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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 just an excuse to /. the US embassy? Seems like this article is a terrorist plot.
Perhaps the Department of Homeland Accuracy.
Given that the mood in Washington is fairly anti-gay rights, what makes you think that one was 'accidental'
</tinfoil hat mode>
binladen, linux, communism.
Those topics are generally disturbing and harmful to both the security and the economy of America.
Berman said. "Basically, we said, 'Implement a porn filter.' We were looking for serious, hard-core nasty stuff to block...I couldn't come up with a list (of off-limits words) if my life depended on it." ;)
Rrriite...
Because he Never Looks at porn
Portland, North Dakota Puppies
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"The official naughty-keyword list displays a conservative bias that labels any Web address with "gay" in them as verboten--a decision that affects thousands of Web sites that deal with gay and lesbian issues, as well as DioceseOfGaylord.org, a Roman Catholic site.
...
What? Never heard of
push @naughtywords, $banned =~ m/gay\./
?
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?
um... they blocked the word 'my'.... this tells me the people running this program are stupid... nothing more.. I see no evil plot here
Selling software wont make you money, selling a service will.
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
The list includes "ass" (which inadvertently bans usembassy.state.gov), "breast" (breastcancer.com), "hot" (hotmail.com and hotels.com), "pic" (epic.noaa.gov) and "teen" (teens.drugabuse.gov). Goodbye any site with the word topic.
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
wow....Bush and Dick are both on the banned word list...ooops.....
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.
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
No, no you are missing the point here. An employer has no right to guide the activities of it's employees on company time, nor does an employer have the right to control traffic on it's data networks.
Stop oppressing us!
My blog can kick your blog's ass
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.
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.
Christ, you know the world is doomed when your government deploys Nazi-based information control and can't even do THAT right.
I am NOT a number! I am a - oh wait, I'm number 761710. Look! 761710!
The IBB has justified a filtered Internet connection by arguing that it's inappropriate for U.S. funds to help residents of China and Iran--both of which receive dismal ratings from human rights group Freedom House--view pornography.
In the abstract, the argument is a reasonable one. If the IBB's service had blocked only hard-core pornographic Web sites, few people would object.
In other words, censorship is a perfectly acceptable thing to do when the majority doesn't complain about it? What kind of fucked up, idiotic logic is that?
Whether the majority cares or not is irrelevant, it's not a reasonable argument because censorship is censorship. I'm sure someone will try to spin it that "oh, well, it's the government censoring ANOTHER country", but that's just bullshit too. If you can't extend the beliefs of this country to non-citizens, there's no particularly compelling reason to believe they should apply to us, either.
Why is it that every time I turn around these days, some sort of idiotic bullshit like this is coming out of the government? Who the fuck let them off their leash anyway?
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
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!
One the banned list is the word "kitt". pr0n surfers will think this refers to sites like Persian Kitty, but those of us in the know realize that this is all a plot by Knight Industries to prevent the Iranians from stealing plans for the Knight Industries Two Thousand.
John.
At least poor Mr. Powell will be ok.
Until filters can understand context, keyword filters will always be stupid. Ass.
We are one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. Back to you with the weather, Bob!
Among some of the sites this U.S. agency accidentally blocks ... several gay rights websites.
The submitter obviously is not familiar with the Bush Administration's stance towards anyone who is not hetereosexual. Anything that happens towards us these days that is negative, do not believe for a moment it was just an "accident".
If you're not convinced, check out The Human Rights Campaign website.
"PC Load Letter? What the $@#% does that mean?!"
example of the underhanded nature of governments. We as cybercitizens should be be psszt ngah naghh @!!6 fghar';!) nraaghg!!!! pleased with the way things are going. Go back to your cubicles, the contents of this web-site is nothing but propaganda paid for by none other than the evil Kim Il Jong
Instead of spending time helping others route around censorship, the U.S. government hires people to censor the web. These people then accidentally censor U.S. government sites.
At this point, the intelligent response would be to say, "Oh, we forgot that idiotic ideas tend to attract idiots. Our bad. We're going to go back to sowing free thought around the world now."
However, the government response will be, "We'll just hire some more people for even more money to implement a better filter. In fact, we've already outsourced a lot of the development work to the same companies that set up China's filter. They've got lots of experience."
Porn, apparently, is a greater threat to the U.S. than a nuclear-armed ex-Communist dictatorship. Sounds like one of John Ashcroft's buddies. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go put the burqa back on Blind Justice. We tried to stone her to death, but they kept bouncing off and our arms got tired.
Stop learning! Only you can prevent esoterrorism.
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
Come on. This is a pile of Orwellian BS. What's next. GoodNet (tm) instead of Goodspeak?
As the amount of information and its accessibility increases the whole idea that you can selectively censor the right things 100% accurately all the time becomes comical. You simply can't have a proliferation of easily accessible information and censor the "bad information" since what is bad is subjective anyway.
If you must place controls, its more practical to do so on the tools and materials required to perpetrate the "evil" you wish to combat.
I for once like the access to information that the internet gives me. Its empowering and I've used this information practically not just for entertainment or frivolous uses.
When doctors have given me and the ones I love incomplete or inaccurate information as they have on a couple of occassions I've been able to get better information and present it back to them to act on it. Its sped up a couple of key diagnoses for my girlfriend and I. In both cases not working out what the problem was as soon as we did would have resulted in each of us spending significant amounts of time out of work (not to mention feeling miserable). We'd each for different medical reasons have been permanently excluded from driving, and would almost certainly have had our lives shortened. Had the information been buried in some public library without any access to anecdotal evidence (usenet) life today for me would be very much worse.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Err... I'm glad that everyone has the best interests of the populations of Iran at heart, but I think there's some confusion about how anonymizer.com actually works.
Anonymizer.com is intended to keep your identity a secret only from the target web server. From the original article: "they can use Anonymizer.com as a kind of jumping-off point, also called a proxy server".
This is correct. The client sends a request for a web page (say google.com) from anonymizer.com (or sedayama.com, or barandaz.com, or whichever). The anonymizer goes out, fetches the page for them, and then feeds it back. In this way, google.com has no idea who they are.
Since anonymizer.com's server is in California, all data must be sent between the server in California and the client in Iran, through the country's firewall and whatever sniffer programs they have running.
In no way whatsoever does this process prevent the Iranian government from snooping the connection between the browser and anonymizer.com to see whatever the heck the client is looking at. In fact, it makes the censor's life easier. All they have to do now is scan for all data to or from anonymizer.com, sedayama, etc. Then they can either parse the data and see what banned sites the client is viewing, or just assume that they're up to no good, raid their house, confiscate their computer and look at the browser cache.
According to the Opennet report, the only real "anonymizing" functionality of this site comes from converting URLs from text to hexadecimal, and the obfuscation from the anonymizer site having to change URLs and IP addresses whenever the Iran government blocks one.
I think the IBB is doing these people a grave disservice by advertising that sites can be viewed anonymously, when in fact they can't. Even if the connection was completely encrypted with SSL, the government censors could determine that a connection was made to an anonymizer site, and that the client is worthy of further investigation.
Again, from the OpenNet report: "Iranian users may not be aware that their use of the service may identify them to Iranian government authorities as citizens wishing to view forbidden content, or as supportive of the ideas found within that content."
Enough said. The people who run the IBB Anonymizer project should realize it was a well-meaning but flawed concept from the start, and it can actually be counter-productive by exposing Iranians who trust the claims of anonymity.
Those claims should be retracted and a big warning banner posted on the site(s), or the project should be killed outright.
Does the US government also attempt to help circumvent other countries' internet censorship laws, such as, say, those of certain Western European countries? Or is it just the countries we're not quite married to (yet)?
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.
Nice to see that the browser screenshots are Mozilla with the Modern theme instead of Internet Explorer.
I'm currently setting up a website that has the word 'blown' in the name (no, it has nothing to do with pr0n, I'd just prefer not to have my server start on fire). Do I have anything to worry about? I noticed today that my site no longer shows up in Google searches.
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.
That's exactly why america wants to control the internet. Control the information, and you control the people. Throw a little "won't somebody please think of the children" in there to shut up the damn civil rights hippies, and the status quo is so much easier to maintain.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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
The article links to the word list.
Blocking sites with "asian" in it must really help out those poor Chinese..
While I was in Thailand recently, the current attitudes in most of asia towards gay rights were all over the news... China is a mostly Buddhist country, and except for the noisy protests of the 5% Christian and/or Muslim members, it's going over without much of a fight. They're currently thinking of legalizing same-sex marriage (albeit slower than southeast asia, where it's very likely that we will see laws being passed shortly).
Hardware, software, and blinking lights!
Yeah, but what about this is scunthorpe?
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".
Chinese attitudes to homosexuality are very conservative. I've met mainland Chinese who assert that there aren't any homosexuals in China. Until not so long ago (at least the 70s), homosexuality was treated as a psychiatric disorder, and homosexuals could wind up in a psychiatric hospital.
As for China being a mostly Buddhist country... well, China is a mostly Confucian country, with a strong familial ethos and a traditionally prudish attitude to sexuality. That's not a culture which homosexuality fits into very easily...
That said, I have had a gay Chinese man (discretely) proposition me in Shanghai...
It's nobody's fault but his own he insists on pronouncing his first name like that. He could pronounce it like any sane person would, to rhyme with "pollen"...
What is the robbing of a bank, compared to the founding of a bank? -- Bertolt Brecht
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
Errr... actually, that's really interesting... I had a chinese girlfriend recently, heh, and the interesting thing is that, while it's not talked about and theres the whole "it'll bring shame on the family if anyone knew" thing... it still happens. The culture is very averse to talking about sex, but whatever happens behind closed doors... You are right, though, it's not *quite* as rosy as I first stated.
Hardware, software, and blinking lights!
Really, who cares what a person's sexual orientation is.
I'm in my forties and it dawned on me a long time ago that gay people aren't fundamentally different than straight people. Its your uncomfortableness with the situation that's the problem, not the sexual orientation of who you're dealing with.
I've heard all the nonsense about how gays destroy the "esprit de corp". What utter utter crap.
Live and let live. And if the guy next to you is attracted to guys, what do you care?
I recently read an article in the American Journal of Primatology with the following keywords. infant-licking, attractiveness of mothers with newborns, female relationships, and ring-tailed lemurs. The keywords would direct you to the paper; Intra-troop affiliative relationships of females with newborn infants in wild ring-tailed lemurs. Can you imagine the flags this would raise with monitoring software or your success with blocking? Out of context the keywords would paint you as an extreme pedophile or someone with obscure sexual attractions. A question to ask is whether this practice is merely censorship or another way to functionally define what is normal or deviant behavior within society? Homosexuality is taboo, so the word gay is taboo. Our historical relationship with the female body to sin is represented as well as other 'deviant' sexual behavior. On a lighter side, at least microsoft, georgebush, and arnold-schwarzenegger.com were blocked!
There's a simple solution for people who sue because they did something a toddler should be expected to be smart enough not to do and it bit them:
They have admitted in open court that they are unable to take care of themselves or handle adult responsibilities. Therefore, they should be put in a home, and any money they collected from that lawsuit should be turned over to the home to pay for their lifetime care.
This would not only solve the problem of frivolous lawsuits and the quest for deep pockets, but it would also help the employment situation by removing these people from the job market and creating jobs for people to take care of them. After all, someone who doesn't know that coffee is hot can't even be trusted to feed themself, or to eat anything that they might choke on, so there will be a need for caretakers to feed them their pureed food blend, help them go potty, and tend to them at all times.
If they want to block porn and save bandwidth, all they need do is not serve images.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
The failure here was not in neglecting to install a monitoring/blocking system, but to take proper action upon notification.
Read: her supervisor who refused to ask the employees to remove the pictures
Employees were posting pictures, and the employer didn't make them stop nor offer disciplinary measures. I wouldn't expect to get away with pr0n at work, and I'd definately expect to be disciplined (perhaps fired) if I tried to. It appears that both the other employees and the employer were definately at fault - but not for lack of filtering.