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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
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
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.
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!
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