who were foreigners) and then continuing into modern times, however, homosexuality was treated far less leniently. However many of the earlier emperors had gay lovers, and the stories are the source of famous euphamisms like the "Passion of the Cut Sleeve" and "The half-eaten peach". What disgust existed for homosexuality was for men who dressed like women. That was giving up one's manhood and honour. I suppose one could say that most homosexual men in China/Japan were actually bisexual.
A big change occurred with the influx of Western culture into China, esp. science. A lot of science at the time said homosexuality was a mental illness and many modern Chinese,eager to grasp Western ideas took this to heart. Homosexuality as well as old Confucian ideas became part of the "old" way and many young revolutionaries were eager to get rid of the "old ways". There's this story about this young revolutionary staring at disgust at his grandfather who came back drunk from a night of debauchery with young male opera stars. Actually the Communists were pretty much against overt romanticism even between males and females as well and even tender parental feelings for your children. You were supposed to be a worker for the state. Women who gave their children to their parents to raise so they could devote themselves to their work were praised (where do you think 1984 got these ideas from?). I'm not sure what the bias against homosexuality is like nowadays. My parents are very conservative religious Chinese who are not very up with PC (eg. they are openly hostile to people with dark skin) and grew up in Communist China. They don't act like they know anything about homosexuality, but then again, they don't act as if they know anything about sex at all. But when I mention something about two teachers possibly being in a homosexual relationship, they just titter rather than act disgusted. They seem to treat it more as something funny than repulsive. I guess I could test it by introducing them to a gay guy...Other people have mentioned that many modern Chinese refuse to admit homosexuals exist at all. It could be because we're from the south (and according to very ancient stereotypes which I'm not sure of the truth of), the south was always supposed to be more liberal about male/male relations (there's extremely old jokes about how "man" and "south" sound a lot alike). And my impression is the far south (Guangdong in my case) was always less influenced by Communist doctrine than further north. Anyway, I see the Communist attitude against homosexuality more similar to their attitude against religion (they banned all