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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.
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
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.
Well because as you could see if you RTFA, it lists what keywords are being blocked, Here.
Portland, North Dakota Puppies
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.
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
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!
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!
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.
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."
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!
Aha, thanks.
Here's the important info for anyone else who may be curious:
For those who are found to be within Iran, the service is freely accessible through several domain names. As soon as the Iranian authorities block one of the service's domain names or IP addresses, new locations are announced to Iranians through Radio Farda and VOA Persian Radio broadcasts. (Some of these domain names are filtered by some ISPs in Iran and thus inaccessible to users, however even the filtered domains can be accessed by directly entering the IP address.)
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